This point, that Thoreau was sanctimonious, is one on which he has been criticized endlessly. Some of it is certainly deserved — his tone is undeniably smug. And so, I would give any sincere reader a pass for deciding they do not love Thoreau, nor even like him. It was well-documented that few in his own time loved him either. So if this is the chief point Schulz is making, I concede it.

But I suspect rather that she is implying not only that he does not deserve love, but that he does not deserve respect. This, to be charitable, is nonsense. Certainly the air of an intelligent person who is certain of his or her own correctitude can be offensive to others similarly inclined (I will not make the unwarranted claim that Schulz is one such, though it does cross the mind), but to use this impression as a means to bury the content of their words is intellectually dishonest, and is even a fallacy. Thus, Schulz’s idea that “no ethical principle is emptier than one that does not apply to its author” is demonstrably false.

But even then, we should be careful to take a sympathetic look at Thoreau’s judgments, which are often expressly not intended to be smug, but rather careful and incisive. Schulz quotes Robert Louis Stevenson who criticized Thoreau for “abstain[ing] from nearly everything that his neighbors innocently and pleasurably use.” But what if they are innocently and pleasurably using slave chocolate, or even slave labor, God forbid?

Schulz’s implicit reaction is that she is uncomfortable feeling judged by Thoreau. Yet this is the point of Thoreau. He is a critic of our imperialist, consumerist culture that we needed then in 1845, and need even more now. If he comes across as slightly sanctimonious, it is hard to blame him, given how hostile people were to his ideas in his own time. Sometimes being radically right means being radically outcast, especially when your society is radically wrong.

And the same goes for his boasts, which he at one point even apologizes for, aware that an uncharitable reader might assume he held himself above all mankind.

“If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself; and my shortcomings and inconsistencies do not affect the truth of my statement. Notwithstanding much cant and hypocrisy, — chaff which I find it difficult to separate from my wheat, but for which I am as sorry as any man, — I will breathe freely and stretch myself in this respect, it is such a relief to both the moral and physical system; and I am resolved that I will not through humility become the devil’s attorney. I will endeavor to speak a good word for the truth.”

If Schulz suspects Thoreau of lying here, then once again I argue she simply does not understand what made the man tick. This makes clear that he does not, first of all, consider himself perfect, but rather a work in progress: “My actual life is a fact in view of which I have no occasion to congratulate myself, but for my faith and aspiration I have respect. It is from these that I speak (Letter to Blake).” Thoreau, in his own life, and in his writing, urged himself and all his readers to follow their conscience: “We should endeavor practically in our lives to correct all the defects which our imagination detects.”

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

Was he self-involved? Absolutely. Was he elitist? Absolutely not. If we go back and read all the seemingly off-putting brags of Thoreau that Schulz quotes with this above caveat in mind, with an open and sincere heart rather than a cynical and self-assured one, we see that Thoreau is telling the reader as much as himself what a miracle his or her existence is. “Sometimes, when I compare myself with other men, it seems as if I were more favored by the gods than they.” Thoreau had no monopoly on transcendentalism — indeed, the whole ethos of transcendentalism is that no one has a monopoly on it; that we should each for ourselves explore our inner and outer lives and experience the miracle of life without an obligatory intermediary like a priest, or even like Thoreau.

But he ate pies!!!! (credit: teenypies.tumblr.com)

Now we move somewhat into Thoreau’s supposed misanthropy, which should help us understand his reaction to the shipwreck from the start. The first, and most easily refuted point is on his parochialism. It is clearly true he was parochial, but not in an ignorant or xenophobic way. He loved Concord and Massachusetts because that was where he found himself. He respected that other people had other homes, but for him, this was home, and it should be enough. He sought out to prove that it was enough, and that happiness did not depend on “bon mots gleaned from London circles” as Emerson described. He would just as readily have done this if he had found himself living in Jamaica or Tasmania, yet he did not find himself there, so he did not constantly long to be somewhere he was not. Despite this, he did not shut out the outside world, instead, he was a pioneer in America in reading Hindu scriptures and other eastern texts, because he believed there were ancient truths to be found in them.

What about his aversion to charity? Here, Schulz’s criticism rings somewhat true, and it is the essence of my criticism of Thoreau as well. He believed in individualism and his individualism is valuable, but he did not see the full implications of this individualism. He came close: as Schulz says, “His moral clarity about abolition stemmed less from compassion or a commitment to equality than from the fact that slavery so blatantly violated his belief in self-governance.”

Yet Schulz misses that her statement is redundant. Self-government taken to its logical conclusion is equality, and self-government extended to all people constitutes the most thorough compassion and trust available in politics. This is indeed moral clarity, but Thoreau, it is true, failed to apprehend its implications completely. As Schulz points out, he was a proto-anarchist, but of the individualist stripe. Anarchists contemporary to Thoreau and in the decades following his death would quickly realize that the allied principles of self-government, equality, and compassion entailed an obligation and responsibility to the needs of our fellow people.

Thoreau, who disliked being too entangled in society’s behemoth problems, mostly shirked this, and we are right to impugn him for it. He did sometimes help the Irish poor, and it’s widely known that he was a conductor on the Underground Railroad, not to mention his famous stint in jail to protest the war of conquest against Mexico. But He seems not to have had enough compassion for the poor, for women, for any of the oppressed in society, and the quotes Schulz singles out are indeed ones where I find my disagreement with Thoreau emerging strongest too. Yet, his moral sense was right on target. If it were me, I would have Thoreau be an activist, a little more being John Brown, a little less pleading for him, but in the end this is a point on which Thoreau can be pretty easily forgiven. His moral clarion call from America’s earlier days has proved more materially worthy in moral terms than much of anything a quiet reformer might have done.