Abstract
Footnotes are often read out of a sense of grudging duty, but in Balthrop-Lewis’s new book, they constitute a lively parallel discussion that expands the frame of reference and provokes the reader to deeper engagement. I particularly appreciated being referred to Kathryn Schulz’s New Yorker article (p. 212), amounting to a thoroughgoing character assassination of Thoreau, which if successful, would undermine the very project that Balthrop-Lewis has embarked upon. Schulz provides an entertaining summary of the long tradition of resistance to hagiographical attempts to beatify Thoreau as a modernist saint, and to elevate Walden to the status of a sacred text of American civil religion. Likewise, she rejects the adulation that turns Thoreau into a channel of the ‘national conscience’ and is sceptical of any sense that he carried a revelation back from the wilderness, pointing the way to a harmony between humankind and nature, and passing on lessons that could or should be heeded in the twenty-first century. Schulz argues that this ‘vision cannot survive any serious reading of “Walden”. The real Thoreau was, in the fullest sense of the word, self-obsessed: narcissistic, fanatical about self-control, adamant that he required nothing beyond himself to understand and thrive in the world’ (Kathryn Schulz, ‘Pond Scum’, The New Yorker, 19 October 2015, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/pond-scum).
Schulz adds her voice to what is now a well-rehearsed chorus of dissent, and by directing readers to hear it, Balthrop-Lewis engages in a strategy by which readers may confront serious accusations made against Thoreau, while also transcending them by means of the carefully researched arguments. The promise is that we will discover the pearl within the unattractive and weather-beaten shell. Indeed, the author’s gambit is that it would be a mistake to focus on Thoreau’s obvious and well-documented flaws to such an extent that we misunderstand the scope, motivations and contemporary relevance of his experiment in living and writing.
In this vein, we might detect an analogy with the reception of another eccentric modernist prophet, and I am thinking particularly of Simone Weil. Just as Weil is sometimes pilloried for being a socialist idealist who was a failure at factory work, and a high-minded practitioner of voluntary poverty who was nevertheless dependent on handouts from her parents and friends, so Thoreau’s critics savour opportunities to note that his brief experiment in voluntary poverty did little to ameliorate the condition of those whose poverty was involuntary and permanent, that he enjoyed the frequent companionship of friends in his ‘solitude’, and that he remained dependent on the institutions and structures he often criticised (pp. 40–45). Accusations of hypocrisy are easy to make, and often entertaining to read, but Balthrop-Lewis is right, I think, to wonder if a swift rejection on such grounds may avoid the deeper moral challenge being issued by one who, grieved by the vast structural injustices in which he knew himself to be enmeshed, sought to embody a different possibility that was tested to destruction in the laboratory of an imperfect and oft-compromised counter-witness. This is a conviction that is articulated throughout Chapter 1 and sets the tone for all that comes thereafter. By discerning in Thoreau a profound engagement with the opportunities and temptations of modernist scepticism, and a critique of the injustices of his own place and time, Balthrop-Lewis joins the counter-chorus indebted to Stanley Cavell, whose Senses of Walden did most, at least in the late twentieth century, to defend Thoreau against detractors, and whose work clearly inspires many aspects of this book (pp. 57, 189.)
Balthrop-Lewis is not only concerned to counter the charges of hypocrisy, but also targets the more serious problem of the defective hermeneutical traditions that have resulted in problematic interpretations of Walden. Readers are informed early on that ‘one premise of this book is that white supremacy perverted Thoreau’s twentieth-century reception’ (p. 5). The result, so the author claims, is that Thoreau was held up as an inspiration for a conservation movement that focused heavily on preserving ‘unspoilt’ wilderness, but often did so without adequate reference to the social and economic domain; a ‘split’ that Thoreau avoided. In this vein, Balthrop-Lewis is not the first to observe that some of the ‘wilderness campaigns’ that claimed Thoreau as a ‘patron saint’ were often uncritical of the desires of white moneyed classes to have wild places to escape frenetic over-work and over-consumption, often without adequate acknowledgement histories of inhabitation, indigenous land management, and racist dispossession. There is a determination here to counter the distortive impact of such biases on the reception of Thoreau’s oeuvre, in the same way that the author is keen to counter Schulz’s sensational claim that the cabin-dwelling author prefigures Ayn Rand’s individualism and egoism. Readers are reminded that Gandhi and Martin Luther King remain ‘the most famous figures to put Thoreau to use for social justice causes’ (p. 4), and that Thoreau’s nature-transcendentalism fuels his cry for economic and racial justice (the focus of chapter 3), rather than being a dimension of his thought that can be ‘split off’ from the rest.
