Demanding the Impossible. Peter Marshall
and government. He therefore went beyond the Jeffersonian formula ‘That government is best which governs least’ to the anarchist conclusion ‘That government is best which governs not at all.’14 Thoreau felt that the same objection against governments may be brought against standing armies: both oblige men to serve the State with their bodies as if they were mindless machines.
Beyond the close argument about moral and political obligation, what emerges most prominently from Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience is his passion for freedom: ‘I was not born to be forced’, he declares. ‘I will breathe after my own fashion.’ After leaving prison his first impulse was to walk in a nearby huckleberry field on the highest hill where ‘the State was nowhere to be seen’.15
It was the same impulse which made him celebrate the wilderness as ‘absolute freedom’, an oasis in the desert of modern urban civilization.16 Thoreau believed that the preservation of the world is to be found in the wilderness; his social ecology was so radical that he went beyond politics: ‘Most revolutions in society have not power to interest, still less to alarm us; but tell me that our rivers are drying up, or the genus pine is dying out in the country, and I might attend.’17
Thoreau asked his compatriots:
Do you call this the land of the free? What is it to be free from King George and continue to be slaves of King Prejudice? What is it to be born free and not to live free? What is the value of political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom? Is it a freedom to be slaves or a freedom to be free, of which we boast? We are a nation of politicians, concerned about the outmost defences of freedom. It is our children’s children who may perchance be really free.18
In Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854), he described the ‘quiet desperation’ or alienation of urban industrialized man, alienated from nature, himself and his fellows as a producer and a consumer. In the process of searching for profit and power, modern man had lost his way. Servitude not only took the form of Negro slavery, but many subtle masters enslaved society as a whole. Worst of all, people made slave-drivers of themselves. It was to overcome this state of affairs that Thoreau chose to live as self-sufficiently as possible by the pond at Walden. He went into the woods to confront only the essential facts of life, wanting to live in simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust
Thoreau had a singular yearning towards all wildness. He had a passion for the primitive. He delighted in the sensuous vitality of his body (while being unable to appreciate women) and was awed by the teeming life in nature. A chaste and literate loner, he was one of the first imaginary Indians. Yet he did not want to return to a primitive way of life and turn his back on all the gains of Western civilization. Although fascinated by the culture of American Indians, he was repelled on occasion by their ‘coarse and imperfect use of nature’. Following an unhappy moose-hunt in Maine, he recalled: ‘I, already, and for weeks afterwards, felt my nature coarser for this part of my woodland experience, and was reminded that our life should be lived as tenderly and daintily as one would pluck a flower.’19
Thoreau did not therefore reject all the achievements of so-called civilization. He not only condemned in Walden a ‘Life without Principle’ but called for a life according to ‘Higher Laws’ (the second name chosen for the same chapter). In the section on ‘Reading’ he recommended a study of the oldest and best books, whose authors are ‘a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind’.20 Thoreau was for the simple life, but not for a life without learning and manners.
He stood half-way between heaven and earth, the civilized and the wild, the railroad and the pond, a Transcendental savage who gloried in the primitivism of the lost race of American Indians and who sought the ‘Higher Laws’ of oriental mysticism. He was well aware of the dualism in his character and he found ‘an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good.’21 But he went beyond the alternative of ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’ to make a creative synthesis of the two. He wanted the best in nature and culture for himself and his fellow citizens.
While Thoreau was a great rebel, he saw rebellion largely in personal terms. But his individualism was not the rugged or narrow individualism of capitalism, but one which wished to preserve individuality in the face of the coercive institutions and conformist behaviour of modern civilization. Neither did he reject society nor the companionship of his fellows. In Civil Disobedience, he insists that he is ‘as desirous of being a good neighbour as I am of being a bad subject’.22 He served American society by trying to reveal its true nature to its citizens.
In place of the hectic and anxious life of commerce and the interfering force of the State, Thoreau recommended a decentralized society of villages. If people lived simple lives as good neighbours they would develop informal patterns of voluntary co-operation. There would then be no need for the police or army since robbery would be unknown. Such a society moreover need not be parochial. Like Kropotkin after him, Thoreau called for the leisure to develop our full intellectual and social potential: ‘It is time that villages were universities … To act collectively is according to the spirit of our institutions … Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men.’23
Apart from a brief foray into the campaign against slavery, Thoreau made no attempt to become involved in any organized political movement. He was exceptionally jealous of his personal freedom and felt that his connection with and obligation to society were ‘very slight and transient’. He considered what is normally called politics so superficial and inhuman that ‘practically I have never fairly recognized that it concerns me at all’.24 He derided politics and politicians for making light of morality and considered voting merely ‘a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions’.25
But while practising the ‘one-man revolution’, Thoreau did not deny his wider bonds with humanity. He called for acts of rebellion, of resistance and non-cooperation: ‘let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine’—the machine of government, of war and of industrialization.26 Despite his influence on Gandhi and Martin Luther King, he was not an absolute pacifist and defended direct action in A Plea for Captain John Brown (1860), after the famous abolitionist had seized Harpers Ferry in 1859 as a protest against Negro slavery.
Thoreau was fully aware of the coercive nature of the State. He met his government, he said, once a year in the person of the tax-gatherer, and if he denied the authority of the State when it presented him its tax bill, he knew it would harass him without end. But he did not try to overthrow it by force. He simply refused allegiance to the State, withdrew and stood aloof from it if it performed acts he did not agree with.
In fact, Thoreau was a gradualist and ‘unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government.’ He might not like the government and the State, but this did not mean that he would have nothing to do with it: ‘I quietly declare war with the State, after my fashion, though I will still make what use and get what advantage of her I can.’27 While he refused to pay tax to finance war, he was willing to pay tax for roads and schools. Like the Greek Stoics whom he admired, he considered himself beyond politics, and however