Let's Find Out - Intro to Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" | ASMR

Episode Date: July 6, 2019

Happy 4th of July (+ 2 days). Thoreau was an outspoken intellectual who sought to remind America what freedom means. It means taking responsibility for yourself and striving to become someone who is an asset rather than a detriment to the culture we are unwittingly a part of and a player in. Thanks, as always, for watching. #ASMR #America #Thoreau

Happy 4th of July, guys. I'm recording it at least on the 4th of July. I don't know when you're going to see it. Luckily, I have the freedom to be able to put this out whenever I please. I had dressed up for the occasion, as you can see. I'd like to also thank my sponsor, early-onset diabetes, for this double chin. Luckily, I can cover it up with my flag, though. Today I want to emphasize the freedom that we have all around the world, but, you know, in a America exclusively or particularly. We have a great compendium of, it's called a reader, I believe, of great thinkers, philosophers, and writers. Everyone from Aristotle, Darwin, Descartes, Freud, Jefferson, Carl Jung, Thomas Coon, Martin Luther King, Margaret Meade, Nietzsche, Reich, B. F. Skinner,

Simone Will, Mary Woolstonecraft, the Buddha, Karen Horny, Henry David Thorell. It's going to be the focus of today's episode. Now, I don't know if I'm going to upload this, be able to edit it and upload it and have the discipline to waste my whole day doing that or use productively my time doing that today. So I might end up just taking the evening off and crack open some good old cold American bruskees and watch the symbol of freedom burst across the night sky to fuse. It's illuminating brilliance across the velvety black summer night sky in here in here not in here that would cause a house fire

I think I only have one more prop so let's get it out of the way I've always been a dissenter from authority I was one of those kids who always said tell me why I gotta listen to you I think that's a really

I think it's a really good question to ask skepticism in general is very good it's healthy for the mind. We need to ask questions. We want to, we desire to know. And Henry David Thoreau,

along with all these great, great thinkers, he wasn't inclined to just listen to an authority because it's an authority. What he wanted to know was, what was the person's place in society? What is it that, would be the most honorable, noble way to contribute and be a member of your society. And one of his ideas is to be, is to exhibit civil disobedience.

He was a great thinker in the 1800s in America. And he provoked a sense of responsibility in the individual to really look at themselves inside the society in which they exist and ask in what way can I be a benefit can I bring value to a society rather than be a detriment and ultimately be a burden on other human beings who are also mortal, going to die, going to suffer, have their own nonsense to deal with in short

and he thinks the way to a most coherent society would be be for everybody to be civilly disobedient in a way that's true and authentic to them. Granted, and this is a serious thing, he's bestowing upon the readers, is that with the assumption that they have already, they have discipline, they have diligence, they have a sense of good, of wanting to do good for, for themselves, their family, their community, etc. And that they have good intentions, you know, not malicious intentions.

So in the hopes that my voice holds out, I'm going to try to read this whole excerpt on civil disobedience here. A sketch of Henry David Thoreau, the famous author of this essay in Walden. Walden He As a background He lived from 1817 to 1862 So actually he died two years before the Civil War

In the United States He began keeping a journal When he graduated from Harvard in 1837 The journal was preserved and published And I like this Because it shows a seriousness A determination In an elevation of moral values

and characteristics that can be found in all his work. He's best known for the book Walden in 1854, record of his departure from the warm congeniality of Concord, Massachusetts. In the home of his close friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson himself was, I believe he had a Christian background. He was actually a pastor in some nature. a great thinker of his own accord. But he left,

Thoreau left Concord, the city for the comparative, you know, relative wilds. It's not in the middle of Alaska, but nonetheless it's way more wild than anything I'm used to. A Walden Pond where he built a cabin, planted a garden, lived simply.

Walden tells of the deadening influence of ownership in Ex-Tolz. And extols the vitales the vitamin. and spiritual uplift that comes from living close to nature. It also argues that civilization's comforts sometimes rob a person of independence, integrity, and even conscience. Thoreau and Emerson were prominent among a group of writers and thinkers of their time that were styled the transcendentalists. They believed in something that transcended the material world.

