How to measure a civilization? By regular folks or ambitious boobies?

Henry David Thoreau is most famous for a book he wrote about building a cabin near a pond in the woods. In fact, we just celebrated the 180^th anniversary of his move-in day: July 4, 1845.

However, he also had some things to say about bigger structures – the pyramids in Egypt – and the people who built them.

Thoreau's cabin: $28.12

Thoreau has been on my mind recently as I contemplated the iconic structures by which we remember civilizations. Pyramids. Towers. Statues. Cathedrals. Skyscrapers. Dams, Bridges. Etc. Things you would see in a game of Sid Meier’s Civilization.

For the United States in the 21^st century, I do not think of any grand structures. I do not think of ambitious public works. We do not seem to build those now. One could say the iconic works of this century are corporations rather than structures. 

In 2018, Apple became the first corporation with a valuation of a trillion dollars. Now several companies surpass that amount, including Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla. 

Some of these entities are involved in the lives of possibly every American, especially inside the technology that we use daily. As the Orange King says, “Everything is computer!” I will focus on Amazon, though. Not everyone shops on Amazon, but everyone knows its logo and sees its delivery trucks each day.

When people think of the United States in the 21^st century, they might think of these corporations as its greatest accomplishment, and the leaders of these corporations might be considered its leading citizens. In fact, several of them were on stage during the coronation of the Orange King. In a past era they would have been called “titans of industry.” Author Thomas Wolfe might have called them “Masters of the Universe,” which is phrase from his novel Bonfire of the Vanities; it is a name for the men who steer the nation’s money and influence the nation’s fate -- and who are known for their extravagant lifestyles.

Thoreau would be disappointed in this lionizing of wealth-hoarders and what they have built. Thoreau asked people to evaluate the greatness of a civilization by the standard of living for its regular people rather than the achievements of its elites.

One of Bezos's yachts: $400 million

I agree with him.

In the first chapter of Walden, Thoreau writes that the workers who built the pyramids “were not decently buried themselves.” He suggests a mason in another era who “finishes the cornice of the palace returns at night perchance to a hut…”  He writes, “It certainly is fair to look at that class by whose labor the works which distinguish the generation are accomplished.”  

Much of Thoreau’s first chapter is devoted to asking why people spend their lives working rather than living. He questions the lifestyles people choose (or have forced upon them) that require so much labor. Returning to the topic of pyramids, he suggests the laborers had better things to do with their lives – like living them. In fact, rather than ask how could people build such marvelous structures, he asks why would people build them at all? In the second chapter of Walden, he writes: 

“As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.”

I suspect Bezos, an ambitious booby himself, would disagree with this sentiment. After all, he famously said he wanted his thousands of Amazon employees to “wake up every morning terrified” of not pleasing their customers. Bezos believes his company is worth the sacrifice of its workers’ lives and happiness.

Thoreau would judge American civilization not by the valuation of Amazon’s stock and Bezos’s wealth, but by whether his employees were treated well and felt their lives were being spent wisely.

Far from urging people to wake up terrified in sheets drenched in sweat, Thoreau urges his readers to be awakened by their “aspirations from within” rather than from without, by an alarm clock or “factory bells.” He urges us to awake in the morning “to a higher life than we fell asleep from.”

Again, I agree with him.

 

 

The populist president who works against the populous

 The motto of capitalism might be “Be careful what you wish for.”

It is an economic system that can generate great wealth, even widespread prosperity, but it also is prone to excesses and instability.

If capitalists manage to gain control of the political system as well as as the economic system, those excesses can get more extreme and more damaging. Capitalism also is prone to boom-and-bust cycles. If unchecked, capitalism can create bigger booms and bigger busts. With Trump in the White House, the bigger boom looks to be guaranteed only for the already-wealthy, and the bigger bust is for everyone else.

This is on my mind because I have been reading The Master’s Tools: How Finance Wrecked Democracy (and a Radical Plan to Rebuild It) by Michael A. McCarthy. In the book, McCarthy describes the ways the U.S. system of governance serves the needs of capitalists more than workers, something we are seeing vividly demonstrated by the Trump Administration. 

Until recently, mechanisms existed to curb some of capitalism’s excesses, and some of these mechanisms benefited workers directly — protecting them from exploitation or allowing them to share more of the wealth generated by their labor.

These mechanisms are called “flanking subsystems.” They are “state agencies, committees, programs (such as welfare), and quasi-governmental entities such as central banks, that actively intervene in relations of production, exchange, and investment” (35).

McCarthy writes, “… capitalist democracies pursue stabilizing interventions that overcome capitalism’s own anarchic and self-destructive tendencies” (35).

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal is perhaps the clearest example of “stabilizing interventions,” and we have many vestiges of it with us today (at least for now); for instance, Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (Social Security), which has saved millions of people from poverty, and the National Labor Relations Act, which encouraged collective bargaining and protected workers who sought to organize unions. Later interventions protected people from discrimination and injury at their jobs. Others benefited everyone, not just workers, by protecting clean air and clean water from the capitalist penchant for polluting landscapes. The Bureau of Consumer Protection is one. Medicare and Medicaid are popular interventions. The Affordable Care Act is another.

