Thoreau: Consummate Poseur of the Greens
If there were a 15-round fight between Mike Tyson and Hilary Swank, my money would be on Tyson. I realize that he is older now, but I still think he would be the go-to guy under those conditions.
Why would he accept the challenge? It would not build his reputation. Not only is Hilary Swank not a very good fighter, she is actually an actress who was in a movie where she played a fighter. It seems to me that the world would not stand up and applaud him for having put her out of the fight after three rounds. Probably, one half of one round would do it, and even so, he would not be heralded as the master of the ring.
I don't think he would take up the challenge. But what if Hilary had kept going to the press and insisting that she could beat him to a pulp? What if the press began taking her seriously? How would Mike handle this problem? Poorly, in all likelihood.
I know exactly how he would feel. This is my problem in responding to the academic equivalent of Hilary Swank. I have been publicly attacked by a lady who has a Ph.D. in English. She has said that I really don't know what I am talking about in the field of literary analysis. She said I have misrepresented one of the greatest literary con men in American history: Henry David Thoreau.
DR. SNIPPETS
She has a reputation for being a writer. She occasionally writes in a libertarian magazine. She also has a book with her name on it, which is generously called a textbook by her New York City publisher. Actually, it is not a textbook. It is a collection of other people's writings. She then makes brief comments on these writings.
This genre has been around for about half a century. Somebody with a Ph.D. collects extracts snippets out of journal articles, or snippets of primary source documents (preferably not copyrighted), and tries to find a publisher that sells textbooks to colleges: books with extremely high markups. The publisher targets the book, so-called, at captive college students. It costs the company about three dollars to print the book in paperback, and the book is sold for about $125 to the hapless students, who cannot escape. Robert Nisbet described this academic genre a generation ago: great snippets. He regarded this as one of the marks of the decline of higher education in America.
In the 1960-61 academic year, I wrote a satire piece for the campus newspaper on snippets books. I remember only my proposed title for one such collection: Readings in the Fetal Pig. The target of my satire knew exactly what I was referring to. He was hauling in royalties from two of these collections: Oliver Johnson of the famous Beatty and Johnson collection of snippets of Western civilization, which is still generating royalties at $90 each for two paperbacks. He mentioned this to me, somewhat defensive. I remained politely silent. Neither of them could teach worth a hoot, but they surely could snip.
Yet she did not write the book. Her father wrote it. That is to say, he collected it. It has been around for over 40 years. She re-edited it, and added comments. The book is on rhetoric. Maybe she will include this article in the next edition. I am pretty good at rhetoric.
The key to understanding her book, according to the publisher, is that it is not meant to be understood. The publisher's blurb says this: "Best of all, the text's short, easy-to-read essays ensure that your class time will focus not on what the readings mean, but on what they mean for your students' writing."
With this as background, I begin my response. She thinks I do not know how to read critically. She wrote an article on my inability to read critically. She found a publisher. That was her first punch in round one.
Someone sent me a link to her article on October 30. I shall now complete the round.
THOREAU: MASTER OF THE POSE
The debate is over Henry David Thoreau's book, Walden (1854). I regard it as a classic example of how the academic Left resurrects a book that almost nobody read when it was published. College professors then force generations of students to read the book. They substitute Cliff's Notes. Nobody else reads it. They may buy it -- "It's a classic" -- but they don't finish reading it. It's one of those books to which this rule applies: "Don't read it while smoking in bed."
Outside of English departments, the book is rarely assigned. Thoreau was a poseur. His neighbors knew this, which is why they were not impressed by Walden.
I wrote an article in mid-April on the nature of Thoreau's pose, and how his legion of promoters fail to mention this. They praise him to the stars. I went through the Wikipedia article on him, line by line, exposing the nature of his con game, and the academic community's continuation of his con game, especially English departments.
The lady protested. My article was posted on April 18. Ten days later, a libertarian magazine published her rebuttal.
If you want to see what I wrote about Thoreau, the original article is here. "Thoreau's Walden: Phony Testament of the Greens". I spent five weeks analyzing Walden for my freshman English course for the Ron Paul Curriculum: 25 25-minute lectures.
I wrote this:
The book had no influence in his lifetime. He died in 1862. It became widely read by intellectuals in the 1930's, during the Great Depression. It was part of the anti-capitalism worldview of Leftist intellectuals. They recognized a kindred spirit.
I also wrote this:
The praise that literary critics heap on the book is a public testimony to the academic con job known as literary criticism.
