Silence is NOT Violence

The Case for Political Neutrality

South African cleric and activist Desmond Tutu once said, "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor." If a quote could summarize the current political zeitgeist, especially on social media, it would be this one. Today, politics permeates virtually all aspects of our lives, and many people feel pressured to make public political statements by slogans echoing Tutu’s sentiment, like “silence is violence” or “complacency is complicity”.

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However, slogans inciting people to pick a side or be forever placed on the wrong side of history can cause just as much suffering as they prevent. Mob justice, groupthink, and ill-conceived policy making are just as likely to be symptoms of a ‘silence is violence’ mentality as is the encouragement of good people to do the right thing.

Instead, political neutrality has a place in our society, and more of it in the right places could help reduce the total amount of injustice in the world, not increase it. Here, I argue the case for political neutrality based on two claims: first, intervening in a controversy one knows little about can cause just as much suffering as if one had remained silent; and second, politically neutral environments have an important role to play in reducing prejudice through intergroup contact.

Good Intentions, Bad Policies

First, political neutrality is sometimes justified because intervening in a controversy one knows little about can cause just as much damage as if one had decided to remain silent. Politics is messy and it takes a serious investment of time and resources to determine the right course of action. Many interventions that seem intuitively correct end up causing unintended consequences that increase injustice, like rent ceilings that block newcomers from the market or expensive prohibitions that lead to rises in crime and homicide. Given it takes a serious investment of resources to figure out which course of action is the morally right thing to do, we cannot expect everyone to have a well-informed opinion on every political controversy all the time. If people wish to remain neutral towards the controversies they know little about, they are not complicit in oppression. Instead, they may even be preventing the injustice caused by well-meaning but ill-conceived policies.

Let me give you a concrete example. If an environmental activist approached you with a petition to ban the rhino horn trade in South Africa, would you sign it? The activist may inform you that South Africa is one of a few countries that still allow the domestic sale of rhino horn and that not acting on this issue means you are complicit in the deaths of thousands of rhinos. As an environmentalist yourself, it intuitively seems like the right thing to do, and you sign.

In 2009, South Africa enacted such a ban under immense pressure from environmentalists. Before the ban, farmers would safely harvest the horns of rhinos on their property after tranquilizing the animals, allowing the rhino to live and the horn to grow back. Since the sale of horns became a major source of income, farmers fiercely protected their rhinos and increased herd sizes through breeding programs. After the ban, the drop in supply caused skyrocketing horn prices that incentivised poachers to risk battle with park rangers and butcher rhinos to steal their precious keratin spikes. Rhino deaths from poaching rose rapidly after 2009, growing from a few dozen per year before the ban to consistently over one thousand per year by 2013. In the twenty years before the horn prohibition, the white rhino population in South Africa had quadrupled. In the ten years after the prohibition, the white rhino population had fallen roughly 15%. Realizing their mistake, South Africa lifted the ban in 2017, and just two years later rhino deaths from poaching nearly halved. Since you were not well-informed on this issue, you may have accidentally supported a policy that had increased, not decreased, injustice.

Situations where what is intuitive is not what is right occur frequently in politics. Slogans like "silence is violence" encourage mob mentality and unintended consequences as much as, if not more, than they reduce injustice. This is not an excuse for ordinary people to withdraw from politics. Rather, it is a shift in obligation from taking action to cultivating an informed opinion before taking action. It is a call for ordinary people to become more knowledgeable in as many political controversies as possible to ensure that we as a society do what is right, not what is intuitive or best signals our virtues.

Politically Neutral Environments and Prejudice Reduction

The second reason political neutrality is sometimes justified is that apolitical environments help facilitate the kind of positive intergroup contact that reduces prejudice. Sociologists and psychologists alike have long understood that certain kinds of positive contact between members of opposing groups (be it nationalities, religions, or political partisans) can reduce intergroup discrimination and hostilities: a phenomenon now known as intergroup contact theory. The theory was first proposed by Gordan Allport in 1954 after studying the racial dynamics in the recently desegregated US military. In his seminal work, The Nature of Prejudice, Allport found that white soldiers in desegregated battalions displayed significantly lower levels of prejudice towards blacks than soldiers who remained in white-only battalions. Since the 1950s, intergroup contact theory has been revised multiple times, but support for the basic premise of the theory remains overwhelming: in a 2006 meta-analysis of 515 studies, psychologists Thomas Pettigrew and Linda Tropp found that intergroup contact typically reduces prejudice. The mechanism is simple: the more we interact with outgroup members on a friendly, human-to-human level, the more we realize they are just like us.

Many organizations avoid politics to foster environments amenable to positive intergroup contact. Eurovision is one such example. Eurovision is an international song contest organized annually by the European Broadcasting Union (the EBU). The contest invites artists from all over Europe to perform at the host country's venue in front of 10,000 in-person spectators and a television viewership of roughly 200 million fans. By celebrating, partying, singing and dancing together, Eurovision facilitates positive intergroup contact between nationalities and ethnic groups from a continent that has historically seen near constant war. Through intergroup contact, Eurovision helps Croats and Serbs, English and Irish, Greeks and Turks, view their enemies as fellow human beings and foster a sense of a common European community.

Getting people from different nationalities and ideologies to party together is why the competition has a strict ‘no-politics’ policy. Yes, politics sneaks in all the time, and a politically tense atmosphere has been growing within Eurovision ever since the EBU’s decision to exclude Russia from the 2022 edition of the contest. But accusations of poor implementation and hypocrisy aside, the purpose of the ‘no-politics’ rule is to foster an environment where anyone from anywhere in Europe feels welcome. If, for example, the contest organizers decided to condemn the outcome of the 2016 Brexit referendum as xenophobic and anti-European, pro-Brexit fans may boycott the competition. As such, these fans would miss out on the opportunity to party with people from all over Europe and realize they have more in common with each other than they think.

Other smaller organizations can play a similar role in facilitating positive intergroup contact, like a church where blacks and whites worship together, a bowling club with members from multiple faiths, or a university that brings students from all over the globe to study together. When these organizations take on explicitly political stances, they can alienate certain individuals and reduce the diversity of their membership. For example, a priest who decides to relate his sermon to why we should all want a wall on the US-Mexican border might alienate the democratic members of the congregation. Fed up with the political preaching, these members may choose to worship elsewhere, thus reducing intergroup contact between Republicans and Democrats.

Of course, this does not mean every social club must adhere to no-politics policies, and such organizations often have a role to play in political mobilization. However, organizations that choose not to take stances on unfolding political controversies or ban the discussion of politics at group meetings are not necessarily contributing to injustice. Their politically neutral environment helps foster a more welcoming atmosphere for people from different ideological and social backgrounds. The intergroup contact they facilitate can reduce the kinds of prejudice that leads to injustice in the first place. Without such organizations, the world's total suffering could easily increase, not decrease. 

Conclusion

To conclude, silence is not always violence. Political neutrality has a role to play in reducing injustice. First, getting involved in a controversy one knows little about can lead to more, not less, suffering. And second, politically neutral organizations and spaces create environments where people from different ideological and social backgrounds can congregate. Such intergroup contact can lower prejudice between these groups and prevent the kinds of injustices that emerge from tribalistic us-versus-them thinking. Today, politics permeates virtually all aspects of our lives: sports teams wear 'pride jerseys,' small businesses slap political slogans on their front door, movies preach political messages, and universities have their own foreign policy. Given such oversaturation, the world likely needs more thoughtful interventions and politically neutral spaces and less activism for activism's sake.