One of the most persistent criticisms of Henry David Thoreau, launched not just by haters but by admirers, is that he acted and wrote “merely” locally. He admitted this freely many times, saying “There are no larger fields than these, no worthier games than may here be played.” However, acting within this local culture – which we could productively call a microculture – is both something biologically and socially necessary for us as human beings and an equally worthwhile activity to pursue. In fact, the microculture that Thoreau shared in nineteenth-century Concord was a fruitful place for flourishing because of its locality. That is a valuable message for us in this century.
The term “microculture” was first defined in the 1990s by scholars Michael H. Matthews, Melanie Limb and Barry Percy-Smith as follows: “Microcultures are created by combinations of personalities, the locations they make their own, and the events they share.” The word has been used occasionally in developmental psychology, in political science, and in sociology, but no universal definition or limits have been codified by the mainstream. It seems that the label could productively be applied to any small adaptive culture with a unique identity and locale – a village, neighborhood, company, or institution.
We can easily see how this idea is necessary and important today. We might refer to recent studies in anthropology and psychology that show that there is a limit to stable social relationships. We might look at reports by business leaders that show how maintaining or establishing concentrated groups of employees is better for company cultures. Based on extensive historical research into tribe and village sizes, British anthropologist Robin Dunbar’s famous number of 150 acquaintances seems to hold true for primates, nomadic societies, offices, military units, social networks, and more (though more recent studies show slight variances from 30-250 people). That is part of a hierarchy that goes from fifteen good friends to about 1500 people any human can recognize. Not only the global society that we access through the internet but even something as large as the state of Massachusetts in Thoreau’s time or the city of Pittsburgh in ours is just too big a population for our biological brains to process.
We might also look at how microcultures provide a contrast to digital and actual nomadism resulting from the modern megalopolis. The nomad aesthetic of global citizenship can undoubtedly feel less problematic and more liberated than a local identity, but it also means fewer people caring for a local environment around a stable home base. Likewise, an intangible virtual world may be a substitute for the village, but it often produces a society that does not value particular places, and thus the ecosystem of those places.
There is further value considering this idea. We repeatedly see how positive microcultures –not the global society– produce both exceptional individuals and clusters of individuals. The tiny village of Concord might nurture a group of writers and thinkers that influences the entire planet. In her 1972 essay in Henry David Thoreau: Studies and Commentaries, Concord resident and author Ruth Wheeler writes, “I believe…the truly great periods of culture the world over had their backgrounds in villages so small that all types were known to each other.” She cites the small town of Florence in Dante’s day, the small neighborhood of London in Shakespeare’s, the Greenwich Village of her own. “The human mind probably needs the encouragement of like minds,” she says. “But more than that, it needs the testing and dialogue of a variety of different people, such as Thoreau found in Concord Village.” These small areas have always been, and will always be, important for both personal identity and human connection, but also for the cultural growth of humanity.
Thoreau has a lot to add to the conversation around this idea. Although many of the early critics and rewritings of Walden focused on the hermitage, the retreat to isolation, some in recent years have begun to focus on his wisdom about community. As early as 1939, a few critics pointed out the false myth of Thoreau as a hermit: that his criticisms of society were social criticisms not nihilistic rejections. After all, his journals are filled with references to his “neighbors” and “neighborhood.” “I am naturally no hermit,” he wrote. “But might possibly sit out the sturdiest frequenter of the bar-room, if my business called me thither.”
And of course, he was intimately involved in his Concord microculture – he ran a school, he surveyed the woods and fields, he participated in a thousand ways with hundreds of people. “Nature was not Thoreau’s final goal,” writes critic Paul Sherman. “But rather the place of renewal, and out of it…he hoped would come a higher, a spiritually or inwardly formed – that is, an organic society.” Another critic, Robert Gross, calls him a “true son of the town,” and explains how the townspeople “forged an array of affiliations, according to their diverse interests and opinions.” In the first book to deal with the subject in detail, Thoreau in the Human Community, Mary Ellen Moller points out his huge number of acquaintances and friends and his “durable and important relationships.” Moller calls this his “sphere,” but she might just as well have called this his microculture.
During the recent pandemic, many turned to Walden, not just as a way of living in quarantined isolation, but as a way of finding new community. For example, Ron Charles at the Washington Post found in Thoreau a resistance against despair, a community found amongst the whippoorwills and bean leaves. He quoted Thoreau, “What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary?” He heard a clarion call to intrude in each other’s isolation, to reach out to others the way Emerson helped Thoreau through the death of his brother, and Thoreau helped Emerson through the death of his son.
Others in the 21st century have turned to Thoreau as an antidote to the unsatisfied and unsatisfying promises of global society. If Thoreau had to push away the news of the world every day, we keep it in our pockets. When he writes, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” rather than meaning “most people,” he can also mean people in large groups. The internet’s vast aggregates of social media add to this by potentially globalizing every moment, thought, or action. Moreover, even the best online communities lack things that their physical counterparts have – including the real touch of other people, animals, and things. Thus, the online expression “touch grass” for anyone who has been “terminally online.” Just as it did for Thoreau, focusing on our real-world microcultures offers an alternative.