THE POSE BEGINS
Here is what I said about Thoreau's return to the land. He built a shack on Ralph Waldo Emerson's land. He lived there for 26 months. He was 27 when he built the shack. He went into town for entertainment several nights a week. He bought his food there. He borrowed money to pay for this food. After his 26 months in the shack, he returned to the family's pencil-making business.
The average college graduate knows none of this. All he knows is that Walden is about a return to simpler living.
I said this about his views on capitalism.
He really did hate free enterprise and commercial life, but he went right back into it after 26 months in his shack. He worked for his family's company for the rest of his life.
I could have added this: at exactly the same time, Frederick Engels was doing much the same. He hated capitalism more than Thoreau did, and he was a far more successful capitalist than Thoreau was. He spent his life running his family's textile factory in England.
According to my critic,
North's major arguments are as follows:Walden is anti-capitalist and pro-Green.
Walden is a big fake.
Walden is a badly written book that only has its reputation because it fits into the anti-capitalist/pro-Green agenda.And all of these arguments are wrong.
So says a lady with a Ph.D. in English and the co-author of a $125 paperback book of snippets.
THOREAU ON CAPITALISM'S INNOVATIONS
In my response to the Wikipedia article on Thoreau, I cited it verbatim:
Progress: In a world where everyone and everything is eager to advance in terms of progress, Thoreau finds it stubborn and skeptical to think that any outward improvement of life can bring inner peace and contentment.
I wrote this:
[If this is true, then progress is a liability. But you are alive because of progress in the division of labor, which sustains modern life. It also sustained life in New England in 1854. Thoreau knew this, and he hated it. He pretended for 26 months to avoid progress in the mid-1840s.]
Here, I use my edition of Walden. You may download it here. This will let you verify my citations: page numbers.
Thoreau was writing in the shadow of the two most revolutionary inventions of the mid-nineteenth century: the telegraph and the railroad. In 1840, the speed of communications had been what it had been in the time of Augustus Caesar: about one mile per hour across long distances. It 1844, this increased to 186,000 miles a second. No invention in history more completely transformed the world faster than the telegraph. In second place was the railroad. He despised both of them. He had contempt for inventions in general.
He used rhetoric. He did not use it well. When rhetoric retroactively identifies a writer as a clever fool, it has backfired. My critic's collection of snippets is on rhetoric. If she had looked for a single passage in American literary history that illustrated the utterly self-destructive use of rhetoric, this passage should have made the short list.
I cite him at length, because the more anyone with an understanding of either logic or economic history reads Thoreau, the more obvious it becomes that the man was a fool. He was not just a run-of-the mill fool. He was one of the great fools in the history of literature.
Here is his view of technological progress.
As with our colleges, so with a hundred "modern improvements"; there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them. Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough (pp. 34-35).
Here, his language identifies him as a consummate fool.
This is my central argument in this essay: Thoreau's verbal foolishness was a product of his pose. He was a poseur, and he has fooled Ph.D.'s in English for eight decades. But he did not fool his contemporaries. They could spot a fool without trouble. They ignored his book -- a wise decision at the time.
But he was just getting started.
One says to me, "I wonder that you do not lay up money; you love to travel; you might take the cars and go to Fitchburg today and see the country." But I am wiser than that. I have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot (p. 35).
It is this kind of rhetoric that has endeared him to English professors, who drive cars, live in air-conditioned homes, use the Internet, and fly to their academic conventions once a year.
Fools.
Such is the universal law, which no man can ever outwit, and with regard to the railroad even we may say it is as broad as it is long. To make a railroad round the world available to all mankind is equivalent to grading the whole surface of the planet. Men have an indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades long enough all will at length ride somewhere, in next to no time, and for nothing; but though a crowd rushes to the depot, and the conductor shouts "All aboard!" when the smoke is blown away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are run over--and it will be called, and will be, "A melancholy accident."
Fool.
Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. If we do not get out sleepers, and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work, but go to tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will build railroads? And if railroads are not built, how shall we get to heaven in season? But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you (pp. 62-63).
Fool.
And when they run over a man that is walking in his sleep, a supernumerary sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him up, they suddenly stop the cars, and make a hue and cry about it, as if this were an exception. I am glad to know that it takes a gang of men for every five miles to keep the sleepers down and level in their beds as it is, for this is a sign that they may sometime get up again (p. 63).
Fool.
The railroads were now feeding the masses, enabling the third great invention -- the mechanical grain reaper -- to feed the cities. This was an answer to the prayer of Jesus: "Give us this day our daily bread." And what did Thoreau think of think of this, the greatest triumph of capitalism so far in man's history (1854). He had contempt for it.
