Naturalist that he was, it’s often assumed that Thoreau loathed technology. In fact he was a sophisticated user, and occasionally a designer, of technologies. He never made much money from writing and supported himself by working in two different tool-intensive fields: as a surveyor and in the pencil-manufacturing business owned by his family. At one point he took on the ambitious project of reengineering the Thoreau pencil so it might fare better in a competitive marketplace. He worked hard on it, conducting extensive research into why certain European-made pencils were so superior to their American counterparts. Based on what he learned, he changed the materials, design, and manufacturing process of his company’s pencils, essentially developing a brand-new product. His efforts were a great success, producing “the very best lead pencils manufactured in America” at the time, according to Henry Petroski’s The Pencil, a history of the tool.
Thoughtful student of technology that he was, Thoreau saw that as the latest connective devices extended their reach into the lives of individuals, they were exacting huge costs. They’re the same costs we’re paying today—extreme busyness and a consequent loss of depth. The more wired people became, the more likely they were to fill up their minds with junk and trivia. What if we built this fabulous global telegraph network, he wondered, and then used it only to keep up on gossip about celebrities? “We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. After all, the man whose horse trots a mile a minute does not carry the most important messages.”
That is, he saw that instant communication had the potential to exacerbate the very problem he had gone to Walden to solve, the superficial, short-attention-span approach to life that afflicted his friends and neighbors and often himself. They were all living from one emergency to the next, he writes at one point, consumed by their work, always checking the latest news. “Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?…We have the Saint Vitus’ dance, and cannot possibly keep our heads still.” Saint Vitus’ dance is a nervous disorder whose symptoms include sudden, jerky movements of the limbs and face. The name comes from a mysterious social phenomenon first observed in Aachen, Germany (the city of the little mirrors), in the fourteenth century, when large numbers of people simultaneously broke out into wild fits of frenzied dancing, foaming at the mouth in some cases. Now the weird dance was in the mind.
Once the consciousness was hooked on busyness and external stimuli, Thoreau saw, it was hard to break the habit. Never mind the telegraph, even the post office could become an addiction, as he observed in a speech:
Surface meets surface. When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip…. In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters proud of his extensive correspondence has not heard from himself this long while.
This is the problem of our time, too, of course. And it’s what he went to Walden to solve. The mission: to see if, by building a home at a slight distance from society—disconnected, yet still connected in many ways—and living there thoughtfully, he could go back inward, regaining the depth and joy that was being leached out of everyday life.
Among all those who were struggling with this challenge in the mid–nineteenth century, Thoreau was unusually well situated to find an answer. Concord was the center of American Transcendentalism, a philosophical movement that provided a rich vein of pertinent ideas. Transcendentalists believed that true enlightenment does not come from other people or outward sources such as organized religion, scientific observation, and books; rather, it comes from within. The profoundest truths about existence are available to each of us through intuition and reflection.
It was a philosophy that spoke directly to a time when trains and telegraph lines, as well as industrialization and other forces of modernity, were pulling people in exactly the opposite direction—outward. The crowd seemed terribly important and powerful in those days, just as it does now, and it was hard to resist its influence. It was as if you had no choice but to submit, fall in line. The Transcendentalists believed that resistance was crucial. Emerson, the movement’s leading figure, wrote in his great essay “Self-Reliance” that to be truly happy and productive, you have to tune out the crowd and listen to “the voices which we hear in solitude.” In another piece, Emerson described a Transcendentalist as a person who essentially wakes up one day and realizes, “My life is superficial, takes no root in the deep world.” And then does something about it.
Guided by this philosophy, the Walden project was really an exercise in practical reengineering. In this case, the device that needed redesigning wasn’t a pencil but life itself. Thoreau’s method was to strip away the layers of complexity that outer life imposes, to “Simplify, simplify,” as he wrote, and, in so doing, recover that lost depth. As Thoreau scholar Bradley P. Dean puts it, “By simplifying our outward lives, we are freer and better able to expand and enrich our inward lives.”
The heart of the effort, serving as both headquarters and object lesson, was Thoreau’s tiny house and the life he constructed there. It was seriously spartan, reflecting the simplicity creed. But there was another kind of simplicity that mattered even more than the material kind: simplicity of the mind. Though the house was right in the midst of civilization, close to town, in sight of the railroad, and within easy reach of visitors, he defined it as a zone of inwardness, and that’s what it became.
