III
Assuming that at least in some cases civil disobe-
dience is justified, the question of what form it should
take
immediately arises. Should it always be nonviolent
in nature or is the use
of violence ever justified? And
if violence is ever justified, what limits
must be set upon
it? Efforts to answer these questions form a large
bloc
of the literature on civil disobedience.
The defense of nonviolence has taken two radically
different forms, one
prudential in nature, the other a
matter of principle. The prudential
argument holds
that if government forces are so strong and oppressive
that they would retaliate tenfold against any violence,
then they should be
opposed only nonviolently or by
“passive resistance.”
If the situation changes, if the
strength of the oppressive government
declines, then
it may be violently resisted. There can be little doubt
that this was the attitude of the valiant civilians in
Norway and Denmark
during the Nazi occupation
whose campaigns of resistance are so vividly
described
in (and were influenced by) John Steinbeck's The Moon
is Down. It was a grave offense to have a copy of
this
book in one's possession in any Nazi occupied country.
The most important defenders of nonviolence as a
matter of principle were
Leo Tolstoi, Mohandas
Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. The
principle
usually invoked to justify nonviolence was the religious
and
moral belief that love is necessarily good and hence
that violence by its
very nature is evil; that only love
of others brings happiness and the
realization of a
moral self, while anger and violence debase the char-
acter of the agent as well as wounding and
killing
others. There was a seriatim influence among Tolstoi,
Gandhi,
and King, though it must not be assumed that
their concepts and campaigns
of disobedience were
identical simply because they agreed on these princi-
ples of nonviolence.
According to Tolstoi, man's conscience reveals to
him a God that is the
supreme Good, not a personal
God but a God “within
us.” Jesus was absolutely right
in saying, “Love thy
neighbor as thyself,” not, however,
because he was the Son of
God but because this is what
is dictated by the conscience of man.
Moreover, the
goal of man is to achieve happiness and this can only
be
accomplished by getting rid of the greed and lust
that continually breed
trouble among men and by
putting love in their place. Love precludes
violence,
which is wrong in every form, including the forms
inherent
in every form of government. The true Chris
tian must refuse jury duty, conscription, and any state
work,
and he must likewise refuse to participate in any
violent efforts to overthrow the state. Property,
Tolstoi
believed, is the private usurpation of what belongs to
all men
and is the source of most greedy activity and
hence the root of violence.
Tolstoi, in short, was a
socialistic anarchist, though he never called
himself an
anarchist since anarchists frequently justify violence.
Gandhi called his own concept of disobedience the
doctrine of Satyagraha, or “truth force.” To
him the
concept of passive resistance came to seem inadequate
to
capture the full scope of nonviolence practiced as
a matter of principle.
One must not only resist passively
the injustice of government but do so
without feelings
of animosity or hatred. Complete commitment to the
love of fellow men is necessary not only as intrinsically
right but as
providing that “truth force” which is
crucial to the
success of civil disobedience. The adjec-
tive
“civil” in the phrase “civil
disobedience” meant
for Gandhi peaceful, courteous,
“civilized” resistance,
and it is for this reason
that some scholars have insisted
that nonviolence is part of the very
meaning of “civil
disobedience.” Admiration for
Gandhi's views and
campaigns, however, is not a good reason for making
these views definitive of a network of views only more
or less closely
related. Such admiration is also not a
good reason for overlooking the
historically relevant
use of the adjective “civil” in
speaking of the civil
government or the civil magistrate simply to distin-
guish them from ecclesiastical,
military, and other
authorities. Thoreau in the earlier title of his
essay,
“Resistance to Civil Government,” surely did
not wish
to imply that the American government was distinctive
in its
courteousness.
Gandhi's formulation of civil disobedience was, in
part, much like that of
the Oberlin abolitionists. The
lawbreaker should openly and quietly disobey
unjust
laws and suffer the consequences of such disobedience
with
dignity. However, Gandhi also felt it was legiti-
mate to dissent from unjust policies and commands of
a
government by disobeying laws which were not
themselves unjust provided
that breaking these just
laws did not itself violate principles of
conscience. This
addition to the Oberlin formula suggests that while
the
Oberlin community accepted the governmental
framework in which it
operated, though critically,
Gandhi ultimately rejected the framework
itself. And
this suggestion, of course, is true in fact, for Gandhi
was ultimately protesting the illegitimacy of colonial
rule and not simply
the injustice of certain laws within
the English colonial system.
