Disobedience takes practice

Or: The revolutionary potential of jaywalking

It’s the middle of the night, and you’re sitting at a red light. It’s a long light so you’ll be sitting there for another two minutes. You’ve got a clear view of all oncoming traffic — nothing in any direction. And you look up to see if there’s a camera next to the stoplight snapping pics of potential light-runners: again, nothing.

Why don’t you just go? You’re not endangering anybody, you’re not going to experience any negative repercussions for running a red light. What’s keeping you sitting there?

While you ponder that, let’s shift to another time and place: you’re in junior high school, and your class is doing a unit on the Holocaust. Your teacher explains that there were millions of people in Germany who didn’t commit war crimes, but who stood silently by while the Nazis murdered millions. These people are now known as bystanders, and history broadly views them as complicit in the Holocaust and the horrors of World War II. In interviews, they are defensive, arguing that there was nothing they could do, or perhaps that it wasn’t as bad as people say.

I wouldn’t be one of them, you say to your teenaged self. I wouldn’t obey just for the sake of obeying. I would’ve done something.

The light flicks to green, and you drive home.

Getting into the practice of disobedience

In 1990, the American anthropologist James C. Scott was living near Neubrandenburg, East Germany¹. The Berlin Wall had only just recently fallen — prior to that, the East Germans had spent four and a half decades living in a communist police state, and a dozen years before that living in a fascist police state.

At night, Scott would wait for his train back to the farm he was staying at, and he’d observe pedestrians at the crosswalk.

The lights were timed, I suppose, for vehicle traffic at midday and not adjusted for the heavy evening foot traffic. Again and again, fifty or sixty people waited patiently at the corner for the light to change in their favor: four minutes, five minutes, perhaps longer. It seemed an eternity.

…Twice, perhaps, in the course of the roughly five hours of my observing this scene did a pedestrian cross against the light, and then always to a chorus of scolding tongues and fingers wagging in disapproval.

Scott eventually decided to become one of the jaywalkers. “It surprised me,” he wrote, “how much I had to screw up my courage merely to cross a street against general disapproval.”

He rationalized his choice by preparing a little speech should anyone try to stop or berate him: it seemed that these Germans had perhaps spent a bit too much of their lives blindly obeying rules, and that if they really didn’t want to slip back into any brutal dictatorships, they should perhaps take up the practice of disobeying small laws that made no sense so that, one day, when a truly unjust law was forced upon them, they would find it easier to disobey that as well. He called this “Scott’s Law of Anarchist Calisthenics”:

Every day or so, break some trivial law that makes no sense, even if it’s only jaywalking. Use your head to judge whether a law is just or reasonable. That way, you’ll keep trim; and when the big day comes you’ll be ready.

Scott acknowledged that not all law-breaking was equal even in the case of jaywalking: once, in the Netherlands, he jaywalked and was chastised by a colleague, who suggested that he was setting a bad example for children on the sidewalk. Scott agreed, and amended his jaywalking rebellion to occur only at times when he was out of the sight of impressionable children who might not have noticed the safety precautions Scott undertook when crossing the street.

Becoming ungovernable

It’s worth going a bit further than Scott suggested — rather than just disobeying laws we find to be silly in the moment, we should also look into why those laws exist in the first place. The history of jaywalking was covered by Adam Conover in his fantastic show Adam Ruins Everything:

The short of it, if you don’t have time to watch, is that jaywalking as a crime was created by car companies who wanted to villainize pedestrians. Prior to cars, streets belonged to everyone regardless of the means of transport, and, when cars showed up, they were originally driven primarily by rich douchebags who liked to speed through the streets and often ended up hitting and killing people.

Public sentiment was very obviously against the rich douchebag car owners, but car companies wanted to flip this public perception, and instead argued that the people walking in the middle of the street were rubes, hicks, or, in the slang of the times, jays. Hence the term jaywalking. They ran a massive public relations campaign, planted articles in newspapers, and effectively turned the public against the idea that the streets are ours. Anti-jaywalking legislation followed, and now it’s a fundamental part of our unbelievably stupid and destructive car-based transportation culture. Our cities and towns are now fully designed for car ownership, which means massive amounts of urban sprawl, terrible walkability, and lower air quality.

Given the repercussions of this societal shift, it seems to me that the only thing wrong with Scott’s Law of Anarchist Calisthenics is that it classifies jaywalking as “trivial.” Disobedience to nonsense laws are vital, especially when the stakes for disobeying them are relatively low. In Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience,” he argues that “under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.” This is perhaps a bit further than most of us are willing to go: the prison’s of Thoreau’s times weren’t the exploitative, violent meat-grinder that they’ve become in modern America, so it was a little bit easier for him to follow his principles to their extremes.

But regardless of how far we are willing to go, Americans as a people could benefit from becoming a lot more independent-minded and ornery. If our “leaders,” after all, are not interested in following the laws that they don’t like, then it is certainly morally (if not legally) permissible for us to hold ourselves to the same standard.

1. This whole anecdote comes from the first chapter of Scott’s delightful book, Two Cheers for Anarchism, which argues that if we do not wish to become anarchists, we should at least learn to view the world through what he calls an “anarchist squint,” because anarchists have an ability to see power and its problems a lot more clearly than the other political ideologies do.

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