Preliminary expectoration concerning a WaPo op-ed about hiking and its reception on the social network "blue sky"
I'm not scholar of marxist social theory, lord knows, but I do believe that it ranges under the heading of "ideology" structures of belief that represent the artificial, local, contingent, and temporal as natural, universal, immutable, and eternal. It's always been this way (but actually, Italian cuisine as we know it today is barely 150 years old if that), is this way everywhere (but actually, they do it differently over yonder), and it has to be this way (but actually, not only wasn't it always and isn't it everywhere this way, here and now it could be different, too). People often don't really like to be disabused of beliefs like this, not necessarily because they're invested in the present form of social organization as such (the content may not have an extremely direct connection to the structure of society), but also because it can be comforting to think that the way things seem now is the way things have to be and distressing to think that they could be otherwise. I mean: obviously these valences can be flipped! I'm not trying to be flippant about weighty matters. I'm pontificating beyond my station because I am trying to understand the unhinged reaction to fairly anodyne opinion piece in the Washington Post a few days ago.
The thrust of the piece is that walking out of doors for pleasure, or as we know it in American English "hiking", is a phenomenon that arose (in Europe and America) over the course of the 19th century, beginning, as he says, "as a Romantic-era reaction to the beginning of industrialization". The author even seems to be aware that he's criticizing an ideological belief structure: "hiking is often seen as a natural activity", he writes, "but there’s nothing natural about it". True! We had to learn how to engage in this sort of activity, to think, as if it were natural, of nature in the way that's bound up with it.
The piece is, to be sure, kind of all over the place in its actual argument, careening from the medieval Norse sentence of outlawry to the supposed necessity of technical fabrics to hike in the modern sense. It is not what I would call careful. The concluding thought is ludicrous. But the basic gist of its thesis is the modern western relationship to the outdoors is one that arose in time. It is also, to be clear, not advancing an especially outré or implausible thesis. You can find lots of poorly or not-at-all sourced potted histories of hiking in the European world making basically the same claims online. It is, moreover, a thesis that you could probably think up for yourself if you got to thinking about it (hiking takes a lot of time and energy you probably don't have; hiking takes a lot of infrastructure; hiking involves a pretty modern view of nature more suited to someone who is primarily not in it than to, say, a tenant farmer or villager); you would probably get a lot of the details wrong (it's not as if no one could ever have looked out into the natural world and thought "my, that's pretty", though it is interesting to learn that the Alps, for instance, have at times been thought hideous rather than majestic and sublime), and of course there's no guarantee that this kind of armchair first-principles reasoning is correct.
Happily, though, in addition to having a sort of pleasing surface plausibilty, the basic thesis does seem to have the merit of being true. The second sentence of the Wikipedia article on "hiking" reads as of this writing "walking for pleasure developed in Europe during the eighteenth century"; inspection of its source, Joseph Amato's On Foot, reveals that the 18th century pleasure walks were promenades taken by the upper crust in formal gardens, and, even when in somewhat wilder surrounds, were not pursued for the beauty of nature. On the other hand, under the influence of romanticism in the latter parts of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries walking "went from being a leisure activity of the aristocracy to a popular pursuit of the upper middle classes" (101) which was "transformed … into an elevated vehicle for experiencing nature, the world, and the self" (102). (What constituted natural beauty in the first place also underwent a change.) Silas Chamberlin's On the Trail similarly asserts that "leisure walking evolved from a rare practice of the urban elite in the eighteenth century to a widespread and multifaceted activity by the late nineteenth century because it resonated with Americans reacting against-and attempting to accommodate-industrialism, urbanism, and a perceived crisis of masculinity" (2).
I know about the Amato book because I followed the citation on Wikipedia. How I know about the Chamberlin book is more curious: this WaPo opinion piece received an absolutely unhinged reaction on bsky, and one bit was a guy sarcastically lamenting that there was no such field as ecohistory (or something—he's deleted the post) which might enable one to fact-check the claims and then posted a link to the book himself reiterating his lamentation that no one had written on this topic before, seemingly believing that it simply must disconfirm, and not confirm, the basic position of the WaPo piece. Another person angrily pointed out that one isn't apt to hike if one spends 60 hours a week doing backbreaking labor, which … is also a point the WaPo piece makes: it wasn't just the psychic revolution of romanticism that revealed (if that's the right word!) the appeal of nature walks, but also a changing class composition over the course of the 19th century that enabled a higher share of the populace to indulge in them. Someone else asserted that the piece showed why we need the humanities, pointing out that people go on walks in Jane Austen's novels, which (and fair do's to her for being gracious when this was pointed out) were all written well after Wordsworth had come upon the scene; someone else brought Wordsworth up as a refutation, having failed to understand when the Industrial Revolution began.
Of all of this the most egregious that I saw was the thread, and the replies appended thereunto, initiated by this post:
The Washington Post opinion section is an elaborate experiment to find the least compelling angle on everything
— Jay Willis (@jaywillis.net) September 13, 2026 at 12:07 PM
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and its immediate reply:
Man shut the FUCK up
— Jay Willis (@jaywillis.net) September 13, 2026 at 12:09 PM
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and then asking "What kind of experience would a baby-brained doofus like this possibly have—ah, yes, got it", with a screenshot of his GMU econ and National Review affiliations. I'm sure that the author is just as vile a person as these affiliations suggest, but come on. It doesn't take first-hand experience to a bit of research about hiking, nor to be curious about how it is we come to hike, and I find the suggestion that this question is somehow stupid or uncompelling frankly baffling. And, well, the relevant experience is in the screenshot: he was on a hike! How incurious about oneself and the world must one be never to have, while on a hike, wondered how it is that we've come to engage in a pastime that is, if you think about it, at least a little peculiar?
You, Varied and possibly Hypothetical Reader, may long since have wondered something like this: so someone was stupid online, what's the big deal? who cares? Point hypothetically taken, I suppose, but I do have an answer. First, this is irksome because people I otherwise consider friends or respect participated in one way or another in the rancidly anti-intellectual idiocy Jay Willis began, which is dispiriting, beyond the general dispiriting effect of being exposed to philistinism. Mocking this line of thought as uncompelling or uninteresting is fundamentally foreign to me: don't you have any curiosity about the world you live in? But also, some of these people are known to me to be defenders of The Humanities or humanistic research, either as such or via specific cases, or are people, such as Michael Hobbes, whose careers were made on the back of debunking commonly held misconceptions. Some of them likely think of themselves as intellectual types. It is extremely unbecoming for these people to look down their noses at an opinion piece that is, really, uncommonly substantive for its genre, more or less correct, and rendering for its readers the sort of service we might think the humanities is well suited to do: defamiliarizing something familiar, showing it not to be timeless but to have come to be in time, and to show, in so doing, that we are different from our predecessors and implicitly that our successors could be different from us. I'm not actually going to say that learning about how or that hiking came to be A Thing is liberatory; that would be a just the tiniest bit silly. But I am going to say that the strong unthinking reaction of rejection and scorn and ridicule is basically reactionary, of a piece with an unseemly anti-intellectualism and disdain for the idea of researh and expertise. (To be sure, I would probably forgive the scorn if the argument were in broad outlines wrong, instead of right. Them's the breaks!) You might even think that this hiking stuff would be a good example of changes in the lifeworld that come to seem as if they were ever thus, despite having traceable origins, to illustrate the general concept before moving on to more deeply embedded or obviously socially significant cases. This is the sort of thing that many of these people can talk a good game about when it comes to, say, gender. I'm not sure why it's so much more challenging when it comes to the outdoors, and I'm not at all sure why anyone would flaunt their closed-mindedness.