The Indian Focus

CIVIL OBEDIENCE obligatorily relates to Justice. Civil obedience is mandatory when the laws are just. However, civil obedience is not mandatory when laws are unjust. In fact, civil disobedience is obligatory when laws are unjust. The officers and judges during Hitler's reign might have argued that they were obeying their laws; however, since those laws were not just; therefore, they were guilty of crimes against humanity. Similarly, we find civil disobedience in the Bible when Shadrach, Meshech, and Abednego refused to bow before the golden image (Dan. 3:14-16), when Daniel opened the windows and openly prayed in defiance to a law prohibiting the same (Daniel 6:10), and when the Apostles refused the authorities' command to stop preaching the Gospel.
The Formula:

• Law+Justice+Obedience = Peace & Order
• Law-Justice+Obedience = Crime & Destruction
• Law+Justice+Disobedience = Anarchy
• Law-Justice+Disobedience  = Resistance

Evidently, the state of civil disobedience is a state of unrest and struggle. There can only be peace when the laws are just and people obey just laws. However, civil disobedience to unjust laws certainly signifies peace within the heart, where resolve submits to conscience. (Rom.2:15) When, from the fountain of a pure conscience, just actions follow, peace prevails within, and peace flows without.

Great peace have they who love your law, and nothing can make them stumble. (Psa 119:165 NIV)

However, when the heart is allowed to be hardened in compliance to godless authority and laws, judgment comes (2Chr. 36:14-16).

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Some Quotes

“One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

"Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state has become lawless or corrupt."
― Mahatma Gandhi

"Civil disobedience is the assertion of a right which law should give but which it denies...Civil disobedience presupposes willing obedience of our self-imposed rules, and without it civil disobedience would be cruel joke....Civil disobedience means capacity for unlimited suffering without the intoxicating excitement of killing....Disobedience to be civil has to be open and nonviolent....Disobedience to be civil implies discipline, thought, care, attention...Disobedience that is wholly civil should never provoke retaliation....Non-cooperation and civil disobedience are different but [are] branches of the same tree call Satyagraha (truth-force)...."
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Colorful demonstrations and weekend marches are vital but alone are not powerful enough to stop wars. Wars will be stopped only when soldiers refuse to fight, when workers refuse to load weapons onto ships and aircraft, when people boycott the economic outposts of Empire that are strung across the globe. ”
― Arundhati Roy, Public Power in the Age of Empire

“If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law”
― Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

“I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.

About four decades ago, the American theologian Harvey Cox, had already defined secularization as an inevitable process.[1] Almost a decade prior to that, Bryan Wilson, in his book Religion in Secular Society (1966) had considered it to be irreversible.[2] However, history has a different tale to say. The scepter of philosophy is hard to cast away. Somewhere or the other it holds its reins and pulls history on. In the 1920s a small group of scientists, mathematicians, sociologists, and economists, (not philosophers) had gathered together in Vienna to develop a unified philosophy that embraced science and attempted to destroy philosophy.[3] Their new philosophy came to be known as Logical Positivism. It, of course, suffered a natural death soon. But, what the empiricists then did not realize was that philosophy may be philosophically denied but not scientifically annihilated. In less than a decade, the world saw the angry reins of philosophies on the chariots of the nations as political philosophies collided, clashed, and combatted with weapons that science had produced to shock humanity with the Second World War. There had to be some other stronger ideology that had to deal with the issue of justice corrupted by corrupt philosophies such as Nazism that tried to base themselves on the evolutionary model provided by the scientific community. The Nuremberg Trial tried Judges who had committed the crime of obeying the unjust laws of their own regime. Some legal philosophy, and not science, had to decide the question of right or wrong during these trials. The definitions and directions were laid down in the London Charter of the International Military Tribunal.[4] The Trial, of course, was subject to much criticism; however, it did open a new chapter in legal history when it defined justice not merely as a domestic political affair but in relation to the notion of natural human rights; thus, the head of a state can’t just merely dictate any law under the pretense of positive lawmaking; he was accountable now to the international community. This also entailed individual responsibility of any person whosoever, irrespective of the laws prescribed by a particular nation. Thus, the ILC’s Draft Code of Crimes against the Peace and Security of Mankind declared in Article 2(1):[5]

A crime against the peace and security of mankind entails individual responsibility,

Article 3 continues:

An individual who is responsible for a crime against the peace and security of mankind shall be liable to punishment . . .

A deeper probe would question the basis of such a law that claimed superior and absolute status above all laws and demanded conformity to it. From the scientific perspective, didn’t the principle of struggle for existence and survival of the fittest look quite natural? In that sense, wasn’t Nazism quite close to nature? But, what science defined to be a principle of nature and what philosophy recognized to be just and right were two different things. The very reversal of the evolutionary natural principle is uplifted as the virtue of greatness: viz., benevolence and compassion. However, only a philosophically valid method can determine if a philosophical contention is tenable.

The above elaboration was essential as there is a tendency among educators to neglect the primary things altogether and focus on more tangible areas that cater tangible results only. However, the age long scheme cannot be broken so easily. The practical man can’t go on for long without the theoretical man; and, there certainly will come a point when the practical man will have to turn to the theoretical man. The British thinker G. K. Chesterton, over a century ago, had dedicated a whole chapter to this issue in his book What’s Wrong With the World (1910). He called it, “Wanted: An Unpractical Man”. One can’t talk of politics without considering the philosophical roots. Chesterton’s observation is appropriate:

Now our modern politics are full of a noisy forgetfulness; forgetfulness that the production of this happy and conscious life is after all the aim of all complexities and compromises. We talk of nothing but useful men and working institutions; that is, we only think of the chickens as things that will lay more eggs. Instead of seeking to breed our ideal bird, the eagle of Zeus or the Swan of Avon, or whatever we happen to want, we talk entirely in terms of the process and the embryo. The process itself, divorced from its divine object, becomes doubtful and even morbid; poison enters the embryo of everything; and our politics are rotten eggs.