Hate America and feel trapped? Have you considered trying 19th century philosophy?

Transcendentalism for our crushing modern problems

This is the second post of two (here’s the first), hashing out ideas that will eventually be fully realized in a book project I’m working on, tentatively titled “Dirtbag Pilgrims.” If you like the ideas in these posts, consider signing up for the mailing list so you’ll get more hopeful stuff like it in the future. 

America the Trap

Here’s the real problem. Despite the rhetoric about America being “the land of the free,” for a whole lot of people, a core American experience is a feeling that researchers call “entrapment.” It’s an overwhelming sense of being stuck in an unacceptable situation without a clear means of escape. It’s awful, and it’s associated with lots of bad things, from burnout to depression to suicidality. You immediately get it, right? A few years ago, when I came across research about the widespread impacts of entrapment on mental health during the Covid pandemic, I was like, “Yep, that's the feeling.”

Based on what you all have told me, this is a big reason that The Dirtbag’s Guide to Life has found an audience. It’s a book for the quietly desperate, about how to escape from traps like jobs that think they own us, social pressures to amass debt to pay for junk, and the overwhelming intrusiveness of smart phones and laptops. There’s a new version of that book coming soon. I’m pretty sure you’ll find it refreshing if you relate to that feeling of entrapment. 

To be honest though, there’s a lot of crap happening out there. The Dirtbag’s Guide is meant to be a fun read. If you want to have a good time, it’s hard to really dig into problems like societal drift into authoritarianism and slow rolling climate catastrophe. Plus, since the first version of the book in 2019, the pressures have gotten worse. Covid, January 6th, AI’s disruption of reality, the Trump re-election, the constant barrage of misinformation, Ukraine and Palestine, ICE raids, storms, wildfires, and the increasingly visible impacts of climate change… I know this has already become a cliche, but I’m going to do it anyway. I’m going to "gesture broadly at everything."

And what are the people with power doing about all of this? The image I keep coming back to is of world leaders fishing on a stormy lake, drinking cheap beer, cackling and shooting holes in the bottom of our collective boat with a machine gun.

It’s a core anxiety of our age. In our current global reality, you feel like bad things are happening and there’s nothing you can do about it…but also, you feel like you can’t just stand by and watch. You need to do something, you just don’t know what. The ecological, political, and social problems we’re dealing with can’t just be shrugged off, right? But what then? 

Well, a bit of reassuring news….

What the hell are we supposed to do now? Maybe become modern Transcendentalists.

This is probably an unexpected plot twist, but hear me out. With all of the garbage going on, it’s a great time to familiarize yourself with the first truly American philosophical movement–the Transcendentalists. 

In short, the Transcendentalists were a small group of 19th-century American thinkers—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and a circle of friends and acquaintances, mostly in Concord, Massachusetts. As a group, they wandered around in the woods, wrote a lot, challenged social norms, and believed that living close to nature and following your own conscience could make democracy possible. They wrote in the 1800s, but their ideas are weirdly resonant today.

That resonance is a little bit less weird when you realize that their world in the mid- to late-1800s had a lot in common with our own. They were writing at the advent of a disturbing technological revolution. Factories and industrialization and urbanization were upending a traditionally agrarian life. They were dealing with deep, dangerous political divisions one generation after the Revolution and in the lead up to (and aftermath of) the Civil War. They were operating under a deeply unethical, deeply authoritarian government in the context of the ongoing slave trade, westward expansion, native genocide, and then Reconstruction. There were deep inequalities as the power and economic imbalances that led to the (first) Gilded Age were developing. The country was reckoning with questions around environmental destruction as previously undeveloped country was being mined for resources by capitalists with no apparent moral core. Same shit, different day, right?

The useful thing is, the Transcendentalists figured out how to live meaningfully and hopefully within that kind of world. Persisting through the smoke of chaos and civil war, their ideas eventually helped shape some of the best and most important aspects of American culture–protection of nature for natures’ sake, racial and gender equity, nonviolent resistance to unjust government, and trust in your own conscience in a storm of mad religious philosophy and bad information. In the end, their ideas helped achieve real progress, from steering the nation towards women’s suffrage to helping establish the vast American network of protected National Parks, long trails, and wilderness areas.  

