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Don’t Rock the Boat

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Earlier today we introduced you to The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life by Eviatar Zerubavel. Below is a second excerpt from the book which looks at why breaking the silence is so very difficult.

…it is not only individuals’ but also groups’ collective face that conspiracies of silence are designed to protect, and silence breakers are therefore usually viewed as more than just tactless. Indeed, they are often explicitly denounced by their fellow group members as traitors.

It was the sight of “so much dirty linen about quotidian Jewish- American life hung out to dry on very public lines” that 9780195332605.jpgevidently bothered many Jewish critics of Philip Roth’s early work. By the same token, it was probably not Jeffrey Masson’s actual claims regarding Freud’s alleged suppression of his own early view of child sexual abuse that so infuriated fellow psychoanalysts as much as the fact that he made them public. As likewise evident from many Muslims’ and African-Americans’ angry reactions to Irshad Manji’s book The Trouble with Islam: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith and Bill Cosby’s equally provocative public rebuke of black youth culture, washing one’s group’s “dirty linen” is particularly offensive to fellow group members when it is done in front of nonmembers. As Time magazine senior editor Christopher Farley bluntly put it, “there are . . . certain things . . . black people won’t talk about in front of . . . white people . . . Bill Cosby broke the unwritten rule of keeping black dirty laundry in black washing machines . . . [A] number of my friends and relatives . . . were more horrified that he had gone public, not at the opinions themselves.” (As if to underscore the fundamental yet commonly overlooked difference between silence breaking and whistleblowing, Cosby later responded by reminding Farley that it was not as if he had actually “divulged some secret about which no one knew . . . [W]here is the secret? The secret walks and it talks. From the hallways of the school to the street to the corner store and onto to public transportation, the dirty laundry is out there.”)

Not only can breaking a conspiracy of silence hurt a group’s public image, it can also destroy its very fabric. As the rather suggestive common expression “don’t rock the boat” seems to imply, it may disrupt the group’s current political status quo thereby generating social instability. A kingdom, after all, needs a king, even a naked one. No wonder it is often less powerful group members, who therefore have less to lose from such “turbulence,” who are also the ones least threatened by silence breakers. The more powerful (and therefore having a greater stake in maintaining the current status quo) one is, the more likely one is to resent such boat-rocking “troublemakers.”

Needless to say, calling attention to what other group members make a special effort to avoid is an implicitly subversive act. If sex, for example, claims Foucault, is “condemned to . . . silence, then the mere fact that one is speaking about it [is] a deliberate transgression . . . [When we speak about it] we are conscious of defying established power, our tone of voice shows that we know we are being subversive.” Indeed, as the poet Czes_aw Mi_osz noted in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “in a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.” To break such a conspiracy is to breach some implicit social contract, and groups indeed treat those who violate their norms of attention and discourse just as they do any other social deviants who defy their authority and disregard their rules.

Many groups, in fact, view silence breakers as threats to their very existence. In the name of protecting their family, a woman who suspects that her husband is molesting their daughter may thus pretend not to notice it. As Sandra Butler, author of Conspiracy of Silence: The Trauma of Incest, has shrewdly observed, “keeping silent about the abuse, virtually denying its existence, is the only way [such a] family believes it can remain intact.”

Indeed, many families seem to feel much more threatened by efforts to call attention to instances of incest within them than by the offense itself, “the taboo against talking about it [thus being] stronger even than the taboo against doing it.” So, in fact, do many organizations when facing similar attempts to call attention to instances of corruption within them. By the same token, as Sonja, the naive German high-school student in the film The Nasty Girl who researches the imagined heroism of her townsfolk in an effort to highlight their “resistance” against the Nazi regime slowly realizes, they actually regard that shameful chapter in their town’s history as much less disturbing than her inadvertent effort to unveil it. In fact, we often view conspiracies of silence as far less threatening than the efforts to end them.

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