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This is the third and final portion of my essay on Henry David Thoreau's essay, "Civil Disobedience." Otherwise known as "the good part!"

Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine.
--Henry David Thoreau

For the past two weeks I've been keeping track of the parts of Thoreau's argument with which I agree, and which were the inspiration for me to do this series in the first place. As anybody who has read Walden knows, Thoreau is excellent at dismantling social conventions, revealing their hypocrisies, and demonstrating their complete lack of inevitability. What Thoreau is really best at is questioning "all the decisions that happen transparently around us," (start video at 1:47)

This is why the current era needs Thoreau, despite his silly attempt to cast aside, on a political and legal level, majority rule in favor of a higher moral individualism: an idea which ignores the fact that individuals may disagree about what is right and wrong, and, indeed, some individuals might have ideas of right and wrong which border on the lunatic. As I said last week, being in the minority is no more a guarantee of moral rightness than being in the majority.

But one place where Thoreau is absolutely correct is his understanding of how submission to social or political convention, done as a matter of course, creates a kind of obedience which denies, undermines, and eventually destroys the individual conscience:

A common and natural result of an undue respect for the law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men at all? or small and movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power?

One of the things that is scariest about reading Civil Disobedience this time is how current its concerns remain. Dear god, this could have been written about any of the last five wars, and the only reason it couldn't have been written about the Iraq War and the war in Afghanistan is that I'm pretty sure the majority of both the country and the rank-and-file military thought we were going into those countries in justified retribution for the 9/11 attacks. I don't know how long it took the military to understand that that was not so. I'm guessing they figured it out faster than the public.

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgement or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well...Others--as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders--serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God.

Thoreau first published this work in 1849, and yet, in 2017, it still comes close to the heart of our troubles in this country. And it's not just overseas, and not just the Pentagon. I don't like to trigger people, so I won't post videos of some of the things that the police have done over the past 5-10 years, which they clearly must have known were wrong. It can't be difficult to understand, for instance, that when you have an unarmed woman penned in with a hard plastic barrier, pepper-spraying her in the eyes is wrong. It can't be hard to understand that when it's below freezing, aiming a firehose on an unarmed crowd till icicles hang off them like trees, is unacceptable. But the moral sense, as Thoreau says, is not free in such people. In fact, I'd venture to say that the moral sense has, in those cases, been relocated up the food chain to where the power is. The argument for creating such authoritarian systems, which separate those who act from those who make decisions, and therefore deprive all the lower ranks of the free exercise of conscience,

very much like this image of the Gentlemen and their servants:

is almost always one of military necessity, because that's the most difficult justification for the advocates of individual conscience to get around. It's true, of course, that in the midst of battle there is little time to reason out what is right and wrong, to debate matters, or decide things in committee. There must be quick and efficient obedience, no matter whether the end is right or wrong. Such concerns of conscience must, under the pressure of life-or-death situations, be relegated upward to the leaders, who are thus become the keepers of the consciences of all their men.

This is perhaps one of the best and least-cited reasons for reducing the number of such situations rather than multiplying them. It's also an extremely persuasive reason for NOT taking the military as a model for civil society, ever. I say this not because the military has no virtues. It's currently one of the few institutions in our society teaching people to work together, to sacrifice for a higher purpose, or for the group, and these are valuable skills for (ironically enough) the survival of the species. However, what a civil society requires, if it is a Republic, is the opposite of a culture of automatic obedience. A civil society needs all of its citizens who are adults, to function as adults, and not relinquish their moral compass and power of choice to some parental figure above--nor to some abstract system.

Thus, under the name of Order and Civil Government, we are all made at last to pay homage to and support our own meanness. After the first blush of sin comes its indifference; and from immoral it becomes, as it were, unmoral, and not quite unnecessary to that life which we have made.

Thoreau's distinction between immoral and unmoral is fascinating, because it reminds me of the Clintons and the Third Way, their insistence on pragmatism, and their corresponding exile of the moral function out of civil society, as if they were spanking a child and sending it to the nursery for bothering the adults. What Thoreau is pointing out here is that in situations where automatic obedience is habitually tolerated, the moral function itself becomes beside the point. It's not just that immorality becomes normalized; the process of excising the moral function from one's own decision-making becomes an apparently immovable part of life.

