Inaction is action. The refusal to take a stand is a stand. The suspension of judgment is a judgment. While I’ve already written about how this principle applies to philosophical skepticism (Doubting Skepticism), a far more pervasive form of the refusal of its recognition exists in the realm of politics, where “neutrality” is seen as somehow less of a viewpoint than taking a clear stance.
I do not intend what follows as primarily a critique of individual actors who don’t take an interest in politics – I generally try to stay away from responsibilization since the concept does not fit with my determinism about free will and my view of the pervasiveness of social and political structures (Blame Machine; An Argument Against Free Will). Instead, the text is an attempt to clear up what I see as widespread confusion about notions like politics, apoliticism, bias, neutrality, and choice. More directly, even if you don’t take an interest in politics, politics takes an interest in you – the desire to stand aside from all politics, therefore, aims at an unattainable object.
Apoliticism and political neutrality nevertheless constitute a strong rhetorical device. To explore how it functions, I’m proposing a taxonomy that recognizes three forms of fictional apoliticism: (1) neutrality-by-intensity, (2) neutrality-by-balance, and (3) neutrality-by-disinterest.
Let’s begin with the former. One source of political confusion is the unjustifiably restricted view of the domain of politics that is now part of common sense. Matters deemed too extreme are treated as no longer “political”, but “ethical” or “human”. Many have a general tendency to draw a sharp line between politics and ethics, between political matters and individual ones, between matters of the state and matters of “basic human rights” – as if the latter is somehow part of a larger, more serious, more severe domain. This is what I’m calling neutrality-by-intensity. This view was not always widespread, evidenced by the fact that Aristotle begins his investigation of ethics with the recognition that the study of what’s good for us belongs to the realm of politics:
[…] we observe that even the most highly esteemed of the faculties, such as strategy, domestic economy, oratory, are subordinate to the political science. Inasmuch then as the rest of the sciences are employed by this one, and as it moreover lays down laws as to what people shall do and what things they shall refrain from doing, the end of this science must include the ends of all the others. Therefore, the Good of man must be the end of the science of Politics. […]
This then being its aim, our investigation is in a sense the study of Politics. (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1094a-1094b)
We don’t need to rely on Aristotle’s authority to see the strength of the argument above, which is as valid and sound today as it was when first written. And if all this seems clear to us now, how is it that people often view some matters as apolitical when they are seen as too intense? This is where the rhetoric of “humanity” begins to function.
In political discourse, words like “humanity”, “human”, and “humane” are primarily used as rhetorical devices to justify the unjustifiable. When a political action is veiled in humaneness, all opposition to it becomes nonhuman. When an issue is placed in the domain of, for example, “basic human rights” or “basic human dignity”, the discourse around it paints the issue in colors of supposed apoliticism. This was clearly seen by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and then expanded on by Carl Schmitt:
Here one is reminded of a somewhat modified expression of Proudhon’s: whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat. To confiscate the word humanity, to invoke and monopolize such a term probably has certain incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity; and a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity. (Schmitt, 2008, p. 54)
A parallel issue – one that strengthens this tendency towards the separation of political and ethical concerns – is the abstract language we use in political discourse. This is why Lenin’s question – who, whom? – is a useful counter to depersonalized political language.
As I’ve already discussed elsewhere (For Whom?), the impersonal statements we make about politics can be cut through by making them more concrete. Abstract political statements should be turned into statements about specific people doing specific things to specific others. This shows the intense nature of the political realm:
The sign in the Underground that reads, “Non-payment of fare will be punished” means that a policeman may arrest and fine you, if you fail to buy a ticket; “Unemployment has risen by x percent” means that certain people who have control of particular economic organisations have done something concrete, terminated the employment, of certain other people. (Geuss, 2008. p. 23)
So, some often claim that an issue is no longer political when it crosses a certain arbitrary threshold of ethical intensity, but no such threshold exists or has ever existed. My argument is that, from its inception, politics was never an amoral or impersonal field – whatever may be thought of as “no longer a matter of politics, but of basic human dignity” is political to its core, and any claim to the contrary is only rhetoric.
Neutrality-by-intensity seems to me like the rarest device from our taxonomy, and what I’ve already said about it should be sufficient to dispel its apparent truth value. Now let us move to a more pervasive form of apoliticism: neutrality-by-balance.
The idea that refraining from action due to insufficient knowledge or insufficient conviction is an apolitical or neutral act is buried deep in our collective political unconscious. So, let’s begin by reflecting on the nature of choice and then move on to a concrete example.
A choice can be thought of as a closing-off of potentialities. Leaving aside the question of determinism, an action is something which, from an infinity of possible futures, actualizes one of them. This is as true of staying idle as it is of moving around. And as soon as a thought about an issue enters one’s mind, no action can be neutral. After all, “thoughts are actions” (Nietzsche, 2003, p. 55), and “thinking is itself a form of behavior” (Adorno, 2000, p. 12).
