Scott Nearing - Philosophical Ideas

Philosophical Ideas

During his 1919 trial for allegedly obstructing American military recruitment during World War I, at which he testified in his own defense, the prosecution asked Scott Nearing whether he was a "pacifist socialist." Nearing's reply was illuminating—he replied that he was a "pacifist" and left it at that. Prosecutor Earl B. Barnes was taken aback and asked for clarification:

Q: You are a pacifist even to class struggles?
: I am a pacifist in that I believe that no man has a right to do violence to any other man.
Q: Even in the class struggle?
: Under no circumstances.

Half a century later, writing in his 1972 autobiography, The Making of a Radical, Scott Nearing described himself as a pacifist, a socialist, and a vegetarian. In his autobiography he says "I became a vegetarian because I was pers­ed that life is as valid for other creatures as it is for humans. I do not need dead animal bodies to keep me alive, strong and healthy. Therefore, I will not kill for food". Nearing listed his four most influential teachers as Leo Tolstoy, Simon Nelson Patten, his grandfather and mother. Other influences he acknowledged in his memoirs included Socrates, Gautama Buddha, Lao Tzu, Mahatma Gandhi, Jesus, Confucius, Henry David Thoreau, Charles Otis Whitman, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Victor Hugo, Edward Bellamy, Olive Schreiner, Richard Maurice Bucke, and Romain Rolland's Jean-Christophe.

Scott Nearing's journey over a century was neatly (albeit perhaps facilely) described by one biographer as follows:

"Nearing's intellectual development followed a path of increasing awareness of the intransigence of the dominant classes of capitalist culture to adopt reforms that would spread the enlightenment and opportunities of the leisure classes to society as a whole. From the time of his firing from the University of Pennsylvania in 1915 through the aftermath of World War I, he experienced the limits of permissible questioning of conventional wisdom. His long, difficult journey from an orthodox reformer of the ruling class from within to a complete secessionist from capitalist cultural hegemony led him by 1932 to choose homesteading—an experiment Nearing called 'living the good life.'
"In that spirit, Nearing moved through a series of secessions—from Christianity, from politics, and finally from American society itself. He voyaged to the wilderness as if on a pilgrimage to a sacred place. His experience, along with a deeper understanding of American culture, led to the inescapable consciousness that capitalist cultural dominance was too strong to eliminate and therefore too powerful to control or mold to liberal purposes. The secessions in his life were progressive repudiations of American canons of moral conduct as well as indications of Nearing's perception of the fragmented, segmented, discontinuous nature of American society. Only in the isolated private sphere provided by homesteading could a radical resistance and constructive challenge to capitalist culture be nurtured.
"In his devotion to conscientious self-reliance, Nearing emerged as a twentieth-century colleague of Emerson and Thoreau."

This view, that Nearing chose to "drop out" of politics and society itself and live life as a rugged agrarian individualist at one with nature, is a common interpretation—and certainly one with some merit. Another possible reading of Nearing's motivations and decision-making lies in his own writing. Nearing repeatedly drew inspiration from the life story of Count Leo Tolstoi, whose life Nearing clearly saw as analogous to his own:

"Count Leo Tolstoi is a classic example of an individual in potential and actual conflict with his group. He was talented and had immense vitality. Until young manhood he accepted his place in the Tsarist social pattern and generally conformed to it. After some drastic experiences and much soul searching, Leo Tolstoi challenged the social system under which he lived to mortal combat. From that point until the day he left home and died in a railway station in his final attempt to win out against group pressures, his life consisted of combats with members of his family, with members of the neighboring nobility, with the army, with the Tsarist autocracy and with the established church."

The tension between the dissident individual and the group was an unenviable one, Nearing believed. In the conflict between the solitary individual and the community, Nearing saw only three possible outcomes:

"(1) The individual may win out and impose himself and his ideas upon the group. The normal consequence of such an outcome is a personal dictatorship or the imposition upon the community of an oligarchy in which the dissident individual or individuals play a prominent role. (2) The division of the community into factions, one of which upholds the dissident individual, with a stalemate leading to feuding, rebellion, civil war. (3) The group wins out, imposes its will and eliminates the non-conformist. Such conflict sequences have occurred repeatedly in contemporary and in earlier history."

Nearing’s chosen lifestyle of "Tolstoian," ascetic, rural self-sufficiency may be reasonably interpreted as the attempt of a self-aware dissident individual to avoid inevitably negative participation in the internal life of the group (be it government or political party), while retaining a keen and almost obsessive interest in the dynamics of society and the world as a whole.

Allen Ginsberg, the Beat Generation poet, referred to Nearing as a "grand old man, a real mensch" in his poem America.