To Be Disobedient

To Be Disobedient

From my perspective, Wilde's claim can be broken up into 2 major sections. 

The first part of Wilde's claim is that disobedience is a valuable human trait, which I heavily agree with. Obviously disobedience is a human trait, else people wouldn't have the feeling to disobey or rebel against something, it would imply that the emotion I've personally felt while disobeying something didn't exist, which can't be true because how else would I have felt that emotion then.

And saying that disobedience is valuable is also something I would certainly agree with, since all emotions or traits are valuable and have importance to being human. Human emotions and traits are what make us human, so all emotions and traits must be valuable in some quantity because they contribute to our humanity. As such, I heavily agree with Wilde's claim that disobedience is a human trait.

The second part of his claim is where the real point of Wilde's claim lies, and is also the more contentious section that I question more compared to the first. Wilde's second section of his claim is that disobedience as a valuable human trait promotes social progress. I think that the crux of the debate surrounding this second part of the claim comes down to what people consider "social progress". 

On the one hand, there are numerous instances where disobeying the norm and rebelling caused social progress, like when Gandhi rebelled against the British powers controlling India, and through his act of disobedience, freed the society of India and allowed for India to not be limited by Britain and to start improving society much faster, rapidly increasing the amount of social progress. Major commonly accepted scientific ideals today, like gravity, evolution, the Sun being the center of the solar system, and Einstein's theory of relativity, etc. were all contested during their times and were consider rebellious and disobedient scientific theories at the time, however they're now almost entirely confirmed as fact today and widely accepted and have contributed to social progress in science in numerous ways. 

However, there's a flipside to this argument. Disobeying the rules can also result in terrible things that don't contribute to social progress at all, like how murdering people is disobeying the law to not commit acts of manslaughter, and doesn't contribute to or further social progress in anyway. In fact, killing someone can sometimes undo social progress, like how recently in France, the murder of a single person has caused widespread riots and protests, which has resulted in more violence, destruction, and less unity among the French populace. None of those aforementioned things actually cause social progress, and can actually undo social progress by destroying things like food, shelter, and the trust between people that causes something to become a society, destroying and undoing potential social progress by creating new problems that had already been fixed before the disobedience happened.

Now, I mentioned above that the controversy over Wilde's claim comes down to what people define as "social progress", but what do I mean by that? 

Well, "social progress" comes down to whatever someone views as best for society and as a progression that furthers society. For example, the scientific ideals brought up before are considered to have caused social progress and increased social understanding by most people, but for someone who believes the scientific ideals that existed before these new scientific ideals were thought up, these new scientific theorems are undoing social progress that the previous scientific theorems were causing and are actually making people less understanding and are undoing social understanding by making people dumber. The same is true for the riots in France brought up above, while many consider these riots to be undoing social progress by causing problems and issues like violence and destruction, for someone who actually hated French society before these riots occurred, these riots are actually causing social progress by undoing and destroying the previous social system that didn't work and was failing, and are causing social progress by undoing a society that wasn't causing social progress at all.

One of the best examples of this can be found during the Cold War. During the Cold War, people in America considered capitalism to be the system that caused social progress, and any countries that adopted the social system of communism were actually undoing global social progress by adopting a society with a system that didn't cause social progress like capitalism would. But the same is true for people in the Soviet Union, since they considered communism to be the system that caused social progress, and any countries that adopted the social system of capitalism were actually undoing global social progress by adopting a society with a system that didn't cause social progress like communism would. 

What people consider social progress comes down to what they consider to further society and what, in their opinion, benefits society. Depending on the perspective of a person, an event could either be causing social progress or undoing social progress because depending on what view of society the person has and what type of society they want, the event could either be contributing to that view and the type of society they want, or doing the opposite and hurting the type of society they want.

In the end, the idea of "social progress" at the end of this essay comes down to the same thing that the idea of "disobedience" came down to at the start of this essay; human emotion.