Abstract
How are individuals and groups of people in extraterrestrial settlements to rebel against edicts, laws and even governments with which they disagree? The instantaneously lethal conditions in outer space make violent disobedience undesirable because of the potentially catastrophic consequences of the destruction of infrastructure. There are approaches, such as a free press and open political deliberations, that may discourage people from engaging in violent disobedience by providing them with effective channels for dissent. Furthermore, habitats can be engineered to mitigate catastrophic effects of violent disobedience should it occur. Additionally, there are various mechanisms of non-violent civil disobedience that could be used by a population to register dissent. By overtly recognising the need for mechanisms of civil disobedience within rules, dissent may have a chance of being included in productive political discussion.
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- 1.
The history of civil disobedience is a rich one and long before this phrase was coined it was considered under other phrases such as the ‘right to resistance’. The concept that bad government should be overthrown was elaborated by Locke (1988), but others before and after him also explored the ideas of active resistance to bad laws and governments. This history is nicely summarised by Laudani (2013, pp. 9–31).
- 2.
Civil disobedience is, it should be recognised, possibly the first step in trying to reverse policies or dictates. As Zinn (2013, p. 16) points out, ‘an act of civil disobedience, like any move towards reform, is more like the first push up a hill’. It can in some ways be regarded as a pressure valve for allowing dissent before it gets out of hand. Zinn later states the following (Zinn 2013, p. 108): ‘That is exactly the point of civil disobedience, of a politics of protest—that it is an attempt to bring about revolutionary social changes without the enormous human toll of suicidal violence or total war, which often fall on a society unwilling to go outside accustomed channels.’ The point about suicidal violence has a particularly powerful resonance with the extraterrestrial case.
- 3.
The mere idea of encouraging it may be anathema to some people, but I take the view of Zinn (2013, p. 25): ‘Without those on the bottom acting out their desires for justice, as the government acts out its needs, and those with power and privilege act out theirs, the scales of democracy will be off. That is why civil disobedience is not just to be tolerated; if we are to have a truly democratic society, it is a necessity.’ He goes on to say (Zinn 2013, p. 29), echoing the precepts of revolution elaborated by John Locke, ‘when unjust decisions become the rule, then the government and its officials should be toppled’. The dangers of this in the extraterrestrial case, particularly when it leads to violence, I discuss in this essay. Nevertheless, the general idea that the denizens of extraterrestrial settlements should challenge their authorities and attempt to remove them when they are severely unjust seems valid.
- 4.
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It is in recognising this extremity that we derive the need to formulate means for civil disobedience. The problem is that the extremes of space encourage authorities to assert the idea that people must abide by the law to avoid certain destruction against the instantaneously lethal conditions. It is this tendency that civil disobedience must attempt to thwart.
- 6.
Cockell (2010, p. 21) states: ‘The combined effects of both the physically extreme environment and the culture it propagates, and the spatial isolation of people with respect to movement and new information, contribute quite simply to the culture of conformity.’
- 7.
Even in very democratic extraterrestrial systems where every effort is made to create open discourse and debate, there is still the pressure on leaders to be wary of changes that threaten the populations. As Cockell (2008, p. 263) observes: ‘In the confined societies of outer space, poor judgements by democratic leaders may more easily result in social disaster or death, making them more cautious, but also strengthening the power of the leaders of the oligarchy, by confirming that their experience endows them with better judgement.’ In referring to the ‘oligarchy’, Cockell means the unchanging network of officials that runs a society and maintains its day-to-day function.
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- 9.
Letter to Abigail Adams, February 22, 1787. He preceded this observation with the words: ‘The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all.’
- 10.
Rawls (1971) and others have been explicit in their view that violence is incompatible with civil disobedience. These views are generally based on the principle that violence is injurious to others and violence transgresses a basic fidelity to the law and the rule of law (even if civil disobedience involves non-violent breaking of laws, such as refusing to pay taxes). In the extraterrestrial case, the argument that violence is threatening and potentially injurious to others is augmented by the reality that violence may threaten the very survival of large numbers of people.
- 11.
For a more developed discussion on what violent disobedience is, a good discourse is to be found in Morreall (1976).
- 12.
