Uncentered

The quote from Elie Wiesel, "We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented," snipped from his Nobel Prize acceptance has metastasized in the meantime. It was recent related to me as "Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral." This latter formulation, attributed to Paulo Freire is a bit more strident than Mr. Wiesel's and somewhat more black-and-white: a conflict between oppressor and victim, or tormentor and tormented has become one between the powerful and the powerless.

The snarky side of my personality wants to ask: If someone is comforting the afflicted by afflicting the comfortable, and I decline to become involved, who aim I supposedly aiding? But the more serious side of me is curious as to where the endpoint of this: "If you're not with them, you're against them" mentality lies.

Because I noted, when looking at the two quotes, the shift that had taken place. When Mr. Wiesel notes that "We must always take sides," he's implicitly presuming a certain level of opposition to the oppressor/tormentor. Silence encourages the tormentor presupposes that any speaking out would be directed against them. In other words, for Mr. Wiesel, neutrality is the suppression of a tendency to come to the aid of the oppressed and tormented; were it otherwise, then silence would be to the benefit of the tormented.

On the other hand, Mr. Freire's formulation, while outwardly similar, seems to put people in the position of needing to prove that they've taken the correct side... the assumption of the listener's sympathies is not as clearly made. And he presumes that a side is always being taken; there is no such thing as neutrality.

I'm curious if people like Mr. Freire felt that Mr. Wiesel had not gone far enough in his exhortation to people to take sides in the conflicts that they saw around them. If the general sympathy that Mr. Wiesel attributed to people, when not acted upon, became a weapon against those it should otherwise have benefited.

And so I wonder what the next step is (or perhaps was) for those who don't see Mr. Freire as strident enough. If declining to become involved in a conflict between other people is to side against whomever feels the most powerless, is everyone a party to such conflicts? If so, what does that mean in practice? When does a call to moral courage become a threat of sanctions?

People's power is not something of their own making, and no-one, I think, awakens one morning with the ambition to be an oppressor or tormentor. These are labels that come from the conflict, rather than being the attributes of people that push them to start a conflict. Mr. Wiesel's original wording understands that better than what came later, I think.