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<\/a><\/p>\nIn Canto 3 of Dante\u2019s Inferno,<\/em> the pilgrim arrives at the brink of Hell, and encounters the shades of the lukewarm or indifferent: \u00a0those who, in life, never chose a side, or took a stand, and now are condemned to rush round and round after a blank banner.<\/p>\n\u201cSo many, I had not thought death had undone so many,\u201d the poet writes \u2013 and five hundred years later these words would be echoed by another poet, T.S. Eliot, describing London crowds in <\/span>The Waste Land.<\/span><\/i> Eliot\u2019s darkest work is part of his early \u201cinfernal\u201d phase in which the characters seem to move through dreamlike, foggy urban hellscapes, repeating endless and mindless patterns, on futile quests that have no goal.<\/span><\/p>\nIn a poem just a little bit earlier, Eliot presented us with the memorable-for-being-unmemorable J. Alfred Prufrock, a damned soul who takes all the sexiness out of damnation. Prufrock wanders through the \u201cmuttering retreats\u201d of that same London, with the evening spread out against the sky above him \u201clike a patient etherized upon a table.\u201d Paralysis, amnesia, and stagnation are themes in Prufrock. The protagonist sees himself as an insect pinned and wriggling, as one who might as well be dead already. He sees himself grown old, walking the beach, where the mermaids do not sing to him. Like one of the hollow men from another infernal Eliot poem, and like Dante\u2019s damned, Prufrock is condemned to go round and round, to the same tea parties, hearing the same voices \u2013 but never the ones he wishes to hear. These characters drift through a dreary inferno in which the end of the world comes not with a bang but a whimper, where the cycles of history draw us through the same empty patterns.<\/span><\/p>\nDante\u2019s portrayal of the lukewarm and uncommitted is alluded to by another but very different Anglican writer of the same period: C.S. Lewis, at the end of <\/span>The Last Battle<\/span><\/i>, portrays one group of dwarves as refusing to take sides, but rather egging both the Narnians and their enemies on to destroy one another, even entering into the killing from time to time, to keep things even. \u201cThe Dwarves for the Dwarves.\u201d The scene in which they shoot all the talking horses still makes me angry and sad, even if it didn\u2019t <\/span>really<\/span><\/i> happen. Never kill a talking horse. <\/span><\/p>\nThe dwarves who refuse to take sides find themselves in their own dim liminal inferno, too, trapped forever in their minds in a dark stable with no light or clean water or room to move, a physical space that images the spiritual space they occupy, a space without magnanimity or generosity or daring \u2013 even if, in reality, or if they were to shift their mental space, they would find themselves in a green and luxurious paradise. <\/span><\/p>\nI\u2019ve been thinking of these stories and images a lot lately, because I keep encountering so many people who take pride in their refusal to take sides, in their commitment to the \u201cpox on both their houses!\u201d narrative. Like the dwarves, they seem content to sit on the sidelines, hoping that Left and Right will destroy one another. \u201cBoth sides are bad,\u201d they say.<\/span><\/p>\nAnd for many years I was in that camp. I\u2019m not a joiner. I distrust slogans, and loathe culture wars. I have been a registered independent for most of my voting years, and up until recently just sort of hoped the Democrats and Republicans would destroy one another. I still do think that loyalty to a political ideology or side can be dangerous, and that \u201ctaking sides\u201d shouldn\u2019t usually mean signing onto a political team. <\/span><\/p>\nLook what happened to the Republicans, after all. Two years ago, I thought that the prospect of Trump as a candidate would be a challenge to blind party loyalty \u2013 but, no. Many seemed to think they had to support anyone the party elected. And so they did. And contrary to their assertions, they did not proceed to correct and control Trump, but rather to defend his every word and deed, so that they quickly morphed into his toadies and bootlickers. So by now, whatever one may think of the Democrats, the Republicans have become the party one must stand against, if one cares about ethics and human decency.