Your Personal Revolution

So what do you have to do to be the exemplar and sow the seeds?

Accept responsibility and act responsibly.
Build yourself a glass house and start throwing stones.

Accept Responsibility and Act Responsibly

Most political action amounts to “who can we find to take responsibility for this problem”. The personal revolutionary asks “what is my responsibility?”

Not that everything is your responsibility, or that the world is looking to you to solve all of its problems. But you should at the very least examine your life to see which problems or solutions you are contributing to. Can one person make a difference? You are already making a difference—the real question is: what kind of difference are you making? As Thoreau put it:

It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him, but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support. If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man’s shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too.…

A man has not every thing to do, but something; and because he cannot do every thing, it is not necessary that he should do something wrong.

In Thoreau’s time, the evils of slavery and of wars of conquest were sustained by the active allegiance and support of ordinary people around him, many of whom nonetheless congratulated themselves for their anti-war, anti-slavery opinions. So he did not address his protest to the government, but to his neighbors:

I quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home, cooperate with, and do the bidding of those far away, and without whom the latter would be harmless.…

I have heard some of my townsmen say, “I should like to have them order me out to help put down an insurrection of the slaves, or to march to Mexico,—see if I would go;” and yet these very men have each, directly by their allegiance, and so indirectly, at least, by their money, furnished a substitute. The soldier is applauded who refuses to serve in an unjust war by those who do not refuse to sustain the unjust government which makes the war.…

Those who, while they disapprove of the character and measures of a government, yield to it their allegiance and support, are undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters, and so frequently the most serious obstacles to reform. Some are petitioning the State to dissolve the Union, to disregard the requisitions of the President. Why do they not dissolve it themselves,—the union between themselves and the State,—and refuse to pay their quota into its treasury?…

If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that because the personal revolution is in your heart that it can just stay there, locked up inside, without leaking out into the world around you:

As to conforming outwardly, and living your own life inwardly, I have not a very high opinion of that course. Do not let your right hand know what your left hand does in that line of business. I have no doubt it will prove a failure.

The personal revolution doesn’t necessarily require living in opposition to society and the status quo, but it does require holding fast to justice and virtue. When society and the status quo try to put you in opposition to justice and virtue, as they so often do, this puts them in opposition to you as well, and you to them.

Build Yourself a Glass House and Start Throwing Stones

Your friends and even your enemies will come to your aid when you hold yourself to a high standard. All you have to do is to make yourself vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy. People love to point out hypocritical moralists, in part because some hypocritical moralists are hilarious, but also in part because it helps people excuse their own failure to hold themselves to a high standard. If you build yourself a glass house and throw stones from it, everyone will volunteer to keep you on the straight-and-narrow.

Hennacy:

I have… put myself in a glass house. If so I must needs take whatever stones come my way. I have the right by my life of integrity to criticize, but I must also take whatever criticism comes my way in all good humor.…

[A] spoiled and arrogant priest wanted to know if I was “holier than thou.” I told him I hoped by Christ I was, for if I wasn’t I would be in a hell of a fix. I used this blunt method to deflate his spurious piety.

At times those who do not want to have their inconsistencies pointed out say in a super-sweet voice to me “judge not, lest ye be judged.” I reply, “O.K., judge me, then.”

When your standards for yourself rise, so do your standards for other people (otherwise you really are being arrogant). Thoreau, criticized for demanding too much from people, said he could not “convince myself that I have any right to be satisfied with men as they are, and to treat them accordingly, and not according, in some respects, to my requisitions and expectations of what they and I ought to be.”

While both Thoreau and Hennacy strike me as having been stern with others, and maybe not always fun to be around (as Hennacy said: “I love my enemies but am hell on my friends”), they were anything but joyless. Thoreau’s vigorous, enthusiastic love of life is legendary, and Hennacy’s character too was eager, life-affirming, and generous (even in its criticisms).

Utah Phillips came home from the Korean war a drunken brawler. He checked in to Hennacy’s Catholic Worker hospitality house in Salt Lake City, and eight years later checked out again—sober, a pacifist, and an anarchist. He remembered Hennacy this way:

He was tough without being hard—tough without that brittle hardness that some tough men have that would shatter if you struck it too hard. “Love in Action,” Dorothy Day called him—Dostoyevsky’s words: “Love in action is harsh and dreadful compared to love in dreams.”

Neither Thoreau nor Hennacy had any tolerance for bliss-bunnyishness, but both were cheerful; both knew how to be dutiful without being dour. Thoreau:

To march sturdily through life, patiently and resolutely looking grim defiance at one’s foes, that is one way; but we cannot help being more attracted by that kind of heroism which relaxes its brows in the presence of danger, and does not need to maintain itself strictly, but, by a kind of sympathy with the universe, generously adorns the scene and the occasion, and loves valor so well that itself would be the defeated party only to behold it; which is as serene and as well pleased with the issue as the heavens which look down upon the field of battle. It is but a lower height of heroism when the hero wears a sour face.…

A great cheerfulness indeed have all great wits and heroes possessed, almost a profane levity to such as understood them not, but their religion had the broader basis of health and permanence. For the hero, too, has his religion, though it is the very opposite to that of the ascetic. It demands not a narrower cell but a wider world.

Notes and Citations

Thoreau, H.D. “Resistance to Civil Government”
Thoreau, H.D., undated journal entry (~1850), from The Price of Freedom (2008) p. 43
Hennacy, Ammon “Questions and Answers” The Book of Ammon (1970) p. 399
Hennacy, Ammon “I Love My Enemies, But Am Hell on My Friends” The Book of Ammon (1970) p. 205
The Dostoyevsky quote comes from The Brothers Karamazov, where it is delivered by a saintly monk named Zossima. He is talking with a woman who is going through a spiritual crisis, and who has fantasized about going into a religious order and becoming a kissing-the-wounds-of-lepers sort of do-gooder. Zossima says that such things are nice thoughts to have because “some time, unawares, you may do a good deed in reality,” but they’re just daydreams of saintliness, not the real thing.

If you do not attain happiness, always remember that you are on the right road, and try not to leave it. Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute. Avoid being scornful, both to others and to yourself. What seems to you bad within you will grow purer from the very fact of your observing it in yourself. Avoid fear, too, though fear is only the consequence of every sort of falsehood. Never be frightened at your own faint-heartedness in attaining love. Don’t be frightened overmuch even at your evil actions. I am sorry I can say nothing more consoling to you, for love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on the stage. But active love is labour and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science.
Thoreau, H.D. “Sir Walter Raleigh”