The Iron String
The year was 1968 and American troops - most of them draftees - were pouring intro Vietnam as President Lyndon Johnson and his hawkish minions attempted to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. I was beginning my senior year at Florida’s Naples High and belonged to the school’s newly created chapter of the National Honor Society, had been elected “mayor” for the annual city government day (Trina, my future wife, served as city attorney), and would soon begin rehearsing for the lead in the senior class play, “Blackboard Jungle.” However, those accomplishments didn’t serve to keep me in good stead with the school’s administration.
While acting the part of a rule-abiding citizen was important to me, I didn’t consider it an absolute. When I thought there was warrant for challenging a standard, or a person in authority, I sometimes did so. The strict high school dress code provoked an occasional pushback from those of us in the sockless surfer crowd; but most notably I, and several of my anti-war compatriots, once refused to participate in the mandatory flag raising assembly with which each school day began. In a gesture similar to that of today’s black athletes who protest silently, with heads bowed or on their knees as the national anthem is played, we just stood mutely, hands to the side rather than over the heart. Although admonished for our disrespect and assigned detention, we escaped with no further punishment.
In my maturity, I’ve tried to be aware of the need to strike a balance between principled protest and honest self-scrutiny. You try to do the right thing, but sometimes you get it wrong, as when I attempted to counsel a former parishioner on an institutional “problem” he was having in his current UU home. Having become aware of this breech of collegial protocol, that congregation’s minister called me out. Abashed, I quickly dashed off a sheepish apology for using poor judgement in an attempt to be helpful.
In what is perhaps his best-know essay, Ralph Waldo Emerson employs a striking metaphor to describe how a self-reliant individual ought to comport him or herself. “Trust thyself,” he admonishes: “every heart vibrates to that iron string.” A bit further on in that same essay Emerson writes that “…one who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”
Anthony Pinn is an African American philosopher/theologian who identifies as both a non-theistic humanist and a Unitarian Universalist. In his own exploration of humanism’s roots and branches, Pinn points to Henry David Thoreau (an Emerson protege) as a key figure in the development of humanist ethics.
In this respect, the essays on civil disobedience and the abolition of slavery are important, but Pinn is more interested in the distinction Thoreau drew between “doing good” (behavior that the larger society prescribes and commends) and “being good” (behavior consistent with one’s determination to live with integrity). As professor Pinn puts it: “Not ‘tradition’ or ‘conformity,’ but rather what matters is a deep effort to be good and to have that goodness guide all one’s dealings.” There’s that “iron string” again.
The three word axiom by which Thoreau is perhaps best known –– “simplicity, simplicity, simplicity” –– plays a role here as well. This isn’t simply about having less stuff, although Thoreau was notoriously frugal (“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone”). In a broader sense, it has to do with setting the right priorities and discarding anything that get in the way of living a meaningful and self-respecting life. Being simple is thus the flip side of being good.
Although I have read a great deal of Thoreau, I found considerable merit in Pinn’s framing of these issues. Few I know have gone to quite the lengths Walden’s author did to be good (this writer included), but on occasion my heart has also felt the twang of that iron string.
