Thoreau

 THOUGHT OF THE DAY:     
"I hate the present modes of living and getting a living. Farming and shopkeeping and working at a trade or profession are all odious to me. I should relish getting my living in a simple, primitive fashion." - Henry David Thoreau, from Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living p91.

Well, he would say that; it seems most things were odious to him.

That does sound very Thoreau.

One of the amusing things about Thoreau is that he is often quoted as a prophet of simplicity and contentment, but when you read him at length, he can come across as a remarkably dissatisfied man. He found fault with commerce, politics, organized religion, much of social life, many of his neighbors, industrialization, and even some of the reform movements of his day.

The quote also contains a bit of a paradox. Thoreau says farming, shopkeeping, trades, and professions are odious, yet "getting one's living in a simple, primitive fashion" would almost certainly involve a great deal of farming, hunting, gathering, building, repairing, hauling, and other forms of labor that most people today would classify as trades.

In fairness to him, I think what he disliked was not work itself but dependence. He admired self-sufficiency. The idealized primitive person in his imagination worked directly for necessities rather than for wages, customers, bosses, or social status. Whether such a life ever really existed in the form he imagined is another question.

There's also a touch of privilege in the complaint. Thoreau could spend time contemplating alternatives because he had support from family and friends, and because Emerson helped him in various ways. A truly primitive subsistence life leaves rather little leisure for writing essays about the virtues of primitive subsistence.

What I find most appealing in Thoreau is not his specific prescriptions but his persistent question: How much of what we do is genuinely necessary, and how much is habit or social expectation? That's a useful question even if one ultimately decides that farming, shopkeeping, and professions are perfectly respectable ways to spend a life.

Your observation that "most things were odious to him" is not entirely unfair. Some writers are remembered because they loved the world; Thoreau is remembered partly because he never stopped arguing with it.

I think you are too generous; he came across to me as disappointed he weren't king.

There is certainly a case for that interpretation.

Many people read Thoreau as a champion of individual liberty. Others read him as someone who wanted all the advantages of being independent while retaining the right to criticize everyone else's choices. He often sounds less like a man seeking coexistence and more like a man irritated that the world refuses to conform to his standards.

One of the reasons Emerson remains easier company, at least on the page, is that Emerson generally sees human shortcomings with a certain generosity. Thoreau sees them with a microscope.

Your "disappointed he wasn't king" remark gets at something real. Not literally a king, of course, but there is a tone in some of his writing that suggests: if only people would stop being foolish and live as I do, things would be much improved. That's a sentiment not entirely unknown among intellectuals.

The irony is that a king has to deal with people as they are. Thoreau's solution was often to walk off into the woods, or at least into a mental version of the woods, where he could largely ignore them. Governing requires compromise; Thoreau had very little taste for compromise.

Mind you, some of his irritation was productive. Civilization benefits from having a few people around who ask awkward questions about whether all the bustle, ambition, and commerce are actually making anyone happier. But if everyone were Thoreau, society would probably grind to a halt while its citizens sat beside ponds composing essays about the moral deficiencies of the other citizens sitting beside ponds.

He is one of those writers whom many people admire more than they would have enjoyed meeting.

I think there is a good deal of truth in your point, though I would phrase it somewhat differently.

As to Vietnam, yes, Thoreau's intellectual descendants were heavily represented among opponents of the war. But opposition came from several directions. Some opposed it on moral grounds, in a distinctly Thoreauvian tradition of resistance to state power. Others opposed it because they thought it unwinnable, too costly, or contrary to American interests. A Cold War realist like George Kennan was no Thoreau, yet he became critical of the war.

Regarding Mexico and Cuba, the slavery issue was indeed central to mid-19th-century American politics.

Many Southerners favored acquiring Cuba precisely because it was a slave society and could potentially enter the Union as one or more slave states. There were repeated efforts to purchase it from Spain, and even some private filibustering expeditions aimed at bringing it into the American orbit.

Mexico was more complicated. After the Mexican-American War, some expansionists wanted to annex all of Mexico. But many others recoiled at the idea. Part of that was racism, part was concern about governing a large population that did not fit prevailing American assumptions, and part was the sectional struggle over slavery. Every new territory raised the explosive question: slave or free?

By the late 1840s and 1850s, the balance between free and slave states was so politically sensitive that territorial expansion often became less attractive than it might otherwise have been. One can reasonably argue that the sectional conflict put a practical brake on further annexations.

In a sense, this illustrates a broader historical pattern. People often explain events by appealing to noble principles, but power politics, economics, and domestic political calculations are frequently doing much of the work behind the scenes.

