In the opening paragraphs of “Civil
Disobedience” Thoreau makes a provocative remark about American 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; for a single man can bend it to his will.” In rhetorically asking such an
audacious question, Thoreau calls the fundamental stability, moral legitimacy,
and lasting permanence of the American government into question. Rather than viewing
America as the real-life and present-day fulfillment of its revolutionary
ethos, within which critiques of law and civil society can be made, Thoreau
elevates and separates the American revolutionary impetus over and against
America. In making this gesture, Thoreau enacts what Lee A. McBride, III calls
the American tradition of “insurrectionist ethics.” According to McBride, III, “Insurrectionist
ethics is a corollary of a larger project aimed at universal human liberation.
Universal human liberation is concerned with liberating populations from
oppressive and debilitating boundaries.” What separates insurrectionist ethics
from other movements that seek to eliminate oppression is its tendency toward radical
action and systemic critique. What often propelled antislavery movements within
the insurrectionist ethos of the nineteenth century was an appeal to the higher
laws of God and Nature.
As
Deak Nabers notes in his article “Thoreau’s Natural Constitution”: “…while
nineteenth-century antislavery movements
were ‘absolutely dependent upon’ the notion ‘of an immutable, higher law,’ the higher law on which they
depended ‘tended to be so transcendent that
it had little bearing on existing institutions’”
(Nabers). From this point of view, Thoreau’s appeal to “a nation of
huckleberries” in “Civil Disobedience” seems like ineffectual
transcendentalizing. Rather than advocating change within the system or violent
insurrection, Thoreau instead appeals to nature and individual conscience as
experienced in relation to naturalisms. Why effect does this produce? I would
like to suggest that Thoreau’s combining of insurrectionist ethos with a turn
towards nature pre-figures what John Dewey terms the failures of civic
articulation.
Writing on Dewey’s notion of the failures of democratic society,
Naoko Saito tells us that “John Dewey criticized what he saw
as a hollow concept and practice of ‘citizenship’ in democracy. In the ‘void between
government and the public’ (310), men became, he warned, ‘skeptical of the efficiency
of political action’ (319). Indifference and apathy, says Dewey, are the signs
of a bewildered public. This leads to what Dewy calls a “crisis of democracy”
and citizenship; it involves a situation in which one cannot articulate one's
feelings, or where, in the loss of one's own taste, one does not know ‘what one
really wants’ (Saito). In light of Dewey’s ideas about the failures of
citizenship, Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” can be seen not as a text that
fails to fill the systemic gap it creates, but rather as a text that
consciously strives to enact such a gap. By doing so, Thoreau combines what
Harris labels “insurrectionist ethos” with what Dewey terms a “crisis of
democracy and citizenship.” By awakening
his conscience in prose, Thoreau suggests a failure of the state to articulate and
enact in concrete terms the values it is predicated upon: freedom and individual
liberty. Since slavery and the Mexican-American war represent clear failures of
the state to enact such principles, it is up to the individual to argue his or
her conscience in place of where the state hasn’t. Thoreau’s appeal to nature,
in this formulation, represents the failure of human beings to articulate a truly
just form of government. If such a just form of government could be
articulated, it is would bear resemblance to the higher laws articulated effortlessly
by nature. Thus, Thoreau utilizes nature as polemic of shame against such failed
state articulations of freedom, justice, and individual liberty.
The
narrative that most gets told about American antebellum political conflict is
one that emphasizes robust disagreement over systemic critique. Rather than
maintaining a historical awareness of radical elements and persons within the
antislavery and anti-imperialist factions of American antebellum
society—factions comprised of those who questioned the foundational legitimacy
of a republican democracy that continued to allow slavery, and indeed had
slavery built into its very constitution—such elements in the American
collective conscious have been notably suppressed in favor of narratives that
tend to emphasize disagreement within democratic systems rather than systemic
challenge. “Excluded from [this]
narrative,” Mcbride reminds us, “are those associated with denouncing America
as such, those agents of philosophies grounded in denying that the ‘founding
principles’ or an ‘American character’ ever existed, especially those who
proffer bellicose means of liberation. Thus the story of the classical American
philosophical tradition tends to lack slave narratives, blatant hypocrisy,
moral indignation, and insurrections.” Mcbride’s description of hegemonic and
counter hegemonic political narratives is derived from political philosopher
Lenard Harris’s elaborations on insurrectionist ethics. Harris argues that
ethical insurrectionism was predominant during the 19th century and
the suppression of it has been due to narrative exclusions that serve hegemonic
interests. Such narrative exclusions become habitual and self-regenerative. In
an attempt to uncover such lost narratives, Harris has engaged in a project to
uncover narratives that deployed radical, systemic critiques of foundations of
the American political system and its ability or inability to ensure and
realize the project of democracy and human rights.
