An open thread dedicated to discussing books, movies, and tv shows we love. And occasionally some politics.

I thought we'd get into something a little meatier today. It's been a long time since I talked about a book.

I figured it was timely, what with one thing and another, to talk about Henry David Thoreau's essay Civil Disobedience.

I'm going to cut this essay in half, because it's way too long for an Open Thread. So this is Part I: What is Civility?

Interestingly, "Civil Disobedience" didn't begin its life as "Civil Disobedience." It wasn't called that until after Thoreau's death. It started life, and during Thoreau's life remained, "Resistance to Civil Government." That change is remarkable, because of what happens to the word "civil." In Thoreau's original conception, the civil is a characteristic of what he wants to resist. It's part of the stupid bureaucracy that only exists, in his mind, because people have decided to lean upon it (more on this later).

I'd be interested to know who made the change from "Resistance to Civil Government" to "Civil Disobedience." The change does two things: First, it returns the concept of civility back where it came from--to the individual citizen. The word civil derives from the Latin word civis
, meaning "citizen." The first definition of the word "civil" is "relating to ordinary citizens and their concerns, as distinct from military or ecclesiastical matters." https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF...

When you entitle the essay "Civil Disobedience," civility itself rests with the individual citizen or citizens doing the protesting and is NOT a property of the government. That brings me to the second effect of the change in title: rather than the civitas being something to be resisted, it is the thing doing the resisting.

I'm actually not sure how Thoreau would have felt about this. On the one hand, he is solidly on the side of "the people." But the concept of a citizen is probably a bit fraught for him, because a citizen is a person with an inherent relationship to a larger community, often identified with an arbitrary political state and the government attached to it. Despite the fact that Thoreau refers to himself as a citizen, I'm not sure he liked the idea of that implied relationship:

"The objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government...This American government--what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity? It has not the vitality and force of a single living man...It is a sort of wooden gun to the people themselves. But...the people must have some complicated machinery or other, and hear its din, to satisfy that idea of government which they have."

In other words, we only need government because people are stupid and think they need one. Not quite sure what being a citizen, or being civil, in the old sense, means if you accept that idea. What are you a citizen of? If government is not necessary to citizenship, what is? Is Thoreau saying that you can have a nation without having government? Are there any examples of that? After all, even the anarchists of Rojava have a government: http://thekurdishproject.org/history-and-culture/kurdish-democracy/rojav... Even GA meetings, as they were practiced at most encampments, functioned as a kind of government.
Of course, in 1849, when Thoreau published "Resistance to Civil Government," no human had landed on the moon either, so maybe it's just that humanity is not yet ready to live at that speed, which Thoreau seems to be saying. But I think it's fair, if you're going to call yourself a citizen, in an essay where what is civil is essentially the enemy, to ask what that means.

I'm also unsure about Thoreau preferring the "vitality and force of a single living man" to "a tradition endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity," which he wants to dispense with. Is Thoreau intending to apply this principle generally, or only to government? Because if it's the former, then Thoreau is consigning history to the dustbin, along with any culture not created within the present generation. For Thoreau, as for a number of early American thinkers, this was a key part of their conception of the American project, and I see it, rather simplistically, as a rebellion against Europe. It is a little unfair to characterize this stance as simply being "All that old stuff, who needs it!" but only a little. The problem is that, just as accepting a given form from your predecessors has implications, so also would eradicating history, tradition, and culture. That is, if you could actually do it, which I don't entirely believe. I don't entirely disbelieve it either. The relationship of individuals and the present moment to inherited culture and the past is damned complicated--a fact which Thoreau ignores, acting like the past, tradition, and culture, are just annoying Sunday clothes forced on him as a boy when he'd rather have been roving the fields.

It's what I love about him and what I find most irritating about him all at once.

But no matter how much I love Thoreau, I get very careful and slow when I see someone consigning the past to the dustbin. As careful, or more, as I get when I see someone writing history in the first place.

