4 - Becoming One of the Worthies of the World in Reform Papers

Summary

WHEN CRITICS CONNECT WALDEN TO THOREAU's ESSAYS, they generally point to the nature essays, especially “Walking.” There is also good reason, however, to see Walden as the first of Thoreau's “reform papers.” In Walden Thoreau expresses a human version of ecological survivorship by demonstrating how society produces the mass of men who lead lives of quiet desperation, while it is only individual natural philosophers who can lead society forward. In his Reform Papers he extends his criticism of the mass of men and attempts to find a representative individual—“the brave man,” “the poet,” “the hero,” “the man of genius,” “a majority of one”—who can provide true leadership.

Prior to his years at Walden Pond, Thoreau wrote notes for a lecture on “Reform and Reformers,” portions of which he used in Walden. In these notes Thoreau contrasts two potential leaders, “the Conservative” and “the Reformer.” Both, he says, are “sick,” but conservatives persist in their sickness, while the reformer is at least convalescent. He acknowledges that the conservative has some virtues, including “courtesy,” “practicalness,” and “reverence for facts,” and, “with a little less irritability, or more indifference,” might be the better of the two (RP 181). Reformers, however, have on their side earnestness, a genuine desire to “heal and reform” the “disorder and imperfection in human affairs” in order “to discover the divine order and conform to it” (182).

The problem is that even the reformers attack only “the exposed roots of innocent institutions” (innocent perhaps in that they are so removed from the people that their members are not even conscious of the harm they do) but not the roots of the evil within themselves. Thus “reform should be a private and individual enterprise” because “the evil may be private also” (183). Thoreau is willing to admit that society can be useful in achieving reform, but only if “it is the individual using the society as his instrument, rather than the society using the individual” (186). The implied warning is that the reformers can hardly avoid being pulled down to the common denominator of the multitude they try to direct.

Although group action might be useful, the reformers’ source of strength must be their harmony with nature's laws rather than with society: “Let us first be as simple and well as nature ourselves” (191).