Take & Read: Ethics

You might not expect America’s most famous recluse, Henry David Thoreau, to be a very good guide through the urgent ethical issues of our time. You might consult him when discussing the environment, since he seemed to prefer ponds to people. However, on issues like racism or politics, you probably wouldn’t think that a person holed up in the woods has much to offer.

On the contrary, argues Alda Balthrop-Lewis. Not only is the environment deeply related to racism and politics, but solitude contains its own form of engagement with these issues. Thoreau helps us out of the either-or dilemmas that dog our moral lives, Balthrop-Lewis argues in Thoreau’s Religion: Walden Woods, Social Justice, and the Politics of Asceticism (Cambridge University Press). Balthrop-Lewis portrays Thoreau as possessed of a wide ecology of diverse ethical concerns and commitments. What many people hold apart, like environmentalism and antiracism, Thoreau holds together, unified in “one man, one life.”

Balthrop-Lewis, an American religious ethicist at Australian Catholic University, unearths from within Thoreau’s life and thought powerful formulations that can inform everything from the afterlife of slavery to contemporary political life. She challenges unhelpful ways of thinking about engagement and withdrawal, turning on its head any suggestion that Thoreau was too withdrawn to be engaged. She speaks instead of a “dynamic within Thoreau’s writing between his desire for solitude and his investment in community.”