The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods summer and winter, sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer's yard, informing me that many restless city merchants are arriving within the circle of the town, or adventurous country traders from the other side. As they come under one horizon, they shout their warning to get off the track to the other, heard sometimes through the circles of two towns. Here come your groceries, country; your rations, countrymen! Nor is there any man so independent on his farm that he can say them nay. And here's your pay for them! screams the countryman's whistle; timber like long battering-rams going twenty miles an hour against the city's walls, and chairs enough to seat all the weary and heavy-laden that dwell within them. With such huge and lumbering civility the country hands a chair to the city. All the Indian huckleberry hills are stripped, all the cranberry meadows are raked into the city. Up comes the cotton, down goes the woven cloth; up comes the silk, down goes the woollen; up come the books, but down goes the wit that writes them (p. 79).
In literature, there is Huckleberry Finn. Thoreau was Huckleberry Fool.
And hark! here comes the cattle-train bearing the cattle of a thousand hills, sheepcots, stables, and cow-yards in the air, drovers with their sticks, and shepherd boys in the midst of their flocks, all but the mountain pastures, whirled along like leaves blown from the mountains by the September gales. The air is filled with the bleating of calves and sheep, and the hustling of oxen, as if a pastoral valley were going by. When the old bell-wether at the head rattles his bell, the mountains do indeed skip like rams and the little hills like lambs. A carload of drovers, too, in the midst, on a level with their droves now, their vocation gone, but still clinging to their useless sticks as their badge of office. But their dogs, where are they? It is a stampede to them; they are quite thrown out; they have lost the scent. Methinks I hear them barking behind the Peterboro' Hills, or panting up the western slope of the Green Mountains. They will not be in at the death. Their vocation, too, is gone. Their fidelity and sagacity are below par now. They will slink back to their kennels in disgrace, or perchance run wild and strike a league with the wolf and the fox. So is your pastoral life whirled past and away. But the bell rings, and I must get off the track and let the cars go by;What's the railroad to me?
I never go to see
Where it ends.
It fills a few hollows,
And makes banks for the swallows,
It sets the sand a-blowing,
And the blackberries a-growing,but I cross it like a cart-path in the woods. I will not have my eyes put out and my ears spoiled by its smoke and steam and hissing (pp. 83-84).
Green fool.
The evil railroad: it is the spiritual heir of the mercenary Greeks.
That devilish Iron Horse, whose ear-rending neigh is heard throughout the town, has muddied the Boiling Spring with his foot, and he it is that has browsed off all the woods on Walden shore, that Trojan horse, with a thousand men in his belly, introduced by mercenary Greeks (p. 136)!
My critic insists the following: "And, as Thoreau's fondness for railroads--honorably limited by his concerns for the poor working conditions of those who construct them--suggests, he is no despiser of modern technology."
She says I got it all wrong. You have now read large extracts. You decide.
Then what about newspapers? Aren't they signs of capitalism's progress?
And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter--we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea (p. 64).
Fool.
REDEMPTION THROUGH SIMPLICITY AND POVERTY
Thoreau is beloved by the tenured poseurs of the academy because of his verbal contempt of economic success. This begins in Chapter 1: "Economy." He begins with a rhetorical tirade against middle-class wealth.
I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born? They have got to live a man's life, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well as they can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and woodlot (p. 2)!
Men do not need 60 acres. A few feet of dirt would do just fine.
The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.
His utter contempt for profit-seeking labor can be seen in this passage. It is one of the most blatant examples of the Green ideology I have ever read. A local pond was Flint's Pond. It was named after the owner of the farm. Thoreau thundered: What right did the owner have to name his pond? What a travesty of justice -- Green justice!
Flint's Pond! Such is the poverty of our nomenclature. What right had the unclean and stupid farmer, whose farm abutted on this sky water, whose shores he has ruthlessly laid bare, to give his name to it? Some skin-flint, who loved better the reflecting surface of a dollar, or a bright cent, in which he could see his own brazen face; who regarded even the wild ducks which settled in it as trespassers; his fingers grown into crooked and bony talons from the long habit of grasping harpylike;-- so it is not named for me. I go not there to see him nor to hear of him; who never saw it, who never bathed in it, who never loved it, who never protected it, who never spoke a good word for it, nor thanked God that He had made it. Rather let it be named from the fishes that swim in it, the wild fowl or quadrupeds which frequent it, the wild flowers which grow by its shores, or some wild man or child the thread of whose history is interwoven with its own; not from him who could show no title to it but the deed which a like-minded neighbor or legislature gave him--him who thought only of its money value; whose presence perchance cursed all the shores; who exhausted the land around it, and would fain have exhausted the waters within it; who regretted only that it was not English hay or cranberry meadow--there was nothing to redeem it, forsooth, in his eyes--and would have drained and sold it for the mud at its bottom. It did not turn his mill, and it was no privilege to him to behold it. I respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruits, but dollars; who loves not the beauty of his fruits, whose fruits are not ripe for him till they are turned to dollars (pp. 137-38).