Furthermore, not only is apparent “inaction” itself an act, but very clearly an action that arises from and reinforces hegemonic common sense – the “folklore” of popular philosophy (Gramsci, 1992, p. 419). In other words, not trying to stop a train from running people over when the button that would stop the train is right in front of you is not a neutral and balanced approach to the situation – one alternative is to stop the train, the other is to not do so. Standing apart from the situation is no longer an option. The same can be said of, to take a more relevant example, attending a protest.
It seems obvious to most that not attending a protest is an “apolitical” or “neutral” act. But the issue is not unlike the example of the train: not attending a protest is as much a political act as attending it – given that one is aware that a protest is taking place. Awareness is what turns the situation into a binding one.
When Antigone has to either obey Creon’s orders and not bury her brother Polynices, thereby violating the laws of the family and the dead, or bury him, thereby violating the laws of the state, she has no third option of passively standing apart from the dilemma – that would be the equivalent of the first option (Sophocles, 1994, pp. 137-187). Inescapability is the defining characteristic of a dilemma and one which applies to virtually all political choices. So when faced with such a problem, the choice to stand apart, to stay passive, is no longer a neutral one – but a vote in favor of whatever that inaction would result in.
We’ve seen that something cannot be made apolitical by intensification or passivity, but what about neutrality-by-disinterest? Isn’t not caring a guarantee of genuine apoliticism? There are several situations in which this can be the case, but they’re hard or even impossible to imagine for most who consciously apply the label of apoliticism to themselves. In such cases, supposed neutrality is similar to genuine nihilism, and the similarity is illustrated by the following (possibly fictional) story about the German philosopher Max Scheler.
A student entered Scheler’s office and proclaimed that he was a nihilist. Scheler opened his drawer, took out a pistol, and gave it to the student, saying: “prove it to me”. The student, shocked, left the office without a reply.
What the story points to is that, no matter what the self-proclaimed nihilist says, any of their actions prove that they really aren’t a nihilist – that they really have values. People who genuinely have no values are fictional. Anyone who claims that they see no value in anything did think that saying that was more valuable than not saying it.
And yet the lighting up of an eye, indeed the feeble tail-wagging of a dog one gave a tidbit it promptly forgets, would make the ideal of nothingness evaporate. (Adorno, 2004, p. 380)
The similarity between self-proclaimed nihilists and self-proclaimed neutral centrists is that these proclamations break down after sufficient reflection. As the nihilist’s actions prove the existence of their values, so do the actions of those who “don’t care about politics”. So, what Sartre thinks of as a criterionless choice doesn’t arise for the average self (Sartre, 2007). That self is already embedded in a context that has already provided the criteria. Nevertheless, there are two cases in which someone could be genuinely apolitical: (1) lack of information and (2) lack of context.
In the first case, if one truly lacks information – which is rarely true of self-proclaimed neutral centrists – one could be said to be neutral. For example, non-human animals and human children are genuinely apolitical. As soon as the child possesses information about a particular issue, neutrality is no longer an option, strictly speaking.
In the second case, by lack of context, I mean that a person can be in a situation that makes political expression impossible. St. Augustine illustrated this in one of his letters better than I can:
No wild beast is called tame merely because it has neither
teeth nor claws, and does not hurt anyone. You say you do
not wish to act cruelly; I think you are not able. (Augustine, 1953, p. 67)
So, political neutrality and apoliticism are almost always fictional. These things are considered virtues, but they shouldn’t be – their value does not exceed that of conformity since, in most contexts, they’re equivalent. In sharp contrast, what should be considered a virtue is the opposite of heedlessness – the courage not to close one’s eyes in the face of horror. As Adorno put it:
The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass. (Adorno, 2005, p. 43)
References
- Adorno, T. W. (2000). Problems of Moral Philosophy. Polity Press.
- Adorno, T. W. (2004). Negative Dialectics. Routledge.
- Adorno, T. W. (2005). Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. Verso.
- Aristotle. (1926). Nicomachean Ethics. Harvard University Press.
- Augustine. (1953). Letters, Volume 2 (83–130) (The Fathers of the Church, Volume 18). Catholic University of America Press.
- Geuss, R. (2008). Philosophy and Real Politics. Princeton University Press.
- Gramsci, A. (1992). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. International Publishers.
- Nietzsche, F. (2003). Nietzsche: Writings from the Late Notebooks. Cambridge University Press.
- Sartre, J.-P. (2007). Existentialism Is a Humanism. Yale University Press.
- Schmitt, C. (2008). The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition. University of Chicago Press.
- Sophocles. (1994). The Theban Plays. Everyman’s Library.
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