Habits of Mind

February 1, 2023 | Lukas Bacho SM ‘25

image description: old house in field

I was recently out to coffee in New Haven with a friend when a woman approached us and asked if we could spare any change. When this sort of thing happens, I can usually answer “No, sorry,” with a clear conscience, since I don’t tend to carry cash. But this time, three realizations made me pause: I had a few small bills in my wallet, my friend’s eyes were on me, and we had just been discussing our Christian perspectives on intrinsic human worth. It felt like a pop quiz of my faith sent from God. So I fished my wallet out of my bag, produced five or ten bucks, and held them out to her. She thanked me and walked away, but my face burned. Would I ever do a good deed out of anything but guilt?

Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, with whom I fell uneasily in love over the summer, spent a lot of strong words on the subjugation of the will to prevailing ideas of good. Their writing is intoxicating, almost ideological in its totalizing effect. Yet, as a Christian reader, I felt I had to square each arresting sentence with Christian ethics as I knew them, and it was these two authors’ tirades against philanthropy that caused me to suspect that they had seduced me with a morally vacuous spirituality. For all of their mystical contemplation on the junction of self and nature, Emerson and Thoreau can come off as indifferent or even scornful toward other people. I worried that their maxim of “self-reliance” indulged my tendency to self-absorption and my attraction to a socially disengaged—not to mention privileged—contemplative life. Consider these lines from “Self-Reliance”: 

Then again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. [1]

Out of context, this passage seems unsalvageable, but let us humor Emerson for a moment. The outburst comes amid a larger critique of conformity, which begins as one exits childhood and enters adulthood, surrendering “the integrity of your own mind” to “badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.” What Emerson lambasts here is not Christlike aid to the marginalized, but philanthropy, with all of today’s condescending connotations. (Indeed, his privileged audience consists of those for whom philanthropy is an option.) He hastens to add that that there are those for whom he “will go to prison if need be,” but that donating to “your miscellaneous popular charities” or shamefully giving a dollar to the man on the street are deeds devoid of moral value, reflective of one whose “virtues are penances.” When he writes, “What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think,” he may have in mind something like Kant’s categorical imperative, which is a moral obligation whose power lies in the fact that it is universal yet determined by each individual will. [2] Emerson’s ethic, like Kant’s, is not anti-Christian but Christlike. Jesus is concerned not just about our deeds, but also the motivations behind them. All three men would rebuke my sheepish surrender of a few dollars to that woman on the street, even as they would approve of the act itself.

Is this reading of Emerson a reach? Thoreau, though his renegade spirit cannot always be trusted, clarifies that it is not. [3] We should balk at his assertion in “Economy” that the poor people he has met “have one and all unhesitatingly preferred to remain poor.” In the same essay, however, he follows Emerson in arguing that “Philanthropy is not love for one’s fellow-man in the broadest sense.” He continues: “Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently appreciated by mankind. Nay, it is greatly overrated; and it is our selfishness which overrates it.” Thoreau admonishes us to value “the flower and fruit of a man” rather than his “uprightness and benevolence,” which are merely his stem and leaves. He might say my abashed attempt at philanthropy is the product of a culture that cultivates the performance of morality over the all-embracing, agape love Christ demonstrates. (What does this mean for effective altruism and evangelical mission trips?)

Here, in Thoreau’s formulation, is the Kantian injunction to act out of duty rigorously defined: “[One’s] goodness must not be a partial and transitory act, but a constant superfluity, which costs him nothing and of which he is unconscious.” That curious phrase, “which costs him nothing,” offers a key to understanding the passage from Emerson above. Dollars and cents are the language of transaction; belonging to others—which should be our aspiration—is the lesson of Cain and Abel, the language of fraternity. If I give to the woman on the street, it must be out of nothing less than filial duty and neighborly love. In the face of such a lofty moral standard, one cannot but assent to Thoreau’s Calvinist confession: “I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.”