In effect he put up invisible philosophical walls that said: No news, busyness or stimulation, including the human kind, enters here without my permission. There were visitors, absolutely, and he welcomed them. “I love society as much as most, and am ready enough to fasten myself like a bloodsucker…to any full-blooded man that comes in my way.” But they came intermittently, and generally for good reason. In town, people would drop by on any excuse, but here “fewer came to see me on trivial business. In this respect, my company was winnowed by my mere distance from town.” However, distance wasn’t the only factor. This space had been zoned for a purpose, and people knew it, or they found out. When they overstayed their welcome, he let them know: “I went about my business again, answering them from greater and greater remoteness.” Thus, the crowd was never overwhelming. There was space and time to be alone, and with others—a healthy human mix. “I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.”
Walden recounts an experiment in building a good home by adopting a new idea of what home is all about and living by it. “So easy is it,” he writes, “though many housekeepers doubt it, to establish new and better customs in the place of the old.” It was a successful experiment: Thoreau had the spiritual awakening he’d hoped for, and it’s reflected on every page.
It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.
Reading him has produced a similar effect on generations of people around the world, and occasionally on history. Among the countless people influenced by Thoreau was Gandhi, who cited him as a major inspiration of his own philosophy and the Indian independence movement.
And because it was an experiment conducted in easy reach of society, in what Robert Richardson calls “a backyard laboratory,” it can be replicated in any home. Walden shows that, even in the midst of a frenetic world, one can create a zone where simplicity and inwardness reign—a sanctuary from the crowd. The need is far more pressing now. Thoreau reports that many of his visitors were mystified by his project, didn’t see the point. Today, a zoned-off sanctuary for the heart and mind couldn’t make more se
nse. It’s why we go to spas and yoga classes, leaving home to obtain what used to be home’s special gift.
There’s a long-standing awareness in architecture and design of the value of domestic zoning, to ensure that a home serves all the needs of those who live there. In the late 1930s, an influential book called The Human House by Dorothy J. Field made the case that every house should have zones designated for various degrees of solitude and togetherness, privacy and activity. In other words, a house should offer its occupants the opportunity to move back and forth along the continuum of connectedness. Focusing on the family dwelling, Field wrote, “All thoroughly satisfactory family houses are zoned. In any such house you can find a room which is always a quiet room, a room where you can always enjoy a romp, noise, or any activity without shushing or nagging, and a private cubbyhole for yourself to retire to.” Her ideas influenced Frank Lloyd Wright and other thinkers.
Zoning is way overdue for a comeback, a digital revival, and it’s surprising it hasn’t happened yet. Thoreau could be the model. Our situation is different from his, in that the crowd is no longer just nearby—it’s right in the home, wherever there’s a screen. So our zoning has to be interior. Every home could have at least one Walden Zone, a room where no screens of any kind are allowed. Households that take their tranquillity seriously, and have sufficient room, might designate such a space for each person. There could be a shelf or cabinet outside the doorway where, upon entering, all smart phones and laptops are turned off and put away.
The wireless signals in those rooms won’t go away, of course, and that’s a problem. But as with Thoreau, the point of the zone is to use an idea as a constraint on behavior. For a Walden Zone to work, you first have to believe it’s a good idea; once you do, it’s a lot easier to resist temptation. The mind puts up an invisible wall, which blocks the invisible signal. Technology could help, too. Perhaps a canny entrepreneur with an eye to the Thoreauvian future will come up with a device that scrambles wireless signals in any designated space.
The opposite of a Walden Zone would be a Crowd Zone, any room specifically designated for screen life. Home offices would be automatic Crowd Zones for most people. Since the kitchen is a natural gathering place in many homes, it’s a good Crowd Zone candidate. In a thoughtfully zoned house, a kitchen with floor-to-ceiling wall screens begins to make sense. Connectedness is much more appealing and rewarding when you know there’s a place nearby to get away to.
Another option is whole-house zoning, in which the entire dwelling becomes a Walden Zone during certain times of the day or certain days of the week. This requires more commitment, as it means truly swearing off screens during designated times. The advantage of this approach is that it creates a genuine refuge, as Thoreau’s house must have been on quiet winter nights when the town seemed a thousand miles away. My family has had great success with a regimen of this kind, which I describe in detail in part III.
The point is not to withdraw from the world but within the world. It’s funny that Thoreau, of all people, should be the source of this wisdom. But remember, Walden was just a two-year experiment. When it was done, he returned to society and lived the rest of his life there. But he took a valuable piece of knowledge with him: you can go home again, whenever you need sanctuary, so long as you have a home that serves this purpose. It doesn’t have to be far off in the woods or up in the mountains or anywhere special. It’s not the place that matters, it’s the philosophy. To be happy in the crowd, everyone needs a little Walden.
“You think that I am impoverishing myself by withdrawing from men,” Thoreau once wrote in his journal, “but in my solitude I have woven for myself a silken web or chrysalis, and, nymph-like, shall ere long burst forth a more perfect creature, fitted for a higher society.”
