Modern Disobedience

“…You must feel! It’s beautiful to feel!"
—Gregory Corso, Marriage

What qualifies as disobedience to unjust authority in our era?

What does that disobedience mean?

We have an image in the mind of holding up signs at a protest. That’s not nothing but it doesn’t feel like so much either in these times. There are tweets, posts, messages, shares, an array of words endlessly billowed into the ether, the post-industrial haze that settles like a fog on the modern mind. There is television, talking headpiece of sense and nonsense, punctuated by interminably irrelevant advertising. If I write this message & send it into the digisphere, does this qualify as meaningful disobedience? As resistance to plutocratic power or injustice?

Increasingly, I think not. What qualifies as resistance is not the sending of messages, it’s the mode of life from which resistance springs naturally, humanely. It’s the autocthonic spirit that arises in each of us individually and many of us concurrently. Traveling the quiet desert on my bike, a jack rabbit darts across my path, small white tail like a cotton puff shown to blue sky above. A political consultant posts a photo of himself and a friend, smiling at a ballgame. I can’t remember what he said but still picture him in a team jersey, smiling. A friend from Iran spends hours listening to news of an attack on a prison, a prison where they held dissidents, and her look of disgust at all humanity. These are moments in which I feel resistance. They spring from active life, from watching the world that surrounds us.

Increasingly, I turn off the television.
Increasingly, I go to the desert.
Increasingly, I read novels, poets, the best writing of sages.

We are heirs to incredible traditions of feeling and wisdom. From the Song of Songs to the Upanishads, from Buddhist koans to the Passion. Increasingly, seeking out these voices seems like resistance. Television wants to tell us both how to live and what to believe. Television wants consumers over people, followers over wisdom, images of satisfaction over happiness. Television insists on the simulacra of happiness, the satisfied consumer, pleased with products. As the society gets angrier and angrier, as people become more and more alienated. We are told what should feel, whether we feel that way or not. If we can’t be satisfied with their images of happiness, we’re told, there must be something individually wrong with us. Try this pill, this ointment, this investment advisor. They know you have nothing to invest but the advice is insistent, aggressive, dominating. I started this out how we’re heirs to great traditions of peace and wisdom. Where did they go? They are subsumed in the noise of junk culture. Listening to the fine traditions of mankind makes up modern disobedience.

We are as long ways from Civil Disobedience, two centuries in fact. It’s still good reading, but the two nights Thoreau spent in jail for refusing to pay taxes seem— quaint. They share this quaint quality, I feel increasingly, with standing on the street holding a sign. We live after Auschwitz. But reading, thinking, silencing the voices of noise and aggression and coercion. This we can do. Finding out what you feel about the way we live. This we can do. Listening and acting from that feeling, human place within. This we can do. This feels like meaningful resistance.

We are alienated from the production society that surrounds us. It assaults that which is best inside us. We all feel it to be true. It’s the central truth of art, literature, and thought for at least two hundred years. It has gotten bad, very bad, and from this springs indifference and cruelty—to people and the natural places we live. I is an other, the young poet said, said so long ago. We become alienated from our feeling selves, from our identity and being.

But they can be found. Do not accept the simulacra of happiness, the culture’s message of identity. Tune these messages out. Nature, music poetry, great novels are there for us all. For us each. Find, listen, and act from that feeling place within, from the identity that makes us each uniquely human yet which we all share.

This is modern disobedience.