Civil Disobedience

William E. Scheuerman

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781509518654
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Politische Philosophie

What is civil disobedience? Although Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King helped to bring the idea to prominence, even today it remains unclear how we should best understand civil disobedience. Why have so many different activists and intellectuals embraced it, and to what ends? Is civil disobedience still politically relevant in today's hyper-connected world? Does it make sense, for example, to describe Edward Snowden's actions, or those of recent global movements like Occupy, as falling under this rubric? If so, how must it adapt to respond to the challenges of digitalization and globalization and the rise of populist authoritarianism in the West? In this elegantly written introductory text, William E. Scheuerman systematically analyzes the most important interpretations of civil disobedience. Drawing out the striking differences separating religious, liberal, radical democratic, and anarchist views, he nonetheless shows that core commonalities remain. Against those who water down the idea of civil disobedience or view it as obsolescent, Scheuerman successfully salvages its central elements. The concept of civil disobedience, he argues, remains a pivotal tool for anyone hoping to bring about political and social change.

1
Divine Witness

Civil disobedience was probably invented by religious believers who envisaged it as a sacred duty forced upon them by their God. Principled lawbreaking in the face of immoral laws represented not just a moral right but a divine obligation, ignored only at a terrible spiritual cost. Although this model of civil disobedience can trace some roots to the distant past, it was the great twentieth-century political figures Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. who vividly outlined, via their actions and closely related writings, what rapidly became the canonical exemplar of religious civil disobedience.¹ In more recent decades, their ideas have inspired a diverse range of activists who openly violate laws allegedly inconsonant with God's will.

Properly conducted lawbreaking, operating as a corrective to a social world plagued by sin and evil, is conceived as tapping directly into divine forces. Outlining a series of demanding conditions for legitimate civil disobedience, Gandhi, King, and their disciples view each component in decidedly spiritual terms. Civil disobedience represents a religious quest requiring of practitioners a proper moral bearing. During the famous “salt satyagraha” (1930–1), Gandhi slept in the open with only the barest material necessities, traveling from town to town where he and his disciples repeatedly violated a salt tax they viewed as embodying British colonial exploitation. Gandhi

saw this as a sacred pilgrimage in which discipline and purity were essential. Indeed, a religious aura surrounded the whole enterprise. He and his followers kept quoting the Gospels, presumably drawing comparisons between Gandhi and Christ deliberately setting his face towards Jerusalem and confrontation with the authorities; the sale of Bibles among Ahmedabad Hindus shot up. The government noted that Gandhi's position in the public mind was completely different from that of any ordinary political leader.

(Brown 1989: 237)

US civil rights activists who broke segregation statutes in the late 1950s and early 1960s were recruited heavily from African-American churches and sang spirituals when carted off to jail. King, no less than Gandhi, viewed his movement as religiously inspired. In this respect, as in so many others, he creatively adapted Gandhi's ideas to US conditions.

We start by analyzing this religious conception of civil disobedience because of its massive historical and intellectual impact. Subsequent, more secular, liberal, democratic, and anarchist accounts of civil disobedience all implicitly start with Gandhi's and King's ideas, trying to preserve their skeletal features while fitting them with a new philosophical and political body. They take up many pieces of the puzzle Gandhi and King constructed, but then remake it. Given the spiritual contours of the original, their more secular orientation sometimes means they have had a hard time doing so.

Special attention is paid to the fertile idea that civil dis­obedience represents neither ordinary lawbreaking nor mere criminality, but instead, as King put it in “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” action exemplifying “the very highest respect for law” (1991 [1963]: 74). The notion of civil dis­obedience as premised on respect for law vividly emerged in Gandhi's thinking, as did the soon commonplace intuition that civil disobedience demands “a willingness to be identified and to accept punishment” (Perry 2013: 15). To understand the lasting appeal of these ideas we need to examine their original religious rendition.

Many virtues notwithstanding, religiously based civil dis­obedience suffers from serious flaws. Its spiritual underpinnings raise difficult questions for modern pluralism. They also risk inviting troublesome – and no longer identifiably civil – lawbreaking.

Civil disobedience and satyagraha

Though Gandhi was perhaps never fully satisfied with the term “civil disobedience,” he used it to describe politically motivated contraventions of the law, like many others wrongly attributing its invention to the nineteenth-century American dissident Henry Thoreau.² Alongside boycotts, noncooperation, pickets, strikes, and walkouts, civil disobedience represented one particularly effective type of satyagraha, or political action motivated by “love” or “truth-force,” whose divine strictures gave moral meaning to the universe. In its most literal sense, satyagraha entailed “insistence on truth, and the force derivable from such insistence” (Gandhi 2008 [1919]: 324). “The universe would disappear without the existence of that force,” Gandhi claimed (1986a [1909]: 244). Gandhi accordingly described his own life-long spiritual quest and activities as “experiments with truth” (1993 [1957]).

