I mean have you not read Walden? This idea of being more self-reliant and independent is popular with a lot of people, it's a central precept of certain schools of philosophy and ethics as well. No, they weren't all miserable hermits who died young. If you don't like that lifestyle it's fine, but you don't need to pee in everyone else's Wheaties.
I feel like this is an extremely uncharitable take.
Surely you can agree that interdependence is a spectrum, and people can find satisfaction at different levels.
At least the newyorker article lays it's objections out clearly. It finds Thoreau repugnant for his libertarian outlook, and even more so when Thoreau comes to agreeable conclusions, but by different means than the author.
>"This is not the stuff of a democratic hero. Nor were Thoreau’s actual politics, which were libertarian verging on anarchist. Like today’s preppers, he valued self-sufficiency for reasons that were simultaneously self-aggrandizing and suspicious: he did not believe that he needed anything from other people, and he did not trust other people to provide it. “That government is best which governs least,” Jefferson supposedly said. Thoreau, revising him, wrote, “That government is best which governs not at all.”"
>His moral clarity about abolition stemmed less from compassion or a commitment to equality than from the fact that slavery so blatantly violated his belief in self-governance.
The author seems upset that Thoreau is not appreciative or thankful for the society he lives in. I think the last paragraph sums it up well.
>Granted, it is sometimes difficult to deal with society. Few things will thwart your plans to live deliberately faster than those messy, confounding surprises known as other people. Likewise, few things will thwart your absolute autonomy faster than governance, and not only when the government is unjust; every law is a parameter, a constraint on what we might otherwise do. Teen-agers, too, strain and squirm against any checks on their liberty. But the mature position, and the one at the heart of the American democracy, seeks a balance between the individual and the society. Thoreau lived out that complicated balance; the pity is that he forsook it, together with all fellow-feeling, in “Walden.” And yet we made a classic of the book, and a moral paragon of its author—a man whose deepest desire and signature act was to turn his back on the rest of us
I think this same sentiment is what is expressed elsewhere in this tread. "how dare you be ungrateful for what society has given you, and how dare you not care for your fellow man". I think some people will never understand the desire of others to simply be left alone.
>I think some people will never understand the desire of others to simply be left alone.
Is that what he really wanted thought? Nobody was preventing Thoreau from disappearing into the wilderness. He did not do that because it would have been 1) very difficult and 2) quite dangerous. He was perfectly willing to embrace society when it benefited him personally.
Also, this dream ends the very moment you need an hospital. Hospitals are complex structures that require immense amount of resources to operate. Not not mention the resources needed to develop drugs, train doctors and so on.
Maybe you could live a solitary life, on your own, using only what your land provides you, but there's no way you could access modern health care, then.
Same goes for Internet access (all those subway cables were laid by somebody, probably subsidised by some government, at least partially).
Same goes for roads, and so on.
This is a myth very few people could live because the others don't and one way or another support them.
Thoreau had a strong social network and his mother still took care of him. he was very lucky in this regard that the people he depended on let him be free.
