On Lack of Progress

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered. These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his life.-- Thoreau, "On Reading," Walden.

If we can get past Thoreau's immodesty -- he comes close to grouping himself among "the wise" --, we can understand him as saying that there is no progress in the underlying circumstances of human life. There is, however, variation in the answers  given to the enduring "questions that disturb and puzzle and confound." Some of that variation can offer a "new aspect," but he resists the idea that the new is also an improvement. Rather, the best books (past and present) make available in speech what we may call, purportedly impossible thoughts ("the at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered"). The denial of progress does not entail pessimism. For, as Thoreau insists time and again, once articulated or exhibited, impossible realities can be made to exist: "If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."

Thoreau insists that the wise exhibit a kind of integrity between words and deeds. That is, philosophy and philosophical lives disclose and revive options that are were locally unavailable in word and deed. These disclosed options can be improvements over the present baseline--they are "salutary" because they are life-affirming (recall), but it is clear that Thoreau thinks these do not secure permanent improvements. Why this is the case is not explained entirely. (To be clear: Thoreau thinks industrial and material advancements are not an improvement because they generate wants that make us psychological slaves.)* Evoking Montesquieu, he claims that ages have spirits apt to them; but Thoreau warns his confident nineteenth century readers, eras come and go. 

While, in context, Thoreau is primarily concerned with spiritual and cultural flourishing, there is also a political tenor to his remarks. That's clear from the fact that the section ends with the observation  that "to act collectively is according to the spirit of our institutions." Here "our" refers to American or, more likely, New England's (or even just Concord's) institutions. In fact, while there is (echoing Emerson's Self-Reliance) a non-conformist, individualist strain in Thoreau, he also recognizes that at least in some ages, collectives are the proper locus of action for some purposes: "Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men."

Thoreau's general denial of progress keeps him relevant. (This is compatible with the thought that some changes involve some moral progress.) Every generation thinks itself ahead of those that came before; that our belated, temporal starting-point somehow secures us special privileges in solving life's questions. (I often note with fascination how students can be amazed to discover the characteristics of their modernity in texts written one or two millennia ago.) By this I do not merely mean that we have not beaten death nor that we have not implemented an equitable tax-regime yet. Rather, every age has eluded finding a formula to generalize living wisely or, what amounts to the same thing, peacefully.** Yet, as always, there is no paucity of seers that point the path toward the annihilation of our enemies.

 

 

 

*I ignore here Thoreau's attitude toward mathematical and scientific advancement.

**Now, one can take Thoreau to imply that the wise would deny that there is any such formula; it is more likely that he thinks the wise form of life is available, "if we could really hear and understand" what has always been known.  

Comments

[David Duffy]

RL Stevenson writes, not on perennial wisdom (though he has definite opinions on Thoreau's ideas - "Looking round in English for a book that should answer Thoreau's two demands of a style like poetry and
sense that shall be both original and inspiriting, I come to Milton's AREOPAGITICA, and can name no other instance
for the moment."), but I thought amusingly:

"It was his ambition to be an oriental philosopher; but he was always a very Yankee sort of oriental. Even in the peculiar attitude in which he stood to money, his system of personal economics, as we may call it, he displayed a vast amount of truly down-East calculation, and he adopted poverty like a piece of business."

[Schliesser, Eric]

Thank you for reminding me of Stevenson's essay. I find the fourth section, especially, very insightful.