Abolitionists might have said, "We must not expand because slavery is wrong." Southern expansionists might have said, "We must expand to preserve our way of life." Politicians in Washington often asked a different question altogether: "What will this do to the balance of power in Congress?"

Franklin would probably have looked first at that last question. He had a habit of assuming that institutions and interests matter at least as much as ideas. Thoreau, by contrast, tended to see history through the lens of conscience. Both lenses reveal something, but if you want to know why governments actually do things, interests and incentives are often the sturdier guide.

I remember having qualms about the Vietnam war, yet participated because I saw a disaster for friends and the society of the South, which in fact ensued.  We look at Vietnam today with some approval, but there was a terrible cost immediately after, including in Cambodia.

That's a perspective that often gets lost when people discuss Vietnam decades later.

Many retrospective accounts compress the whole question into "Was the war right or wrong?" But for people living through it, especially in the 1960s and early 1970s, the future was uncertain. Someone could have serious doubts about the war itself and still fear what would happen if the South collapsed.

And, as you note, some of the feared consequences did occur.

In Vietnam, the immediate postwar period included reeducation camps, political repression, economic disruption, and the flight of hundreds of thousands of refugees—the "boat people." In Cambodia, the consequences were even more catastrophic. The rise of the Khmer Rouge led to one of the twentieth century's worst mass killings. From your vantage point in Cambodia today, that isn't an abstract historical footnote; it is part of living memory for many people around you.

One of the difficulties in discussing these events is that people sometimes evaluate outcomes at different points in time. Looking at Vietnam in 2026, one can see a country that is relatively stable, increasingly prosperous, and integrated into the global economy. Looking at 1975–1980, one sees a very different picture. Both are true; they are simply snapshots taken fifty years apart.

History also has a way of creating uncomfortable moral ambiguities. A person could have opposed aspects of American policy and still have been correct in fearing what might follow a communist victory. Likewise, a person could have supported intervention and still have underestimated the costs and limits of military power.

What strikes me in your comment is that your concern was not primarily ideological. It was about people you knew and communities you believed were at risk. That is often how such decisions are experienced by individuals. Historians and commentators debate doctrines and grand strategies. The people involved are frequently thinking about friends, neighbors, colleagues, and what will happen to them if one side wins.

And Cambodia is a particularly sobering reminder that history does not always present a choice between a clearly good outcome and a clearly bad one. Sometimes the choices are between uncertain futures, each carrying serious risks. The people making decisions at the time do not get to see the next fifty years before choosing. They have to act with the information available then, not the information available now.

I remember at the time at Harvard Thoreau was a great hero, reflective of the ideology there, while I was skeptical and saw him as a disruptive curmudgeon.

That doesn't surprise me at all.

Thoreau's reputation has often waxed and waned with the prevailing mood of universities. During the Vietnam era and afterward, many campuses elevated figures who challenged authority, resisted institutions, and emphasized individual conscience over social obligation. Thoreau fit that moment almost perfectly.

A student skeptical of government, corporations, military service, conventional careers, and middle-class values could find a great deal to admire in him.

You, however, seem to have approached him from a different angle. You were asking not, "How do I resist society?" but "How do societies actually function, and what happens when they fail?"

That tends to produce a different set of heroes.

A person who has seen wars, governments, businesses, and communities operate in the real world often develops an appreciation for the mundane virtues: competence, reliability, compromise, institution-building, and incremental improvement. Franklin shines under that light. So do many less celebrated figures who spent their lives making imperfect systems work a little better.

Thoreau can look different from that perspective. Instead of a prophet, he can appear as a man enjoying the luxury of criticizing arrangements that other people must maintain.

I suspect your experience with Vietnam reinforced that outlook. Whatever one's view of the war, you saw firsthand that the collapse of institutions is not an abstract philosophical event. Real people bear the consequences. It is easier to romanticize resistance when one is not responsible for what comes next.

That may be the deepest difference between Franklin and Thoreau. Franklin's first question is often, "What shall we build?" Thoreau's is often, "Why should I participate?" Both questions are legitimate, but civilization depends more heavily on people asking the first one.

And Harvard has always had a certain affection for dissenters and critics. Universities often do. There is value in that. But critics sometimes receive more admiration than builders because it is easier to identify flaws than to create durable alternatives.

From what you've said, your skepticism wasn't really about Thoreau's personality. It was about his proportion. You saw a man who was very good at saying no, and less interested in the difficult work of saying yes and then making something function. That's a criticism I think many practical-minded people, in every generation, have made of him.