Chapter 1 What Civil Disobedience Is (And Is Not)

Notes Chapter 1 What Civil Disobedience is (and is not) 1 McKie (2003); Sissons (2003). Countryside Alliance website: (http:// www.countryside-alliance.org.uk/hunting-campaigns/hunting-views/civil- disobedience/). 2 Hartocollis (2006). 3 Adam (2007). 4 Sheldon Wolin (1996) has argued that the rebellious element of democracy and what he terms ‘the political’ may be traced to Athens and each suc- cessive change to the ancestral constitution (39). We could, however, go even further back into a mythic past when Prometheus, the founder of civilization, stole fire from the gods and thereby reduced the inequality between gods and men. It was an act of disobedience that founded earthly civilization. 5 I would like to thank my colleague at San José State University, Professor Larry Gerston, for alerting me to the activities of Critical Mass. 6 The Economist Magazine noted in June 2007: ‘In the tropical seaport of Xiamen citizens still talk excitedly about how an anonymous text message on their mobile phones last month prompted them to join one of the biggest middle-class protests of recent years. And in Beijing, politicians are scrambling to calm an uproar fuelled by an online petition against slave labor in brick kilns.’ See ‘Mobilised by mobile’, June 23rd, 2007, p. 48. 7 See A Force More Powerful (http://www.aforcemorepowerful.org/game/) 8 ‘A Baker’s Dozen of Writers Comment On Civil Disobedience, 1967’, New York Times, November 26, 1967. 9 It is not impossible, however, to imagine an individual using the judicial process in her defense, believing that respect for the society is sufficiently demonstrated by willingly accepting society’s judgment, not its punish- ment. See Schochet (1972). 10 As Bauer and Eckerstrom (1987) note: ‘In the United States vs. Ashton, mer- chant sailors argued that necessity excused their criminal act of disobeying the captain’s orders. The sailors refused to continue their scheduled voyage because they believed that the boat was unseaworthy. Weighing the “necessity of having a just and tender regard for life” against the dangers of not upholding with a steady hand the authority of the master’ the court found that the sailors asserted a “justifiable self-defense against an undue exercise of power,” and submitted the defense to the jury’ (p. 1176). 11 While control over the mainstream media has tightened and moved closer to the military and political administrations, the choice of coverage has broadened. Activists may now turn to a variety of local, national, and international news outlets as part of the independent media move- ment to gather alternative viewpoints from those broadcast in the major networks. 167 168 Notes 12 Though for an alternate view see McCloskey (1980): ‘I wish to suggest that both seemingly and actually quite useless civil disobedience may be justified, not because both may really be useful in some indirect, unrecognized way, but because they are what they are, expressions of moral integrity of the civil disobedient. This is more evidently so with the disobedience of the conscientious objector who is also a civil disobedient’ (p. 549). 13 The case of Socrates is, however, extremely controversial. Though there is evidence that he committed an act of civil disobedience in the Apology, ulti- mately the ‘dialogue’ with his friend Crito shows Socrates to be an obedient subject to the Laws. I will explore this in more detail in Chapter 2, Section 2. 14 See ‘Conscience and Conscientiousness’, in Joel Feinberg, Moral Concepts, pp. 80–92. Also, David S. Meyers notes in The Politics of Protest, that ‘the political efficacy of tax resistance as a topic was of far less interest to Thoreau than the moral inconvenience of compliance…He is not…a political tactician or activist in any sense, and he leaves the real problems of politics and policy for others to ponder. Indignation may be the start of meaningful politics; it is not, however, a substitute’ (pp. 106–7). 15 In this tradition, one might also include Thomas Paine’s natural right to conscience discussed in the first part of his Rights of Man. Paine argued that individuals always have the power and right to use their conscience (or judgment) to decide when someone has treated us unjustly, or whether a government ought to be replaced. 16 However, as Hannah Arendt pointed out in The Life of the Mind, there may be occasions when even the supposedly apolitical act of thinking takes on political significance. I will examine this point in more detail in Chapter 5. 17 According to Clarke (2003), ‘[t]he task of proving this society to be funda- mentally exploitative and unjust is onerous only in the sense that the sup- porting material stretches to infinity’ (p. 491). The law can serve to keep inequities in place, perpetuating injustice from one generation to the next. In fact, Clarke goes further and argues that: ‘As a general rule, we can say that whatever economic, social, and legal rights that oppressed people have secured have thus far been obtained through social resistance that disrupted the status quo to the point of generating crises. Such activity was rarely conducted with official sanction, and it often occurred despite legalized efforts to destroy any uprising’ (p. 495). 