On the Duty of Civil Disobedience
I must now make a shameful confession: I have never, until now, read Henry David Thoreau. In school, the mandatory oral book reports led me to think that the entire class read Walden, or Life in the Woods. (Though I am now cynical enough to suspect a dog-eared and passed-around Cliff Notes of the same.)
With my Nook reader, I get to download cheap and even free classics, and that is why I am now getting acquainted with Thoreau’s essay, “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.” First impression: he’s a Libertarian, who strongly believes “That government is best which governs least.” Only he takes it further by saying, “That government is best which governs not at all.” So, second impression: he was at best a foolish dreamer and at worst a well-meaning idiot.
Thoreau tells us that all that is needed to achieve this no-government utopia is for men to rule by conscience and not by majority. Well, duh! I’ve said myself that if everyone in the world lived by the Golden Rule (“Do unto others as he would have them do unto you”), we would have no need for policemen or standing armies. That is nothing but simple truth. But I have never used that argument as a reason for slashing the budgets for either public safety or national defense. Why? Because even people who are raised on the Golden Rule, who are fed the doctrine in Sunday services and evening prayer meetings, do not always live by it, and some behave as if they never even heard of it.
There is another reason why Thoreau’s argument could not work. He assumes that everyone shares the same sense of right and wrong. They don’t. Our nation has been through at least three decades of gridlock because our leaders cannot agree on what’s right and what’s wrong, and they have lost the ability to compromise, to find a solution that both sides can live with. Let’s go even further: As despicable as bigotry is, bigots can always rationalize their feelings and actions in such a way that they feel they are the victims and the divine avengers. The hijackers who hit us on Sept. 11, 2001, did so with the absolute certainty that they died in a holy cause.
Or Thoreau could have looked at his own fellow Americans, many of whom owned slaves or supported the right to do so. Did he think so many would continued to do so if they believed in their hearts they were wrong? No, they had to rationalize it with arguments I can’t bring myself to say because they are so insulting to the black race. They had to; it would have been the only way they could live with themselves.
I myself may be an example of this. There is a movement afoot that questions how I can rationalize my love of cheeseburgers when some poor innocent steer had to die so I could have one. I pay higher prices for grass-fed beef in the hope that the gentle bovines grazed in relatively free pastures before they met their doom. Yet I sometimes wonder if a future vegetarian society will look back on us carnivores with the same horror that we now look back on the slaveholders.
The point I’m making is this: we cannot count on the unorganized conglomerate of individual consciences to achieve the golden age of justice. It’s going to take debate, consensus and, sad to say, the coercion of government to force mankind to do the right thing.
1 Comment
Leave your reply.