I'm starting to understand why places like The Drudge Report post images of "Civil Disobedience" (I almost used one for this essay, and then recoiled in shock, as I'll be damned if I link to them in any way whatsoever, if for no other reason than that they sure as hell weren't committing Civil Disobedience when Bush was president). He fits in a lot better with the right wing. Or perhaps what I should say is that part of the right wing in this country is sincerely on the same side as Thoreau in his conception of the individual's proper relationship to the government, and the proper constitution of government itself. That's the honest libertarian men (they are mostly men) that you see at rallies against mass surveillance and for net neutrality (and I feel I should say here, that unlike some on the left, I've got absolutely no problem standing with them in defense of the Bill of Rights). And then there's the other part of the right wing, that pretends to support Thoreau's position in the same way that the Fortune 500 pretend to support the small businessman--because it's useful PR to do so. In either case, Thoreau fits in a lot better with them than he does with anybody I know on the left, unless it is left-wing anarchists:

"I heartily accept the motto, `That government is best which governs least;' and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe--"That government is best which governs not at all"...Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient."

From this leftist's point of view, Thoreau has a habit of combining clear and passionate truth with obnoxiously blind, perhaps willful, naivete, which I remember well from his condescending description of the Irish farmer in Walden. (If you want to get mad at a canonical literary figure, look up Chapter 10, "Baker Farm.") Of course it is true that government is an arbitrary form that is liable to abuse, and Thoreau's critique of that abuse is clean and sharp as a scalpel:

"The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it. Witness the present Mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool; for in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure."

This is Thoreau at his best, cutting away pretense, hypocrisy and falsehood. And can anyone from our era dispute him? I sure as hell can't. However, it's quite a leap from that to the idea that government itself is a stupid noise that people keep inventing each generation because they're used to the din. What Thoreau refuses to do, as he refuses similarly in Walden, is to take seriously the questions of power and wealth. He imagines a free individual moving in a field of nature, a field which is rudely interrupted by arbitrary social forms, like government.

And that's why I'm both with Thoreau and against him. On the one hand, of course these forms are arbitrary and needn't exist in their current shape--or at all! God knows, I often get frustrated by people acting like social ideas are as fixed as the law of gravity or the speed of light, treating conventions like they are invisible furniture of the mind--their thoughts moving around this furniture without, apparently, ever actually seeing it.

But the following statement is really foolish. I'm going to take it in bits:

"For the government is an expedient, by which men would fain succeed in letting one another alone..."

Well, OK, I guess I can see that. Thoreau is talking, of course, about what government should be, not what it actually is in the year when he feels the need to withhold his taxes and go to jail. His version of what government should be is a lot more limited than mine, which would go something like "For the government is an expedient, by which human beings would fain succeed in taking on endeavors too large, costly, or dangerous, for one human being to manage alone," but I can live with Thoreau's notion, which is that government exists to keep assholes from interfering with your life and pursuits, hopefully in a manner impartial to all.

But it all falls apart in the next part of the sentence!

"and, as has been said, when it is most expedient, the governed are most let alone by it."

No, no, no. That was rhetorical sleight-of-hand, and I saw "let alone" go up your sleeve. Thoreau's original concept of the government being a way for men to let each other alone is a restatement of the idea that government is a way of protecting the rights of the governed: government exists so that if I want to go on a nice trip up the Merrimack river, some asshole with a gun can't blow me and my friend away with impunity, and everybody knows it. Hopefully knowing it will make said asshole think twice before coming after me. He will, instead "let me alone."

Unfortunately, what this ALSO means is that the government itself would come after said guy with its own guns. Or billy clubs. Or whatever. That's what provides the deterrent that makes a large portion of the populace "let each other alone." So no, actually, "the governed" are not "most let alone" by a government which exists to make "the governed" let each other alone. The government makes sure that "the governed" let each other alone, NOT by letting them alone, but by interfering when they act like assholes.

Do you see how he transferred the implicit idea of violent interference with an individual's free will from the governed to the government, without parsing out the logic of either presumption?

As one of my favorite characters says: "Tricksy! False!"

