Thoreau and Rousseau

Philosophers are obsessed with getting down to the natural state of man, absent of all the layers of culture. Imagine the old cartoon owl licking his way to the center of the tootsie roll pop. one. two. three. crunch. Academia invented a word to indicate these layers: construction. Thoreau also discussed the layers in Walden.

"Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake."

Remembering Thoreau's metaphor for all pursuit of truth, that is, life on the pond absent of society's hindrances, I can imagine him walking his little path from the cabin door to the pond, preparing for his daily religious experience that was bathing. He must have begun to step into the pond and you know how sludgy ponds are at the shore, his feet began to sink. Each day, they'd sink and maybe one day he just stood and let them sink and sink to see where they would stop. At some point they must have stopped when his feet came to a rock beneath the layers of mud and scum. Eureka! This is the true pursuit of humanity, according to Thoreau: to weather the unpleasant process of sliding beyond the constructions of society until we reach the rock, the truth that is ourselves absent the layers.

Rousseau was convinced we'd been to the rock before as a species. That up until the establishment of the family unit, the first seeds of society as he saw it, natural man lived in bliss without reason or corruption, on the rock that was/is truth beyond the constructions of society.

Again, I'm reminded of Jane Goodall's chimpanzee cultural groups at Gombe. It's lovely as a parent to read the accounts of parenting found among the chimpanzees. The most attentive parents inevitably raise the strongest and culturally most successful children. The attentiveness is comprised of most always being open to play with the baby, grooming the baby with physical touch, carrying the baby everywhere, providing safe social playmates (achieved by high social standing), lactating at least three years. These principles read like a Dr. Sears book. Indeed, a continuum of attachment parenting principles can be found from Gombe's chimps to Margaret Mead's observations at Somoa, from timeout to nursing on demand, from sibling-assisted child rearing to responsive conditioning. Attachment parenting seems to be the parenting method rock, devoid of society's constructions and we're just getting back to the beneficial outcomes in children these methods bring about.

As far as parenting is the baseline for all of society, can we conclude progress on behalf of our culture by this evidence of return to our afore-known perfect parenting models? Because I've so idealized parenting for the sake of strong, successful children, I believe I've made the mistake Jane Goodall herself cautions against. The instinct-driven culture of the chimpanzees is far from a moral ideal.

Among the chimps, the natural law that determines all social interactions is determined by which behaviors will, for the males, allow them to spread their seed to the most females, and for the females, will allow themselves to have the most babies and to ensure the survival of those babies through adolescence. The natural law is not entirely dark--love and attachment are touchingly shown as essential to survival--but it is commonly brutal.

I am left to conclude that human nature is , absent of constructions, filled with much potential for love, but commonly brutal to all those we don't love. Hence, the natural human is not a very good representation of the collective ideals of the enlightened and romantic ages, with the savage fight for survival ripe with infanticide, cannibalism, and even genocide. Instead of constructions of society being the bane of all human existence, perhaps constructions are leading us out of the whims of survival that is savage animal existence. We still tend toward war and death, but the ranks of the moral few are growing, fueled by that amazing instinct primates clearly retained through human development: love.

reading Thoreau at the Earthship

The irony is hardly lost on me that Henry David Thoreau was 28 when he left the academic Elision Fields of Harvard for the material-free life of Walden. This year John is 28 and I am 27 and after renting an Earthship in Taos every long weekend and vacation we can muster
for a year now, we’re seriously speculating on small pieces of land upon which we can build our own little fully sustainable getaway from society.

The allure of the Earthship must be identical to the renewal and peace Thoreau found in his little shed, which by the way, was built with sustainable values as he bought an immigrants old shed (cabin), tore it down, and reconstructed it on his good buddy Ralph Waldo Emerson’s land rather than felling trees afresh to construct his abode.

Earthships are built from old tires with dirt pounded into them and stacked to form walls. Discarded cans and bottles fill the holes between the tires and simple adobe made from the dirt onsite covers the tires. Like a pioneer’s dugout, three sides of the home are built into a constructed or carved-out hill. The forth side is entirely comprised of windows and solar panels. Just inside this wall of windows is a long, narrow flower bed, called the jungle, which absorbs the graywater from the home’s occupiers daily dishwashing and showering. The roof is constructed so that rainwater runs off it into a giant cistern, typically an 8 ft by 8 ft circular adobe tub. With at least 7 inches a year, the home has adequate water to supply the family’s conservative use. Thus, with the solar panels and collected water, Earthships have no need for utilities.

The most notable detail of living in an Earthship, aside from the tranquility of working with the Earth rather than against it, is the silence. One forgets the noise of the collective appliances, always running on some low voltage of electricity for built-in clocks or lights. Achieving this silence is dependent from an entire Earthship, as houses are built to subsist off-grid all the time, and more common, with minimal help from the electric company. This was a lesson clearly demonstrated to us a year ago when the universe introduced us to a man from Wisconsin aside the big Kiva at Chaco Canyon.

Back in the seventies, the utility companies wanted him to pay for the connections to his land because he was outside their normal service area. Incensed, he began to work on developing his own energy sources for his home. By the eighties, he was making more electricity than he needed, and because the government requires electric utility companies to purchase energy from individuals if available (in an effort to depend less on foreign energy sources), the utility company he had quarreled with was forced to build lines to his land after all, but to purchase rather than sell electricity.

Now, his entire living is to engineer people’s homes for renewable energy. He explained to us that the road to living off-grid begins simply with using less and less energy from the grid. Every time you have to buy or repair an appliance, purchase the smallest and most energy efficient version of that appliance you can find. In time, you may have your wattage down enough to use solar panels on your roof rather than electricity from the utility company. Just as Thoreau didn’t pay his pole taxes because they would have gone to support the invasion of Mexico by the United States, I deeply believe we (to use Thoreau’s term) awakened citizens are bound by duty to minimize our energy cost because the corruption of energy suppliers globally is the central fueling force of most the world’s wars and economic destabilization right now.