Just like American demons aren’t new, neither are our angels. If we want to get through this, it’s crucial at the moment to remember both. Many of the most important angels were summoned and unleashed in American culture by the Transcendentalists. They shaped American values that still exist today and still have power, even if they are regularly overshadowed by our dark side. 

In short, the Transcendentalist movement is worth understanding because it gives you a bit of hope these days, you know? The ideas they came up with make you feel like Americans do have the resources to get through (here I go gesturing broadly again…) whatever this is. We do have agency. They provide you with some grounding principles and a path forward. They maybe even help you believe in America a little bit. 

A little help from our (Transcendentalist) friends

The Transcendentalists were a productive, chaotic little movement, so you’ll have to dig in to their writing yourself if you want the full experience (or for a shortcut, read this compilation). However, for a primer, here’s a collection of some of the points they made a few hundred years ago that will probably be useful, as you're trying to deal with modern problems.

Worried about how to respond to corrupt government? Refuse to be corrupt yourself.

The modern US government sucks for a bunch of reasons. Also, it always has. Henry David Thoreau lived under the same government when it was responsible for genuinely monstrous things. The slave trade was alive and active, and the country was expanding its burgeoning empire west using genocidal tactics and establishing territories that were likely to spread the institution of slavery even further. 

It’d be wrong to present Thoreau as a real hero in this context. His racial and gender ideals were progressive for his day, but didn’t live up to modern standards. (Our morals and ideals won’t live up to standards in 200 years either, if things go well.) He supported John Brown's raid in spirit, but he was no martyr himself. He did, however, think deeply about the problem of living under an unjust government. And he did act on his convictions. He protested to the point of being jailed for refusal to pay his taxes. (It was just for a night, but still–it’s not nothing.) You could put some of his quotes on protest banners and hang them over a highway today:

“How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.”

A reflection on his time spent in jail, Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience” may be the most historically significant piece of Transcendentalist literature, and the most inspiring to re-read in today’s political climate. The approach he advocated influenced everyone from Gandhi to Martin Luther King, Jr.

In short, his belief was that you can’t solve all of the world’s problems, but you can refuse to participate in wrong where you encounter it. 

“It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.”

The suggestion he made about how to respond can be summarized concisely: don’t follow unjust laws. 

“If the law is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine.”

That’s a great line: “be a counter-friction to stop the machine.”

Gandhi read “Civil Disobedience” while living in South Africa, and cited this approach as a driver of his own philosophy of protest, leading a nonviolent movement that eventually secured independence for India. Martin Luther King drew on Thoreau and argued for a very similar strategy in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” 

The application is complicated, but it’s a simple and classic blueprint for moral decision-making. You can’t solve every problem, but you can always decline to contribute to injustice yourself.

Overwhelmed by divisiveness and inequality? Respond by doing the opposite. Gather, build equitable communities, and communicate about it.

Political alliances after the Revolution were fragile, and by the time the Transcendentalists were writing, the country was sliding toward the Civil War—a time when Americans were undeniably even less amicable with one another than they are today on social media. It was a radically unjust world. Slavery was still legal and active, the government was setting up an apartheid system for indigenous people, women couldn’t vote, and wealth was concentrated in the hands of a shrinking number of robber barons. 

The Transcendentalist response was to insist that people are equal and search for ways to weave together a fractured social fabric. They continued to influence culture, even when the winds of change were against them. Not surprisingly, men weren’t the most important Transcendentalist champions of this approach. It was one of the 19th century’s most influential women–Margaret Fuller. 

Fuller’s “conversations” are the distilled essence of her strategy. For years, decades before women won the vote, she organized large, all-female gatherings to engage in discussion and collectively search for truth. One blogger compared these to proto-podcast conversations, promoting normally silenced voices, deliberately excluded men (who disrupted the gatherings when they were allowed in), and asserting women’s equal authority to define meaning. 

