A kind of sequel to the preceding post, delivered on September 10, 2019 to an audience drawn from the same source as before.

On Civil Disobedience

            The suffering caused by his leader having become intolerable, Achilles on his own calls an assembly; and there, finding himself dishonored, he vows to lend no help to the Achaeans in their hour of need. Each of these acts has something of civil disobedience about it, although the camp at Troy is far from being a civil state.

            Much clearer are the well-known case of Antigone, who defies an edict she deems unconscionable, and the deeds of Lysistrata and her followers, who not only strike against their wifely duties, but also block access to government funds. Achilles, Antigone, Lysistrata—poetical dreams all. What of history?

            When the Thirty ordered Socrates and four others to bring Leon the Salaminian to be executed, “that government,” he says, “powerful as it was, did not frighten me into doing anything unjust.” The others obeyed; “but I,” he continues, “went home; and perhaps I would have been put to death for it, if the government had not quickly been put down.” [Apology] Even if the rule of the Thirty is odious, still they are the civil authority at the time, and the philosopher disobeys their order. He does not seek to intervene to prevent its fulfillment; he simply refuses to do his part. After all, he has never had much use for the preoccupations of gentlemen.

            Now passing over two millennia and a quarter—during which, among other things, John Milton dared to publish without license—I come to Thoreau, who observes that the American government is practicing injustice: it countenances slavery, and is prosecuting an unwarranted war against Mexico. So he refuses to pay his tax, and explains himself in an essay called “Resistance to Civil Authority”—later, maybe by an editor, given the title now established, “Civil Disobedience.” “How,” he asks, “does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.” Then what does Thoreau consider a man’s obligation? “It is not a man’s duty,” says he, “to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.” Some injustice, he allows, is “part of the necessary friction of the machine of government,” and may be let to cure itself; for specific injustice perhaps the remedy may, he says, “be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you 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.” “A minority,” he says, “is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight.” Well, he spent a night in jail. “It was like travelling into a far country,” he says, “such as I never expected to behold, to lie there for one night.” Then “some one interfered, and paid that tax,” so he got out, upon which, he says, “I saw yet more distinctly the State in which I lived”—and the people around him too, whose “friendship was for summer weather only.”

            And ever since, the thing has had a name, civil disobedience; still, what is it the name of? A kind of action, certainly the kind of which Thoreau says, “Action from principle,—the perception and the performance of right,—changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with any thing which was.” Can passivity be action? Socrates simply went home; Thoreau simply did not pay. The phenomenon is exemplified by the quiet behavior of Bartleby the scrivener, who, though fictional, gains immortality by mildly responding to his master’s legitimate requests with the explanation, “I would prefer not to,” and acting, or rather the reverse, in accordance with his preference. This calls forth a general remark on the part of the master: “Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance”; which we may apply as well to an earnest civil authority. Gandhi, of course, who read Thoreau, elevated passive resistance to a guiding principle of his mass movement, which found success against a mighty government—one, to be sure, not wholly lost to decency.

            So one can do much by not doing, by refusing to do; but one can also do by doing, and sometimes that is the better course. Indeed, even inaction can demand active preparation, such as positioning oneself so that passivity may be effective. With this we move from mere refusal to the beginnings of interference. Of a conscientious objector to the First World War the story is told that, when the skeptical examiner roared at him, “What would you do if a German soldier was about to violate your sister?” he replied, “I would try to interpose myself between them.” This is a personal instance of a general tactic, to get in the way. That’s what a certain Southern governor once became notorious for doing, standing in the schoolhouse door in defense of his principle, which was, “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Any tactic can be turned to evil purpose. So Bob Dylan sang, long before he sank to the level of the Nobel prize for literature, “Come senators, congressmen / Please heed the call / Don’t stand in the doorway / Don’t block up the hall.” Of course the governor’s individual display was merely symbolic, and the singer’s verse metaphorical.

