The Social Theory of Neutrality

It’s an interesting time to be researching Intellectual Freedom in libraries. In the 1930s, when IF was formulated in early versions of the Library Bill of Rights, communism was an attractive alternative both to capitalist depression in North America and to the rise of Fascism in Europe. Its attractiveness meant it was a challenge to a mode of production based on private property, free exchange, and the exploitation of labour. Librarianship was faced with an alternative: commit to antifascism in the name of defence of the democratic republic - the line pushed by Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish - and adopt a strict neutrality in the name of the values and principles of that republic. Early versions of the Library Bill of Rights explicitly connect Intellectual Freedom, Neutrality, and the values and support of the American republic.

Censorship of books, urged or practiced by volunteer arbiters of morals or political opinion or by organizations that would establish a coercive concept of Americanism, must be challenged by libraries in maintenance of their responsibility to provide public information end enlightenment through the printed word.

Libraries should enlist the cooperation of allied groups in the fields of science, of education, and of book publishing in resisting all abridgement of the free access to ideas and full freedom of expression that are the tradition and heritage of Americans. (1948 version of the Bill of Rights).

Skip forward nearly a hundred years to the political and economic crises that underline the end of American hegemony and we can see the same debates over the same principles arise.

Yesterday, at the 2021 ALA Midwinter Conference, a Resolution to Condemn White Supremacy and Fascism as Antithetical to Library Work (pdf) was proposed which directly challenged the idea of libraries as neutral and explicitly recognized that “libraries have upheld and encouraged white supremacy both actively through discriminatory practices and passively through a misplaced emphasis on neutrality”. The proposal was moved by Lindsay Cronk and seconded by Whitney Buccicone and Raymond Pun, and sets out a list of concrete recommendations for the ALA to abandon the rhetoric of neutrality and determine how it can become committed to antiracism, antifascism, and take real steps towards equity, diversity, and inclusion.

I like the proposal, though I am not hopeful that the ALA can take any meaningful steps in the proposed direction. It is too large, too old, and too embedded in the “control structures” of North American librarianship. But we’ll see. I understand from commentary on the resolution that the final language needs to be voted on, but that at the meeting there were those who objected to the word fascism and wanted it removed. It would appear that denying and excluding fascism would itself “establish a coercive concept of Americanism” which, in the rhetoric of neutrality, must be avoided at all costs. There could be no clearer example of Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance.

In many ways, what we are seeing are the logical consequences of the adoption of neutrality and Intellectual Freedom after the Second World War, in contrast to MacLeish’s explicitly antifascist commitments. In many ways this can be explained by the socio-economic prosperity of the postwar period, in which people’s social and political views were irrelevant as long as GDP, wages, and house-prices continued to rise. The Cold War too forced North American culture into embracing the myth of “non-coercive” Western culture against the Soviet Union and China. The first real threat to neutrality and IF came in the late 1960s, as an explosion of rebellion against the norms of Western society exploded. The Civil Rights movement, gay and women’s liberation movements, anticolonialism, counterculture, and protests against the Vietnam War, all signalled that the silence (= neutrality) around the faults of Western society would no longer be tolerated. Out of this process, the tendency in librarianship called Social Responsibility arose, formalizing its distinction from strict Intellectual Freedom over the following decade.

In many ways, then, both neutrality and Intellectual Freedom can be understood as privileges of prosperity. At a conference a few years ago, I challenged John Buschman over his valorization of a period of “good capitalism” (the post-war boom that lasted until the early 1970s). He argued that the boom “floated all boats”, that everyone benefited from capitalist prosperity after 1945, and the neoliberal turn was an aberration. What is needed, in Buschman’s view, is a return to the liberal values and prosperity of the “thirty glorious years” following the War.

But not everyone benefited from post-war prosperity. To argue that ignores and erases the real inequalities that lay behind the Selma marches, Stonewall, the fight for Vietnamese independence, the Black Panthers, various Indigenous sovereignty movements, and many other conflicts of post-war American society. The term “cultural genocide” was first used in Canada in Harold Cardinal’s scathing attack on the government’s proposed policy of Indigenous assimilation entitledThe Unjust Society (1969).

Many who want to exclude “fascism” from the ALA resolution are, in fact, culturally and emotionally embedded in the post-war myth of American prosperity and individual freedom. Many of us were born after the neoliberal turn began to dismantle the (unequally applied) protections of the welfare state, but our culture and school systems and libraries continue to holdup “Western society 1945-” as a shining example of negative liberty, individual freedom, and functioning democracy. In many ways, the alternative problems - racism, sex and gender inequality, poverty, white supremacy, and fascism - have been repressed by the example of this glorious past. Trump, the Proud Boys, and the January 6 “riot with deadly intent” must be understood as a “return of the repressed”, an eruption to the surface of long-suppressed problems with North American society, rather than some kind of unimaginable, surprising mistake, shocking in its novelty.

It will be interesting to follow the fortunes of this proposal within the ALA over the next few days and months. The pandemic isn’t over, its economic impact is only beginning to be felt, and in periods of severe crisis, the faultlines between material life (health and the economy) and society (politics and culture) become exposed. Neutrality has always been the fig leaf covering racism, white supremacy, and the underlying fascism of capital; it has always been a politically motivated sham; the sooner we can abandon it completely, the better.

What I am mostly interested in is the social theory of neutrality - a position which often implies an absence or rejection of theory altogether. Neutrality - which can be considered an expression of Isaiah Berlin’s negative freedom - is based on the same social contract individualism as liberalism is, and therefore of all “liberal-democratic” political systems (both parliamentary, as in the UK and in Canada, and presidential/congressional, as in the US). This individualistic social theory, in a nutshell, sees human beings as fully formed and autonomous units, deciding their fates for themselves on their own, prior to coming into social contact with anyone else. This idea, while nonsense, has been hugely influential and is deeply embedded in North American political thought, values, and opinions; despite, or because because, this kind of individual rejects any notion of shared thoughts, values, and opinions outright, except as the result of a free choice by free individuals. Structural oppression, economic determination, sexual exploitation, none of these can exist in the context of the radical individualism of liberal social and political thought. A rejection of neutrality has to be, if only implicitly, a rejection of this kind of unquestioned, absolute individualism.

And we are not short of alternatives - political theories that developed out of the Marxist tradition reject individualism, many feminisms, theories of race, gender, and sexuality, reject individualism. Philosophies as far apart as Wittgenstein’s later work and Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism (as well as contemporary approaches to critical realism such as that of Margaret Archer) all reject it. When we as librarians reject neutrality (something which is long past due) we have to take a long hard look at the individualistic myth of our societies, confront it, recognize the dead-ends it has led us to and its own implication in coercive concepts of (North) Americanism founded on racism and fascism. The interest surrounding Dean Spade’s recent book on mutual aid indicates a hunger for an alternative to individualism. Repurposing MacLeish’s injunction to commit to the protection of liberal democracy against fascism, we can say that libraries and library workers should be at the forefront of a commitment of mutual aid and support against the corrosive individualism that underpins so much of the lore of our profession.