It is easy to contrive general notions of disobedience that allow violence. Zinn makes the point (2013, p. 45): ‘Would not any reasonable code have to weigh the degree of violence used in any case against the importance of the issue at stake?’ The problem with this idea is actually creating a calculus that allows these different issues to be weighed. And what about the case where some limited violence against the extraterrestrial infrastructure unpredictably results in a spiral into much more serious violence that destroys oxygen-producing machinery? The problem in space is that violence could kill many, if not everyone, before anyone has a chance to curtail it.
- 13.
Mill’s idea of tyranny of custom has much in common with de Tocqueville’s (1998) ‘tyranny of the majority’. In extreme environments where even small errors of engineering or errant human behaviour could threaten many lives, the power of the consensus or majority view is sharpened. The tyranny of custom or the majority becomes intertwined with the very notion of survival and under these circumstances, at least to those living in the moment, the word ‘tyranny’ hardly seems appropriate. Indeed, as discussed elsewhere in this essay, the majority viewpoint or a custom based on prior experience may even be seen as a protector of liberty and the guarantor of survival against the lethal conditions of space.
- 14.
Cockell (2010) discusses the way in which a settlement can be physically engineered to enhance liberty, including modularisation. However, one should also be mindful of the possibility that such contrivances could work in directions not foreseen. For example, modularisation of habitats might create factions and groups antagonistic to one another. These antagonisms, if they find expression in the way in which the wider settlement affairs are to be managed, could in themselves lead to civil disobedience of one group against another. So although modularisation may provide an engineered safety against violent disobedience by allowing sections of a habitat to be sealed off, it may equally be the case that modularised habitats could enhance the very disagreements that encourage violent disobedience in the first place.
- 15.
Berlin (1988) provides a discussion of the separation between negative liberty (freedom from interference) and positive liberty (the capacity and freedom to do certain things). The recognition of the separation between these two types of liberty precedes Berlin (e.g. C. Bay, The Structure of Freedom, p. 57 and elaborated throughout M.J. Adler, The Idea of Freedom, Doubleday & Co., 1958). Insofar as the freedom to do a certain thing usually implies a lack of coercion against doing it (i.e. potential interference), then one can argue that there is no difference between positive and negative liberty, though Berlin’s distinction is nonetheless useful.
- 16.
Rawls (1971, p. 336) observed that disobedience really only works in democracies, and using the example of authority deriving from a ruler who sees themselves with divine authority, he says, ‘if the basic law is thought to reflect the order of nature and if the sovereign is held to govern by divine right as God’s chosen lieutenant, then his subjects have only the right of suppliants’. The problem in the extraterrestrial case is clear enough: if the extremity of the extraterrestrial environment is held up to be an irrefragable fact of nature to which everyone must be aligned, then the excuse to manage a settlement along basically dictatorial lines will destroy any possibility of disobedience.
- 17.
In this essay, I take a rather broad view of civil disobedience. The reader must understand that exactly what constitutes civil disobedience (as opposed to, for example, political disobedience, radical disobedience or a variety of other definitions and nuances discussed in the literature) is a wide discussion that merits an entire volume in itself. My concern here is not to engage in a general discussion on what civil disobedience is, but instead to focus on how the settlement of space may affect general conditions for disobedience. The sort of disobedience of which I speak includes disobedience against laws, but it may also include disobedience against private institutions or the state. In the extraterrestrial environment, particularly in space settlements in the early stages of exploration, there may be very little distinction between the state, committees, private institutions, law makers, etc., thus making the sorts of discursive investigations on what exactly civil disobedience is on Earth less important in the extraterrestrial case anyway. A good volume with which to examine the nature of civil disobedience in more detail is that by Milligan (2013).
- 18.
Bedau’s definition is broadly consistent with others who also see civil disobedience to be about changing the behaviour of existing government decisions. Rawls (1971, p. 364) for example, defines civil disobedience as ‘a public, nonviolent, conscientious yet political act contrary to law usually done with the aim of bringing about a change in the law or policies of the government.’ Zinn defines it as ‘the deliberate, discriminate violation of law for a vital social purpose’.
- 19.
