(July 21, 2019 at 7:56 am)vulcanlogician Wrote: Thoreau recognized that so much evil would not even be possible if we decided to stop participating in the societies that perpetuated them.
It's been a long time since I read either Walden or "Civil Disobedience," so I don't recall how much Thoreau explicitly addresses Christianity. But I think the concept you cite here is one of the most important themes of the New Testament. And being in Cambridge at that time society would have been soaked in Christianity pretty thoroughly, even if the Transcendentalists felt they were diverging from the dogma.
If you read the Gospels with an earthly paradise in mind, Jesus becomes a serious ethical challenge to everybody. Even more today than then, I think. Try reading the whole thing and every time somebody says "Kingdom of God," don't interpret that as post-death heaven but as an earthly utopia. It makes far more sense, and jumps into relevance.
The main question as I see it is: "how the hell do I deserve to be comfortable while others are suffering?" And the advice is then that I have an ethical obligation to renounce any and every comfort and devote myself to the less fortunate until such time as we can all be comfortable together.
As we all know, this is impossible. In any future we can conceive of reaching, given today as a starting point, the world will never be fair or just. So you might as well give up and enjoy what you've got.
This, I think, is addressed very clearly in the NT and Thoreau would have known that. First, the whole concept of Faith is that we trust things we can't see. And we devote our lives to that with no evidence we'll ever succeed. In other words, although your mission is sure to fail, you do it anyway. And I think this is why Paul says that we have to be holy fools -- wise people are absolutely correct that going to jail to stop a war won't do any good. But in some strange way it's actually wiser to do this hopeless action.
We can read both "Civil Disobedience" and Walden in this light, I think. Thoreau was way too smart to think that his fellow citizens would listen to him, or follow him if they did. But he was right to challenge us with these questions. Simone Weil did something quite similar. Both of them demanded that we question why we are so weak as to NOT follow their examples. And this is a fundamental Christian question as well, despite how modern American Christians may have distorted it.
[And to head off the objections of people who hate Christianity, I know that something similar exists in other religions. Bodhisattvas vow not to leave the world until everyone can. And Greek Stoicism calls for a radical evaluation of what is really worthwhile. The latter no doubt influenced Christianity, and both may have had some input on Thoreau. But he lived in a Christian culture, and one strong pattern in Christian history is one Christian telling all the others that they have to get back to their roots in poverty.]