Her conversations were about building grassroots community, and enabling people to contribute to the progress of American democracy even when they were legally barred from formal participation. As the lead editor of The Dial, the Transcendentalist movement’s most important publication, Fuller helped spread these ideas nationwide. Her book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, was controversial and widely read, and for a time she was among the most famous creators in the country, male or female. On women’s role in society, Fuller was unapologetically defiant:

“Let them be sea-captains, if they will. I do not care what case they try, so it be one in which they feel called to serve, and in which they can serve the world.”

Though her ideas were far ahead of her time, the communities she developed and the principles she promoted helped lay the groundwork for the movement that eventually achieved full suffrage for women in 1920, 70 years after her own death.

The lesson is still inspiring: healthy community and a commitment to human dignity don’t require government sanction to move society forward. Principled organizing with moral courage, even among the apparently powerless, eventually leads to progress.

Anxious about the train wreck of technological advance? Go outside and play so you don’t become a tool of your tools.

A core part of the Transcendentalist message was that industrialized society can poison your humanity, but going outside is the antidote.

Most people don’t think much about Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, but when they do, they often picture a couple of nature loving dandies. While Thoreau was actually viewed by his neighbors as a pretty butch guy, that’s otherwise fair enough. Changing widespread ideas about nature was a big thing for them. In the 1800s, wilderness was usually viewed as either a threatening beast or a resource to be conquered and exploited. For them, nature wasn’t an obstacle. It was the essential environment for human development, and a place to restore humanity in the face of industrial excess. These were core messages of both Emerson’s most enduring essay, “Nature,” and Thoreau’s famous Walden; or Life in the Woods.

John Muir isn’t usually seen as a member of the Transcendentalist movement, but he loved Thoreau, took Emerson on a personal tour of Yosemite, and built consciously on Transcendentalist ideas in his own writing and advocacy. He ultimately became the most important Transcendentalist prophet crying out in the wilderness, preaching the need to protect American forests in the midst of a developing crisis of exploitation. 

It’s super interesting (to me at least) that growing up, Muir had a lot in common with Chris McCandless of Into the WIld fame. Both were raised by fathers who, at the time, would’ve been seen as strict, but nowadays would be recognized as callous and abusive. Both were brilliant, promising kids. Like McCandless, Muir went to university in part to get away from his dad–he talked his way into a placement at the University of Wisconsin. Unlike McCandless, he didn’t finish, but left college early for his own trip into the wild. In Muir’s case, initially he went off into the Ontario wilderness for a period of self study and botanizing, before heading south to Indiana where he took a job in a factory to scrape together some money. 

Muir’s real origin story happened there, when a file he was sharpening shot loose and stabbed him in they eye, nearly killing him, and even more nearly costing him his eyesight. While McCandless’s brush with death in the Alaskan wilderness ended in tragedy, Muir recovered from his own crisis, and after his sight came back, he decided to leave behind his remaining connections to industrial society. Muir described the moment of recovery after the accident in almost spiritual terms: “Now had I risen from the grave.” 

Afterwards Muir never really went back to a conventional life. He initially became America’s first thru-hiker (spiritually at least) and walked a thousand forested miles from Louisville, KY to Florida. Then, after a short trip back north, he took a boat from New York to California by way of the Panama Canal. He spent the rest of his life in the West studying and working in nature, guiding, writing, and organizing for its protection, particularly in the Sierra and Yosemite.

Very often, Muir’s argument was centered on the fundamental human need for escape from a built environment, and the importance of the wilderness as the avenue for that escape.

“Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity…” 

During Muir’s day, industrializing society had its issues, but jump forward to today, and the problem is deeply entrenched. Everyone owns an inescapable smartphone parasite and the world has become so technologically complex and interconnected that existence outside of The Matrix is almost incomprehensible. 

From the beginning, the Transcendentalists recognized the potential for dehumanization in this system. In the earliest days of the shift from agrarian society to industrial labor, Thoreau wrote a protest in Walden: 

“I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men may get clothing. The condition of the operatives is becoming every day more like that of the English; and it cannot be wondered at, since, as far as I have heard or observed, the principal object is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that corporations may be enriched.”