            Blocking a way in reality, which in military conflict is done all the time—witness the Spartans at Thermopylae, and every other occasion on which the cry of “¡no pasarán!” has been raised by soldiers standing fast, or sailors holding a seaway,—this tactic belongs as well to civil disobedience. Crowds block streets, strikers block entrances, sitters block trains, and so on; these very days, for example, the activists of Extinction Rebellion have been blocking traffic. Everyone, I hope, has seen the exploit of “Tank Man,” as he is called, who thirty years ago—it was June 5, 1989—stood in front of a column of metal monsters that had assisted at the massacre of Tiananmen Square the day before. The lead tank maneuvers to go around him; he maneuvers to stay in front of it. His name is unknown, his fate can be imagined.

            Any such action goes beyond a typical “demonstration,” or “protest,” which is a legally sanctioned affair, such as a march along an approved route in an approved time. Many of these have been conducted for civil rights, or against war. Demonstrations can be effective, if carried out by large numbers of people, and especially if repeated. They do not constitute disobedience or resistance, strictly speaking, except insofar as they disrupt the ordinary course of government affairs, obliging the authorities to acknowledge views they would rather ignore, and to make arrangements, which they may find onerous, for accommodating and controlling the participants. In that way a protest does bring about a degree of blockage: business as usual is hindered, just because the uncustomary proceeding occupies time and space meant for other purposes.

            Governments themselves, it should be noted, are adept at blocking, and not only directly, as that governor proposed, but much more by discovering and imposing indirect impediments to motion, as by the red tape that, from tying up legal and official documents, comes to tie up every species of action. Thus Dickens describes the institution at the heart of his state:

The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. … It was equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong without the express authority of the Circumlocution Office. If another Gunpowder Plot had been discovered half an hour before the lighting of the match, nobody would have been justified in saving the parliament until there had been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical correspondence, on the part of the Circumlocution Office.

This glorious establishment had been early in the field, when the one sublime principle involving the difficult art of governing a country, was first distinctly revealed to statesmen. …  Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving—HOW NOT TO DO IT.

… How not to do it was the great study and object of all public departments and professional politicians all round the Circumlocution Office. … [T]he Circumlocution Office was down upon any ill-advised public servant who was going to do it, or who appeared to be by any surprising accident in remote danger of doing it, with a minute, and a memorandum, and a letter of instructions that extinguished him. [Little Dorrit]

Do you think I have gone on too long about the Circumlocution Office? Why, that was just the point. Dickens goes on much longer. —But to bow to the Circumlocution Office is civil obedience, which is not my concern.

            Beyond the passive activity of blockading is the carrying out of illegal deeds, such as the production or distribution of forbidden matter, whether literature or whiskey, and the subversive impairment or destruction of property, which is sabotage. This may have an appealing innocence to it, as when it arises from obedience to a necessity obscurely felt. Thus Tolstoy’s improving landowner Levin finds himself in a struggle with his peasants. “On the one side, his own,” the author explains, “there was a constant, intense striving to remake everything after the last-considered fashion, and on the other there was the natural order of things.” So the wrong field is mowed, the hay-maker machine breaks down, the misused plows wear out the horses and ruin the soil, the best calves get into the clover and die,—and “All this was done not because anyone wished evil to Levin or his farming”; it was done because “his interests were not only foreign and incomprehensible to [the peasants], but fatally opposed to their own most just interests.” [Anna Karenina, trans. Pevear & Volokhonsky]

            Turning again to history, in the remarkable complete failure of the Germans, during the Second World War, to deport the Jews of Bulgaria—in order to murder them—we find a somewhat similar innocence at work, although now in the face of a mortal threat clearly seen. How they failed, despite the support of a friendly administration, when they succeeded almost everywhere else, is a complex story, in which the king is essential; but the determination and force to resist came from the Bulgarian people, who considered the Jews part of them. As the German ambassador reported to Berlin,

Partly raised together with Greeks, Armenians, Turks and Gypsies, the average Bulgarian doesn’t understand the meaning of the struggle against the Jews, the more so as the racial question is totally foreign to him.

I am convinced that the Prime Minister and the entire Cabinet desire and aspire to a final and total solution of the Jewish question. But they are tied by the mentality of the Bulgarian people, that lacks the ideological enlightenment that we have. [Michael Bar-Zohar, Beyond Hitler’s Grasp]

The problem was, we recognize, that the government’s plan didn’t make sense, while the benighted populace expected sense.

