A Rumination on Taking a Stand

This morning in 1846 Henry Thoreau left his cabin on Walden pond to go into town. There he was arrested for refusing to pay his poll tax as an ongoing protest against what he felt to be an unjust war. He spent the better part of two days and a night in jail before an anonymous friend paid the tax – over Thoreau’s objections.

Inspired directly by this experience, a year and a half later he would give a talk.

It would later be published by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody as Resistance to Civil Government, and would eventually be known as Civil Disobedience.

Elsewhere I’ve been reading about the conflict between freedom of speech and right speech for Buddhists on the web. I found the first part of that essay intriguing, the second, sadly, disconcerting. I’d like to elaborate a bit here…

For me the connection is that tension between freedom and responsibility.

There are so many kinds of freedom, and of course, there are so many kinds of responsibility.

At its worst freedom dissolves into a kind of licentiousness, with a total disregard of any limitations on an individual’s words or actions beyond, perhaps, the constraints of voluntarily entered into contracts. Here the cardinal rule is what’s in it for me?

At its worst responsibility completely subsumes the individual through appeals to larger perspectives such as religion or nationalism. Here the cardinal rule is submission to authority.

Most of us do not live at either extreme, although we probably tilt in one direction or another.

My own perspective, which might offend an Aristotelian, is that we are at the same time absolutely precious, unique individuals, never to be repeated, and within our passing uniqueness to be cherished – while within that exact same time we exist only within relationship, we are created out of relationship, we exist in relationship, and we will die within the embrace of relationship, within a complete and total interdependence.

Ethics flow out of this assertion, even as they flow from the assertions of autonomy and dependence. Specifically for those of us who acknowledge the preciousness of an individual and the impossibility of separating that individual from the context of interdependence there are questions of specific instances and times and places: when the individual and when the group? And these decisions are moving targets, now one, now the other, most often some compromise, which specifically almost never obvious to all…

So, the interview at Enlightenment Ward. Here an individual seems to claim to know when. And standing from that perspective of knowing his freedom of speech and right speech are one thing.

Maybe.

Perhaps not.

When I hear assertions of certainty I find myself uncomfortable.

Because usually with certainty, civility goes out the window. And much more is lost together with that civility. The other is a hard other separate from oneself. Absolute good and absolute evil rise and someone must win and someone must lose.

I can think of occasions when circumstances dictate such decisions. And I know blood and unintended consequences flow from such decisions.

And I think the times we should surrender to such analysis and the following consequences should be nearly as rare as hen’s teeth. I believe there can be such times. And they will take us to hell, even though hell may be where we must go…

Mostly, however, its much, much more complicated. Just like life.

When Henry Thoreau refused to pay his Poll tax he made some personal judgments. He paid other taxes. But he chose this one as a symbol for his opposition to a specific war.

Was he right? Probably the majority of those who study such things consider the Mexican war not very just. Although at the time it was a pretty popular conflict, at least north of the border.

Now we also do have some sense of how Thoreau actually acted while engaged in his protest. And I find this very important. Constable Samuel Staples reports that Thoreau was perfectly respectful of the people involved. In fact, Staples offered to loan Thoreau the price of the fine, which was politely declined.

The people involved were not confused, it appears, with the circumstances. I don’t know that Thoreau understood this consciously, but he acted as if he knew every blessed one of us is complicit in the good and ill of life. And so he engaged everyone with respect. Apparently.

It strikes me that in this world of confusion, where we must make choices and take stands, never with certain knowledge that what we are doing is the right course, where this poor suffering beautiful world is in complete flux, and each individual within that passingness is precious: one needs always to be kind.

And kind or respectful or just gentlemanly, Thoreau and Staples met each other as individuals bound to each other.

And, I think, as much because of this intuition as for his “higher” principles expressed in that discourse, Thoreau’s position inspired others later such as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

One never knows the consequences of one’s actions.

It is probably wise to assume the other’s good will, until, of course something else is established beyond reasonable doubt. But even then one’s opponent is also very much one’s own self.

We are, after all, woven out of each other.

And, that appears to be the deeper principle in all this:

What is done to one, is done to all.

Act with this in mind, and probably, one will do a bit more good in this world than harm.

Two cents on a Thursday morning…