(This quote, by the way, is not so different from Cal Newport’s central message about social media in Digital Minimalism. The internet is not the best place to find friends and build human relationships, but it has been sold as such so that corporations may be enriched.)

Thoreau had another great phrase, “Men have become tools of their tools.” He saw from the very beginning of industrialization that we need to be conscious to maintain our essential humanity. Things are much worse now, I'd say. We’re much more dependent on our tools, and much less capable of escaping technology. However, the prescription is the same, and it’s simple and accessible. Go outside. Go for a walk. Spend time in nature every day, and practice remembering who you actually are.

Overwhelmed by the shitstorm of media? Refuse to be overtaken by “secondhand thought.”

There are legitimate reasons to feel overwhelmed and trapped these days, but there are also artificial factors that exacerbate the problem. One of the most insidious and pervasive of these problems is the relentless blast of media anxiety and outrage that feels almost inescapable. It’s intentional. “They” are doing it on purpose, right? To keep us angry and disoriented so we’re politically malleable? It feels like a conspiracy theory, but you understand the disorientation I’m talking about, I’m sure of it. Social media is even more toxic, and harder to escape, than traditional media.

Going outside and getting yourself out of cellphone reception helps of course, but also:

While they didn’t deal with this level of media madness in the 19th century, Emerson had a great concept that is relevant to the situation. He talked about the importance of avoiding being overtaken by “secondhand thought,” by which he means ideas that are imposed on you against your will by external actors. In his essay, “Self-Reliance,” Emerson said, “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members… The virtue in most request is conformity. The man who has learned to think for himself has escaped the habit of secondhand thought.” 

If you can get past the man-centric language, the point here is still valid. The pressure of external voices seeking to shape and control our beliefs and identities is constant and dehumanizing. It comes at us from every angle, with every stupid little ping of our phone. In order to survive, a key is to recognize that you don’t have to become a victim of externally imposed anxieties. Engagement and connection are important, but so is the ability to flex your core, refuse to let people with their own agendas shape your sense of right and wrong, and set your own boundaries with the noise. This isn’t an absolute, but it’s important these days amidst the onslaught of propaganda and rage-inducing clickbait: as Emerson said, “To believe your own thought…that is genius.”

Anxious about the climate crisis? Simplicity is the prescription. 

It’s anxiety provoking watching the storms get more intense, wildfire seasons getting more deadly, and politicians fighting amongst themselves during a time when mass coordination is needed to stave off some really major future catastrophes. While our leaders should do some serious education and planning, for most of us, it feels like the biggest anxieties are around: 1) What should I do as an individual? and 2) What happens to me and the people I love when the Mad Max future arrives? We live inside the machine, but most of us don't actually get to pull the levers. The only real control most of us have is individual and local.

Once again, a lot of what the Transcendentalists said centuries ago is useful. Thoreau and Muir in particular were aware that they were responding to an environmental crisis of their own: the rapid population shift toward urbanization, the destruction and “development” of wild places, and the rapid spread of industry. That process was out of their individual control, but you have to do something right? There's a lot of practical advice for the individual to be found in Transcendentalist writing.

Thoreau’s experiment at Walden Pond, for example, was all about simplicity. He built a small cabin, reduced his possessions to the essentials, and lived deliberately, developing an existence according to a principle that would become his calling card throughout life, and which Emerson quoted in his eulogy.

“I make myself rich by making my wants few.” 

At Walden, Thoreau calculated that he only needed to work one day a week to meet his basic needs. He was then able to spend the rest of his time paddling on the pond, writing, chatting with friends who dropped in to visit, and observing the natural world around the cabin. Maybe he stretched the numbers a bit (What is this, Henry? Tim Ferriss’s 4-Hour Workweek?), but the point is legitimate. Most of us haven’t really needed to work constantly to survive for centuries. Today, most of our “need” for constant work comes from failures of social systems, resource distribution, and the satanic delusion that consuming more will make us happier.

