In the series organized by Michel DeGraff entitled Language & Linguistics in Decolonization and Liberation Struggles in Haiti, Palestine, and Israel, earlier announced here:
Speaker: David Beaver (University of Texas at Austin)
Title: “Neutrality helps the oppressor”: how accommodation can become complicity with a radical agenda
Time: September 18, noon-2pm
Location: Room E51-095
Abstract:
In this election season, amid bloody global conflicts and the existential threat of climate change, we are all called upon to take sides. Let us say that public discourse is polarized if large subsets of society are unable to recognize the legitimacy of the perspectives embodied by other people’s speech. Then today we find ourselves in an extreme situation. We are witness both to polarization, in which groups diverge from each other, and to asymmetric polarization, in which one group (say a group centered on conspiracy theories) diverges rapidly from prior norms. And despite that chaos, we find some who claim, self-righteously, not to have taken sides, to be, in some sense, above the fray. I think here not only of Fox News’ preposterous claim to be “fair and balanced”, but also of the NYT publisher Arthur Sulzberger’s recent assertion that he, and hence his newspaper, has “no interest in wading into politics.”
Elie Wiesel began his Nobel prize address, from which my title quotation is drawn, imagining a conversation with the child he had been, a child sucked into the bewildering terror of the holocaust. Here is a little more of the famous quote:
And then I explained to him how naive we were, that the world did know and remained silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.
Wiesel can be read as suggesting that neutrality is not merely ill-advised, but impossible: everything we say reflects affinities and disaffinities with the groups who surround us, and even the silent implicitly take sides. Building on my recent book “The Politics of Language”, with Jason Stanley, I will explore the idea that there can be no true neutrality. The thought here is that language, far from being neutral, inevitably reflects social affinities and associated ideologies. On this view, supposing one’s speech to be neutral is not evidence of objectivity, but of failure to recognize the legitimacy of other perspectives. The archetype here is not national media, for which few people take the claim of neutrality seriously, but bureaucratic language, supposedly neutral speech which can be the ultimate tool of an autocratic oppressor, or of any large organization that has no direct interest in the well-being of those it interacts with. I will consider the processes that lead to extremes of speech and ideology, whether extremes to the left, extremes to the right, or, incongruously oxymoronic though the phrase may seem, extremes of neutrality.