Monday, March 18, 2013

Disobedient Patriotism: Hawthorne's "The Blithesdale Romance" and Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience"


"The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one's self a fool. 
The truest heroism is to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom to know when it ought to be resisted and when obeyed."
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance

Laws are good only insofar as they are in agreement with justice as a whole. Problems arise when lawmakers attempt to reverse this order: to mold justice in their own image rather than allowing justice to define their laws. When these laws no longer align with justice they cease to be valid and citizens are no longer subordinate to them.

The United States’ Declaration of Independence says that when the government usurps basic human rights and acts unjustly, “It is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government….” Thoreau draws on the same principle when he asks for “not at once no government, but at once better government.” 

In his famous essay "On the Resistance to Civil Government" (known also as "Civil Disobedience"), Thoreau points out two forms of corruption within the American government which are  hypocritical in context of the Declaration: Slavery and Conformity.

Slavery’s contradiction is obvious: it opposes the Declaration’s assertion that, “All men are created equal.”  Conformity may be less obvious, but no less hypocritical, as it forces people to go against their consciences in favor of obeying corrupt laws. In Thoreau’s time, people who believed slavery was wrong still did not speak out against it because slavery was a legal institution. 

Although in some ways this essay could be interpreted as anti-American, I don’t think that was Thoreau’s intention. Rather, Thoreau was being patriotic in encouraging every American to live according to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, even if the founding fathers themselves did not.

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