Why does this matter today? First, Walden is a model for a sustainable life, even if that wasn’t exactly his intention. Thoreau produced little and consumed only what he needed—values that align with what we should be aiming for during a climate crisis. It gives us a model for how to live ethically.

Second, Thoreau didn’t feel like he was losing anything by living a simple life. Actually, he said that his life was better as a result. So, for people like us, Walden can kill a lot of the anxiety about whether the human future is going to be terrible–once we’re out of oil and can’t afford to keep our smartphones charged and our ebikes running. His experiment is reassurance that a good life doesn’t require all the crap that we accumulate as citizens of industrialized societies. We can live with less and still be happy. As Rebecca Solnit said in her really good essay collection, No Straight Road Takes You There:

“A monastic once told me renunciation can mean giving up things that make you miserable… Materially, [living happily during a climate crisis] could mean embracing modesty in consumption. Consuming less stuff means less money spent, means less time earning, means more time for everything else–and maybe more of almost everything good that money can’t buy.”

It’s true that responding to the climate crisis requires collective action. It’s the quintessential massive societal problem that no individual can solve on their own. But still, we live our lives as individuals. The Transcendentalist model of simplicity is a tool that anyone can use, regardless of influence or connections. It’s a model for living sustainably and a reminder that even in the midst of environmental crisis, it’s possible to live well and find peace with our own role in the process.

Finally: Despairing because of the breakdown of the American myth? It’s possible to identify a truer, more hopeful story without denying where we’ve gone wrong. 

For me, a big reason I’ve been sucked in by the Transcendentalists isn’t about anything specific they said. It’s that their existence in our history speaks to one of the most painful problems that we’re dealing with as Americans–the breakdown of the stories about ourselves that give our lives meaning.

Being raised as an American means being indoctrinated into a cult. I don’t mean that metaphorically. I think it’s genuinely true. Belief in the essential goodness of American culture and government, and our history of (slow, but steady) progress together are ingrained mythology. “The greatest country in the world” and all that. These sorts of ideas are interpretations of our collective history that provide us with a sense of meaning. They aren’t “true.” They’re beliefs we’re taught as children, which we hold onto as adults because they give us a sense of purpose, identity, and direction. 

Those American cult mythologies have broken down for a whole lot of us across the last decade (what with the fascism and all). I don’t know about you, but my gut feelings about the U.S. these days usually veer more towards “What the hell is wrong with you people?” than “This place is a shining city on a hill.” It’s painful, even for someone like me, an American living abroad and separated from it to some degree. Reading the news out of the States doesn’t feel that different from losing faith.

But reading books by and about the Transcendentalists over the last few months, my feelings have been shifting in a way that’s a little bit hard to quantify. 

I don’t think it’s a MAGA emotion. I haven’t been feeling inspired by whitewashed visions of the American past. In fact, reading what these people wrote in detail, beyond the inspirational quotes, sometimes makes you nauseous. The classic complaint about Transcendentalists is that Thoreau got his mom to do his laundry at Walden. That is probably not exactly true, and in fact, he's the Transcendentalist least deserving of modern criticism. They weren't all icons of integrity though. Emerson had a “this dude was kind of creepy” air about him. He ran hot and cold with women, and despite being a vocal abolitionist, in at least one essay he outlined a racist scientific theory about the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon race. John Muir, as has become general knowledge in the outdoor world, said a bunch of disparaging things about indigenous and black people alongside the inspiring stuff he said about nature. 

So no, it’s not nostalgia for an imagined better past. What I think it is: I think reading the Transcendentalists has been helping me reconstruct a truer, more useful story in place of the American myth. That story is about how change happens and how good ideas can move forward even in bad circumstances. 

The Transcendentalists were a group of flawed, eccentric, but also smart and hardworking friends trying to advance a set of ideas that they believed would make the world a better place. Their ideas were largely countercultural and faced immediate headwinds–to the point that there’s a generally accepted narrative that the Transcendentalist movement was overly idealistic, and “died” due to the horrors of the Civil War.