In uncovering such narratives, an
attention to language becomes fundamental. As McBride shrewdly states: “Quaint
platitudes about democracy, sympathy, and communal discourse are grossly
inadequate in negating the material conditions that have debilitating effects
on denigrated populations.” Thus, to enact counter hegemonic discourses it
becomes necessary to imagine discourses or narratives that exist outside of familiar
narratives and discourses. To put it another way, any discourse that operates
within larger discourses or narratives of containment do not go far enough to
challenge oppressive hegemonies. This is so because debates couched within
always already legitimized foundations assume a legitimate foundational basis
upon which to stand and deliver critique. Such critiques, then, fall short
because they do not challenge fundamental flaws that subtend structures that
become, in the symbolic networks of statehood, universalized and transcendently
ahistorical and apolitical. For Harris, material and structural changes in fundamentally
oppressive systems, both governmental and economic, is what is needed to begin
to end oppressive institutions (McBride). However, to change systems of
oppressive government requires more than mere debate; for Harris it requires
discourses and rhetorical moves that are fundamentally disruptive. Such a
systemic critique is what Thoreau deploys in “Civil Disobedience” when he
reanimates revolutionary discourse. “All men,” says Thoreau, “recognize the
right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist,
the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable.
But almost all say that such is not the case now. But such was the case, they think,
in the Revolution Of '75.” By invoking a historic proximity to the American
Revolution, Thoreau reminds his audience that revolutionary discourse is not
merely a discourse enshrined in history and therefore static; rather, he
suggests that such discourse is available to us at any given time.
According
to McBride, antebellum ethical insurrectionists shared these common features:
They recognized that America was founded on the systemic brutality of slavery
and believed in the “use of civil disobedience, irreverent
protest, subterfuge, and, in some cases, violence against prevailing authority”;
they viewed “slavery, racism, and other denials of a population’s humanity” as “insults
that justify enmity, if not vengeance, as a natural response”; they believed in
representative heuristics, that is, the idea that individuals can stand as
representatives of a whole population and its conditions (though not without
acknowledging variety within social typologies), and they celebrated as
virtuous certain character traits not commonly associated with virtue, such as
audacity and aggression. They in turn viewed these traits as justifiable in the
face of injustice (McBride). In “Civil Disobedience” Thoreau manifests these
traits. Thoreau recognizes the problematic foundation of America in the form of
its sanctioning of slavery within the constitution: “But in this case the State
has provided no way: its very Constitution is the evil. This may seem to be
harsh and stubborn and unconciliatory; but it is to treat with the utmost
kindness and consideration the only spirit that can appreciate or deserves it.
So is a change for the better, like birth and death, which convulse the body.”
Here Thoreau foregrounds the founding document of the country, the
constitution, as being an entity of “evil.” Thoreau also uses metaphors of
death and rebirth to suggest that the foundations of any “body” or nation,
though it may be painful, though it may cause them to “convulse,” can and
should be subject to radical change if said foundations do not adequately serve
and/or perform their purported values. Thoreau applies the same systemic
critique to the then active Mexican-American war: “…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.” By siding with Mexico in the conflict as the
aggrieved party, Thoreau grafts the philosophical grammar of the American Revolution
onto a transnational space. Granted, Thoreau’s grievance is with his own
country; however, he demonstrates sympathetic identification with the Mexican
people, and does so within discourse commonly reserved for America and
Americans.
According
to Thoreau, “What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the country
so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army.” Such systemic
critiques and interventions represent, according to McBride, Thoreau’s
insurrectionist ethos. This insurrectionist ethos has been left out of common
and popular narratives concerning Thoreau: “Almost nothing is mentioned of his
condemnation of slavery, his descriptions of blatant hypocrisy, his refused
allegiance to state and federal government, his reverence for abolitionists, or
his approbation of violent rebellion” (McBride). However, what McBride does not
adequately account for is the Garrisonian pacifism of moral suasion running
throughout “Civil Disobedience.”
