Current issue of Kingston Peace News
Is Civil Disobedience Always Right?
Section from Howard Zinn's Declarations of Independence
There is a common argument against civil disobedience that goes like this:
If I approve your act of civil disobedience, am I not honour bound to
approve anyone's civil disobedience? If I approve Martin Luther King's
violations of law, must I not also approve the Ku Klux Klan's illegal
activities?
This argument comes from a mistaken idea about civil disobedience. The
violation of law for the purpose of committing an injustice (like the
Governor of Alabama preventing a black student from entering a public
school or Colonel Oliver North buying arms for terrorists in Central America)
is not defensible. Whether it was legal (as it was until 1954) or illegal
(after 1954) to prevent black children from entering a school, it would
still be wrong. The test of justification for an act is not its legality
but its morality.
The principle I am suggesting for civil disobedience is not that we must
tolerate all disobedience to law, but that we refuse an absolute obedience
to law. The ultimate test is not law, but justice.
This troubles many people, because it gives them a heavy responsibility,
to weigh social acts by their moral consequences. This can get complicated
and requires a never - ending set of judgments about practices and policies.
It is much easier to lie back and let the law make our moral judgments
for us, whatever the law happens to say at the moment, whatever politicians
have made into law on the basis of their interests, however the Supreme
Court interprets the law at the moment. Yes, easier. But recall Jefferson's
words: "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."
There is fear that this kind of citizens' judgment about when to obey
and when to disobey the law will lead to terrible consequences. In the
summer of I968 four people who called for resistance to the draft as a
way of halting the war in Vietnam - Dr. Benjamin Spock, Reverend William
Sloane Coffin, writer Mitchell Goodman, and Harvard student Michael Ferber
- were sentenced to prison by Judge Francis Ford in Boston, who said,
"Where law and order stops, obviously anarchy begins."
That is the same basically conservative impulse that once saw minimum
wage laws as leading to Bolshevism, or bus desegregation leading to intermarriage,
or communism in Vietnam leading to world communism. It assumes that all
actions in a given direction rush toward the extreme, as if all social
change takes place at the top of a steep, smooth hill, where the first
push ensures a plunge to the bottom.
In fact an act of civil disobedience, like any move for reform, is more
like the first push up a hill. Society's tendency is to maintain what
has been. Rebellion is only an occasional reaction to suffering in human
history; we have infinitely more instances of submission to authority
than we have examples of revolt. What we should be most concerned about
is not some natural tendency toward violent uprising, but rather the inclination
of people faced with an overwhelming environment of injustice to submit
to it.
Historically, the most terrible things - war, genocide, and slavery -
have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.