However, since his election, Trump has been removing (or attempting to remove) many of the guardrails that keep capitalism from producing the anarchy and self-destruction McCarthy discusses.

Although capitalist interests may dominate U.S. politics, they have been kept in check, to some degree, by other interests, since until recently, the United States had a functioning democracy. McCarthy says these checks ultimately make capitalism sustainable, saving it from itself. He writes:

Sometimes what capitalists want is not what they need. And therefore, to effectively stabilize capitalist social relations, capitalist states need to govern on behalf of capitalism [but] not necessarily at the behest of capitalists…. It must protect capitalist relations of exploitation and domination from the very conditions those relations produce while also ensuring capitalist relations remain dominant in the political economy (36).

Trump is throwing all of this out the window. In many ways, he is giving the capitalists what they want rather than what they need: diminishing workers’ rights to organize, reducing protections from injuries at the workplace, undermining protections from discrimination, removing environmental regulations to allow more pollution of the water and the air, etc.

Promising great wealth for everyone, Trump is setting the capitalists loose while providing nothing for workers. While claiming to be their champion, he is making them more vulnerable.

In addition to making workers physically, emotionally, and financially vulnerable, his policies make their lives more precarious by many of his other decisions — closing Job Corps, which provides vocational training; closing down the Federal Emergency Management Agency; limiting information on disease outbreaks and rationing vaccinations against deadly diseases, etc.

If McCarthy is right, this may result in a deep crisis. Capitalism creates “monsters that it cannot fully control,” and it is dependent upon bureaucratic and democratic governance to be kept in check. Those monsters “also have the capacity to harm the thing that brought them into existence — that is, capitalism itself” (36).

A healthy capitalist system cannot be sustained by a nation of disempowered, unemployed, stressed, poisoned, ill, or abused workers.

Zealotry is unAmerican

 

I was born in 1961, and in the United States in which I grew up, people were suspicious of extremes. A “zealot” was something you did not want to be, religious or otherwise.

That is why the nation’s turn toward extremism in recent years seems surprising and dismaying.

Especially surprising and alarming is the combination of religious and political zealotry.

I saw an article in The Atlantic recently about the New Apostolic Reformation, “The Army of God Comes out of the Shadows” (February 2025). The subhead states: “Tens of millions of American Christians are embracing a charismatic movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation, which seeks to destroy the secular state.”

According to the article, this movement is on “a mission to claim the Earth for the Kingdom [of God] as humanity barrels deeper into the End Times.” Anyone opposed to it is, by definition, opposed to God’s will, which makes them a heretic and invalidates their views (and perhaps their rights).

Its members see Donald Trump and MAGA as instruments for bringing about the kingdom. The feeling is mutual, according to the article. Trump (and Elon Musk) see them as instruments to attain their goal: acquiring political power to enrich themselves and avoid time in jail.

I grew up in a Southern Baptist church, and I do not recall anyone saying that Jesus wanted to create the Kingdom of God as a literal government. I certainly never heard that coercing Christian beliefs and behaviors on other people was advisable. Freedom was a core value: people were free to believe or not, and only those who believed were obligated to follow God’s teachings.

However, the New Apostolic Reformation has other ideas and is intent on creating a theocracy: a government based on their particular version of Christianity. The article states the movement seeks “aggressive social and institutional transformation.”

This strikes me as inherently unAmerican. The article cites a study indicating up to 40 percent of American Christians are part of or approve of the New Apostolic Reformation’s goals. That means they have abandoned freedom.

If freedom is out, then so is democracy.

This situation reminds me of “What Is An American?” by J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur. This is the
title of a famous entry in his book Letters from an American Farmer, which was published in 1782. (I assume historian Heather Cox Richardson alludes to this book with the title of her newsletter, Letters from an American.)

Crevecoeur discussed religious fervor in “What is an American?” The American immigrant experience cooled it, and he found that to be a good thing.

One way America was better than Europe (a major topic for him) was “how the various Christian sects introduced wear out, and how religious indifference becomes prevalent.” He said intense religiosity was the source of conflict and division. See how many wars and oppression it had caused in Europe? He described how in a generation or two after immigrants arrived in the colonies, marriages between people of different denominations were common. What people believed was not the concern of others.

He wrote, “How does it concern the welfare of the country… what this man’s religious sentiments are, or really whether he has any at all? He is a good farmer, he is a sober, peaceable, good citizen…. This is the visible character, the invisible one is only guessed at, and is nobody’s business.”

Crevecoeur would be sadly surprised to see religious zeal burning again and to see the return of persecution of those who deviate from the beliefs and behaviors of self-appointed divine rulers – health professionals receiving permission to withhold treatment from others because of religious differences, county clerks refusing to process marriage certificates for people to whose lifestyles they object, books being removed from libraries, etc.

Making another person’s beliefs and lifestyle your business leads to trouble, and Crevecoeur celebrated the tolerance he found in America: “Persecution, religious pride, the love of contradiction are the food of what the world commonly calls religion. These motives have ceased here; zeal in Europe is confined; here it evaporates….”

I wish that were true again.