Tools of their Tools
“The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary.”
“My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore-paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine” (Walden, 64).
I opened to this quote and the shot was fired that started the 2025 Thoreau Annual Gathering in Concord, Massachusetts.
(I wanted to let those know, who are my usual free subscribers, thank you SO MUCH for being kind enough to read what I write each week. After much deliberation, I’ve decided to monetize my substack, as my decision to go freelance has rooted. I will have a paywall where people can read a little bit. Please consider contributing, even the lowest payment level helps me continue to write, which I love to do. Thank you! :)
The scholarly papers, academic presentations and panel discussions, astounded, as per usual, though I had not been to a full gathering since 2017.
Starting off, Peter Wirzbicki presented his paper entitled, “Machines and Men: Technology, Slavery, and Disobedience in Thoreau’s New England”.
Something propounded in the paper—and which remains to this day—is people are and have become tools of their tools. Tools--being that they are detached from us truly—distort and even corrupt us in a million tiny ways.
Ruminating on it later, I thought about what our modern tools look like. Our modern “essentials” like laptops, iPad, cars, coffeemakers, TVs, A/C units—all become machines we rely on, but which, in no small way own us. We are dependent on them for our “survival”. Yet we meet someone who uses a bicycle to get around, or has stopped drinking coffee, or goes without A/C in their car or house, and we are taken completely off guard. “You can do that!?” We are surprised out of our semi temporal reality.
Our ancestors have done without these new-fangled contraptions. Our grandparents, parents and even we remember when many of these “conveniences” were just coming in.
Thoreau writes explicitly: “Our inventions are won’t to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are improved means to an unimproved end…” (Walden, 33).
Thoreau, the Debby downer of consumerism, pointed out that we truly can do without many things in fact!
“…for a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”
He does not boast of or relish in the things he’s acquired, which is the habit of most people. In fact, just the opposite. His negation of ownership is arterially spread through many chambers of his life.
He explains, “…I even had the refusal of several farms,--the refusal was all I wanted,--but I never got my fingers burned by actual possession.”
Thingification
As if man’s chief end was creating and consuming goods…
Factories were and continue to be created just to manufacture slightly cheaper goods. There is time and again, more value and emphasis placed on the product than the producer.
In the first presentation I learned that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s renowned novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was originally titled The Man That was a Thing. This notion astounded me and showcased the very real assumption that those of African descent were nonhuman. Slavery was not a trade of men, or of souls, but of things. Therefore, the justification and subsequent brutalization.
Slavery, therefore, knowingly extracted labor without consent. Even in non-enslaved work, men and women at the time were seen as commodities versus spiritual entities, deserving respect and fair treatment.
[Work should elevate our lives, not diminish us to a status. However, you can’t truly make men and women into things, as they are ultimately souls.]
There was presented the contrast of the “chattel principle” and Christianity. That men (as then was defined) had inalienable rights, given by God. That there was and should be a distinction between morality and consumerism…
There was some discussion about how in the South the Bible was used in defense of slavery. How could preachers and pastors account for it? Theodore Parker, a well-loved preacher of the time made a point that Christians used and use the bible as an idol and could thereby justify anything.
Peter Wirzbicki shared about the concept of “thingification” as presented originally from Martin Luther King Jr.
There was an excellent quote which got the crowd going, more or less, that the North uses tools, factories, and teachers while the South uses the town and country club, ministers and preachers. Yikes!
It was revealing to learn that in defiance and resistance, the enslaved would sometimes break their tools to slow down production. What a profound statement that was!
In Richard Higgins’ talk on Thoreau’s Inner Revolution, he shared Thoreau’s view that many are mired in social morays and trivial pursuits, “merely civil”. This is true to this day.
True freedom, Higgins suggested, is freedom from religious and various snares. He said that “freedom [is] in proportion to the dignity of his nature.” Thoreau believed that the world is more beautiful than it is useful. That people’s attachment to coffee, sugar and butter make us slaves that inadvertently or directly support injustices.
To paraphrase Thoreau in “Civil Disobedience”, we tax ourselves unjustly. There is a part of us that is not represented.
I decided later to look up the Martin Luther King speech referred to in the presentation. Jumping time frames, in his speech, Where Do We Go From Here, given to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, in August 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. asserted:
“Your whole structure must be changed. A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will “thingify” them and make them things. And therefore, they will exploit them and poor people generally and economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments and everything else, and it will have to use its military might to protect them. All of these problems are tied together.”
The goal then for us, even now, is not to become a rusty tool—a tool merely. We should stand up to the lions of injustice, in whatever form they take, so as to refuse to be used by those who would extract our labor from us without our consent or without proper compensation.
As the joke goes, “Don’t be a Tool!”
Food for thought:
1.) Are we a commodity to be bought and sold?
2.) Or are we something more-if so, what?
3.) Have we become tools of our tools? And if so, how?