NATIONAL SURVIVAL: Sacred Thoreau chose to live alone!

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2023

David Brooks focused on others: As we noted in Tuesday's report, the newly inaugurated President Lincoln had a better idea.

"We must not be enemies," he said in March 1861, at the very end of his inaugural address. "We are not enemies, but friends." 

National survival was at stake—the very survival of the nation, such as that nation was. Already, our friendship was under a great strain, as this short capsule history recalls:

The election of Lincoln provoked the legislature of South Carolina to call a state convention to consider secession. Before the war, South Carolina did more than any other Southern state to advance the notion that a state had the right to nullify federal laws, and even to secede from the United States. The convention unanimously voted to secede on December 20, 1860, and adopted a secession declaration...The "cotton states" of Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas followed suit, seceding in January and February 1861.

Those seven states had already seceded. For good and/or for ill, there followed a long, bloody war.

National survival was in question when Lincoln gave that address. Such questions had been alive for decades at that time, but then again, there was this:

Seven years earlier, in 1854, Henry David Thoreau published one of this nation's most famous books. It was an account of several years he had spent (largely) by himself, in a cabin in the woods. 

Thoreau was well aware of the moral disaster involved in the ongoing, centuries-old practice of human enslavement. Still, he spent several years in the woods, famously explaining why:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

More or less, so it was. It was something resembling an inner exile, even as the nation grappled with a transcendent moral issue which was putting national survival at stake.

Should sacred Thoreau have done that? A furious critic could almost claim that this was the start of the Me Generation, with "a leading transcendentalist" turning his back on affairs of the world with the stated goal of "suck[ing] out all the marrow of life."

Quite often, that sucking of marrow succeeded. Here is our favorite passage from Walden. It's the start of the chapter called Solitude:

This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself. As I walk along the stony shore of the pond in my shirt sleeves, though it is cool as well as cloudy and windy, and I see nothing special to attract me, all the elements are unusually congenial to me. The bullfrogs trump to usher in the night, and the note of the whippoorwill is borne on the rippling wind from over the water. Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath...

On such evenings, Thoreau imbibed delight through every pore. 

As he did, our national nightmare continued in the South, and he was well aware of that fact. A furious critic could take exception to the way he positioned himself in the chapter called Economy, at the very start of his book:

I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both north and south. It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself. Talk of a divinity in man! Look at the teamster on the highway, wending to market by day or night; does any divinity stir within him? His highest duty to fodder and water his horses! What is his destiny to him compared with the shipping interests? Does not he drive for Squire Make-a-stir? How godlike, how immortal, is he? See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself...

Yes, there were Negro Slaves in the south—but that teamster on that New England road was enslaving himself! 

No one reads it at this point, but Walden is a very famous book. As a moral tract, it can be read in various ways.

We'll have to admit that we thought of Walden when we read David Brooks' lengthy essay in Sunday's New York Times. His essay concerned his new book, a book which arrives at a bookstore near you with a somewhat squishy title:

How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

At the New York Times, Sunday's lengthy essay appears online beneath this squishy-adjacent title:

The Essential Skills for Being Human

So reads a somewhat fuzzy title. As the lengthy essay starts, it can perhaps convey the feeling of being All About Brooks Himself:

BROOKS (10/22/23): If you ever saw the old movie “Fiddler on the Roof,” you know how warm and emotional Jewish families can be. They are always hugging, singing, dancing, laughing and crying together.

I come from another kind of Jewish family.

The culture of my upbringing could be summed up by the phrase “Think Yiddish, act British.” We were reserved, stiff-upper-lip types. I’m not saying I had a bad childhood; far from it. Home was a stimulating place for me growing up. At Thanksgiving, we talked about the history of Victorian funerary monuments and the evolutionary sources of lactose intolerance (I’m not kidding). There was love in our home. We just didn’t express it.

Whether it was nature or nurture, I grew into a person who was a bit detached. When I was 4, my nursery schoolteacher apparently told my parents, “David doesn’t always play with the other children. A lot of the time he stands off to the side and observes them,” which was good for a career in journalism but not for emotional availability or a joyous life.

So the lengthy essay begins. Even by the time he was four, Brooks wasn't positioned on the road which leads to "a joyous life."

Under current arrangements around the world—under current arrangements here at home—should major American journalists be casting about, looking for ways to live "a joyous life?" 

Presumably, you can teach that flat or you can teach it round. But watching Brooks on last evening's PBS NewsHour, we were struck, once again, by the self-referential nature of his discussion of this new book.

(You can watch that discussion here, or you can read the transcript.)

Much of Brooks' discussion with Geoff Bennett has a certain "All about me, plus my family and my friends" feel. But then again, there was this early, more sweeping reference:

BROOKS (10/25/23): I'm not an exceptional guy, but I am a grower. I do change. And so I have been on a journey to try to become more emotionally available, more spiritually available, a better friend to people.

And the sad thing is, is as I have become on a journey to becoming a little more human, the country has been on a journey of becoming less human. And so we now live in bitter and divided times. There's just so much social pain.

And this book is really an attempt to make us all better at seeing another person, making them feel seen, heard and understood, because, if our country is going to come back from the inhumanity, and if our families are going to come back from the breakdown, and if our workplaces are going to thrive, we just have to be really good at this skill of seeing others, making them feel valid, respected, heard and understood.

Our country has been on a journey of becoming less human. If our country is going to recover from this, "we just have to be really good at this skill of seeing others."

All of a sudden, Brooks seemed to be talking about something which extends beyond himself and his friends. Somehow, Brooks seems to feel that his book isn't just a treatise on how to be a better friend. It's also a treatise on an existential question:

Our country is becoming less human. How can our country come back?

At such moments, Brooks move away from the simple self-reference and speaks to a larger question. And indeed, as we noted yesterday:

In his lengthy essay in the Times, he says that his book concerns the fact that our "national survival" is at stake!

Thoreau ventured into the woods. He lived there, largely alone, for an array of reasons. 

By way of contrast, Brooks has embarked on an attempt to learn how "to be really good at this skill of seeing others." According to Brooks, here's one of the reasons why he wanted to develop such skills:

BROOKS (10/22/24): Finally, I wanted to learn these skills for reasons of national survival. We evolved to live with small bands of people like ourselves. Now we live in wonderfully diverse societies, but our social skills are inadequate for the divisions that exist. We live in a brutalizing time.

Here in this best of all wonderfully diverse worlds, "our social skills are inadequate for the divisions that exist." Brooks has sought to learn these skills for reasons of national survival!

Our national survival is somehow at stake, Brooks has explicitly said. That was true in Lincoln's time, but also in ours, Brooks says.

Our national survival is somehow at stake! We're inclined to agree with that observation, but what did Brooks mean by that?

Tomorrow: According to Brooks, behaviors we need to drop