Thoreau, Graffin, & the Punk Ethos

Clearly, an anti-establishment and authority-defiant approach is fundamental to both Thoreau and the punk aesthetic, and perhaps the most obvious connection between the two men and movements. In a scholarly book length follow up to his punk manifesto, Greg Graffin expanded on the punk ideal with Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science, and Bad Religion in a World Without God. In it Graffin explains punk’s challenge to the tyranny of institutional authority warning that “If people unquestionably give in to the massive force exercised by the oppressive institution that is the government, they will enable the people in power.” This criticism mirrors Thoreau’s assertion in Resistance to Civil Government about the relatively few bending the government to their will with the Mexican War. 

Prior to Graffin’s book Anarchy Evolution, Bad Religion’s song "You are the Government" had decreed “when people bend, the moral fabric dies,” and that concern is the essence of Thoreau’s abolitionist stance and the development of his most significant and enduring political work in the art of “Civil Disobedience.” Thoreau’s original thinking on government and the integrity of the individual who dissents began as his counterargument to William Paly’s “Duty of Submission to Civil Government” from The Principals of Moral and Political Philosophy. While scholars and historians widely acknowledge the lineage of Thoreau’s ideas running through the anti-colonialist revolution led by Mohandas Gandhi and the American civil rights protests led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the defiant beliefs can easily extend through the 1970s and 80s with the rise of punk. 

Granted, no one is aligning the historical struggles for abolition, independence, and civil rights with the kids raging in mosh pits during the early 80s. That doesn’t, however, discount the connection of the punk ethos linking back to the ideas of Thoreau. For, when Graffin “warns against blindly accepting the government directives and blindly conforming to their ideals,” he is channeling the transcendentalist concepts of self-reliance and civil disobedience. Graffin, Bad Religion, and the punks of the Lower East Side would certainly “accept the motto that government is best that governs least” and might even agree that “when men are prepared for it, that is the type of government they shall have.”

Thoreau the Educator

In Laura Dassow Walls' sublime Thoreau biography, she describes 1839 as a time when Thoreau's life truly blossomed. Coming out of the harsh economic market facing young people when Thoreau graduated amidst the Panic of 1837, which led to the country's first and most serious economic depression lasting nearly ten years, Henry and his brother opened their school, and he "rose to a position of standing and honor in his community." The Thoreau school was truly an exemplary model of education, extending far beyond the rote memorization of early America's classical liberal arts foundation. 

In a letter to Orestes Brownson, Thoreau had pondered why we should "leave off our education when we begin to be men and women? ... It is time that villages were universities," uncommon schools where citizens could pursue liberal studies for the the rest of their lives, banding together to fund the arts and learning, and make not a village with a few noble men, but "noble villages of men."

Thoreau: the Economist

While Henry Thoreau is often thought of as an environmentalist and a nature writer, based primarily on the reading public's knowledge his work Walden, or Life in the Woods, fewer people see Thoreau through his philosophy on work and economics. In fact, few people think of Thoreau as an economics writer even though the introductory section to his opus, Walden, is titled "Economy." Truly, Thoreau wrote at length on the natural world and man's relationship to his environment, but his retreat to Walden Pond was specifically designed and chosen for him to have time, space, and a viewpoint from which to critique a dynamic and changing economic situation in Concord and America at large. 

In the study Henry at Work (Kaag and Van Belle), Thoreau is portrayed as one who above all else "realized the power of money to warp our lives." Having graduated from Harvard in 1837 during the most serious economic crisis the young nation had yet faced, Thoreau both witnessed the rise of the consumer commercial economy in which surplus was a new concept, at the same time he experienced the dire fiscal situation facing many young graduates. In fact, as Robert Sullivan points out in The Thoreau You Don't Know, young Henry "went to the pond to make a point about work." Thoreau was actually an incredibly hard worker and industrious young man whose talents ranged from innovator of a new superior pencil lead to trusted surveyor of the Concord landscape.

And, "If you think Thoreau as anti-work, that is because Thoreau questioned "why we work" (Kaag and Van Belle). In embracing the natural world and being in tune with, rather than at odds with, his environment, Thoreau even challenged the Biblical notion of the work week and the Sabbath, opining that man should work one day a week and rest the other six. Imagine the views of church leaders and inheritors of the Puritan ethic with that one. Yet, Thoreau was no "do-little," as he is often mistaken to be and criticized for.  While Thoreau explains that his "purpose in going to Walden was not to live cheaply nor to live dearly, but to transact some private business the fewest obstacles," he was working to explore and develop an economic critique.

And despite those stated intentions of transacting private business, "an important part of of Thoreau's experiment turned out to involve basic economic questions: What is the best way to earn a living? How much time should be spent at it?" (Thoreau's Living Ethics, Cafaro). Few people ask these questions, though Henry believed people should first and foremost draw their own conclusions, rather than submit to standards established by institutions. For he believed the point of economics is not how much wealth an individual produces, but what sort of people that work and wealth makes us.

An interesting connection to punk culture, especially in the second wave California bands like Black Flag and Minutemen, is the serious work ethic exhibited by these musicians to simply work on their terms. Because the punk economy was small, most bands lived quite sparsely, often "hand-to-mouth," and that fiscal reality was fundamental to the band Minutemen's philosophy and ethic of "jamming econo," which basically meant doing things "as cheaply and efficiently as possible" (White Boys, White Noise, Bannister).