RE: Thread for the Analysis of Henry David Thoreau's Writings
July 21, 2019 at 6:57 am
(This post was last modified: July 21, 2019 at 8:40 am by Alan V.)
First of all, thanks for the new discussion and the thoughtful post.
If I remember correctly, Thoreau's aunt paid his tax without his permission and he was released the next day. He was not happy about that.
I have been a student of Thoreau for going on fifty years now, so I have been thinking about what he said and did for a long time. I am no longer the uncritical fan I once was.
The problem with this particular incident is that the U.S. government did some bad things but also some good things with their tax money. Not everything was awful. So Thoreau was just as much denying his funds for those good policies as well as for the bad ones which he opposed. That means his neighbors, who likely understood this, may have thought that paying their taxes was not necessarily contributing to injustice in balance. They may also have concluded that there were better ways to protest and change the policies than the one Thoreau chose, even if they took longer.
So while I can certainly understand why Thoreau chose to stand on principle on these matters, people were already aware of them and were also working to change them. So I think Thoreau likely misrepresented ordinary people to emphasize his point, which unfortunately was something he did on other occasions as well. He understood and used such questionable rhetoric, such exaggerations, from time to time as an argumentation technique.
In the real world, pluses and minuses are bound up together and can't easily be separated one from another. Thoreau thought the ideal was possible, and therefore ignored the tradeoffs involved in ordinary people's decision making.
If I remember correctly, Thoreau's aunt paid his tax without his permission and he was released the next day. He was not happy about that.
I have been a student of Thoreau for going on fifty years now, so I have been thinking about what he said and did for a long time. I am no longer the uncritical fan I once was.
The problem with this particular incident is that the U.S. government did some bad things but also some good things with their tax money. Not everything was awful. So Thoreau was just as much denying his funds for those good policies as well as for the bad ones which he opposed. That means his neighbors, who likely understood this, may have thought that paying their taxes was not necessarily contributing to injustice in balance. They may also have concluded that there were better ways to protest and change the policies than the one Thoreau chose, even if they took longer.
So while I can certainly understand why Thoreau chose to stand on principle on these matters, people were already aware of them and were also working to change them. So I think Thoreau likely misrepresented ordinary people to emphasize his point, which unfortunately was something he did on other occasions as well. He understood and used such questionable rhetoric, such exaggerations, from time to time as an argumentation technique.
In the real world, pluses and minuses are bound up together and can't easily be separated one from another. Thoreau thought the ideal was possible, and therefore ignored the tradeoffs involved in ordinary people's decision making.
