Civil disobedience: history, ethics, and social movements

Civil Disobedience

Thoreau's Disobedience

Thoreau's essay on civil disobedience not only gives a startlingly strong argument against paying one's taxes (which is in itself a difficult task), it also gives a subtle but clear image of Thoreau himself. In this essay, the reader discovers a writer who is at once romantic and cynical, idealistically self-sacrificing and fiercely self-centered, areligious and mystical. It would be tempting to portray Thoreau as inconsistent or somehow duplicitous, but it would be more accurate to recognize him as merely complex.

The romantic in Thoreau comes through clearly when he describes his experience in jail, where "It was like traveling into a far country, such as I had never expected to behold, to lie there for one night... It was to see my native village in the light of the Middle Ages, and our Concord was turned into a Rhine stream, and visions of knights and castles passed before me." He addresses his experience in jail like a medieval gothic adventure, and actually seems to be enjoying his monastic cell for the night. Flights of fancy overcome him, as he considers how free his soul must be while his body is confined, and how dark the hearts of his neighbors must be that they tolerate the existence of this jail. At the same time that he is so fanciful, Thoreau shows a certain cynical sense, for there is nothing particularly romantic about his understanding of America's position in her war with Mexico, and no sense of feudal loyalty to the state. Thoreau obviously considers revolution somewhat soberly, for after all his words, he suggests a revolution consisting of nothing more or less than tax evasion.

This mild-mannered revolution which he has in mind highlights another complexity to his character. On the one hand, Thoreau seems like quite the pleasure seeker, and seems to be a less-than-fervent revolutionary. After all, he says "It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even to 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..." (Thoreau) which is in itself not a precisely revolutionary statement. Yet at the same time, his suggestion that one need not make such grand sacrifices for a cause, he later suggests that he would accept death before he would become complicit to the crimes of the state. " But even suppose blood should flow. Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded?" (Thoreau) A critic might suggest that Thoreau is a lazy rebel, too retiring to actually start a war with the state or undertake any violence, but conscientious enough that he is willing to break the laws when it is convenient and profitable to do so. This sense that revolution ought not be a full time job sits rather uncomfortably, it seems, with his equally firm conviction that one ought to fight the corrupt state even to the point of death.

Thoreau's struggle on this point obviously arises from a fine moral sentiment. Even if one does not agree with his anarchist ideals which claims "That government is best which governs not at all," (Thoreau) today it seems self evident to agree with his understanding that slavery is a grave sin. Thoreau's argument for not supporting the state, it must be understood, stems from the fact that the state both sponsors and condones slavery and is involved in violent and bloody wars on external soil. Even today, the most conservative people generally believe that the individual is justified in opposing the state in the (supposedly very rare) historical incidences in which the state is genocidal. In fact, those Germans who did not oppose Nazi Germany are generally considered to be bad and immoral persons, though to this day those who violently opposed slave-holding America are still considered somewhat traitorous. (It is generally easier to sanction rebellion against someone else's country) Thoreau of this time is an abolitionist, and yet he is justifiably annoyed with those other abolitionists who merely hold protests and talk, without making self-sacrifice to free their fellow men. At the same time, the reader must recall from history that Thoreau was an artist, and the dedicated pursuit of art is a lofty occupation in itself that leaves no time to be a full-time provocateur. So Thoreau is left with the awkward commitment to a sort of quiet, passive resistance against the state that ideally leaves him time to create his art. On this point, Thoreau is very lucky. In his writing he suggests that only the landed or unjustly rich man needs to fear imprisonment, and that other men can live free within jail walls -- he does not seem to take into consideration that a man whose art was different from his own may not be able to pursue the "other concerns" which are his by nature and destiny. Even in Thoreau's time, though far more so now, a painter or sculptor would not have been able to continue creating in jail as a philosopher or poet did, and would have need of his freedom and finances for