Their philosophy was based on the work. of Emmanuel Kant, the famous German philosopher of the 1700s, German idealist, Cooleridge, and the English poet Gerta. Oh, sorry, Cooleridge was the English poet, the German dramatist and writer and poet Gerta. He wrote Faust. All these writers, what they had in common were that they praised human intuition and the capacity to see beyond the limits of common experience. their philosophical idealism carried over into the plainer social concerns of the day

expressing itself in the works of walden in civil disobedience what was originally published as resistance to civil government in civil here meaning not militaristic just i believe it's just um local governments governments of the civilians and uh although with the row all but denies his idealism in civil disobedience. It's obvious that after having spent a night in the Concord jail, he'd realized he could not

quietly accept his government's behavior in regard to slavery. He'd begun to feel that it was not only appropriate, but imperative to disobey unjust laws. And that's a huge theme of this essay, is that the government, again, should be, in his perspective,

of minimal and subservient to the individual because ultimately what is the government but the creation of human beings so it shouldn't be a subject to it it should be subject to the ideally enlightened and hard-won wisdom of the individual in Thoreau's time the most flagrantly unjust laws were those that supported slavery. The transcendentalists were strongly opposed to slavery and spoke out against it. Abolitionists in Massachusetts actively harbored,

escaped slaves and helped them move to Canada into freedom. We got a big ass blanket. A huge maple leaf in the background there. Hopefully you guys can see. Oh, this isn't not trying to be xenophobic. or even American-centric Ameri-centric

USA-centric I'm trying to I'm trying to read this something that we can apply something that's applicable to the modern world this isn't just some dry nugget of history

and we can all sit and pontificate over and have nothing come no it be fruitful. We want to, we want to use these ideas, we want to use the history of past human suffering and past human courage, you know, like this guy, he gladly went to jail after being outspoken against slavery and other unjust laws of his time. And we no doubt live in a time that's a little bit better than that, than what they had to endure, but it's not

perfect and it still very much needs to be subject to critical, you know, analysis. And we need to be able to understand what, where we've been, so that we don't make those same mistakes and so that we can feel like we're not just lost adrift in the contemporary world, but we're actually a part of a broader history of slow progress of human evolution. and if not progress as a whole, at least we can latch on and learn valuable lessons from great people, great thinkers, great activists, great disciplined, good, genuinely authentic, people not afraid to speak up when they've done their homework, arrived at the conclusion that what they see, even if it's only a small part of the society around them, is wrong. And I think there's a lot to be learned from this guy's life.

So, Fugitive Slave Act enacted in 1850 a year after this essay was written, was published. It made the row a criminal because he refused to comply with the Massachusetts civil authorities. when in 1851 they began to return escaped slaves to the south as the law required so prior to that I guess this effusion of slave act was actually a support of slavery it required slaves that were even um i forget if there was a line at which if they made it far enough norris and they would they would still be free they would be protected But it was utilized by jail time or whatever if you harbored a slave officially. So people deemed slaves were considered property.

And this is a really important thing to know is that we haven't always had the rights and privileges that we now are granted by birth. It's been a hard one. And, you know, there was Jewish slaves 3,000 years ago in Egypt. There were Mediterranean slaves of Mediterranean people. So there wasn't even a necessarily an ethnic difference in what made one person a slave to another in the Greek and Roman times. And then modern times we had, of course, Africans were the men. bearer of the brunt of slavery in modern you know in the last few hundred years but it

didn't end with them I mean there were especially Irish I don't know enough to elaborate fully on it but I know you know other white people were also slaves of course I guess this would factor into the modern notion of having privilege because if you are an Irishman you look very similar to an Englishman and therefore if you escaped slavery it would be a lot easier to blend into society than it would be for someone who looked on the outside completely different so we got to keep in mind slavery is something that up until just not even 200 years ago was a fairly normal thing it was very outspoken against by certain people

particularly this guy but it was it's a part of our very terrific and our very heroic past we had the horrific treatment of other people as slaves

and property yet we had other people heroic enough to risk their lives and be killed and be martyred in an attempt slow down rich in an attempt to make known the evil of such behavior.

