THE HIGHER LAW: INTERDEPENDENCE

Everyone seeks to be a part of something.  Everyone at some point feels separated and alone.  We want to be involved in the community of man.  Some would say that such feelings are part of human nature.  Man is a creature of relationships, both internal and external.   We all struggle with the duality of our nature: we are good and bad, happy and sad, courageous and afraid, mortal and eternal, instinctive and intellectual, dependent and independent.  

The author Henry David Thoreau in his book On Walden Pond tried to express his feelings about the duality of man's nature.  But during his time with himself and nature he uncovers the third element that completes and explains the meaning of life. Nature opens herself to Thoreau and he transcends his need for independence by discovering the intricate interconnectedness of nature and his own interdependence as a sojourner in nature.

Thoreau sought the woods around Walden Pond to be more in tune with those feelings and to gain understanding.  It was a time for him when "the beliefs in scripture, inspiration, incarnation, atonement, election, predestination, depravity, fall, regeneration, redemption, deprived of their interior meanings became ragged heaps of dogmatism, unbeautiful, incredible, hateful", (Frothingham).  Society had lost its identity, or rather was evolving a new one.   The old Puritan ways were archaic and unworkable.  Man's social evolution had progressed far beyond the concepts that had driven Thoreau's ancestors to the barren woodlands of North America.  His ancestors had believed that man was set apart from nature; that he was supposed to be fruitful and multiply and have dominion over the creatures of the field, but the followers of the Enlightenment had set a torch to those notions.

"The Enlightenment view of man was, of course, that he was wholly of a piece with nature and shared in the general uniformity of composition which natural science, under Bacon's urging and Newton's guidance had discovered there [nature]," (Geertz).  It would follow then that man's only value is in the compounds of which he is comprised: man being merely a metamorphosed glob of cosmic dust that occupies only one of the rungs on the evolutionary ladder; that man would share a common heritage with all the other living things on the planet; that the physical instincts would or should have rein in man's life.

Simplicity was on Thoreau's mind as he trekked out into the woods.  The rugged simplicity of his Puritan forefathers had given way to the crowded complexity of life in New England.  He was troubled by society's obsession with materialism. "I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowed on a velvet cushion," (Thoreau).  He sees in society the race to have more and finer things: clothes, houses, food, entertainment, travel, and he worried that society had not lost its perspective toward the more important things in life.   He sees a culture whose sense of priority has been thrown off balance.  "As with our colleges, so with a hundred 'modern improvements'; there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance…Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things," (Thoreau). Of all he sees in society: "the mainspring is vanity," (Thoreau).

Values are things [thoughts or attitudes] intrinsically worthwhile or desirable.  "The improvements of the ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man's existence", (Thoreau).  Man's nature has not changed; even after thousands of years of supposed evolution nothing has changes the motivations of humanity.  We still must feed ourselves, and clothe ourselves [for warmth], and we must defend ourselves from the elements (both natural and man-made).  We are pushed and prodded on by the basic instinct for survival. From the very first of life we are confronted with the human instinct of wanting.   And in the wanting, we pursue the thing in order to and possess it.   First it is hunger.   We feel the need for food.  Our stomach tells us that we must act or we will surely die.  We instinctively know that we must put something in our mouth and swallow.   Some intuitive knowledge tells us what to do, but it does not tell us how to do it.  The thought of death, though we have never physically experienced it, fills our mind with a dread that horrifies our psyche.  Our biology enslaves us to a life of hunting and gathering (food, sex, and self-esteem) -- no matter to what level of sophistication we might aspire. We are continually occupied with "I".  We are never satisfied.  It is perversion of human nature to be content.  Peace and tranquility become boring. Solitude is something to be dreaded.

The Walden experience is Thoreau's chance to renew the value of self.  Everything he does, from the cutting of trees to build a house, to the making of his own furniture for his house is done with the thought of glorifying the virtue of individual effort.  Thoreau's spirit yearns to be free from the fetters of society.   His Puritan ancestors were obedient to dogma and a sense of place, but Thoreau cannot abide with it.  He longs to experience the community of nature.  He wants to be able to direct his own path and experience the "simple pleasures".  "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not when I came time to die, discover that I had not lived…. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that is not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and if it proved to be mean, why then get the whole and genuine meanness of it…;or if it be sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it," (Thoreau).    Walden then is life [society] stripped of its vanity.

In nature there is abundance.  There is provision for man’s “necessities", and yet we are afraid that it is an enemy to us, and we go to great lengths to insulate ourselves from it.  It is a great satisfaction that the grocery store is just a short drive away.  All our needs are met without soiling our hands.  But someone had to get out and do the work to produce the food, or medicine, or gasoline, or build the car, or make the tires.  Do we have any understanding of how nature operates?  There is no need to know the principles of aerodynamics to ride in a airplane.  Someone has already mastered the details in order for other people to experience flight without giving aerodynamics a second thought.    We would prefer to benefit from someone else's labor.  There is a natural inclination of man to take the path of least resistance. What good would it do us to know the inter-workings of the fabric of nature. 

Yet, by observing nature we can see the truth that Thoreau experienced: that all life is interconnected and interdependent.  We are nurtured and sustained by the inter-connectedness of all life, and once that interdependence is understood then we begin to value it, and we appreciate how valuable our relationships are.

"There is, in brief, a human nature as regularly organized, as thoroughly invariant, and as marvelously simple as Newton's universe.  There are laws of human nature as immutable as the universe -- maybe obscured by the trappings of local cultures, but it is immutable," (Geertz)

"There is no knowledge apart from the knower, and equally now knowledge apart from something to be known.  Subject (knower) and object (known) form a continuum rather than a dichotomy," (Royce)