Walden

 

This pandemic has allowed me to review my home library.  A few weeks ago, I rediscovered an old battered paperback copy of Walden.  This time, instead of speed reading out of sense of duty, I have been taking my time and listening to what he says.  Turns out to be somewhat different than the memories and mythology I had about a young man who rejected everything to live humbly in the woods.

Thoreau was, of course, well educated, and the events related took place in a sedate and settled community, not in raw wilderness.  Finally, I realize he did not so much reject the consensus of his civilization as stand a bit outside of it _ for a while_ to see how it related to what he wanted to do with his life.  All of us have been there, but many of us fail to act on our meditations.  He did so, but only for a while, and only moderately, and with an eye to writing about it. 

What I had missed in an earlier rushed read, was that he was not really advising anybody to do anything different.  Walden is not a polemic against civilization.  Thoreau appreciates a lot of modern comforts.  He is not against using iron nails, precut boards, shirts, or even occasional meals from friends. He simply wonders how much he really needs to be happy, and what he should be willing to pay for it in hours of his short time on the planet.  But he constantly reminds himself, and us, that he hardly believes that his conclusions have much if any relevance to anyone else’s life.

That is a standard problem.  Almost all of us work out our own approach to life in a more or less satisfactory manner.  We think we have done about what we could have and should have.  As we grow older, most of us become more proud of our life accomplishments, and more content in the paths we have taken.  But then, rather than stop there, we try to tell others that such is what they should also do, or should have done,  or compare their (poor) choices and actions to our (correct) legacy.  Even if we end up bitterly hating our lives, we try to tell everyone else how to avoid our mistakes, or at least how to fight those who we think made our life a disaster. 

Thoreau brazenly states that he has never met a sixty year old who had anything of value to tell him at thirty.  More uncommonly, as he discovers his inner peace, he makes no pretense that his conclusions will apply to you or me.  He just lays them out and challenges us to challenge ourselves in a similar manner.  Compared to fanatic diatribes of current philosophers, that is a refreshing approach. 

Contemplation of the right way to live automatically drifts to definitions of utopia.  How do I live the best life for me, how does society provide the best life for everyone?  Thoreau is the proper starting point, not with solutions glibly offered but with profound questions.  More interestingly, in these times when everyone is admonished to “be all that you can be,”  he questions just how much “all” in socially defined terms is really important.

Death of Smallness

 

A pathetic new plea by Karl Rove reiterates the false mythology of Republicans as the party of small government.  This has been a mantra (when they were out of power) since Reagan’s famous line about “I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” followed by “starving” Leviathan with tax cuts as fantasized by Gingrich.  But everywhere, in everything, all the time, bigness has won.

The only national players _ superpowers and others _ are the big countries with bigger militaries.  Amazon has destroyed the corner stores and regional malls, big fast food chains have driven out smaller competitors, big citizens make billions of dollars, superstars dominate entertainment, big media reigns, big pharma produces drugs, and each small success startup is quickly gobbled by some giant corporation.  Saving a local park or recycling household bottles means nothing in the face of global climate change and mass animal extinction.

Meanwhile in the US there are only two big political parties, each fighting the other as if in a war, with only a winner or loser for whatever “base” supports it.  The good of all is tangential to simply having power.  And that power _ bureaucracy _ must be big to keep the other big parts of society _ police, military, corporations, billionaires, states, media _ under control so that civilization does not rip itself apart.  The deep state is a necessary infrastructure for remaining socially cohesive.

I admire small things.  The local entrepreneur, contractor, restauranteur, professional are to be encouraged.  But each of them is supported by large networks, especially the huge protection of our immense court system.  They purchase what they need, generally, from appropriate goliaths _ contractors, for example, frequent big national home-goods centers.  But they exist largely on sufferance and are likely to be snuffed out by a change in taste, or a pandemic, or new legal consensus.

I admire representative democracy when it is organized as a republic whose purpose is formally to respect the rights of its inhabitants.  But I am not sure what these rights _ in a modern technological crowded and globally connected world _ should be.  I have lived through vestiges of “blue laws” and worry about the fanatic beliefs of evangelicals because the freedom of one may be the chains of another. 

So what should a conservative _ or for that matter libertarian _ mindset consider?  Simply how is all this bigness somehow subordinated to an individual’s rights.  I do not want to be told what to do by billionaires, deep state, or corporations _ yet I also know that if these and the huge military keeping us protected from other countries and each other would cease to exist, my life would be awful indeed.

We’ve gone about as far as we can with enlightenment philosophies _ generated before electricity and the global community.  We need some new ideas.  And if current conservatives or anyone else cannot provide them, they should step aside.  But I guarantee that whatever the solutions or outcomes, smallness will not play much of a part.  Current civilization and its needs have killed that forever.

Everything is big now.  A small government would be crushed by other governments and other forces, and would in fact be a pitiful and useless annoyance.