cheese it, the cops!

department of defiance

 

american defiance is out in paper, with kindle coming soon. it is a collection of anti-authoritarian texts stretching from anne hutchinson's defense against and attack on the puritan theocracy to voltairine de cleyre's "anarchism and american traditions."

there are some celebrated slices, especially emerson and thoreau, but there is so much that is so little known. i've tried to give whole texts or very substantial parts. john woolman's 'plea for the poor' from the 1760s anticipates the arguments of peter singer. sarah grimke's letters on the equality of the sexes is probably the first feminist book published in the us, and she's better than fuller, i think. william lloyd garrison argues for total anti-statism in 1838. sitting bull lures a reporter into the new york herald's last stand. there is a really stunning and ground-breaking essay on race by frederick douglass that is almost never read (better than dubois 50 years later), along with a big chunk of david walker's unbelievable appeal. angela heywood throws down some surrealist political sex poetry. anti-federalists, abolitionists, anarchists, and antinomians are all represented. 

this is our most radical and most american heritage: a fierce anti-hierarchical tradition, the texts themselves sometimes unimaginable acts of defiance. we need remindin.

in editing this book, i am appointing myself secretary of defiance. these texts constitute our artillery battery, our canon.

american immanentalism

as i've often said, i think that american transcendentalism is ineptly named; i'd prefer an antonym, actually, such as 'immanentalism.' now i think the canon needs expanding, and i think the narrative according to which transcendentalism was superseded by pragmatism is simplistic. 

so, if i were assembling a set of transcendentalist essays, i might start with rogers. i would certainly include essays by voltairine de cleyre, perhaps 'the dominant idea' and 'crime and punishment.' and i might fetch up with zora neale hurston: i am straight up asserting that zora is an american transcendentalist in the thoreau mould. a volume focusing exclusively on her essays is long overdue.

in the hands of lit and phil profs, the transcendentalists have sunk into quaint american fossils, groovy proto-hippie nature children, with an embarrassing political individualism that no one can believe anymore, or that must be attenuated or vitiated under interpretation. but a good part of the whole thrust is political from the outset in rogers, emerson, thoreau: a radical anti-authoritarianism. and they have a beautiful individualism that is also not at all about economic self-seeking, but derives from protestant notions like the quaker inner light of god in each person. also, this individualism is a radical egalitarianism, as you see in rogers, in voltairine, in hurston. and it is an individualism that connects with the natural world in much the way many had previously connected to god, and then seeks to place us each as an individuals - not as races, not genders, not parties, not classes, not general wills - into the same shared world. 

it is my philosophy.

 

my canon

zora neale hurston's essays are still radically undervalued. she is one of the great american essayists. in the canon of great expressions of american individualism i would place seeing the world as it is alongside emerson's self-reliance and thoreau's walking.

as you may have gathered, one of my little lines is nineteenth-century american reform movements. i turn to these because they were the last movements of the american "left" that directly endorsed individuality and political freedom that was not itself grounded in political oppression, that wasn't just an attempt to wield state power. one problem with this material, for my money, is that it was connected with the fad of "spiritualism," into which it almost disintegrated after the civil war, but which infested it long before. (cf perhaps victoria woodhull. but i was also shocked to come across letters by my dude josiah warren taking the whole thing very seriously. (his long island utopia modern times (=brentwood) was a big center of this kind of junk, but i'd though him pretty immune.)

there have been various accounts of why this should be so. spiritualism was more or less anti-christian or at a minimum extremely unorthodox, so it was theologically liberating. it has often been pointed out that the fad was dominated by women, and had a feminist tinge: its "clergy" was female, which was an important development. but to make the case for it as a sociological development, you have to overlook the fact that its practitioners were charlatans (i mean, actual frauds), its doctrines moronic. and that it was a distraction from actual political reform, a frittering away of the energies of serious, committed people into an ether emitted by themselves.

that's why i was pleased to come across this in thoreau's correspondence, from a letter to his sister sophia, july 13, 1852:

Concord is just as idiotic as ever in relation to the spirits and their knockings, Most people here believe in a spiritual world, . . .  in spirits which the very bullfrogs in our meadows would blackball. Their evil genius is seeing how low it can degrade them. The hooting of owls, the croaking of frogs, is celestial wisdom in comparison. If I could be brought to believe in the things which they believe, I should make haste to get quit of my certificate of stock in this and the next world's enterprises, and buy a share in the first Immediate Annihilation Company that offered. I would exchange my immortality for a glass of small beer this hot weather. . . . Consider the dawn and the sunrise, - the rainbow and the evening, - the words of Christ and the aspirations of all the saints! Hear music! see, smell, taste, feel hear, - anything, -and then hear these idiots, inspired by the cracking of a restless board, humbly asking, "Please, Spirit, if you cannot answer by knocks, answer by tips of the table." ! ! ! ! ! ! !

from thoreau's journals, june 16, 1854:

I do not believe that there is a judge in this country prepared to decide by the principle that a law is immoral and therefore of no force. They put themselves, or rather are by character, exactly on a level with the marine who discharges his musket in any direction in which he is ordered. They are just as much tools, and as little men.

from the same entry, later incorporated into the essay "slavery in massachusetts": "My thoughts are murder to the state."