Of course, real world microcultures may be unhealthy or flawed, too. All of us have worked at a toxic company or had to endure a toxic family situation. It often takes only one person to damage or fracture a group of friends and cause a reevaluation of or even flight from a chosen village, institution, or friend group. Thoreau mentions this toxicity in this journals when he says, “Each kind of culture will introduce its own weeds.” He often criticizes the minor toxicities of his own small culture, such as in Walden, when he denounces peoples’ self-centered attitudes towards the misfortunes of others – either reveling in them or taking credit for fixing them. We might also remember that Thoreau himself was often considered by other members of his microculture to be a “messy” member of the group, a somewhat unsatisfactory piece of their own overlapping societies.
So, what can Thoreau teach us about building positive microcultures? How might his life and work provide a blueprint for the return of – or move forward into – a world of small, adaptive cultures with unique identities that develop from or around their locales?
First, Thoreau tells us we need to broaden our idea of community to include the sparrows and muskrats, the oak trees and the stars. “I have looked after the wild stock of the town, which give a faithful herdsman a good deal of trouble by leaping fences,” he writes. “I have watered the red huckleberry, the sand cherry and the nettle-tree, the red pine and the black ash, the white grape and the yellow violet, which might have withered else in dry seasons.”
He encourages us to be friends not just with philosophers and writers, but “weak-headed paupers” and unsophisticated woodchoppers, the marginal and the marginalized. “On a Sunday afternoon, if I chanced to be at home,” Thoreau writes. “I heard the cronching of the snow made by the step of a long-headed farmer, who from far through the woods sought my house, to have a social ‘crack.’” While at Walden Pond, he befriends everyone from “half-witted men from the almshouse” to runaway slaves. Thoreau teaches us to take our friendship and society from all.
Another point that Thoreau often makes is that we need to establish both healthy boundaries and bonds with our neighbors. “Individuals, like nations,” he wrote. “Must have suitable broad and natural boundaries, even a considerable neutral ground between them.” He gives rules for human interaction that seem sensible to anyone over the age of twenty-five.
“In the evening went to a party. It is a bad place to go,—thirty or forty persons, mostly young women, in a small room, warm and noisy…I could imagine better places for conversation, where there should be a certain degree of silence surrounding you, and less than forty talking at once. Why, this afternoon, even, I did better. There was old Mr. Joseph Hosmer and I ate our luncheon of cracker and cheese together in the woods. I heard all he said, though it was not much, to be sure, and he could hear me.”
When he was at Walden Pond, “fewer came to see me about trivial business,” and so “only the finest sediment was deposited around me.”
And yet, with those boundaries established, we must also develop real bonds of neighborliness and friendship. Indeed, friendship might even be the basis for social organization, certainly at the level of a microculture. “Friendship is equal and additive,” he writes. He tells us to listen to our friends: “It takes two to speak the truth,—one to speak, and another to hear. How can one treat with magnanimity mere wood and stone?” And he says that the bonds of friendship will improve us and educate us: “Think of the importance of Friendship in the education of men. It will make a man honest; it will make him a hero; it will make him a saint.” Build a few healthy friendships and suddenly you are living in a dynamic microculture.
Likewise, Thoreau tells us to do our part in that microculture and strive to make it better. He played his part, or rather parts, in the Concord community, whether by official surveying work, by giving lectures on abolitionism, or by showing a giant parasol fungus to the neighbors’ children. He certainly wanted Concord to be better, saying: “It is time that villages were universities” and “instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men.” As he writes in Civil Disobedience, he paid his highway tax “because I am as desirous of being a good neighbor as I am of being a bad subject” and supported schools by “doing my part to educate my fellow-countrymen.” If he didn’t pay the tax that supported slavery and the Mexican War, that was a method of trying to improve his culture, as well. The man who points out the limits and foibles of a society is inherently and necessarily a part of it.
Lastly, Thoreau might tell us to avoid the trap of utopian thinking – that our neighborhood, so to speak, will always be messy, full of the slightly (or greatly) unsatisfactory interactions of the human world. Thoreau declined to join his friend Bronson Alcott’s Fruitlands, which even the most sympathetic author – Alcott’s daughter – criticized as a failed experiment at best, and a corrosive mess at worst. Their mutual friend Ralph Waldo Emerson laid out the problems in his journals, rejecting Alcott’s experiment as “an intellectual sansculottism,” saying, “The philosophers at Fruitlands have such an image of virtue before their eyes, that the poetry of man and nature they never see.” “The fault of Alcott’s community,” he writes, “is that it has only room for one.”
Thoreau’s idea of community was much messier than Alcott’s. As Mary Ellen Moller wrote, “Thoreau was attracted and comforted by another image of the village – that of a true community, small enough to be fully comprehended, made up of self-reliant, idiosyncratic individuals, whose self-reliance would be nurtured by familiar association and mutual respect.” That kind of Thoreauvian community might provide a healthy model for place-based microcultures and a corrective for our ever-growing, technologically connected civilization. It doesn’t mean we have to quit the internet or withdraw from the global wonderland. Instead, his life and work teach us that we need to pay attention to our natural and built environment, to bring balance to our compassions, and to cultivate where we live now. He tells us to return to those small things that make us human.