So we must not automatically obey. What are the other choices? Thoreau goes into some, and, again, it's chilling to think that he was having this discussion in 1849, a mere 62 years since the establishment of the Constitution. Wait till you see what he says about voting!

I hear of a convention to be held in Baltimore...for the selection of a candidate for the Presidency, made up chiefly of editors, and men who are politicians by profession; but I think, what is it to any independent, intelligent and respectable man what decision they may come to? Shall we not have the advantage of this wisdom and honesty nevertheless? Can we not count upon some independent votes? Are there not many individuals in the country who do not attend conventions? But no: I find that the respectable man, so called, has immediately drifted from his position, and despairs of his country, when his country has more reasons to despair of him. He forthwith adopts one of the candidates thus selected as the only available one, thus proving that he is himself available for any purposes of the demagogue.

I said Thoreau was great at taking social conventions and revealing their entire lack of inevitability. Here he takes apart the idea of political parties choosing candidates for the people. After all, if we have wise and honest people in the populace, what do we need these conventions for? What's the need for parties? What Thoreau is pointing out here is an instance, in 1849 for God's sakes, of people being manipulated through what I usually call the menu tactic: control people's choices by presenting them a list of what's available! Get people to choose between prepackaged candidates prepared by the powerful for their consumption. The man Thoreau describes probably saw himself as choosing the lesser of evils!

How long, oh lord, how long.

I'm not kidding guys, some of this stuff cut me pretty close to the bone. It's just too applicable to our current situation:

Those who, while they disapprove of the character and measures of a government, yield to it their allegiance and support are undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters, and so frequently the most serious obstacles to reform.

You know who this makes me think of, don't you?

Oh dear. I think it was easier for Thoreau, who was prickly and not particularly soft-hearted, to give his clarity and honesty free rein. I'll try to do the same with mine, but I hate the way it makes me feel.

The good man as an obstacle to reform. Ouch.

And then there's this:

How can a man be satisfied to entertain an opinion merely, and enjoy it? Is there any enjoyment in it, if his opinion is that he is aggrieved? If you are cheated out of a single dollar by your neighbor, you do not rest satisfied with knowing you are cheated, or with saying that you are cheated, or even with petitioning him to pay you your due; but you take effectual steps at once to obtain the full amount, and see to it that you are never cheated again. Action from principle, the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. It not only divided States and churches, it divides families, ay, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine.

I can actually feel the division in myself as I'm writing this, and what's most vexing is that I'm not as certain as Thoreau that it's the divison between the angelic and diabolical. My wish not to present Sanders as Thoreau's "conscientious supporter," though that's clearly the relation between Sanders and the Democratic Party, is not of the devil. It's my heart responding to Sanders' moments of genuine decency. I don't want to attack a decent man, not even with the truth. But times like these--and apparently like Thoreau's as well--require one to decide which is more important. Is the truth the most important thing? What are you willing to sacrifice for it? Are you willing to place a good man in a bad light because he's not living up to his highest self, and thus is actually functioning as an obstruction?

My answer to that has to be yes, even if I'm not happy about it, because I can do without Bernie Sanders; I can't do without the truth. I've seen what happens when we ignore the truth; I've seen what happens even when we just cheat the truth a little bit. The hell of the past 15 years, with its entire abandonment of moral principle, its fouled water and air, its torture chambers, its hundreds of thousands of unnecessarily dead and its tens of millions of unnecessarily impoverished, would not have happened had we responded honestly, as a society, to the election fraud and voter suppression of 2000, or even of 2004. In fact, it wouldn't have happened had we responded honestly to 9/11 itself.

All machines have their friction...But when the friction comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are organized, I say, let us not have such a machine any longer. In other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.

Thoreau's inheritor in this case is clearly Mario Savio, whose articulation of this idea rivals Thoreau's own:

Perhaps I prefer Savio because I get the feeling that he has a clearer idea than Thoreau of what "putting your bodies on the gears" means. Thoreau is never at his best when it comes to the costs of rejecting convention and obedience. Not only has he no sympathy, he has no real understanding of the brutality which can be visited on those who have little power and money when they say no to power--which I would argue is worse today, far worse, than it was in 1849, at least for white people. We don't have slavery, at least outside the prisons, anymore, but we've thrown away our basic rights; in an ugly parallel to dropping the wages of white men when we "let" white women into the workforce, we've decreased the guaranteed rights that white people used to have after acknowledging, or at least giving lip service to the idea, that Black people should have some too. This is why I no longer favor equality as a foundational virtue, since apparently the establishment is happy to present being equally under some rich guy's foot as equality.

