The Review

With the enviable fluency that characterizes everything he writes, Kwame Anthony Appiah in his latest essay for The Atlantic ranges across fields (philosophy of science, legal studies, sociology, journalism) to make a subtle case for “neutrality.” “Sophisticated thought,” he says, “has certainly turned against it. The very idea, we’re told, is misconceived, at best a ruse for prettifying partisanship.” He cites journalists, legal theorists, and academics who have all, in their separate domains, come to suspect the ethos of neutrality that asks professionals of various kinds to abstain from mixing work and politics.

For neutrality’s critics, the corruption of bad faith is preeminent among its sins. By pretending to be above politics, the thinking goes, journalists, judges, academics, and university leaders merely mask the ideological commitments and political biases they share with the rest of us. Appiah illustrates this concern with reference to the sociologist Erving Goffman, whose sociology, which developed metaphors drawn from the theater into a comprehensive account of human behavior, “distinguished between our ‘front stage’ conduct and our ‘backstage’ conduct.” Neutrality, for its critics, is the myth that our front-stage selves are our only selves — that the waiter is always in the dining room and never on a smoke break behind the restaurant. Is neutrality, Appiah asks, “all a matter of dramaturgy — with secret agendas lurking behind the judge’s robes, the reporter’s pad, the provost’s bland reticence?”

Goffman can seem like the ultimate debunker. His description of how classical concertgoers set their faces into expressions of rapt responsiveness to impress other audience members, for instance, might be taken as indicting a lamentable failure of authenticity. But Appiah understands that Goffman is much subtler than this. “The ‘front stage’ performance,” Appiah writes, “has power. It’s a fiction that is not merely useful, but indispensable: a fiction that creates its own reality … In short, the social roles we choose — including those that distance us from overt partisanship — matter.” Goffman’s is not a moralizing critique of inauthenticity, but a description of the role of social performance even in the most earnest and exalted spheres of activity.

In a recent essay in the Columbia Journalism Review, the journalist Wesley Lowery attacks what he calls “performative neutrality,” whereby “too many news organizations were as concerned with projecting impartiality as they were with actually achieving it, prioritizing the perception of their virtue in the minds of a hopelessly polarized audience over actual adherence to journalistic principle.” Lowery is here developing further the critique of the media he had begun in an influential 2020 New York Times piece, which is one of Appiah’s leading examples of skepticism toward neutrality. For Lowery, newsroom policies prohibiting journalists from the extramural expression of political opinions participate in a fantasy of impartiality, not the real thing.

Appiah agrees that defective pseudo-impartiality is a risk. We shouldn’t, he says, “pledge ourselves to both-sidesism. Accuracy, not balance, is the proper aim.” But he is much warmer toward the protocols of neutrality than Lowery is, for several reasons. First, following Goffman, he doesn’t accept any hard distinction between authentic and “performative” neutrality: “The standard professional protocols … can make reporters better, sometimes by buffering their human passions. Performing fairness can make us fairer.” Journalists and judges have biases like everyone else, but by submitting to the constraints of a professional ethos they have a better chance of overcoming them than otherwise. Second, the “perception” of neutrality by the public is in fact integral to the legitimacy of many professions. That’s one of the reasons why former New York Times editor Dean Baquet urged his staff to lay off Twitter last summer, reversing an earlier policy that encouraged Twitter use as a driver of engagement. He had come to realize that the strident expression of personal opinion the platform incentivizes was eating away at the authority of the journalistic enterprise.

For Appiah, the posture of neutrality is the only way to maintain legitimacy when your public is large and diverse. Whether your arena of action is the courtroom, the classroom, or the newspaper, neutrality assures “members of an eclectic community that all will be treated with respect.” This is what neutrality as a professional ethos shares with neutrality as a political principle. When it comes to university matters, Appiah is on the side of Kalven Report-style administrative abstention from talking politics, since “if you’re a university president, particular student groups shouldn’t feel that you harbor a grudge toward them.”

As Republican legislators move against tenure and, in Florida, take over entire campuses, the question of whether and when administrative neutrality is appropriate has assumed new urgency. In our pages, Brian Rosenberg, former president of Macalester College, took Florida’s academic leaders to task for what he sees as their culpable nonresponse to partisan political incursions. He acknowledges the force of the argument “that college leaders should avoid taking positions on controversial social and political issues,” but insists — plausibly, in my view — that the imperative to political neutrality ought to be suspended in this case because “this is not a debate about gun control, abortion, or Ukraine, but about, for colleges, what might be called the thing itself.” Normally, no one in higher education is more bound by the requirements of neutrality as a political principle than the presidents of public universities, who for many reasons (not least of them practical) cannot seem to take sides in partisan political contests. But even the Kalven Report, Rosenberg notes, makes an exception for threats to “the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry.” When the university itself is the object of partisan squabbling, the only options for administrators might be to fight or drop out of the game.

Read Kwame Anthony Appiah’s “Neutrality Is a Fiction — But an Indispensable One,” Wesley Lowery’s “A Test of the News,” and Brian Rosenberg’s “The Deafening Silence of Florida’s College Presidents.”

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• “Sergei Eisenstein, Sir Walter Scott, and my late in-laws had little in common but for the chosen companionship of Piranesi.” In The New York Review of Books, Susan Tallman writes about three new books on Piranesi.
• Hyperpolitics “gives us an intensely frenetic form of activity that dissipates immediately.” For The Point’s podcast, Jonny Thakkar talks with Anton Jäger about Jäger’s recent essay “Everything Is Hyperpolitical: A Genealogy of the Present.”
  

Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com.

Yours,

Len Gutkin