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The Courage of Neutrality (With feeling) |
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“The hottest places of hell are reserved for those who, in times of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.” – JFK, paraphrasing Dante.
And in that spirit, the world rushes madly to form sides and avoid being neutral.
This reaction is based on a fear of what I call passive neutrality: avoiding taking responsibility for one’s actions by taking no action. Or, staying out of a fight in the hopes that it will resolve itself. Passive neutrality has allowed great injustices to take place – the most famous being the Holocaust. Now good people take a firm moral stand on just about anything so that they will never allow injustice through inaction. A noble strategy indeed, with only one small flaw. In the process of taking sides, more injustices are committed than are permitted by neutrality. The Nazi party would never have gained public support for their atrocities in the first place if people were not so eager to take sides. Any side.
Mindlessly taking a position on morality will not solve the world’s problems. Active neutrality can.
The difference between active and passive neutrality is that an active neutral does not merely sit by while those who have chosen sides march past. Active neutrals respond to the world around them. But they do so without taking sides.
The greatest danger and the greatest lure of taking sides is that coming together for a cause magnifies emotions. This phenomenon has been well documented in everything from sports teams to terrorist cells. And it is a wonderful thing to feel the excitement of comradeship. But what if one of those emotions in the mix is hatred? People die. Because neutrals never come together against an enemy, they are relatively safe from the deadly magnification of hatred. Japanese internment camps would never have developed if active neutrality had been more prevalent in World War II.
Refraining from naming enemies allows active neutrals to practice love of enemy. And love of enemy ensures that we will never seek to harm others for personal gain merely because they are our enemies. This is absolutely vital, because even in the midst of evil there is good. Not all Germans were Nazis. And even in the Nazi party there were those who sympathized with the Jews and tried to lessen their suffering. Active neutrality can encompass the good in each side of the conflict. The only belief incompatible with active neutrality is that which actively seeks to attack other beliefs.
And when we take sides, we attack other beliefs as a matter of course. Sides-taking cuts off questioning. It is tempting to think that your group has all of the answers – and doubting the organization feels very close to attacking it. This is the philosophy that spawned the idea of ‘support the president in everything he does,’ an idea more suited to a dictatorship than a democracy. It is the philosophy of “Our country, right or wrong… if wrong, to pretend that it’s right.” Ignorance is only bliss until the consequences hit. And they are about to.
Americans are already noticing the way the country splits neatly into red and blue states. The distinction is largely artificial – surveys have shown that most of the country holds the same moral principles. Yet the democrat/republican polarity remains. And because questioning the party is taboo, no one really understands their arguments. Debates are deteriorating into who can make the point faster, not by clever argument, but by yelling out the party name and platform as quickly as possible. Possibly with a “Good American values” thrown on at the end. Never mind that no one bothers to find out what those values are – or even wants to find out. Discovering that both the abortion and death penalty debates are centered in respect for life would absolutely demolish the Republicans’ pro-death penalty stand and the Democrats’ pro-abortion rhetoric. Which is, of course, bad for the party.
Active neutrality allows us to address the issues without worrying that the important questions will undercut our faction’s agenda. And only through the full questioning of active neutrality will we find solutions to society’s problems.
But is neutrality always enough? Could Hitler have been stopped with neutrality alone? No. Unfortunately, no nation is invulnerable to assault. Sometimes in the course of defense force must be employed in opposition to a force. But the death tolls would have been much greater without the help of active neutrals - those Germans who sheltered Jews without attacking the Nazis. Even when force is necessary, active neutrals can remove innocent people from the collision path. And they can do something more – they can ensure that we do not totally lose track of our common humanity in the pursuit of factional interests.
People such as Dante look down upon neutrality because it is cowardly. Yet it seems to me that active neutrality is more courageous than choosing a side. Where passive neutrality seeks to avoid responsibility, active neutrality is assuming the whole of it upon self alone. Taking sides provides a group for support, people to convince you to keep fighting the good fight. But a neutral person rarely has a group to share their actions with. Some may be hated by both sides for failing to choose a cause.
The misconception that all neutrality is wrong, always, is not only false but dangerous. When my parents were divorced, I wanted very much to love them both. I wanted to be neutral. This was a reasonable expectation for any child of any age – but my father convinced me that neutrality was the same as apathy. So, for a time, I fought against my mother. I took a side and I hurt my family in my ignorance. As long as people reject neutrality there will be people who are pushed into choosing one side or another as I was. There will be people who join a fight without understanding what they are fighting for or against.
One must either bend or break; but the desire to fight is strongly ingrained in human nature. It is a survival instinct – you or me, us or them – it is a false dichotomy. To be unable to identify with an us, a home tribe, by refusing to also identify a them, an enemy, may be difficult and painful. But the urge to fight need not be the urge to fight against. To fight for all goods in this world rather than choose between causes – for the good of all, not merely the good of us – allows all of us to be Humanity.
Aldorel · Sat Jan 20, 2007 @ 01:58pm · 1 Comments |
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