18 See Macnair (2003). For an opposing position, see McCloskey (1980) who argues: ‘What kinds of civil disobedience are justified will depend in part on what kinds are most effective. Thus, if violent, intimidatory [sic], coercive disobedience is more effective, it is, other things being equal, more justified than less effective, nonviolent disobedience’ (p. 547). This definition is broad enough to include violent resistance within a definition of civil disobedience, and in so doing overturns the prohibition against non-state actors use of violence. 19 Hedges (2002) notes: ‘Most of us willingly accept war as long as we can fold it into a belief system that paints the ensuing suffering as necessary for a higher good, for human beings seek not only happiness but also meaning…And tragically war is sometimes the most powerful way in human society to achieve meaning’ (p. 10). Notes 169 20 Those who suggest otherwise face the ire of cultural critics and comment- ators. As Kellner (1984) notes, Herbert Marcuse’s defense of the student movements ‘led him to defend confrontation politics and revolutionary violence and deeply alienated Marcuse from those who advocated more moderate models for social change’ (p. 280). Marcuse justified violent responses qua self-defense against the brutal state suppression of student groups. See Marcuse (1977). For a classic defense of the transformative power of revolutionary violence see Fanon (1990) along with Jean Paul- Sartre’s ‘Introductory Essay.’ 21 Political violence is defined by Hondereich (1976) as follows: ‘a consider- able or destroying use of force against persons or things, a use of force pro- hibited by law, directed to a change in the policies, personnel or system of government, and hence also directed to changes in the existence of individuals in the society and perhaps other societies’ (p. 9). For a related discussion see Christian Bay (1975) and Michael Bayles (1970). 22 See also Slavoj Zizek (2008a): ‘At the forefront of our minds, the obvious signals of violence are acts of crime and terror, civil unrest, international conflict. But we should learn to step back, to disentangle ourselves from the fascinating lure of this directly visible ‘subjective’ violence, violence per- formed by a clearly identifiable agent. We need to perceive the contours of the background which generates such outbursts. A step back enables us to identify a violence that sustains our very efforts to fight violence and promote tolerance’ (p. 1). 23 See Waldron (1987) for a discussion of umbrella concepts in political theory. 24 Others have developed similarly nuanced views of reality, noting how norms become internalized through self-regulation and self-discipline, and the manner in which people live their lives on a daily basis (see Foucault, 1980). The point here, as Eagleton notes in his discussion of ideology, is that: ‘in order to be truly effective, ideologies must make at least some minimal sense of people’s experience, must conform to some degree with what they know of social reality from their practical interaction with it…ruling ideologies can actively shape the wants and desires of those sub- jected to them; but they must also engage significantly with the wants and desire that people already have, catching up genuine hopes and needs, reinflecting them in their own peculiar idiom, and feeding them back to their subjects in ways which render these ideologies plausible and attrac- tive. They must be ‘real’ enough to provide the basis on which individuals can fashion a coherent identity, must furnish some solid motivations for effective action and must make at least some feeble attempt to explain away their own flagrant contradictions and incoherencies. In short, successful ideologies must be more than imposed illusions, and for all their inconsis- tencies must communicate to their subjects a version of reality which is real and recognizable enough not to be simply rejected out of hand’ (1991, p. 15). Chapter 2 Obedience: Ancient and Modern 1 As Daube (1972) notes, the earliest deliberate disregard of a governmental decree occurs in the Second Book of Moses, Exodus 1.15, when the Hebrew midwives refused to obey the order from Pharaoh to kill the male children. 170 Notes The refusal of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar, on the ground that a higher moral law was at stake is another such example of disobedience from the Old Testament. 2 Similar treatments were conducted by Aeschylus in the Oresteia.

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