This is nothing short of slander. His victim could not defend his name or reputation. Thoreau besmirched the reputation of a man he did not know. His language was deeply religious: "who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him." Yet Thoreau had nothing but contempt for Christianity, as anyone who has read Walden knows. "Our manners have been corrupted by communication with the saints. Our hymn-books resound with a melodious cursing of God and enduring Him forever" (p. 53). This was a self-conscious caricature of the Westminster Shorter Catechism's first question. "Q. 1: What is the chief end of man? A: Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever."
What would he have put in place of Flint's economic success? Why poverty, of course -- grinding, squalid poverty.
Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth. Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor--poor farmers. A model farm! where the house stands like a fungus in a muckheap, chambers for men, horses, oxen, and swine, cleansed and uncleansed, all contiguous to one another (p. 138)!
Green fool.
He tried to resurrect the myth of the noble savage, while keeping alive the myth of the civilized savage.
It is a mistake to suppose that, in a country where the usual evidences of civilization exist, the condition of a very large body of the inhabitants may not be as degraded as that of savages. I refer to the degraded poor, not now to the degraded rich. To know this I should not need to look farther than to the shanties which everywhere border our railroads, that last improvement in civilization; where I see in my daily walks human beings living in sties, and all winter with an open door, for the sake of light, without any visible, often imaginable, wood-pile, and the forms of both old and young are permanently contracted by the long habit of shrinking from cold and misery, and the development of all their limbs and faculties is checked. It certainly is fair to look at that class by whose labor the works which distinguish this generation are accomplished. Such too, to a greater or less extent, is the condition of the operatives of every denomination in England, which is the great workhouse of the world. Or I could refer you to Ireland, which is marked as one of the white or enlightened spots on the map. Contrast the physical condition of the Irish with that of the North American Indian, or the South Sea Islander, or any other savage race before it was degraded by contact with the civilized man (pp. 22-23).
And this:
"What!" exclaim a million Irishmen starting up from all the shanties in the land, "is not this railroad which we have built a good thing?" Yes, I answer, comparatively good, that is, you might have done worse; but I wish, as you are brothers of mine, that you could have spent your time better than digging in this dirt (p. 36).
If there is any doubt that Thoreau shared the contempt of the New England Brahmins for the Irish, this dispels it.
What does mankind need? Redemption! And how can redemption come? Simple living!
I am convinced, that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough (pp. 120-21).
And then, after 26 months of living in a shack, he returned to business. Why, it was the Adamic fall, all over again!
There is one logical way to argue that this man was not a fool: to argue that it was all a pose.
A LEGACY OF POSEURS
My critic knows that I targeted the academic specialty which granted her a Ph.D. degree: English professors. They are attracted to poseurs. Walt Whitman is the classic example in American literature. It is a shame that Esther Shepherd's book, Walt Whitman's Pose (1936), has been out of print for 75 years. She came rather late to this discovery. His contemporary, who knew him, William Roscoe Thayer, went into print on this early.
Thoreau was a fake. He was a small businessman who hated the innovations of his era -- innovations that were transforming the lives of tens of millions of people. He hated the railroad, hated the telegraph, hated newspapers -- if we are to believe his rhetoric. But there is no good reason to believe anything he wrote. It was all a pose. He did not fool his contemporaries, but he has fooled three generations of English professors.
My critic writes of his career, "If this is fakery, we can no longer recognize truth."
She speaks for a guild of mostly tax-funded, self-certified, tenured professors of English.
At least she got out of academia, although she still cashes in on it with her $125 collection of snippets. She now works for a libertarian outfit that has $300 million, and is basically invisible. She has free market tenure. Good for her. But she would be wise to spend her time more productively by writing about something less dear to her heart than that old con man, Henry David Thoreau.
CONCLUSION
If the lady wishes to come out for round two, I am ready to oblige.
[Just for the record -- and for search engines -- her name is Sarah Skwire. You may not have heard of her. I hadn't.]