Singer (1973) elaborates on this view of disobedience and sees disobedience as a strength rather than a weakness of democracies since it provides a means for a minority to change what on the face of it are legitimate decisions taken by a majority through democratic procedures. The problem, as Singer recognises, is that majorities can make wrong decisions on things that do not matter to them, but are vitally important for a minority. Disobedience provides the means for a minority to register this strength of feeling.
- 20.
In examining the civil disobedience of Thoreau, Milligan (2013, p. 65) reminds us that ‘the state is nothing more than a political body which helps to get some important things done. Accordingly, we should not, out of any sense of loyalty to the state, accept instructions to engage in acts of injustice towards others.’
- 21.
In some terrestrial definitions, private institutions have been excluded, for example by Raz (1979, p. 264), but I suggest here that the extraterrestrial environment, which is likely to be opened up vigorously by private concerns who will exclusively run some outposts, has a particular possibility of generating privately enforced despotism and therefore civil disobedience against such institutions may be necessary.
- 22.
Persson (2015, p. 133) explores this entire problem and states that ‘Given the overarching aim for the corporation of making money for the shareholders, “free thinkers” and dissidents will not be of any interest to the company.’ He elaborates on the basic problem thus (Persson 2015, p. 132): ‘If the organisation that governs the settlement is the same as the corporation that supplies the life supporting services, it will create an extreme asymmetry in power between the rulers and the ruled that will make it very difficult for the settlers to claim any respect for their civil liberties.’ He suggests that there needs to be robust separation between those making the laws and those running the settlement.
- 23.
Thoreau (2010, p. 17) goes on to say, ‘What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.’
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- 25.
There is much disagreement on whether breaking the law is ever justified since it may foster a disregard for all laws. Certainly a general culture of lawbreaking is likely to erode social order, but as Zinn (2013, p. 12) points out, ‘… this is like arguing that children should be made to eat rotten fruit along with the good, lest they get the idea all fruit should be thrown away. Isn’t it likely that someone forced to eat the rotten fruit may because of that develop a distaste for all fruit.’ As he states earlier in his treatise (p. 19), ‘If the effect of civil disobedience is to break down in the public’s mind the totalitarian notion that laws are absolutely and always to be obeyed, then this is healthy for the growth of democracy.’ This may be particularly pertinent to the extraterrestrial case since extraterrestrial environments are prone to tyranny.
- 26.
This is a non-exhaustive list and the specifics of the opportunities offered to engage in civil disobedience will depend on how a settlement is run and what sorts of bureaucratic machinery and administration can be disrupted for the purpose of civil disobedience. This can ultimately only be known by those living on the frontier.
- 27.
Cockell (2010, p. 17) discusses the problem of the surveillance state in extraterrestrial settlements and later (Cockell 2015) elaborates on how the tendency for safety to degrade into an all-embracing culture of monitoring might be deliberately avoided when establishing extraterrestrial settlements.
- 28.
Assuming that there is a collective sense of responsibility to the settlement, it is not unrealistic that people would choose to self-regulate the extent to which they carry out disobedience. Rawls (1971, p. 374), in recognising that there is an upper limit of the ‘ability of the public forum to handle such forms of dissent’, avers that ‘The ideal solution from a theoretical point of view calls for a cooperative political alliance of the minorities to regulate the overall level of dissent […] what seems called for is a political understanding among the minorities suffering from injustice.’ These ideas seem idealistic, but if faced with instantaneous death from depressurisation and extreme isolation, it may not be unrealistic to expect the denizens of extraterrestrial settlements to cooperatively manage and exercise restraint in their use of disobedience.
- 29.
Milligan’s set of civility norms (Milligan 2013, p. 36) follows a tradition that includes the concepts of civility advanced by Gandhi. It broadly encompasses concerns such as good manners and polite demeanour. Although these concepts are notoriously difficult to pin down, they nevertheless provide some sort of cultural brake on excessive violence, and in the extraterrestrial case at least caution people to be ever mindful of the potential disastrous effects of violence unleashed on a small enclosed population in a lethal environment. Any such mechanisms that provide checkpoints on people’s behaviour, even if only vague cultural norms, must surely be a good thing.
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Cockell, C.S. (2016). Disobedience in Outer Space. In: Cockell, C. (eds) Dissent, Revolution and Liberty Beyond Earth. Space and Society. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29349-3_3
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