Thoreau characterizes civil resistance in
terms of conflict: “I quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near
at home, cooperate with, and do the bidding of those far away, and without whom
the latter would be harmless,” and Thoreau characterizes governmental
oppression in terms of a human resistance to non-human machinery: “If the
injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let
it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth- certainly the machine will
wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank,
exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will
not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you
to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your
life be a counter-friction to stop the machine.” The first line of the passage
suggests that oppression within governmental systems may eventually
self-ameliorate. If this is the case, then nothing need be done about it. The “machine”
of oppression will simply wear itself out. Thoreau’s next line, however,
suggests a systemic problem: the oppression is a function of the machine
itself. Thus, says Thoreau, one must weigh whether or not the means justifies
the ends in one’s attempt to resist oppression. Lastly, Thoreau says that if
the injustice is so egregious that it goes against one’s own moral and ethical
constitution, then you must “Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the
machine.” The metaphor of machinery and friction sounds bellicose enough. However,
Thoreau in fact prefers passive resistance throughout the essay: “If a thousand
men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and
bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit
violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a
peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.” For Thoreau, the system is
institutionalized violence and the individual who abandons, symbolically and
materially, the machinery of the system is committing an act of peaceable
resistance. Thus, Thoreau’s suggested solution is moral suasion: “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. If the alternative is
to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not
hesitate which to choose.” Thoreau in “Civil Disobedience,” embodies all of the
traits of Harris’s insurrectionist ethos except for an open advocating of
violence as a necessary means of civil resistance. Thoreau tacitly acknowledges
that such violence is a possibility, but to a large extent prefers the violence
of rhetoric to the violence of bodies and guns. Why doesn’t Thoreau openly
advocate violence as a last-resort means of just resistance to slavery and
American imperialism? Rather than historicize this question, I want to follow
Thoreau’s text closely to see what it is interested in. However, before doing
so, I will touch upon the trope of natural law within antebellum antislavery
movements.
The appeal to a law higher than the US
constitution was a common trope of the antislavery movement: “In the nineteenth century, natural law bore a curious
relationship to slavery. The call for abolition was almost universally accompanied
by an appeal to nature; so too was the defense of slavery” (Nabers). Thus, the
appeal to natural law could be appropriated in both pro- and antislavery
directions. While an appeal to natural law was made popular in various ways,
particularly within Garrisonian abolitionism, debates in the 1850s concerning
the abolition of slavery continued to be placed within legalistic frameworks
(Nabers). According to Nabers, “Gregg Crane
has recently examined the ‘higher law tradition’ in the nineteenth century,
whose ‘core idea is constant and may be expressed (if not implemented) simply:
to be legitimate, law must be just.’” Thus, any law that does not conform to
God-given and/or natural principles is see as disposable, including the US
constitution. As McBride states of Thoreau’s ethical insurrectionism: “Thoreau
maintains a conception of humanity that militates moral action against obvious
brutality or injustice. According to Thoreau, human beings have a duty to serve
humanity. This moral obligation issues from a source beyond human legal
statutes—a higher law.” Thus natural law created a space outside of American
legal sovereignty and constitutionality from which to operate and deploy its
critiques, challenging the legitimacy of the nation’s foundational government.
However, as Nabers points out, this discoursive appeal to higher law, to the
law of God and nature, began, in the 1840s and 50s to wear thin: “If slavery’s peculiar legal standing stressed the law’s necessary
implication in the maintenance of the peculiar
institution, the debates in the 1840s and
1850s surrounding fugitive slaves and slavery’s
standing in the US territories exerted a countervailing influence. They suggested that freedom, however much it
may have been a matter of ‘natural right,’
was ultimately just as dependent upon the
law as the ‘brute forces’ of bondage.” Thus, as Nabers shrewdly summarizes for
us, it became increasingly clear for antebellum antislavery factions that while
the law was the instrument of slavery it was also the necessary instrument of
freedom. The radical outsideness to an appeal to natural law beyond human law,
while initially kickstarting the bellicose rhetorics of antislavery movements,
eventually became a kind of nowhere territory. However, according Nabers,
Thoreau was able to align such appeals to nature with a pragmatic reformist
framework: Thoreau’s 1850s essays constitute an
extended effort to specify nature’s political function
in a world where the law has become a necessary instrument of justice. In testifying
to nature’s dependence upon the law as well as its superiority to it, they amount to a
systematic elaboration of the terms on which nature could exercise normative
political authority. More than any other abolitionist operating in the broad
Garrisonian paradigm, Thoreau recognized the danger that the natural right could drift away
altogether from the realm of human institutions. (Nabers) If Thoreau’s 1850s essays attempted to
maintain a healthy balance between natural right and human institutions, then
“Civil Disobedience,” written in 1849, I wish to suggest, offers a slightly
different program.
