Baron Wormser: Dissident

Of necessity, the path of the dissident, since it depends on the exactions of conscience, is a solitary one. I think of Henry David Thoreau’s night in a jail cell where he resided for his refusal to pay a poll tax. (Actually, Thoreau shared the cell with someone, a man who had set fire to a barn.) In his essay “Civil Disobedience” that spoke to his stay in jail, Thoreau declared his opposition to slavery and to the military adventurism represented by the Mexican War. He was not, however, what he called a “no-government man,” which is to say one of those libertarians who want to dissolve any vestige of government. The people needed roads and schools and a government that could take care of such services. Whether people needed a peremptory power whose ends too often had little to nothing to do with an individual desiring to lead an individual life was not so much another story as it was in Thoreau’s mind no story. Invading Mexico was not a story that made any sense to a man getting in his winter wood or a woman churning butter. 

    Such stories were, to use a word Thoreau favored, “expedient.” Whatever war-like visions patriotism promoted could be hailed, somehow, as necessity, a purposeful answer to some seeming outrage or other. To say that such a war was inexpedient, that it merely covered the scheming variable of national interest, was to risk censure for stepping out of the flag-waving line. Or the line was merely formed out of resignation, for what was such a war to the populace, much as for many in the North, slavery did not matter. If slavery was expedient for the South and part of the nation’s constitutional make-up, as that stout defender of the Constitution Daniel Webster contended (and about whom Thoreau wrote), then slavery was rightful. This created a situation that Thoreau put forthrightly: “Thus, under the name of Order and Civil government, we are all made at last to pay homage to and support our own meanness. After the first blush of sin comes its indifference; and from immoral it becomes, as it were, unmoral, and not quite unnecessary to that life which we have made.”

   An act of civil disobedience is exactly that – an act. We make all manner of gestures in this world. Short of suicide, life goes on for each of us. Yet some gestures count for more than others, particularly those that speak to how we feel about ourselves and what our lives represent. Thoreau was, in his reserved Yankee way, obsessed with the depth an individual life could assay. As obsessions go, it’s always seemed to me one of the most productive ones. As he put it, “I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.” I realize many do not endorse those words and feel something like the opposite. They feel they came into this world to make it “a good place.” The grounds exist to convict Thoreau of egotism and a degree of coldness. That, however, is only part of the story. Another – and to my mind larger – part of the story is his determination to savor the depth of being here in his particular body and to give full vent to feelings that refused to be suborned, to be truly an individual. If the State required him “to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine.” I cannot say how haunting it is to me that he spoke in 1849 to the “machine.” I want to say, “Little did he know” but he did know. 

   Thoreau seems to me to be an arch dissident in that he was willing to take a stand that went well beyond a political choice. (He considered voting to be “a sort of gaming.”) He envisioned the life of a dissident neither as the approved pursuit of happiness nor as the path of good works and good intentions but – the phrase bears repeating – as “a counter-friction,” a metaphor that brings up the physical nature of his endeavor, his throwing his daily being into the fray and his implying how such friction might wear a spirit down. Such a life was an effort but, after a time, might become a sort of second nature because the machine was not going to stop. If anything – and it is the story of modern times – the machine kept ramping up, literally but figuratively, too, in the totalitarian ministrations of ideology. The effort, nonetheless, was crucial for a person’s self-respect, a matter that went far beyond hope and similar wishful recompenses. However remote Thoreau can be at times, he was also intensely personal in how he went about his life. 

   Although we may finger a precipitating event, as the war in Vietnam was for me a precipitating event, we don’t know where conscience comes from. We know it speaks clearly across centuries and cultures. It does not seek applause. It may be recognized, it may not. Though it may issue in an outward action such as going to jail due to an act of civil disobedience, it is not “news” in the sense of what is paraded across screens and about which people endless opine. It is inward and may seem insubstantial. That would be a mistake, however, because conscience has a back bone. As Thoreau put it, “O for a man who is a man, and, as my neighbor says, has a bone in his back which you cannot pass your hand through!” Conscience never sleeps but how it is called into play each day is not an easy call. We make a thousand compromises with the world we are born into. Yet what Thoreau was ever aiming at was the issue of human stature. 

   I think here of certain poets such as Zbigniew Herbert who have guided me. Herbert was intent on looking at that stature critically but not without feeling for how much pathos might accrue to a life, a pathos that bristled with irony since the sense of free will varied greatly. He proved his point, so to speak, when he refused to join with those who believed (or acted as though they believed) in the beneficence of communism. For years, he scuffled from one crummy, poorly paid job to another. Little wonder that he wrote, as he put it, “for his desk.” If there was no worthy outlet, then there was no worthy outlet. He was not one to pretend and had little use for those who did pretend. He was not a cynic nor a purveyor of classical nostalgia but a realist who kept his eye on the truth that lived within a given historical situation: Are you betraying yourself? Are you betraying others? Is your indignation skin-deep? 

   All this pertains to the present situation in the United States but for me it has pertained for what amounts to a lifetime. I have been a dissident in the sense that I have not been interested in the stories the society has been eager to tell me about consuming, about the virtue of its wars, about a happiness that ignores suffering and sadness, about the use of the Earth as a “resource,” about education as a corporate business, and about the scant value of literature for a grown person. The list goes on, believe me, but that is enough for my purposes here. None of this presupposes some yardstick that measures heightened virtue. I can be as petty as the next person but it does argue for that stance that first came in sight in the United States in the prose and poetry of the 1850s, a willingness to look life in the eye and not flinch. To argue (and commit acts of civil disobedience) at the present moment against a tyrant makes good sense but tyranny comes in many forms. The automatic militarism that has been manifest in my lifetime is a good example, however much we brush it aside. So is what my son, the author and landscape designer Owen Wormser, calls our “ecological illiteracy” that allows us to think so little about the consequences of our daily arrangements.  

   It occurs to me as I write this that I am trying to write about fear and how much it rules any life. To acknowledge that we are bubbles on the way to oblivion is no easy task, particularly in a society that does everything it can to make the gossamer of moments seem solid. We are, to be sure, expressive bubbles but cats are expressive, too. Indeed, that shared sense of being is part of the beauty of our time here on Earth. If a dissident does in some powerful sense stand alone as someone who refuses easy answers and glib shrugs, we must remember that dissidents (the Abolitionists for instance) have banded together time and time again. I suspect that is what is happening right now and is heartening news that confirmed dissidents such as Thoreau and Herbert would, in their shrewd way, have applauded. 

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Copyright 2025 Baron Wormser

Baron Wormser’s many books include The History Hotel (CavanKerry 2023).Wormser founded the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching and also the Frost Place Seminar. He currently resides in Montpelier, Vermont, with his wife.