Prompted by Extinction Rebellion and some of my friends who are involved in direct action protests on climate, war and other things I've been thinking a fair bit about civil disobedience. This is what timid people like me do when faced with the option of being confrontational - we go away and think about it. I'm planning to share various things with you over the next little while but here, by way of starters, are some reflections on Frederic Gros' little book Disobey: The Philosophy of Resistance.
The framing question for his reflections is not 'why should we disobey?', but 'why do we obey?'. He discusses this in various ways but one is through the ideas of a French Renaissance essayist called La Boetie.
What strange phenomenon is this?...What vice is it, or rather what degradation? To see an endless multitude of people...suffer plundering, wantonness, cruelty, not from an army, not from a barbarian horde...but from a single man - not from a Hercules nor from a Samson, but from a single little man. Too frequently this same little man is the most cowardly and effeminate in the nation...
From this starting point he develops the concept of 'surplus obedience' - we obey far more than we have to, we give our governments, our tyrants, not simply the obedience they force us to give at the point of the sword of the barrel of a gun, but a willing excess of obedience that we give freely. Why do we do this?
Perhaps the most graphic illustration of this is the trial of Adolph Eichmann. Eichmann was arrested in Brazil and tried in Israel in 1961 for his role in the Holocaust. At his trial Eichmann's defence, such as it was, was firstly that he was simply carrying out orders, and secondly that he never personally killed anyone. He was a public servant - he was not at the Wannsee Conference of the Nazi leadership which made the decision to implement the Holocaust, and he did not personally contribute to the decision. He was simply following the orders of the government he served. His job was transport logistics. He organised the trains, staffing and communications necessary to get people from the places in which they were arrested to the places where they were tortured and killed. What happened once they arrived was not his department.
But of course this defence doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The fact that he didn't personally kill anyone barely needs discussion, but on the side of his logistics job, he had many choices. The most heroic option, of course, would have been to refuse the order, even at the risk of being arrested himself as a traitor. Not everyone can be a hero, but alternatively he could have defected to the enemy, fled to a neutral country, resigned his post and gone into retirement, or applied for a transfer to a job that did not involve the administration of torture and death. Or, as another alternative, he could simply have done his job badly. He could have messed up the train timetables, lost the paperwork or let it sit on his desk for weeks, sent them to the wrong place, failed to provide fuel or drivers, routed them close to the Swiss border to give the captives a chance at escape. Any war bureaucracy has plenty of scope for incompetence.
But Eichmann did none of these things. He was a model of bureaucratic excellence, solving problems, overcoming barriers, marshalling resources, ensuring coordination across borders and time-zones amidst the chaos of war. He efficiently and successfully sent hundreds of thousands of people to their deaths. Although I am no fan of the death penalty it is hard to argue that his execution was unjust.
Eichmann is, to be sure, an extreme example. Not many people in history have organised the logistics of genocide. Not many of us have that choice placed before us. Yet we all have lesser versions of the same choice. We all give far more obedience to our unjust and corrupt governments than we are strictly obliged to. So the question is, perhaps, not so much why we should disobey, as why we decide not to - why we not only assent in a kind of passive way, or do what we must, but do over and above what we are required to, provide excellent service to this injustice and corruption? If we only did the minimum we are forced to do, he suggests, these regimes would quickly collapse.
Why then do we go on with our enthusiastic compliance, or surplus obedience? Gros's answer is somewhat complex but what it comes down to is this - we have abrogated our responsibility to follow our own conscience. We are not sure who we are, so we follow a leader, a trend, a community that gives us an identity. We are at the point where we no longer know quite what our conscience is telling us.
If we want to find it in ourselves to disobey, we need to rediscover the art of knowing ourselves, and of being ourselves. We need to have a source of understanding ourselves that is not purely derived from who we are in this society, a capacity for deeper reflection and self-examination. The alternative to obeying the powers that be is not obeying no-one, or even obeying some alternative power that in all likelihood will turn out to be just as much of a tyrant. The secret is to learn to listen to, and obey, ourselves. We must refuse to attempt to delegate the task of being ourselves to someone else.
This is, of course, a long way from organised campaigns of civil resistance. Gros does not discuss specifics - how should we disobey, by what tactics, with whom, to what end? These questions are left hanging. Instead he leaves us with this cryptic challenge:
...care for yourself, sense this 'two in one', revive this palpitation which is what philosophy consists in, this backwash of thought: yes, no, perhaps...And at the end of the day it is for me to decide, and for me to reply, to this impossible, necessary, revisable, worrying decision. And it is in the common vibration of non-delegable selves that we find the inconvenient and eternal urgency and honour of true politics, the politics of disobedience.
***
To me, there seems to be something missing from this analysis. Sure we have abrogated our responsibility to ourselves, and perhaps to others also. But why do we do so?
It seems to me that there are two reasons. The first is that there are benefits to doing so to us personally. We get paid, we get to live peacefully in our homes and enjoy the company of our friends and family. It is risky to step outside this - we may lose our jobs and become poor, our friends and families may ostracise us, if we disobey in certain ways we may be arrested and, in some places, killed. We weigh up the risks and benefits.
The other is that the system we live in is never all bad. We have a reasonable amount of freedom, a social safety net that is OK even if it has holes in it, decent public health and education systems, a police force that is sometimes corrupt and discriminatory but also does a fair job of keeping us safe. We accept a little imperfection for the sake of the good bits - and this is especially so if the imperfection impacts mostly on someone else, like a minority social group, or a person who lives in the future.
These two factors create a fair bit of inertia for us. If they are eroded slowly we may not notice. If homelessness increases but we remain housed, we may turn a blind eye, or we may campaign for change without trying to turn over the whole system. The same might happen if Aboriginal incarceration rates go up, or if the imprisonment of asylum seekers drags on for years on end without any possibility for resolution.
And given the increasingly dire warnings of the IPCC, how much rope do we give our governing parties before we see the threat as too immediate to play nice any more?
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