In Saito’s article “Citizenship Without Inclusion: Religious Democracy after Dewey, Emerson, and Thoreau” Saito writes that
Dewey “reminds us today that the crisis of the ‘eclipse
of the public’ has a bearing not only on democracy as a matter of deliberative
procedure or political participation but also on one's ways of living, on an
ethical dimension of life that precedes political and ideological
dimensions—the dimension that involves the question of how one should live, and
how one should relate oneself to others.” It is here I am suggesting that
Thoreau’s ethical philosophy elaborated in “Civil Disobedience” bears some
commonality with Dewey’s notion of the “eclipse of the public,” that is, the
gap that exists between democracy’s purported values of inclusion and universal
rights and the actuality of its legal institutions. Dewey tells us that a space
exists prior to our being constituted as a subject of the state. This is the
“ethical dimension of how one should live,” which “precedes political and
ideological dimensions.” By combining an insurrectionist ethos with an appeal
to nature’s higher laws and the law of one’s own conscience, Thoreau in “Civil
Disobedience” attempts to access this prior space. This space exists in the
form of one’s own ethical conscientiousness. However, in order to articulate
the existence and primacy of this space, Thoreau must disarticulate the
dominant grammars of the state. Such grammars seek to turn men of conscience
into an instrument and subject of the state, that is, into an army: “A common
and natural result of an undue respect for the law is, that you may see a file
of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporeal, private, powder-monkeys, and all,
marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their will,
ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep
marching indeed.” In their service of the state, that is, in the sublimation of
their consciences, they become the instruments of the state’s injustice: “Now,
what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service
of some unscrupulous man in power?” Thoreau thus attempts to generate a gap
between self and state and exploit and dwell on the potentiality for
conscientious objection existent in such a gap. In this sense, Thoreau is
attempting to desubjectivise or deconstitute the subject: “I think we should be
men first, and subjects afterward.”
In providing a gloss of Michel
Foucault’s concept of Panopticism in relation to state power and its control
over the subject, Mohammadreza
Arghiani writes: “The genius of the panopticon lies in the
fact that the threat of surveillance replaces the need for actual surveillance,
so that the role of the guard is internalized and enacted by the prisoner”
(Arghiani). Within Foucault’s framework of the modern structures of power, the
question of what constitutes self-subjectivity becomes inextricably bound up
with historically contingent power structures, particularly those of the state.
Foucault’s primary interest, then, was how such historical, discoursive
processes end up constituting the subject, both in terms of what we might
loosely call the “individual” as well in terms of how state power executes
dominance over individuals and populations. Thoreau, both like and unlike
Foucault, is greatly interested in how the subject becomes constituted by the
state and social apparatuses. In revealing and exploiting the gap between state
action and individual conscience, Thoreau offers us the possibility of not only
a disposition of insurrectionist ethos, but also a space that exists outside of
state formations:
When I meet a
government which says to me, ‘Your money or your life,’ why should I be in
haste to give it my money? It may be in a great strait, and not know what to
do: I cannot help that. It must help itself; do as I do. It is not worth the
while to snivel about it. I am not responsible for the successful working of
the machinery of society. I am not the son of the engineer. I perceive that,
when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the one does not remain inert
to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and grow
and flourish as best they can, till one, perchance, overshadows and destroys
the other. (Thoreau)
One
interpretation of this passage is that Thoreau is an acorn and the US
government is the chestnut. Thoreau says he does not accommodate himself to the
self-destructive failures of the chestnut, that is, the government, because it
is not in his nature to do so. However, I want to propose a slightly different
interpretation. Rather than allegorizing the state and the individual in terms
of acorns and chestnuts, Thoreau is making an actual comparison. Nature, unlike
man, allows for its own greatest health. It does not stall its own development
and natural trajectory in order to accommodate elements within it that are
destructive to it. Thus, to side with nature, a non-human model for human
conscientiousness, Thoreau praises nature for its health and shames man for his
self-destructive impetus.
