Sample Student Research Project 2012
Essay
LITR
4232 American Renaissance
Sample Student Research Project 2012
Essay
Andy Feith
April 30, 2012
Henry David Thoreau and Wendell Berry: Professional Transcenders of
Government
Thoreau’s attitude toward governments is pithily stated in the first
sentence of the essay: “That government is best which governs least.” His vision
of the ideal human society is even more sweeping; he says that when “men” have
become sufficiently mature, they will have no need for government at all.
Government is expedient at best, an impediment at its worst.” One of the objects
of Resistance to Civil Government is
to desacralize the institution of government among human beings, and to contrast
its imperfect laws with the absolute laws of capital-T Truth.
One of the universal flaws of all governments is that they are vulnerable
to being hijacked by a few powerful people to serve their interests. (Thoreau
cites the Mexican War as a then-current example). Wendell Berry pursues a nearly
identical argument in “A Citizen’s Response,” an essay written as an answer to
the Bush White House’s “National Security Strategy” document published in
September 2002, which lays out the administration’s right and intent to carry
out preemptive attacks.
There is a certain kind of romanticism in the attitudes of these two men
toward their American government. Both men seek to stand apart from their
governments, to criticize it from the outside, and in Thoreau’s case, to sit in
one of its jails as a silent testimony to the power of individual action in the
face of institutional injustice. Furthermore, his certainty that, one day, men
and women will have learned how to govern themselves and grown out of the need
to hear the “din” of the government machine is a quintessentially romantic
desire for a future utopia. Berry’s stance toward his government is more urgent
and less obviously romantic, but his decades of effort to persuade his fellow
citizens by appealing to their emotions and their intellects—“the better angels
of their natures” —seems a bit romantic in the context of cynicism toward
politics and politicians that I, at least, perceive to be widespread.
Furthermore, Wendell Berry’s entire stance as an agrarian and a farmer, along
with his conviction that Americans were demonstrably more sane and lived more
sustainably before World War II, is a strain of romanticism.
It is romantic for Thoreau to assert the moral superiority and the power of
truth inherent in an individual who acts according to his principles rather than
the letter of the law; Thoreau is also transcendant in his emphasis on the real
substance of invisible things. I’m
referring to passages like the one in which he calls attention to the spiritual
wound that occurs when a man obeys the established law in violation of his
conscience. “Through this wound a man's real manhood and
immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death.” (We may have even
found a touch of the gothic here! One might call it the moral or ethical
gothic.) Or when the jailers shut him up securely in his cell for the night, he
marvels at the thoroughness of the cell’s safeguards against escape, yet his
intellect and his imagination are free to roam. (Indeed, there is physical
evidence of the uncaged prisoner’s mind, in the form of the sheets of verses
that are passed from person to person yet “remain unpublished.” Here is
Thoreau’s defiant declaration of superiority to the government that jails him:
“What force has a multitude? They can only force me who obey a higher law than
I.” The romantic and the transcendent converge.
In the fifth paragraph of “Resistance to Civil Government,” Thoreau
introduces the idea that a government’s laws can be justly disobeyed, in what
strikes me as an obvious and incontrovertible statement: “It is not desirable to
cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation
which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.”
However, through automatic obedience to governments and “corporations,” Thoreau
contends that men function as “machines,” unintelligent, unthinking, “at the
service of some unscrupulous man in power.”
When I consider whether this statement is true today, whether Americans
still exhibit “an undue respect for the law,” I have to observe that things have
become more complicated. Acts of simple civil disobedience, intended to result
in the protestors’ being arrested, have become a common tactic. In certain
pockets and populations—I have the city of New Orleans in mind as an example
from my own experience—there is a powerful strain of distrust toward law
enforcement. In the realm of politics, voters’ faith in politicians’ good
intentions is discouragingly low. Yet, all of this being the case, it seems to
me that most Americans live their lives without engaging in conscious civil
disobedience.