My original annotation beside the Emerson passage I quoted above reads “the part incompat. w/ Christianity.” But I now see that such a reading is a misguided oversimplification, even if Emerson’s words are not the first I would choose to express his point. Still, a larger question looms: short of the moral standard Emerson, Thoreau, and even Jesus provide, is not a guilt-ridden philanthropy like mine better than none at all? Let us take one of Emerson’s most biblical paradoxes as a jumping-off point. Just before the passage at hand, he echoes Mark 10:29, declaring, “I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me.” In context, I take this to mean that being true to one’s principles is more moral than being beholden to social custom or filial decorum. Yet in “Man the Reformer,” he calls love “the one remedy for all ills,” writing, “We must be lovers, and at once the impossible becomes possible.” This sentiment echoes Mark 10:27—“For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible”—and seems to encourage the Christian approximation of faking it till you make it: Sell your possessions and give the money to the poor, even if your motive for doing so is the promise of salvation. The pretense of love, with its attendant transformation of your material conditions, will usher in genuine love. And there is no question that Emerson intends not just love, but the same elimination of social inequality that Jesus preaches:

The State must consider the poor man, and all voices must speak for him. Every child that is born must have a just chance for his bread. Let the amelioration in our laws of property proceed from the concession of the rich, not from the grasping of the poor. Let us begin by habitual imparting.

It is worth pausing to marvel that this passage and the one above on philanthropy were produced by the same mind in 1841. Now, how does one move from not belonging to humanity to being a lover of it? Emerson’s “habitual imparting” sounds a lot like Christ’s ethic of acting generously even before one feels generous. We must teach each new generation the “equitable rule” that “no one should take more than his share, let him be ever so rich.” Of course, this is the rule of Jesus. As Emerson put it, “This great, overgrown, dead Christendom of ours still keeps alive at least the name of a lover of mankind”—and the fact that Jesus is the only person to ever become a true “lover” must not discourage us from aspiring to his standard. 

The Emersonian vision for humanity that links “Man the Reformer” to “Self-Reliance,” the social to the individual, is manifest in the following parallel passages. From “Man the Reformer”: “He who would help himself and others should not be a subject of irregular and interrupted impulses of virtue, but a continent, persisting, immovable person”; and from “Self-Reliance”: “the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” Self-reliance is in fact about thinking independently, not living independently. It is about existing in society without succumbing to the prevailing model for how one ought to do so. It is about loving God and loving one’s neighbor at once. For Christians, it is about how to retain the countercultural spirit of a religion after that religion has become cultural.

Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond dominates the popular view of transcendentalism, as well as the American imagination more generally. Unfortunately, it has muddled the spirit of “self-reliance.” The starkness of Thoreau’s experiment and its rhetoric—“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately”—was a major source of my fear that transcendentalism was individualism, and self-reliance what passes nowadays for “self-care.” Another essay could be devoted to the perils of taking Emerson too literally, as Thoreau might have done. Suffice it to say that history has shown the perils of doing Scripture the same injustice. 

The good news is that, where Thoreau may have failed to unite the theoretical and practical, and Emerson is sometimes confusing, Jesus succeeds with startling directness. He has his parables, yes, but he also has his commands. His injunction to the rich man to “sell what you own, and give the money to the poor” could not be more explicit, and the Gospels ought to be at the center of any Christian conversation about civic engagement. Together, Christ and Emerson tell me that I was right to feel shame after helping that woman, but not because I should necessarily have acted otherwise. Christianity proposes that giving poor people money is not a moral deed divorced from the rest of my life, but one that reflects my standing in relation to humanity writ large. The hope is that, by freely giving to and exchanging words with strangers, my heart will gradually soften, and with time I will cherish rather than tolerate my neighbor.

[1] All the material quoted from Emerson in this essay can be found in the 2003 edition of Nature and Selected Essays, published by Penguin Classics.

[2] Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. “I should never act except in such a way that I can also will that my maxim should become a universal law.” (tr. James Ellington)

[3] All the material quoted from Thoreau in this essay can be found in Walden (as it appears in the 2004 Macmillan Collector’s Library edition).