Civil Disobedience

I’ve never been a fan of Henry David Thoreau despite having been required to read several of his works while in school. Brilliant he undoubtedly was, but he was also a rather strange man. Thoreau was many things, a naturalist, conservationist, sometimes vegetarian, an abolitionist, a hermit and conversely an admirer of civilization, sometimes school teacher, and even an anarchist in the days before that became a popular credo. In 1849, Thoreau published an essay entitled “Civil Disobedience” wherein he proposed his concept of nonviolent resistance to the rule of government. His concept greatly influenced both Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. in later years. He argues that people should not permit government to overrule their conscience, and that people have a duty to avoid allowing the government to make them the agents of injustice. He was of course motivated by his disgust of chattle slavery. “Civil Disobedience” is quite interesting reading if you can find a copy.

In part, he wrote; “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”; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.”

“That government is best which governs least” is usually attributed to either Thomas Jefferson or Thomas Payne, but it’s also claimed that Thoreau was the first to put it into print. He believed, as do I, that the less government we have, the better off we are. He wanted to carry this to extremes however, in preferring no government whatsoever. I rather like that idea as well, but I also realize that this final stage is a utopian dream and completely impossible if there are more than two people making up the population… and it’s certainly not feasible in any civilized world.

Government is usually defined as a centralized authority that does those necessary things for us that we are unable, for one reason or another, to do for ourselves. Understandable, in that while I am quite capable of defending myself and my family against an intruder, I’m going to have a hard time defending the back forty from an outlaw gang! For that, I’m going to need assistance from friends, relatives, and probably the neighbors as well. Somebody’s got to plan and direct the defense, so now we have an improvised and temporary sort of government. How to defend an entire nation? With an Army naturally, and having an army means that we’re going to have a correspondingly larger and more formalized government responsible for training, equiping, and feeding that army. Then to, if I wish to write a letter to someone on the east coast, how do I get it to the intended recipient without having to hand carry it all the way by myself? Passing it hand to hand via the neighbors might work of course, but that seems a somewhat laborous and unreliable method at best. We could of course have a postal service, but that also means more government. Personally I think having some sort of fire protection available is a very desirable thing, but have you ever tried to buy your very own personal fire truck!? (I have, and it’s an expensive proposition! I could have bought a quite nice house for what I spent on that truck.) As long as we have a say in what government we get, the trick is to decide just what “services” we actually need or want, and eliminate everything else. That can get quite difficult in our modern day, as nearly everyone has their own “the government outta” pet idea, and if any three of them can agree, we suddenly find ourselves saddled with even more expensive and self-perpetuating government! And “Government” is self-perpetuating after all, in that it exists only to grow and keep itself “in charge”!

“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… 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.”

Actually that’s exactly what does happen, a few individuals generally decide what we’re going to do next, long before the rest of us can say “Hey, wait a minute!” Do you remember the start of the war in Iraq, or even the beginnings of the wars in Korea or Vietnam? Did “we the people” decide that we wanted to go to war, or did a relative few people lead us into them by our noses? For a good many years I’ve listened to the ongoing litany of “War is wrong. War is evil. War is immoral”, and I can well agree with that sentiment despite (or probably because of) having spent part of my life as a soldier. However, I also well know that there are evil men in this world, and that they have “plans” for me and mine. Perhaps not for me personally, but they certainly have plans for this country and its citizens. We do need a means of defending ourselves from those men and their plotting, which means we need some sort of government, like it or not. As long as we’ve got that government we might as well let it deliver the mail, along with the other things we would be hard pressed to do individually. But, that government must be kept under some sort of tight control lest it become a totalitarian monster controlled by home-grown evil men, and promptly enslaves everyone else! (Or perhaps they’d settle for just spending us into the poorhouse?) Our nation’s founding fathers, knowing full well that a direct democracy can’t work for long, chose to give us a representative democracy, whereby every few years we select the individuals who will represent us, “We The People”, not some vested interest, foreign government, or “world opinion”.

What Thoreau failed to mention is that if we are to have any hopes of the electorate making a wise selection from among the candidates, that electorate must be reasonably well educated, well informed, and contrary to much of the liberal bleating, they must have a set of strong moral guidelines. Our current government has pretty well eliminated the education part with the dumbing down of Americas schools in the interest of “self-esteem”, the nation’s mass media certainly can’t keep us well informed without their favoritism showing through, while Hollywood is happily teaching our kids that morals aren’t relevant anymore.

Perhaps the American people should put an end to all this. We can begin by taking charge of our own lives and electing representatives who will eliminate government’s continuous effort at assuming control of our lives. We could return to teaching our children that morality does matter. We could also stop being enthralled by “change” just for the sake of doing something different, and start paying attention to doing what we know is morally right and proper instead of what’s expedient or politically correct.