The idea of the “corporation,” as Thoreau uses it, has changed its shape
and assumed a place at the center of American discourse. The term “corporation”
today is likely to refer to one of many multinational corporations, the largest
of which are wealthier than entire countries. If we assume, with Thoreau, that
“a [typical] corporation has no conscience,” then we have found another powerful
entity, in addition to the government, that is subject to each individual’s
determination of right and wrong. Wendell Berry, who like Thoreau is a
conservationist, humble toward the mysteries of nature, posits in his essay “The
Total Economy” that individual Americans need to become aware of their passive
complicity in large corporations’ grave misuses of our land. “ . . . [M]ost
people in our country . . . have given proxies to the corporations to produce
and provide all of their food,
clothing, and shelter.” (No greater contrast could be offered at this point than
the first chapter of Walden, in which
Thoreau enumerates, down to the penny, what it cost him to build his house, and
grow his food). Both Thoreau and Berry seem to be conveying the message that, to
create a more just society (which, for Berry more than for Thoreau, entails an
awareness of the destruction of ecosystems and the need to change our practices
so as to preserve those ecosystems), their readers ought to endeavor to live
more like Berry and Thoreau themselves.
Both men also distrust the post-industrial revolution economy. Here is
Thoreau: “I
cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men may get
clothing. . . . [A]s far as I have heard or observed, the principal object is,
not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that
corporations may be enriched.” And Berry: “A corporation, essentially, is a pile
of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance . . . .
It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of
becoming a bigger pile of money.” I’ve already mentioned Thoreau’s notion that
men who unquestioningly do what they are told to do by the government function
as machines, not men; perhaps it isn’t too much to go further and say that the
industrial revolution also tends to make men into machines. Rather than owning
the means of production or working their own plot of land (a system which
Wendell Berry would heartily approve), men go wherever there are jobs, and work
in factories where they must efficiently apply their bodies to operate
machinery. Both
In the closing paragraphs of
Resistance to Civil Government, Thoreau finally turns his attention to the
sacred documents of his peers, the Bible and the constitution. Yes, they have
many virtues, and yes, the constitution lays out a form of government that is
superior to most, but only from “a lower point of view.” “They who know of no
purer sources of truth, who have traced up its stream no higher, stand, and
wisely stand, by the Bible and the Constitution”. Thoreau’s audacious move is to
suggest that these documents are not the end-all be-all source of truth. The
constitution is in the end still a manmade document, and the Bible may be a holy
scripture, but it is not the only or the final word of God. The “fountainhead”
of truth will always be ahead, just out of reach, ever prompting the human race
toward further discoveries and achievements. The transcendent figure of the
upward or ascending form comes to mind. This fountainhead is the ultimate
invisible reality. Accepting that there are higher planes of truth to achieve
would enable a government to act in such a way that would genuinely benefit its
people. Thoreau asks the tantalizing question: is democracy the best way that
human lives may be ordered? Can there not be a government that respects the
individual first and foremost, that can flourish without coercing its subjects
or trampling on the bodies of other nations through wars and invasions? In a
typically transcendent move, Thoreau invokes the image of this “more perfect and
glorious State,” which he admits he has neither seen nor even imagined. Like the
fountainhead of infinite truth, it can only be approached by men and women who
are ever progressing in their efforts toward governing themselves in accordance
with the absolute moral laws of the universe.
Sources
Berry, Wendell. Citizenship Papers.
Washington, D. C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2003.
Bloom, Harold, Ed. Modern Critical Views:
Henry David Thoreau. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987.
Gibbs, Jared A. “The Length of Our
Vision”:
Thomas, Owen, Ed. Henry David Thoreau:
Walden and Civil Disobedience: Authoritative Texts, Background, Reviews and
Essays in Criticism.
Thoreau, Henry David. Resistance to Civil
Government. Accessed online at
<http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/hsh/whitec/texts/AmClassics/Transcend/Thoreau/ThoreauResCivGvt.htm>.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden.
Accessed online at
<http://thoreau.eserver.org/walden00.html>.
