Thoreau vs. the BYU

[Henry David Thoreau is not impressed by your BYU beard bans]

 

You can always tell when an English major got their undergrad at BYU by how vociferously they denounce Thoreau.  I don't just mean they roll their eyes at Walden or respectfully disagree with his Defense of John Brown, no, I mean they tear into him like a cornered dog, as though he has personally insulted them somehow.

Serious, almost every last BYU English grad I've ever met has at some point ranted (as though they were the only students on Earth to learn this) about how when Thoreau lived at Walden, he visited his Mom in Boston every Sunday, who in turn gave him a care package (wow, he loved his Mom and she loved him back, what a scoundrel!), and had coffee with the Emersons (*gasp* he wasn't an anti-social misanthrope, how dare he!).

While these Sunday visits maybe slightly undermine his whole Walden project of roughing it alone in the wilderness, it likewise doesn't distract from the fact that he, well, lived in a cabin the other 6 days of the week--not to mention that he built it all by himself, and survived not one but two New England winters therein (have you experienced a Nor'easter without central heating?). That is, even if his whole escape into the woods may not have been quite as awesomely hardcore as we initially assumed, well, it was still by a wide margin a heckuva a lot more daring than anything any of us have ever done.

But to hear some BYU English majors declaim, every word that Thoreau ever wrote is now delegitimized and exposed as an egregious fraud.  Besides that angry dismissal being a total ad hominem fallacy if there ever was one, well, to paraphrase Thoreau on John Brown, Thoreau can frankly only be judged by his peers--and since not one of these privileged young American college students has ever even tried to build a log cabin, let alone live two years in one, then these English majors are hardly the peers qualified to judge him. In science terms, if you don't even try to reproduce the experiment, then you are in no place to challenge the results.

And this from the self-professed disciples of a Man who taught "judge not, lest ye be judged," and what's more, One who regularly withdrew from the world to meditate in the wilderness as well!  Which makes this whole Thoreau hostility all the more perplexing--shouldn't they be looking to Thoreau as a potential model to emulate, one who embodies their most cherished virtues of thrift, self-sufficiency, contemplation, meditation, anti-materialism and unworldliness?  The BYU English dept. has this knee-jerk tendency to claim near every great writer as some closet proto-Mormon incognito (Emerson, Milton, Wordsworth, CS Lewis, etc), so why not also Thoreau, who actually does seek to live up to our purported values?

Maybe that's just it--he actually practiced what we preach, he did what we only talk about, which exposes us a bit, and we resent that a tad perhaps.  Because ideally, BYU would likewise be training our students, like Thoreau, to "seek not for riches but for wisdom," to serve God and not Mammon (the Hebrew word for wealth), to "lay aside the things of this world, and seek for the things of a better."  

But of course, BYU doesn't actually teach that, at least not nowadays.  Its top ranked programs are in Accounting and Business.  It's a hotbed for Summer Sales and Pyramid Scheme recruiters.  We are instructed to "be in the world but not of the world," but we're actually still kinda of the world too, aren't we.  In practice, BYU students do the exact opposite of what Thoreau preached, so we discredit him at every turn lest we be pricked by our own consciences.

But that theory still doesn't account for the fact that the English dept. is where all the lefties and liberals, the anti-capitalist types, tend to congregate at the BYU--but again, these are the ones, not the business majors, who savage Thoreau the most. Just what's going on here?  Is it maybe, subconsciously, they do so desperately want Thoreau to embody their most deeply held values, and so feel a palpable sense of personal betrayal when he doesn't precisely live up to his mythology?  

Is this the secular equivalent of when some Mormons learn that Joseph Smith wasn't the flawless Saint he never claimed to be, so they turn on him viciously and throw the baby out with the bathwater?  Is this BYU Thoreau-bashing an indicator that we LDS types still have not quite figured out how to treat human beings as human beings, and not as idols?  (Idolatry is a sin anyways...)

Maybe they resent Thoreau as some counterfeit Messiah?  Maybe Walden pales compared to the travails of Brigham Young and the pioneers (whom we also have not matched)?  Maybe this Harvard alum who voluntarily walked away from such prestige punctures the careerist pretensions of those attending the "Lord's" University?  Maybe his uncompromising principles gives them away as not nearly as lefty as they think they are?  Maybe we love out A/C and laptops too much to bear contemplating a world without them (as unsustainable as that world may be)?  Maybe the neck-beard throws them off?  Who knows.  

All I know is that when I prepared to move out East and wondered how I would move all this stuff, it was Walden that reminded me to quit letting the things I own own me, and leave it all behind.  And the last time I read Thoreau's "Walking," I was filled with a deep and propulsive need to go for a walk in the woods and commune with God's wonders that is as yet unmatched by any personal essay I've yet to encounter from the BYU.