Thoreau's civil disobedience and contemporary social issues

Civil Disobedience

An Analysis of Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" and the Military Industrial Complex

Julia Ward Howe composed her "Battle Hymn of the Republic" to the tune of "John Brown's Body," which the Union soldiers sang in the Civil War. John Brown had been a controversial figure -- and one whose sanity was questioned by men like Herman Melville in his anthology of Civil War poetry, which included a composition called "Weird John Brown." Henry David Thoreau on the other hand praised and extolled the virtues of the radical abolitionist, whose extremism essentially led to his execution. While Melville saw Brown as a symptom of the times, Thoreau saw him as a revolutionary guide -- and that same sense of revolution is what inspired "Civil Disobedience" -- even though its essence is rooted not so much in Romantic/Enlightenment ideology as it is Aristotelian ethics. Therefore, from such a perspective will this paper discuss "Civil Disobedience" with regard to today's society and the war machine that has become known as the military industrial complex.

As Richard Lenat states, "Civil Disobedience' is like a venerated architectural landmark: it is preserved and admired, and sometimes visited, but for most of us there are not many occasions when it can actually be used." Lenat's statement, however, is only half convincing. The character of "Disobedience," while against-the-grain in many ways, is after all, as Lenat suggests, an essay based on resistance -- and recent history has shown how the text has inspired more than merely Gandhi in India or Martin Luther King, Jr. In the South: "In the 1940s it was read by the Danish resistance, in the 1950s it was cherished by those who opposed McCarthyism, in the 1960s it was influential in the struggle against South African apartheid, and in the 1970s it was discovered by a new generation of anti-war activists" (Lenat). Just as John Brown would be the reactionary icon for abolitionist extremists, Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" would serve as a footstool of the 20th century resistance-movement and social revolution.

Even today, in the 21st century, one can find in Thoreau's essay a kind of old world spirituality that those dissatisfied with modern government can cling to as a means of support. Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience," of course, simply reminds one of his duty to follow his conscience and the spirit of the law rather than the letter. There is in his writings the echo of the Pauline scriptures, which exhorted the early Christians not to become like the Pharisees, who were hypocrites for observing only the letter of the law and not the spirit. Compare, for example, Thoreau's line ("Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison") (par. 22) with St. Paul's ("To him whom you obey you are the slaves, whether to sin unto death or to obedience unto justice") (Rom 6:16). Both recognize a higher authority than the civil -- a spiritual authority understood by Thoreau as the cardinal virtues of Plato -- understood by Paul as Christ.

Pharisaical practices are as popular today as they may be supposed to have been in the time of Christ -- and one of the biggest hypocrisies of our time is what Roosevelt called "the great arsenal of democracy," the shield-phrase with which the U.S. would pursue its policy of "manifest destiny" all over the globe (and an ideology it had been pursuing since the end of the 19th century when a Republican White House paved the way for Wall Street to start directing foreign policy) (Jarecki 41). The amount of government waste that is poured into overseas wars in the Middle East would today have Thoreau off in the woods again, lamenting his heart out like a prophet of old. The same callousness with which our government devalues human life for the sake of profit is what Thoreau opposed in "Civil Disobedience": as he himself states, "I quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home…are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity, and are not prepared to do justice to the slave and to Mexico, cost what it may" (par. 10).