Martin Luther King, Jr. interpreted the Christian
message as one of love and
compassion and hence
accepted the doctrine of nonviolence as a matter of
religious principle. He was also much influenced by
Gandhi's
techniques of passive resistance, which he
incorporated whenever possible
into the civil rights
movements, and by Gandhi's statement of the
principle
of civil disobedience. Like Gandhi he believed that
unjust
laws should be disobeyed quietly and the conse-
quences suffered with dignity when they cannot hon-
orably be avoided. He carefully defined the nature of
the unjust laws against which Negroes were dissenting
as the laws which a
minority are forced to observe
but which are not binding on the majority.
However,
in later years, after much civil rights legislation had
been
passed but either not enforced at all or only partly
so, he emphasized that
the root of racial injustice lay
in a double standard of law
enforcement—in short, in
the unjust policies and commands of
civil authorities
rather than in unjust laws (King [1967], p. 82).
Many arguments have been offered against the view
that nonviolent civil
disobedience is always right in
principle and that acts of civil
disobedience therefore
must always be peaceful (which is the common de-
nominator in the thought of Tolstoi,
Gandhi, and King).
It should be borne in mind, of course, that
arguments
which claim to show that violence is not in principle
wrong
are not arguments to show that violence is
always right or that any certain
degree of violence is
right but no other. When violence is justified and
to
what extent, are further questions that need to be
answered by
further arguments. Indeed, as we have
seen, it is possible to believe that
violence is not in
principle wrong and still believe on prudential
grounds
that violence is not ever justified. The arguments
against
nonviolence-in-principle are too numerous to
examine in detail here, but
the general strategies in-
volved are few and
clear. Some people reject the
pacifistic interpretation of Christianity and
certain
other world religions, while others reject entirely a
religious viewpoint from which any moral position,
pacifistic or otherwise,
can be deduced. Still others
reject the formalistic view of moral
philosophy which
gives rise to an absolute commitment to nonviolence.
Others point out that a utilitarian justification of non-
violence is useless, since it would never yield the abso-
lute quality necessary to the pacifist
commitment. (It
is also pointed out that unfortunately some of the
most
eminent proponents of nonviolence mix together,
unwittingly,
incompatible formalistic and utilitarian
justifications.) Moreover, there
are difficulties with an
absolute commitment to love, since it implies an
abso-
lute commitment to forgiveness, as
well as to nonvio-
lence, which conflicts
with that concept of justice
which entails the need for punishment.
Moreover, there
are various crucial roles that anger and other
emotions
condemned by a nonviolence doctrine play in the
psychological health of individuals and communities.
Finally, the argument is advanced that the absolute
view of nonviolence is
based on a mistaken view of
man's present nature and future possibilities.
The ma-
jority of men simply are not moral in
nature and are
incapable of responding to the call to conscience
sounded by the advocates of nonviolent civil disobe-
dience. Psychiatrists assure us that some people are
incapable of the moral point of view because the
affective tone of their emotional life is so dulled that
they are incapable
of fellow-feeling. Experience assures
us also that many more people simply
reject the moral
point of view as a piece of outright foolishness;
they
are selfish as a matter of self-evident principle. Still
others
are selfish unwittingly, never having given any
matter of principle a
moment's thought. Certainly
nonviolent civil disobedience is just so much
chaff in
the wind to all these people—and always will be.
If
anything will work it will be the use of pressure tactics.
To be
sure, pressure tactics are also irrelevant to those
of seriously dulled
emotions, but such tactics do have
desirable effects on those who are
selfish-on-principle
or thoughtlessly selfish if they are reasonably enlight-
ened. Such tactics may not convert
these people, of
course, but they will increasingly help justice be
done
as these people become convinced that their own wel-
fare depends on it; and, hopefully, what they are at
first pressured to do out of enlightened selfishness they
will gradually
out of habit come to regard as moral.