<\/span><\/p>\nIt is no longer morally reasonable to say \u201cboth sides are equally bad,\u201d when one side is stripping the land of its protection, cutting away safety nets, rejecting principles of human dignity, and now kidnapping infants and keeping them in cages. It\u2019s not about Democrats vs. Republicans anymore, nor Left vs. Right. You might be a progressive liberal, or a radical leftist, or a paleo-conservative, or an anarchist, or eschew labels wholly. Whatever you are, this is one of those times in history in which refusing to take a stand gets one lumped in, not with an Aristotelian \u201cgolden mean,\u201d but with Dante\u2019s too-bland-even-for-hell-to-want.<\/span><\/p>\nI\u2019ve been thinking of another character who didn\u2019t want to take sides: Treebeard, from <\/span>The Lord of The Rings,<\/span><\/i> tells the Hobbits that he is not altogether on anyone\u2019s side, because no one is altogether on his. I know how he feels\u2026well, a little bit, since I\u2019m not a tree-herd, exactly. But I know what it is to feel that no one in power has one\u2019s well-being truly in mind. \u00a0As a tree-herd, Treebeard sees that in the wars among elves, dwarves, orcs, and men, nature itself is often the most devastated victim. The \u201cBrown Lands\u201d have never recovered from the war in which Sauron was first defeated. The Entwives are gone forever. The \u201cgood guys\u201d are not, after all, especially good. They just happen to be trying to stop the spread of annihilating evil. <\/span><\/p>\nTreebeard sees which powers are devoted to senseless destruction, and even if he doesn\u2019t exactly join up with the armies allying against Sauron, he knows which side is is \u201caltogether <\/span>not<\/span><\/i> on.\u201d And he rises up against it, not because of a lust for destruction or love of violence or adulation of power, but simply to protect what he knows to be good.<\/span><\/p>\nT.S. Eliot\u2019s diagnosis of the sickness of modernity had to do with an enervation, and emptiness, masked sometimes as bourgeois respectability.\u00a0 Just a few years after The Waste Land<\/em>, this sickness would erupt into a widespread spiritual and ethical plague, as fascism began to rise in Europe \u2013 and the nice people did nothing about it. Who is Prufrock to struggle with a demon, after all? Even a shabby demon, like the one in Crime and Punishment<\/em>? We\u2019re post-modern, now, and not modern anymore, supposedly, but the sickness continues. Maybe it\u2019s really a sickness of humanity, the moral sloth or apathy once termed \u201cacedia\u201d by the old moralists.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThere are times when sitting on the sidelines and taking a middle ground are no longer virtuous options, and this is one of those times. Don\u2019t be a nameless dead soul running around after a blank banner on the outskirts of hell.\u00a0 Don\u2019t be Prufrock. Be Treebeard.<\/span><\/p>\nimage credit: https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Gustave_Dor%C3%A9_-_Dante_Alighieri_-_Inferno_-_Plate_14_(Canto_V_-_The_hurricane_of_souls).jpg<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Whatever you are, this is one of those times in history in which refusing to take a stand gets one lumped in, not with an Aristotelian \u201cgolden mean,\u201d but with Dante\u2019s too-bland-even-for-hell-to-want.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2650,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1382,354,121,1427,1442,1445,1430,1023,1448,1436,142,1433,1439,1451,20],"class_list":["post-2162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-aristotle","tag-c-s-lewis","tag-dante","tag-eliot","tag-golden-mean","tag-indifferent","tag-inferno","tag-lord-of-the-rings","tag-lukewarm","tag-prufrock","tag-republicans","tag-the-last-battle","tag-the-waste-land","tag-treebeard","tag-trump"],"yoast_head":"\n
Some Dead White Males on the Topic of "Not Taking Sides"<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Whatever you are, this is one of those times in history in which refusing to take a stand gets one lumped in, not with an Aristotelian \u201cgolden mean,\u201d but with Dante\u2019s too-bland-even-for-hell-to-want.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/suspendedinherjar\/2018\/06\/2162\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Some Dead White Males on the Topic of "Not Taking Sides"\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Whatever you are, this is one of those times in history in which refusing to take a stand gets one lumped in, not with an Aristotelian \u201cgolden mean,\u201d but with Dante\u2019s 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