The thing is though, two centuries later, many of the ideas they advanced (and strategies they employed) are mainstream features of American culture, government, and infrastructure. There’s a very real sense in which the Transcendentalists prepared the American mind for the National Park system, women’s suffrage, the Civil Rights movement, and a whole lot of the #resist stuff that’s happening now.  

I’m not saying they were everything, right. I’m just saying they did some things right. We’ve talked about a lot of the important points already:

1. They insisted on the individual’s ability to resist the barrage of noise, trust your instincts, and identify what’s right in troubled times. (Emerson on “secondhand thought”.)

2. They insisted on organizing voiceless communities, gathering knowledge and perspectives, and putting it in front of the public in a way that couldn’t be ignored (Fuller and The Dial.)

3. They insisted on rejecting materialism and consumption and carefully considering how to build a life based on things that actually matter.  (Thoreau at Walden.)

4. They insisted on the value of the natural world for human wellbeing and for its own sake, and they prescribed wilderness as an antidote to the problems created by technology. (Emerson, Muir, and Thoreau.)

5. They discouraged allowing yourself to give up due to the massive scale of collective problems, but encouraged action to become friction in the machine where you come into contact with it. (Thoreau in “Civil Disobedience.”)

The fact that all of those ideas still resonate proves that the Transcendentalists identified timeless wisdom, but it also shows that across the long run, their collection of strategies is an effective way to make sure your life matters beyond the shitstorm. 

Stated concisely, the American story that comes from the Transcendentalists is: The United States is a deeply flawed place. It always has been. But also, we have the individual and collective resources to improve it. There’s data from American history about beliefs and strategies that will eventually work, even if things seem hopeless in the moment.  

To me, that feels like a useful American story for the present moment. It’s true, and hopeful, and realistic.

Carrying good ideas forward into a modern Transcendentalism

Personally, when I started reading reading the Transcendentalists a year or so back, it was because friends had pointed out resonances with Walden in The Dirtbag’s Guide to Life. I wanted to understand my ancestry. 

The Dirtbag’s Guide is a book about how to avoid the traps of the modern world in order to build a good life. Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that a lot of the core Transcendentalist teachings speak to the need for escape that’s so omnipresent these days. 

In any case, it’s a good exercise. In the last post I talked about how thru-hiking naturally ingrains values and practices that help you feel a bit more free, human, and enlightened in the midst of our modern complex of crises. The point here is that getting familiar with the Transcendentalists can do the same. When you’re stuck in a situation where big, uncontrollable bad things are happening all the time, it’s nice to have some guidance on a path through. In the midst of the supposedly historically unprecedented, it’s nice to have reassurance that people have figured out ways to survive and live effective, meaningful lives in times with as many problems as our own. And in a time when the myth of American exceptionalism has clearly been exposed as propaganda, it’s nice to find messier, truer stories about real, flawed people that managed to contribute to lasting progress. And, in a time when it feels like you need to do something, it’s nice to have some practicalities. Refuse to cooperate with injustice where you see it. Build communities that give people dignity, even when our leaders won’t. Go outside often enough to remember that you’re human. Turn off your phone and resist the constant barrage of “secondhand thought.” And keep your life simple so you’re free enough to do the things that matter.

None of that changes the immediate American reality, but it does provide a little bit of reassurance that maybe we’re not actually trapped. And who knows, 200 years from now, maybe we’ll all be reading blog posts about modern transcendentalists–a core group of dirtbags and idealists whose values and actions were inspiring, even when the reality TV fascists were trying to institute martial law and reinstitute the Confederacy. Who knows? But you have to keep going.  

I’m going to be dealing with this for a while—this cognitive wrestling match between long trails, old American ideas, and whatever the hell is happening at the moment. If that sounds entertaining, useful, or interesting, join the mailing list on the home page. You’ll get new thoughts as they develop, including updates on the forthcoming revised version of the unintentional modern Transcendentalist manifesto, The Dirtbag’s Guide to Life and the follow up project, whose working title is Dirtbag Pilgrims.