He goes on with another foolish assumption:

"Trade and commerce, if they were not made of india-rubber, would never manage to bounce over obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way; and if one were to judge these men wholly by the effects of their actions and not partly by their intentions, they would deserve to be classed and punished with those mischievious persons who put obstructions on the railroads."

Note that "trade and commerce," to Thoreau, are as inherently positive as "government" is inherently negative. It's interesting that he mentions india-rubber, since the history of india-rubber production includes colonialism, forced labor, and other exciting pasttimes. Yes, trade and commerce in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries might well be metaphorically identified with india-rubber. Perhaps the slave labor provided some of its elasticity and bounce. Notice too, that to Thoreau, industry and commerce, unlike government and laws, are NOT social forms. Industry and commerce don't arise from society. They're real, like Newton's law of universal gravitation. Or like trains, which have nothing to do with social conventions, culture, or history either.

And certainly nothing to do with government:

"During this period, Americans watched closely the development of railways in the United kingdom. The main competition came from canals, many of which were in operation under state ownership, and from privately owned steamboats plying the nation's vast river system. The state of Massachusetts in 1829 prepared an elaborate plan. Government support, most especially the detailing of officers from the Army Corps of Engineers - the nation's only repository of civil engineering expertise - was crucial in assisting private enterprise in building nearly all the country's railroads. Army Engineer officers surveyed and selected routes, planned, designed, and constructed rights-of-way, track, and structures, and introduced the Army's system of reports and accountability to the railroad companies. More than one in ten of the 1,058 graduates from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point between 1802 and 1866 became corporate presidents, chief engineers, treasurers, superintendents and general managers of railroad companies.[2] Among the Army officers who thus assisted the building and managing of the first American railroads were Stephen Harriman Long, George Washington Whistler, and Herman Haupt."

So much for government being the obstruction on the rails, preventing commerce from moving forward. To quote Gore Vidal, "Mangiare! Would that it were so!" Looks instead like government designed and built the damned rails! (That's not all they did, but more on that later...)

Then there's Thoreau's assumption that of course, commerce and trade couldn't possibly interfere with an individual the way government could:

The Canton Viaduct, still in use today on the Northeast Corridor, was built in 1834
State governments granted charters that created the business corporation and gave a limited right of eminent domain, allowing the railroad to buy needed land, even if the owner objected.[3]

I try really hard not to criticize Thoreau for not knowing how things were going to turn out in this country. Unlike him, I have respect for history; I do at least question what information was available to an individual in his or her lifetime. But there's no damned excuse for him not knowing about this. It was happening in the northeastern United States, in his adult lifetime, fifteen years before he published "Resistance to Civil Government." With all his objections to how the individual, commerce, and trade were being impeded by government, where the hell was his objection to government impeding the individual on behalf of commerce and trade? Even if we grant that the right to private property is the most important of the rights enumerated in the Constitution, and referred to more poetically in the Declaration (I don't), what about the property rights of the folks in the way of the train? Who was really the obstruction on the rails? Doesn't look to me like it was the government. Looks like it was probably some guy with a farm. Maybe it was Mr. Baker's farm. Apparently, his rights don't come into it.

I really don't like the way Thoreau, as intelligent as he is, plays these games of sleight-of-hand with his reader. His writing is so good it's easy to let him get away with it. But I'm not 16 anymore, and I'm too old to play these games. Especially when he's writing on a subject which is actually deadly serious.

We'll get to the deadly serious part next week, and hopefully some discussion of how the deadliness and the gravity of Thoreau's proposal plays out in our own time.

Emerson wrote in his journal, "Elizabeth Hoar, the gentlest of women, once remarked,"I love Henry, but I cannot like him; and as for taking his arm, I should as soon think of taking the arm of an elm-tree."

I know some of you may be feeling that I've ruined Thoreau for you. Don't give up on him yet. He still has a lot to say, and, like I said, he mixes a lot of the clearest and sharpest truth I've ever seen with the kind of selective blindess I've described above. I've seen both in Thoreau ever since I first read Walden, and I still love him despite his flaws. You may too, so don't relinquish him yet.