Civil disobedience is a civic duty
Civil disobedience is a civic duty. According to Iran Gate, Civil Disobedience means any overt and intentional illegal action aimed at drawing everyone’s attention to the illegitimacy or moral and rational incorrectness of certain laws.
The strategy of civil disobedience or non-compliance with the government was especially used by Mahatma Gandhi to gain India’s independence from the British Empire. Gandhi’s method was based on defying national laws, not paying taxes, refusing government positions, boycotting legislative elections, not cooperating with British officials, and boycotting British-made goods.
In passive resistance, the main emphasis is on the refusal to act and a kind of indifference, while civil disobedience has no meaning without action. The common aspect of these two forms of struggle is their peaceful nature. In passive resistance, this peace is achieved through refraining from action, while in civil disobedience, it is achieved through a kind of action.
Civil disobedience is also translated as public disobedience, which is not an accurate translation but contains a precise point: if civil disobedience is carried out by a few specific individuals and does not spread, it will be practically ineffective.
However, such a movement always has a starting point, and that starting point is the defiance of a few specific individuals against a law or laws that are not accepted by a significant portion of the people, but no one dares to defy them. The individual or individuals who start this defiance of the law may inspire others and lead them to violate laws that are deemed unjust by public opinion.
For example, on December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man and was consequently arrested and fined. She holds a special place in American history, and her protest against racial regulations is considered the symbolic starting point of the American civil rights movement.
Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat on a city bus to a white man and her subsequent arrest led to a widespread boycott of the public transportation network by African Americans and sparked broader protests. Rosa Parks was an activist in the American civil rights movement and was later recognized by the United States Congress as the mother of the freedom movement and the first lady of the civil rights movement.
Opponents of civil disobedience, even if they do not inherently believe in the law, insist on the necessity of lawfulness to delegitimize this strategy. However, such insistence is only justified when the law is changeable. A law that is not supposed to change in any way is not truly a law, because in the modern world, a law must be derived from the will of the people, and future generations in any nation can change the laws enacted by previous generations.
A law derived from the will of the people, even if it is not easily changed, has a clear path for change, and requesting its change is not considered a crime. For example, in the United States, laws regarding the legality of buying and selling firearms have shown great resilience based on the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which affirms the right of the people to keep and bear arms. However, requesting the repeal of these laws or holding protest gatherings for their repeal is not a crime, and fundamentally, changing these laws and also changing the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution is possible and does not fall into the realm of heresy or impossibility.
Furthermore, some opponents of civil disobedience try to provide a truly secular and rational basis for their opposition to violating a law by relying on a kind of Socratic lawfulness. That is, as long as a law has not been repealed by the government, which is the legislative, executive, and judicial system, it must be obeyed. For instance, Socrates, even though he considered the legal verdict against him unjust, did not accept the suggestion to escape from prison and submitted to the execution of the law.
However, proponents of civil disobedience defend just laws and recognize the right of citizens to object to unjust laws. Some even go further, arguing that a government that enacts unjust laws is itself criminal, and the behavior of those who violate such laws is wrongly called civil disobedience because their actions are aimed at justice and are therefore lawful.
This argument is based on a fundamental assumption that the law must be just, and an unjust law is not truly a law, and therefore violating it does not count as violating a true law. In the famous debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault about the nature of humanity, Chomsky supports such a view of the law and, on this basis, says that derailing a train in America carrying weapons and ammunition for the Vietnam War is only illegal from the perspective of the American government; otherwise, this action is inherently lawful because it is an action aimed at achieving justice.
From this perspective, the concept of civil disobedience dissolves, and actions and laws are divided into two categories: just or aimed at justice, and unjust or deviating from justice. Laws aimed at justice must be observed until further notice, but laws deviating from justice are not obligatory.
But how can one determine whether a law is aimed at justice or not? Chomsky’s answer is that humans have a nature and are not entirely the product of a specific society or historical period. Therefore, they can discern right and wrong and justice and injustice through their inherent rationality and understanding, and in understanding these concepts, they are not entirely subject to political propaganda or ideological productions of educational institutions aligned with the government.
From this perspective, Socrates had the right not to comply with the seemingly legal verdict against him because that verdict was unjust. In fact, Socrates and his students had the right to civil disobedience against the Athenian government, although from Chomsky’s point of view, such an action was not even civil disobedience and was merely an action aimed at justice.
Therefore, resorting to rigid Socratic lawfulness becomes ineffective with the introduction of the concept of justice and the necessity of aligning laws with justice. This point is important because civil disobedience often occurs when a broad social class, such as the people of India under British rule or African Americans in the United States, is fed up with the current situation, which is based on law, and evaluates the existing legal situation as completely unjust or oppressive.
Usually, in cases where there are minor or brief criticisms of a law or legal situation, civil disobedience does not take shape. The occurrence of such a phenomenon worldwide is the result of a sense of clear injustice and oppression, regardless of whether this feeling is right or wrong. However, historical experience shows that civil disobedience has been an action aimed at spreading justice.
Like the cases related to the people of India and African Americans that we mentioned. Also, in cases where the path to changing the law is not fundamentally blocked, or citizens can repeal a law through legal mechanisms, civil disobedience does not find necessity. The blockage or difficulty in changing the law usually leads dissatisfied social classes and forces to resort to civil disobedience.