Chapter Eleven
A COOLER SELF
McLuhan and the Thermostat of Happiness
“How are we to get out of the maelstrom created by our own ingenuity?”
At the end of an e-mail, a friend mentions how crazy her life has become, particularly at the office. She has a good job at a prestigious university, the kind of place I like to imagine as being somewhat insulated from the chaos. I ask what she means by crazy.
“The i.m.’ing knows no bounds,” she replies. “It feels like my central nervous system is interlinked with all my colleagues’.”
A brief description, less than twenty words. But I know just what she’s talking about, and she knows that I know. We’re both interlinked to more people than it’s possible to hold in the mind at one time. Everyone is. And the panicky feeling behind her words, the sense of being plugged into an infinite crowd from which there’s no unplugging, is the characteristic sensation of this era.
So far, the ideas explored in this part of the book have come from the distant past. There have been all kinds of striking parallels between past and present, ways in which people of previous eras felt much as we feel now. But the fact is, none of them experienced exactly what we’re experiencing.
Thoreau walked under telegraph wires and heard them sing, but he never watched an event unfold on the other side of the world in real time. He never typed in a search term and instantly got back 25 million results. He never woke up in the morning to find that 150 new messages had arrived overnight, silently, inside a waferlike object glowing on the nightstand—an object that really does seem to have a direct line into the nervous system. Yet there is a way to pull the good ideas from the past into the reality that surrounds us. Marshall McLuhan, the only philosopher in this survey who lived in the age of screens, provides the missing piece.
Today McLuhan is known primarily for two catchphrases that he coined, “the global village” and “The medium is the message.” They weren’t just slogans, they were prophecies, and astonishingly good ones. He saw this digital world of ours coming, and he wrote a great deal more about it than two phrases. He left behind a sprawling, penetrating, idiosyncratic body of work, a whole philosophy aimed at making sense of life in a world made much smaller and busier by electronic technology. His overriding theme was that, even in a hyperconnected world, everyone has the ability to regulate his or her own experience.
At the time it was widely feared that mass media were turning people into helpless automatons. The crowd was on the rise again, and McLuhan wanted people to know that if they felt overwhelmed by technology—“involuntarily altered in their inmost lives,” as he put it—it didn’t have to be that way. They could take control of the situation, just by living more consciously.
It’s the same theme that great thinkers have struck time after time over the last two thousand years, but it keeps getting forgotten. The answer to our dilemma is hiding in the last place we tend to look: our own minds. McLuhan believed that even at a time when technology, and the crowd it delivers, has direct access to the mind, the best tool for fighting back is still the mind itself. His mission was to update the mind’s arsenal for the new challenges of the future. That future has come, and though McLuhan died thirty years ago, his message couldn’t be more timely.
MCLUHAN WAS A Canadian academic, a scholar of English literature with a passionate interest in mass media and popular culture. In his early writings, he examined the content of media, particularly advertising. At the time, this was the standard way of thinking about technology: it was ideas and messages that mattered, not the devices that delivered them.
This is not to say the technology was ignored. Radio and television pulled huge new crowds together in the 1950s and early ’60s, giving birth to mass society, and there was enormous concern that individuals were losing the ability to think for themselves. It was in 1950 that sociologist David Riesman’s book The Lonely Crowd came out, garnering wide attention with its argument that human beings were becoming less “inner-directed,” or guided by their own values and beliefs, and more “other-directed,” or shaped by those of society. Outwardness was replacing inwardness.
Numerous other books and movies of this period grapple
d with the meaning of the crowd and its impact on people’s minds and behavior. Some, such as The Organization Man and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, focused on the soul-killing conformity of life in the corporate world. Others saw demagoguery in politics as a growing threat. World War II was a fresh memory, and Hitler and other fascist leaders had been skillful manipulators of mass opinion. The fear was that new rabble-rousers could use the electronic media to spread poisonous messages. In his influential book The True Believer, a San Francisco longshoreman turned philosopher named Eric Hoffer examined why individuals willingly surrender their freedom and individuality to mass movements. In the 1957 movie A Face in the Crowd, Andy Griffith played a simpleminded country singer who becomes a media celebrity and political demagogue. But it was the messages themselves, and the charismatic personalities of the people sending them, that were thought to be the real source of power. Technology was basically a conduit.
Meanwhile, the burdens of this new life in the crowd were being felt in the ordinary comings and goings of daily existence. In Gift from the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote in 1955 about the crushing load of obligations bearing down on the modern self:
For life today in America is based on the premise of ever-widening circles of contact and communication. It involves not only family demands, but community demands, national demands, international demands on the good citizen, through social and cultural pressures, through newspapers, magazines, radio programs, political drives, charitable appeals and so on. My mind reels with it…. It does not bring grace; it destroys the soul.
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