The first Cynic, Diogenes of Sinope, epitomized the ideal of simplicity that Thoreau sought to revive in the 19th century.
WAS DIOGENES OF SINOPE REAL FULL
But as one looks more closely at that history, and at Thoreau, it becomes clear that modern cynics truncate, or pointedly misunderstand, the full scope of cynicism as a school of thought and Thoreau’s rendition of it. Thoreau’s apparent separation from society - his move away from city life - was an attempt to “live deliberately, to front the essential facts of life,” to see if he “could not learn what it had to teach.” The point of his two-year experiment with simple living was to see what life could be like without the corrupting forces of social conventions and traditional politics.Ī ll of this is consonant with cynicism’s long history. Emerson, Thoreau’s mentor and 14 years his senior, had also taken issue with the high intellectual culture of Harvard and Cambridge and argued that there was often a high price of admission to modern institutions and organizations: the freedom to exercise one’s autonomy. Thoreau was also on a quest to embody that most Emersonian of ideals, self-reliance.
When Thoreau escaped in 1845 to Walden Pond, two miles from his native Concord, Mass., it was, at least in part, in search of that sort of education. He quickly decided that universities, even the best ones, might teach “all of the branches of learning” but “none of the roots.” Deep education, the lessons that actually stick, are, according to Thoreau, practical, hands-on, and best learned in the world beyond the classroom walls. He attended Harvard, but only begrudgingly, and the snobbery of academe grated on this son of a pencil maker. Thoreau was, for example, no friend to the liberal elitist window dressing of New England. And there is, it is true, at least a family resemblance between the cynicism of today and the philosophy that he developed in the 1840s. Thoreau, who was born two centuries ago this year, was arguably the first, and most thoroughgoing, American cynic. Trump’s supporters heartily accept a motto, endorsed by the 19th-century American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, “that government is best that governs least.” But they misunderstand the nature and context of Thoreau’s cynicism, for, unlike them, he was cosmopolitan, not nationalistic, and spiritual, not materialistic. The rise of Donald Trump was, at least in part, founded on this suspicion, on the belief that the political and cultural establishment was fundamentally botched. P erhaps it’s time to reassess the virtues of cynicism - that deep and abiding suspicion of all things organized.
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