Like the ethical insurrectionist,
Thoreau makes himself a heuristic representative. Rather than merely claiming a
self-separation over and against society, Thoreau turns to an alliance with
nature in order to utilize its civic and ethical pedagogies. Thoreau is not
apart from society, he is separating himself from this society, instead favoring a potential society wherein
individuals legislate not according to expediency but according to conscience:
“Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide
right and wrong, but conscience?” This is possible for Thoreau if the
individual is not divided against himself: “It not only divides states and
churches, it divides families; ay, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine.”
However, nature also for Thoreau
signifies, I want to suggest, the failures of the American government to
articulate justice. Thoreau’s account of his night spent in jail is
characterized by his silence rather than his speech. While in jail, Thoreau
listens to what the imprisoned have to say of their imprisonment: “The night in
prison was novel and interesting enough. The prisoners in their shirt-sleeves
were enjoying a chat and the evening air in the doorway, when I entered.”
Thoreau describes this scene of conversation as a democratic moment wherein
subalterns articulate democracy in ways the American congress has failed to: “I
found that even here there was a history and a gossip which never circulated
beyond the walls of the jail. Probably this is the only house in the town where
verses are composed, which are afterward printed in circular form, but not
published. I was shown quite a long list of verses which were composed by some
young men who had been detected in an attempt to escape, who avenged themselves
by singing.” In this depiction of verse making by healthy, robust youths whom
the nation has rendered invisible within the machinations of political
institutions, Thoreau suggests a alternative mode of speech, one that is more
democratic in that it is unmediated by political expediency.
When Thoreau exits the jail, he
describes how his experience has transformed his localized perspective: “When I
came out of prison,—for some one interfered, and paid that tax,—I did not
perceive that great changes had taken place on the common, such as he observed
who went in youth, and emerged a tottering and gray-headed man; and yet change
had to my eyes come over the scene,—the town, and State, and country,—”
Thoreau’s former insurrectionist speech has been becalmed by a silent recognition
of what the State is. Thoreau then says: “When I was let out the next morning,
I proceeded to finish my errand, and having put on my mended shoe, joined a
huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and
in half an hour,—for the hose was soon tackled,—was in the midst of a
huckleberry field, on one of the highest hills, two miles off, and then the
State was nowhere to be seen.” While Thoreau’s joy at rejoining his “huckleberry
party” suggests the constancy and permanence of nature over the ephemerality of
the government, it also suggests, I want to argue, a sense of elegy for human
institutions which have failed to articulate justice within their governmental
frameworks.
By replacing the act of constitutive or
representative speech with the silence of huckleberries, Thoreau both playfully
and mournfully bears witness to a crisis of democracy, as he does throughout
“Civil Disobedience.” The crisis he bears witness to is the failure of America
to legislatively articulate its founding principles. This leaves Thoreau in a
state of “bewilderment” as Dewey says. In such a state, one floats in the “void
between government and the public” (Saito). However, rather than merely being
in a state of mourning over his government, Thoreau seizes on this gap between
stated revolutionary values and their concrete legislative articulation as a
moment to remind his audience that they are representative owners of their own
government. In other words, government operates on the illusion that it is
entirely separate and more powerful than its subjects; however, Thoreau
suggests, government is only oppressive to the extent that its subjects allow
it to have power over them. Thus, Thoreau enlivens revolutionary rhetoric to
enact an insurrectionist ethos. At the same time, he combines this
insurrectionist ethos with nature and an appeal to natural law in order to show
how nature, in its silence, articulates what the American government has failed
to article: its own claim of justice and human equality.
Works Cited
Arghiani,
Mohammadreza. “Diminishing
I’s: The Unnamable’s Absent Subjecthood and the
Disintegration
of Meaning in the Face of Foucault’s Panopticon.” Philosophy
and
Literature. Vol. 36, N.2. (2012). Project Muse. Web.
McBride, III, Lee A.
“Insurrectionist Ethics and Thoreau.”
Transactions of the Charles S. Pierce
A Quarterly Journal in
American Philosophy. Vol. 49, N. 1. 2013. Project Muse. Web.
Nabers, Deak. “Thoreau’s Natural
Constitution.” American Literary History. Vol. 19. N. 4. 2007.
Project Muse. Web.
Saito,
Naoko. “Citizenship Without Inclusion: Religious Democracy after Dewey, Emerson, and
Thoreau.” The
Journal of Speculative Philosophy 18.3 (2004) 203-215. Project Muse.
Web.
Thoreau,
Henry David. Collected Essays and Poems.
DC: Library of America, 2001. Print.
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