Thoreau knows that the real problem is that people are scared (then as now):

When I converse with the freest of my neighbors, I perceive that, whatever they may say about the magnitude and seriousness of the question...the long and short of the matter is, that they cannot spare the protection of the existing government, and they dread the consequences to their property and families of disobedience to it. For my own part, I should not like to think that I ever rely on the protection of the State. But, if I deny the authority of the State when it presents its tax bill, it will soon take and waste all my property, and so harass me and my children without end. This is hard. This makes it impossible for a man to live honestly, and at the same time comfortably, in outward respects. It will not be worth the while to accumulate property; that would be sure to go again. You must hire or squat somewhere, and raise but a small crop, and eat that soon. You must live within yourself, and depend upon yourself always tucked up and ready for a start, and not have many affairs.

Obviously Thoreau relies on the protection of the State, as he said at the beginning of his essay, to make sure that men let each other alone (in other words, as a deterrent to crime). I do like his cavalier tossing aside of wealth in favor of virtue. I feel the need to point out, however, that he has no children, and no dependents, so that if the State, whose protection he should like to think he doesn't need, lays waste to his property, or decides to throw him into a deep dark hole for the rest of his life, he would have no one to worry about except himself. But then again, it's completely clear that Thoreau has no concept of that sort of imprisonment:

I have paid no poll tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up. I wondered that it should have concluded at length that this was the best use it could put me to, and had never thought to avail itself of my services in some way.

Damn. If there's a progressive out there that doesn't feel that way, I've never met him (or her). We as a society are choking on wasted human potential.

I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for one moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar. I felt as if I alone of all my townsmen had paid my tax.

Just when you think he has no concept of the social compact, he comes out with something like that, maybe not one of the deepest truths, but sound as a well-cast bell.

I could not but smile to see how industriously they locked the door on my meditations, which followed them out again without let or hindrance, and they were really all that was dangerous. As they could not reach me, they had resolved to punish my body; just as boys, if they cannot come at some person against whom they have a spite, will abuse his dog...[The State] is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.

Well, this all sounds quite inspiring and grand. But, as I said, Thoreau, while he definitely had an understanding of armed conflict and violent revolution, and that such things could cost him his life if he participated in them, has less understanding of what prison can mean than I do. This is what prison is to Thoreau:

The night in prison was novel and interesting enough. The prisoners in their shirtsleeves were enjoying a chat and the evening air in the doorway, when I entered. But the jailer said, "Come, boys, it is time to lock up"; and so they dispersed, and I heard the sound of their steps returning into the hollow apartments. My room-mate was introduced to me by the jailer as "a first-rate fellow and clever man." When the door was locked, he showed me where to hang my hat, and how he managed matters there. The rooms were whitewashed once a month; and this one, at least, was the whitest, most simply furnished, and probably neatest apartment in town...[he] had been there some three months waiting for his trial to come on, and would have to wait as much longer; but he was quite domesticated and contented, since he got his board for nothing, and thought that he was well treated.

If this is what jail entailed, it's no wonder that Thoreau had so little fear of being imprisoned. I'm not sure how to begin to bridge the gap between his experience of "jail," and what would wait, even for me, a white woman with some resources, if I had been arrested at an Occupy encampment, for instance, or if I had been present at Standing Rock last year. It's true, in a way, that the mind need not be confined simply because the body is, but what happens when the jailers are deliberately trying to imprison the mind--or break it?

Yet I cannot deny the truth of his words:

Under a government which imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. The proper place today, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less despondent spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, as they have already put themselves out by their principles. It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race should find them; on that separate but more free and honorable ground, where the State places those who are not with her, but against her-- the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor....A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight...This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible. If the tax-gatherer, or any other public officer, asks me..."But what shall I do?" my answer is, "If you really wish to do anything, resign your office." When the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned from office, then the revolution is accomplished.

That's an undeniable truth. But they've made the cost of living that truth horribly high.

What's our choice going to be?