Balthrop-Lewis sets herself the task of rescuing Thoreau from exaggerated attacks and lopsided interpretations, with the added conviction that what emerges from this process is a profile of a figure who can inspire ethical deliberation and political action in an age of global warming and acute biodiversity loss. To this end, she sets out to ensure that readers not only appreciate Thoreau’s nature mysticism, but also his sensitivity to political and economic realities, which are explored in detail throughout the book. Readers are educated as to the structures of the local economy in nineteenth-century Concord and the role the Walden Woods had in providing a place of safety and subsistence for freed slaves and poor itinerant white labourers before and during Thoreau’s retreat there (pp. 40–87). Readers are also invited to a detailed consideration of Thoreau’s religious and philosophical vision in context (chapter 2), always with reference to ‘the persistent epistemological problems of the modern period’ (p. 50). His ambivalence toward, and deep indebtedness to, the Unitarian tradition, together with his embrace of Emerson’s transcendentalism, is expertly and sensitively described with exhaustive reference to primary and secondary literature. What emerges is a portrait of a man who was keen to disrupt notions of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, by making a periphery his centre: a cabin in the woods becomes the centre of a web of sociality that includes those living nearby or travelling through, but also more radically, the natural world in which he is immersed and on which he knows himself to be dependent (pp. 50–54). Balthrop-Lewis argues persuasively that lopsided readings of Thoreau that distort and compartmentalise his writings, dislocating nature from society, often stem from a failure to properly account for his religious context, formation and convictions, in which the groundwork for a more integrated vision is found.
Thoreau’s retreat into simplicity prefigures neither a wordless contemplative rapture, but the opposite: it becomes the context for an explosion of linguistic expression and creativity. It gives Thoreau the time and space to write, anticipating an extended sociality across time and space that includes us, his readers (pp. 182–90). It is this integrated vision of sociality, emerging within a context of contemplative discipline, which leads Balthrop-Lewis to argue that Thoreau is much closer to many radical Christian voices than many critics and admirers dare to admit. We are reminded that for all his scepticism toward religious institutions and forms of ‘Christian philanthropy’, the contemplative shape of his life, and the development of an ethic that turns the periphery into ‘the centre’, strikes the author as holding a deep resonance with forms of monastic political asceticism witnessed throughout Christian history (pp. 168–70). This is an argument that is explored throughout chapter 4, where a resonance is found between Thoreau’s retreat and ‘medieval monastic reform movements … orientated by Jesus’s radical economic message’ that integrate notions of mystical union and dissenting ways of ordering communal time and money (p. 202). In chapter 5 the argument is extended further, as Thoreau’s asceticism is defended against charges of hypocrisy, humourlessness, and a life-denying avoidance of pleasure.
After five chapters describing Thoreau’s life and ideas, and countering defective interpretations and applications, readers arrive at a long concluding chapter, which moves into a more speculative and constructive key (pp. 248–78). Here, the author considers Thoreau’s continuing relevance to contemporary Christian ethics, and eco-ethics generally. I was impressed with the perceptive engagement with debates that have arisen in the wake of Lynn White’s oft-cited and much critiqued argument, made in 1967, claiming that the Bible’s influence on ‘western culture’ had exacerbated environmental calamity, and that Christianity, perhaps with the exception of St. Francis, represented a roadblock to future progress on environmental sustainability (pp. 252–54). There have been many compelling responses to Lynn White from theologians and biblical scholars, which, according to the author, have largely focused on repairing conceptions of ‘nature’ with reference to biblical and patristic sources. And while Balthrop-Lewis sees such counter-arguments as essential, she also insists on a need to move beyond the temptation to see the ‘ecologic crisis’ as attributable to ‘a singular, abstract problem: the dominative view of nature’, because this results in equally abstract efforts at repair (p. 254). Ethicists must also seek to examine and support forms of persuasion that amount to a ‘seduction to the good’, which means both avoiding the temptation to abstraction and a tendency to obsess over particular ‘hard cases’ (p. 257).
And this is where Thoreau is seen to assist and inspire, because such a ‘seduction’ requires role models, saints and prophets; figures who see their task not only as clarifying concepts, but also embodying a judgement of the status quo. A lived witness to simplicity and sociality may enliven the moral agency of others and give momentum for virtuous ‘feedback loops’, and ethicists may need to make such witnesses intelligible and defensible (pp. 265–67). Indeed, what is needed in the midst of the present crisis, so claims the author, is bold experiments of contemplation, protest and articulation, which are robust enough to survive the inevitable accusations of hypocrisy. To this end, Balthrop-Lewis contributes a compelling and deeply researched account of Thoreau’s life and ideas, even though sceptical questions persist at just this point. Can Thoreau’s tendency toward individualism be inspiring and helpful in an age in which the agency of political institutions is the only real hope to avoid the worst projections of climate change? And is Thoreau’s over-wrought attack on philanthropy really going to inspire us in a time when foreign aid budgets are increasingly under pressure from regressive nationalist ideologies? I have my doubts, but for Balthrop-Lewis, Thoreau’s enactment of sociality may be a prompt for a generation facing the Anthropocene to imagine and enact bold experiments in simplicity, sociality and sustainability. To what extent Thoreau can help us now remains an open question, but Balthrop-Lewis has produced a lively study of his politics, religion and legacy that makes an indispensable contribution to any search for an answer.