Self-Reliance, Civil Disobedience and Nature

The wide universe is full of goodness—the first ray of the morning sun, the last hint of sunset, or a gleam of light which flashes across our own mind. The old lessons of bards and sages are worth our hearing, but the spirit of individualism is like a perpetual dawn, shining its light through all the great moments in the history of mankind. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are two pioneers of early American individualism, which distances itself from old Europe and asserts its independence and originality. Emerson and Thoreau believe that individualism is an attitude of speaking out what you think, what you believe and what you trust. Truth and nature are of primary importance; the individualist must reject anything—any rule, any law, any opinion of the majority—that do not accord with them. But the individualist is not an egocentric; he is part of the universe, and because nature, god and man are one, the individual’s radical behavior must always transcend himself and his own self-interest to benefit the universe. Emerson and Thoreau’s individualism have helped shape American culture as a whole, including its political culture, its ethic of resistance, in ways that can only appear strange and special when viewed through Chinese eyes.

On Christmas Day 1832, Emerson got on a ship and left America for Europe. From this encounter with Europe and European writers, Emerson generated two basic ideas which would fundamentally change American literary culture and establish its independence from transatlantic literary traditions. In his 1841 essay “Self-Reliance,” Emerson outlines the germ of a new philosophy. In its opening lines, Emerson claims that “to believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all man,—that is genius” (19). Emerson believes that great people are those who show clearly their minds and their hearts, who prove themselves absolutely trustworthy, and who are masters of their own being and character. Each individual is important and incomparable; he should avoid conformity and false consistency. He must express himself and help shape the world according to the truth that he individually sees. If we do not do this, other people will “say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time,” and we, as the originator of this thought, shall “be forced to take with shame our own opinion from other” (20). We must not see in others what we have ourselves failed to say and do, for others cannot truly represent us. We must instead work to remake the world in the image of the truth that we find in ourselves as individuals.

Inheriting and carrying forward Emerson’s individualisms is Thoreau. Instinctively siding with the losing Mexican side in the Mexican-American war and being appalled by the administration's policy of hunting down and returning runaway slaves to their masters, in 1849, Thoreau writes the essay “Civil Disobedience” and declares that “that government is best which governs least,” and that government ought to be only an “expedient.” He deepens Emerson’s individualism and applies it to the relationship between individual and country. Thoreau believes that a democratically elected government is trying to make people into “subjects,” but that we should be “men” first and “subjects” afterwards. Individual conscience and doing what one individually believes to be right are much more important than being a cog in the machinery of the government. Thoreau advocates civil disobedience as his solution to the weakness of representative government; he says that democratic voting means “feebly” expressing your desire that the right will prevail. An election may settle who the president might be but it doesn't determine that everything the president does is right. The power of the government could be “abused” and “perverted.” When a democratic, “representative” government, in which people vote for representatives, fails to represent an individual at a deeper level, he is justified in disobeying it. When an individual cannot recognize her own values reflected in the government meant to represent her, she has, in Thoreau’s view, a duty to be disobedient. This is the kind of individualism that can lead a single citizen to oppose an entire government on moral grounds.

The author of the article “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration” is, in a sense, acting according to Thoreau’s principles. Published anonymously by the New York Times on September 5, 2018, this editorial claims that some current members of the administration deliberately refuse to follow directions from the President when they feel that they would be bad for the country. The author laments Trump’s “amorality” and lack of “any discernible first principles." Because this individual, despite working for the Trump administration, cannot recognize his own values reflected in the President who is supposed to represent them, he feels he has a responsibility to be disobedient. He feels justified in making an individual decision to undermine his government’s will because he is convinced of his moral righteousness.  

But does Trump himself not represent a form of American individualism? The President of American, Donald Trump, whose current disapproval rating is 52.7%, certainly seems like an American individualist—a all-American figure that disobeys any authority or any rules to do what he wants. But Trump is not only an individualist; he is also an egoist. Let’s take his current climate change denial as an example. On January 20, 2019, ten days after his own Defense Department released the 22-page report about the effects of future 20 years of climate change, including a series vulnerabilities of military installations because of foreseeable flooding, drought, wildfires and thawing permafrost in the future, Trump teased climate change in a tweet. He said: “wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!” This is not the first time that Trump has denied the existence of global warming. Early in December 2013, Trump had already declared on his social media that “Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax!” Doubting the the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists, Trump seems a real fighter, individually opposing the majority with his own view. However, Trump is not unique but stubborn, not a fighter but a coward. He is not a person that pursues their conscience but a egoist who puts his personal interest the first. Every appalling argument he makes is not an plucky, individualist breakthrough on behalf of the universe; it is a more like an attempt to bend government policies to serve his narrow political interests. He wants the whole to serve him, not to serve the whole.

By contrast, Emerson believes that the individual must behave as one part of the universe. The connection is so strong that all individuals, while insisting on what they believe is right, will also concern the whole of nature, the whole world. Individualist people according to Emerson and Thoreau choose to be self-reliant or disobedient not out of self-interest. They are seeking the truth. The truth to make nature, and the world a better place. Self-reliance does not equal to self-indulgence. Different from wheeler-dealer or egoist, Emerson’s individualism is both self-concerning and universal. A key element of being individual is hidden in Emerson’s 1836 essay “Nature,” where Emerson discusses our relationship to nature: “we come to our own, and make friends with matter, which the ambitious chatter of the school would persuade us to despise. We never can part with it; the mind loves its old home: as water to our thirst, so is the rock, the ground, to our eyes, and hands, and feet.” The kind of individualism that Emerson advocates is not a separation from the world. Emerson promotes a “naturalism” based on individual man’s “original relation to the universe.” He believes an essential connection between nature or God and man exist in the world. As man realizes his duty to be a unique individual, he is by this very act becoming an important and indivisible part of the universe. As one number of the world, the individual rids herself of dogmatic religion and historical traditions and trusts nothing but her own instinctual relation to the universe, she also prevents herself from doing harm to nature, because it is nature that gives birth to her instinct and her being. Nature is where we come from, what we are actuated by and where we belong to. Human beings are “part or particle of God” and God is Emerson’s word for the vital and material being of nature.

Emerson, and Thoreau after him, therefore propose an individualism based on sharing in the being of the whole world. It must be said that to some non-Americans, it can be hard to separate such strong views of individualism from self-indulgence and egoism. To a Chinese national, certainly, the form that civil disobedience takes in the United States can only be confounding. In China, there is no individualist ethic that can oppose an individual to an entire State. China is a party monopoly, socialist country. Its current political form, culture and history determine the best government to be the one that can achieve full power, for country is the symbol of majority rule, and majority rule means everything. In other words, the government and citizens themselves doubt that real individualism even exists, at least on the same level that the Nation exists. In China, contrary to Thoreau's idea, it is impossible for a person to fight individually, as an individual, against the country; the only way to revolt or to fight, is to win over the masses support. In a sense, the Chinese are individual only in a very different sense of the word: they cannot be divided from the people or the nation as a whole, and cannot have political existence as separate persons.

Yet in America, being individual is encouraged and booming. From the father of American literature Ralph Waldo Emerson to the leading individualism Henry David Thoreau, from the African American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr to the latest Trump resistance movement, American people fight for what they individually believe. Emerson and Thoreau were the prophets of an American individualism that is powerful and enduring. It has sometimes led to great excesses, arguably, but it also has provided the language and ethic through which such excesses can be resisted.