How best to practice and thereby advance divine truthfulness? Our inner voice, or moral conscience, provided access to divinity and thus was by nature indubitable. God is ready to speak to each of us personally and directly (Sorabji 2014: 200). Yet one could only properly recognize that voice by means of the “strictest discipline. Irresponsible youngsters therefore … have no conscience, nor therefore have all grown-up people” (Gandhi 1986b [1924]: 125). Those who engaged in rigorous processes of self-purification, where both mind and body were subjected to mental and physical discipline (a strict diet and sexual abstinence, or brachmacharya), would alone prove receptive to godly conscience.

By necessity, civil disobedience was always conscientious lawbreaking: Gandhi never delineated civil disobedience from what liberals and others later called conscientious objection. Rightful lawbreaking had to rest directly on “the voice of God, of Conscience, of Truth, or the Inner Voice” (1986b [1933]: 131). It had to be civil, not because it entailed common or civic obligations to a community of political equals, but because its practitioners should abide rigorous norms of proper moral behavior and decorum. Why? Because God demanded nothing less.

In Gandhi's reworked version of Hinduism, “God is Truth,” and genuine religious faith entailed an unceasing quest for absolute truth, and by necessity principled indifference to anything (for example, material well-being or sexual pleasure) getting in the way of that quest. The search for absolute truth should not, however, engender disdain for others. Because no mortal could ever legitimately assert that he or she had fully approximated divine truth, or that conscience spoke decisively to him or her alone, a basic respect for others – Gandhi, following Leo Tolstoy (1967), in this context generally refers to love – was required of anyone hoping to avoid sinful hubris. “[C]onduct based on truth is impossible without love. Truth-force then is love-force” since no human being was qualified or competent to harm or punish, by destructive or violent means, others similarly situated (2008 [1919]: 324; also, Bondurant 1958). Truth, love, and nonviolence (ahimsa) were intimately intermingled because the quest for absolute truth presupposed an acknowledgment of human cognitive and moral limitations. Human fallibility required nonviolence, since only the hubristic mistakenly believed that they were entitled to do violence to others. Those rightly attuned to the human capacity for error instead refused to force on their peers their own potentially mistaken “experiments with truth.”

Civil disobedience represented spiritual truth-seeking in action, a sacred duty in the face of morally corrupt laws. When the law humiliates or discriminates, makes arbitrary or unfair distinctions, or rests on mere brute force, it clashes with divine Truth or Soul-Force. If secular powers successfully resist attempts to change or abrogate such laws when pursued by alternative channels (for example, economic boycotts or negotiations with power holders), then it becomes obligatory on divine truth-seekers to repair a damaged moral order. “That we should obey laws whether good or bad is a new-fangled notion” (1986a [1909]: 246). Even laws made by powerful political majorities can be unjust since democracy and majority rule provide no guarantee of moral rectitude (1986a [1909]: 247). When and how it was best to engage in lawbreaking, Gandhi conceded, raised difficult political questions. Yet it remained a moral – and ultimately divine – obligation to do so.³

In part because of its risks, and in part its spiritual preconditions, Gandhi tended to suggest conscientious lawbreaking should only occur after ordinary political and legal channels had been properly exhausted. Lawbreaking was a serious matter, and when recklessly committed could easily generate violence or chaos. At crucial junctures – for example, when opposing colonial anti-sedition statutes passed during 1919 – Gandhi abruptly broke off his endeavors precisely because of such fears. “Every possible provision should be made against an outbreak of violence or general lawlessness” (1987 [1922]: 99). Gandhi doubted the likelihood of advantageous political outcomes when lawbreakers lacked the requisite religious and spiritual discipline. Since “he alone can offer satyagraha who has true faith in religion,” any idea of civil disobedience as a morally neutral technique deployable by any activist, spiritually inclined or otherwise, was anathema to him (2008 [1909]: 329).

Highlighting his strategic acumen, recent commentators have pushed back against the stereotypical view of Gandhi as an idealistic moral crusader (Mantena 2012). Such interpretations build on prior attempts to uproot Gandhi's political methods and techniques from their spiritual soil, an approach surely in part responsible for his ideas’ successful global dispersion (Sharp 1973; Shridharani 1972 [1939]). Gandhi, in fact, frequently relied on military and strategic metaphors; he possessed a keen eye for the mechanisms of power. Principally committed to nonviolence, he still conceded that in a spiritually imperfect world, some violence remained unavoidable. Nonviolence not just vis-à-vis other human beings but also in relation to animals – the source of Gandhi's vegetarianism – was a counsel of perfection that we should heed but could not always completely achieve, even if morally obliged to try to do so (Sorabji 2014: 198).

Construing Gandhi as a closeted ...