So civil disobedience has been much more influential in the 20th century than in the 19th, the 1800s, when it was written, which is, you know, a brief lesson of how ideas take time to sink into the culture, especially with, when you consider people as the mediums through which ideas pass. And if you have a stubborn enough population, those ideas are going to remain in power for a long, long time. So that's why a lot of new ideas, revolutionary ideas, are projected and absorbed by the youth, who aren't necessarily set in their ways yet. And, you know, ideally, if the youth, I'm at the very, very end of my youth, I would say, 30 years old right now, um we should be educated enough we should be vigilant enough we should be rational and informed enough to recognize what is true and what is false what is authentic what is what may harbor things under the surface that might bring negative repercussions if enacted um

unexpected and unintended consequences. That's why history is so important because so many of the negative things are unintended. You enact certain... If you enact certain rules, we don't necessarily always think all of them through. We don't think amount to their logical end, their logical conclusion,

and it could be... There's a famous phrase, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. So we gotta watch out for uneducated, unwise, good intentions. Mohandis Gandhi, 1869 to 1948, claimed that while he was editor of an Indian newspaper in South Africa, it helped to inspire his theories of non-violent resistance. this essay. Gandhi eventually brought the British Empire to its heels by implementing these theories helping to win independence for India. In the 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr. applied the same theories in the fight for racial equality in the United States. The Rose essay once again assumed

great import during the latter days of the Vietnam War. When many young men resisted, being drafted because they believed the war was wrong and unjust. Civil disobedience was written after the Walden experience. When the row quietly returned to Emerson's home, he also returned to civilization. He discovered his refusal to pay the Massachusetts poll tax, not a tax on voting, but a per-head tax imposed, on all citizens to help the Mexican war landed him in the Concord jail

he spent just one day and one night there his aunt paid the tax for him but the experience was so extraordinary that he began examining it in his journal I really don't write in it much but I do keep a journal I haven't written it in probably like a year but I've had one since me and my buddy

started them in like six sixth grade it must be god I got to admit it's pretty embarrassing to look back on but it's also really really meaningful to see the transition of really just 20 years I mean not just really two decades of my life my most formative years really I'm so uh really grateful that I wrote that down I see my arrogance and my ignorance and my naivety and I see my budding interest in history and science aimlessly wander around and you know I see my influences if I watch a great movie or I just read a great book I'll go and I go write down my journal and it's even just little anecdotes and

memories I'd completely forgotten like my essay my teacher I was complaining about but she threw a grammar, a test on grammar, something like that at us at the last minute. I don't know, very inconsequential stuff, and I was upset because I didn't study, but I was like, I think I got a good grade. Now let's go, you know, ready for summer, I guess. But it was a bad example, but there's a lot of things that I had forgotten all about. And they were really, you know, a part of my history, a part of my history, a part of the time. of who I am, what made me the way I do nowadays.

And it's really cool. I think it's really important for all of us to learn, learn from the journey of what we've been through, maybe what we avoided even, learn about ourselves. So a brief understanding of Thoreau's approach, his rhetoric, delivering information was mostly oral. He did a lot of writing, but he also gave. a lot of lectures, which really is a different type. Communication, it depends on a real-time gauge of the audience.

And, you know, many other things. The rose habit of writing in his journal lasted throughout his life. And though he intended to become a poet after college, he was soon convinced that one of the few ways he could hope to earn a living was by writing. However, he made more money from lecturing, the Lyceum circuit this was an institution in most New England towns which I really love the idea of having a lecturer circuit I would go every weekend if there were non you know scientific lecturers like you know sitting and reading a data off a

graph if there were actual you know imposing um just I really think that would uh I mean maybe I'm just ignorant and there is around my town but seems like something that would be awesome or at least there should be more of and it should be more widely known so the lyceum in the institution of most New England towns resembled a kind of adult education program featuring important speakers such as Emerson and even foreign lecturers fees were very reasonable and in the of other popular entertainment, the Lyceum was a popular proven ground for young speakers interested in promoting their ideas. So this essay is kind of like a polished bit that I don't want to

create it, calling it a bit like a stand-up bit, but he worked on it and honed it through giving lectures and writing in his journal. So this is yeah, polished. Civil disobedience bears the hallmarks, of the spoken word. It's written in the first person and addresses an audience that Thoreau expects will share many of his sentiments,

but certainly not all his conclusions. Yeah, it's just more about the style, his actual delivery. So let's jump into it, a 30 minutes end here.