            And a tear may be dropped for the young disobedients of the White Rose, who, although themselves belonging to the society whose enlightenment made the ambassador proud, nevertheless objected to its schemes as much as those Bulgarians did. Advocates of non-violence, they were met promptly by its opposite. They had distributed leaflets; others around the world have engaged in sabotage—breaching dams, setting fires, wrecking trains, and what not—always with a view to hindering the civil machine by which they believed that they were being crushed. And more directly they have attacked its human drivers: they have planted, or thrown, bombs, beaten, stabbed, shot, etc., in uncivil resistance to one or another civil authority. Often to no avail; sometimes with a result beyond their dreams.

            Now these differences in tactics point up a number of differences of principle, along whose spectra the nascent rebel must situate himself or herself. I have just reviewed tactics from refusal to participate, to blockading, to sabotage, to assault upon persons. This is a progress in degree from passive to active, and at the same time, from non-violence to violence. Of course, one’s point of view matters. If I refuse to act, when action would avert catastrophe, am I passive? If I impede work so far that workers are thrown out of their employment, have I done them violence? Am I responsible for the ramifications of my act of sabotage or assault? The thoughtful activist will consider these questions, and many others.

            Then too, should one’s civil disobedience be public or private, open or hidden? Nor are these distinctions quite the same. I may privately refrain from paying my taxes, but the default will hardly be hidden from the treasury. Forbidden publications may be distributed to all the public, without a hint of their source. One’s preference as to mode of action depends on considerations of what is right, what is possible, and what will work.

            Most resisters will also seek to act so as to minimize danger. This involves calculation: Tank Man, I feel, expected the tank to stop. What of penalties? Should they be accepted, or should one seek to evade them? On the one hand, accepting imprisonment, for example, may show respect for the legitimate functions of government, and thereby serve to distinguish them from the illegitimate ones that are protested; on the other, imprisonment may be felt a mere extension of the original impropriety—and besides, “He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day”—so that respect for authority may mean, in effect, disrespect for one’s cause.

            To resist, and how, are not decisions easily reached, not least because it can be hard to perceive and acknowledge one’s true situation. Ay, there’s the rub: it is not the falling off a cliff that hurts. Thus our Declaration recognizes that “mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” As I suggested at the outset, it is only when suffering becomes intolerable that action will be taken. Then debate of principle and preference has to yield to practicalities; “for in our hands,” Patroclus reminds Meriones—who is disputing with Aeneas, whose spearcast has just missed him, what might happen if he, Meriones, were to cast his spear at him, Aeneas, and whither then, if he should strike his enemy squarely, the latter’s soul would fly—“in our hands,” the other chides, “is the outcome of war; that of words is in the council. So we must not multiply words, but must fight.” τὼ οὔ τι χρὴ μῦθον ὀφέλλειν, ἀλλὰ μάχεσθαι.

            Even so, the question of aim raised by our Iliadic warriors besets opponents of the status quo, and with it they will be challenged by skeptics, who to terrify them are likely to brandish the categorical imperative of Kant, as once Athena shook the aegis of Zeus with paralyzing effect. You would resist, they mock, you would cast your spear; if it should strike home, what then? What do you propose to put in place of what you are seeking to overthrow? You would not pay your taxes—what if no one paid taxes? In general, you would refuse, obstruct, subvert, destroy; what if everyone did as you? One must declare a goal beyond rejection, they insist, and elaborate it in all detail, before one has the right to act.

            Must one? I doubt it. A whiff of the Circumlocution Office puffs from the skeptics’ protocol. A government engaged in wickedness means to associate all citizens with itself. If, in Thoreau’s words, one “cannot without disgrace be associated with it,” then one ought to resist both its capacity to pursue its wrongdoing, and its ambition to implicate oneself in that. Let the government, or others in the council that Patroclus distinguished from the field, or oneself at another time, find the better path; one’s present duty is to deny to the guilty the cooperation upon which they rely.

            I will leave you with a poem of E. E. Cummings from the period after the First World War, a little less than a century ago, which sets out the determination of one resister—a youth, if not so witty as the clever fellow I quoted a few minutes ago, yet able to wield the rude English tongue in his own way—and the fate awarded him.

                        i sing of Olaf glad and big . . . [see  https://poets.org/poem/i-sing-olaf-glad-and-big]