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.