“Silence,” Picard observed, “is nothing merely negative; it is not the mere absence of speech. It is the phenomenon of the whole man.” He distinguished between original silence, the primal quietude woven into creation itself, and the provisional silences we stumble into in modernity, the pauses between bombardments of sound. One, creative and life-giving; the other, destructive, masking emptiness. Picard contrasted the unbroken quiet of mountain valleys with the incessant buzz of modern cities, where engines and horns fill every crevice of time. He feared that when language is no longer sheltered by silence, it loses its savour, collapsing into chatter. Without that holy hush, words become mere signals. Relationships, too, suffer, for without shared repose there can be no true listening.
The age of the telegraph and the wireless already threatened to banish this original silence. What would he say now, when we carry the factory whistle in our pockets, when algorithms call out to us day and night, when even dreams are colonized by notifications? His intuition remains bracing: without a surrounding quiet, language grows thin, judgment hardens into argument, and intimacy withers. The word that has not been sheltered by calm arrives brittle, even when it means well. It shatters at first use. […]
The mystics had already lived this lesson. Pseudo-Dionysius taught that God is beyond every name, beyond even being, so language must proceed by negation until quietude itself becomes praise. Meister Eckhart spoke of Gelassenheit, a letting-be in which the soul consents to emptiness, entering the “desert of the Godhead” where no word can follow. Nicholas of Cusa described a learned ignorance, docta ignorantia, that bows before mystery rather than presuming to master it.
Angelus Silesius, the German mystic and poet, sang the same wordless hymn in his seventeenth-century verses. For him, prayer was a return to the root of being: “True prayer requires no word, no chant. . . . It is communion, calm and still with our own godly Ground.” His brief, crystalline aphorisms teach that silence is the condition in which Love can be born anew. “If in your heart you make a manger for Love’s birth, then God will once again become a child on earth.” In this sense, silence is less a void than a cradle, an emptied chamber of the self where divinity may alight, tender and unannounced. […]
Our century multiplies Picard’s concern exponentially. Social media rewards speed, assertion, and outrage. Scholars describe “continuous partial attention,” a state where nothing receives depth. Linda Stone coined the phrase to describe the condition of perpetual distraction that fragments consciousness itself. Studies of noise pollution reveal its measurable toll: elevated blood pressure, disturbed sleep, impaired learning in children. We flee into digital detox retreats, or into apps that sell quietude back to us as a subscription service. Noise is the religion of our age, demanding constant sacrifice of our attention.
Yet silence is a human inheritance. It is the ground where thought clarifies, where prayer ripens, where friendship deepens. Even politics needs stillness: Václav Havel described the power of the powerless as a refusal to participate in lies, a silence that carried more truth than many speeches. That refusal was costly; the person had to live by the truth without requiring a hearing. The moral strength of such a stance comes from the same source as contemplative practice.
cheap “bravery”
One of the things that I’ve always detested about a certain segment of the left is what I often call “bravery on the cheap.” We saw a lot of it during the George W. Bush years. Some critics of the administration would assert that Bush was Hitler reincarnated and then pretend they were Martin Niemöller heroically speaking truth to power by opposing him. Hollywood was full of this sentiment. Actors would win an Oscar® and use their acceptance speech to vow they won’t be silenced or some such.
It was all B.S.
For starters, telling an auditorium full of Hollywood liberals exactly what they wanted to hear didn’t take a lot of courage. The last time I saw real courage at an awards ceremony, it was when Ricky Gervais told the assembled bigwigs that no one cares about their political opinions.
The much more important point is this: If Bush was Hitler—or even Hitlerish—very few of these people would say boo about him, because they’d be terrified. It was precisely because Bush was not anything like Hitler that people could criticize him without paying any price at all. Martin Niemöller was sent to a concentration camp. Naomi Wolf got a book contract, Michael Moore got another movie deal, etc.
A lot of protest-addicted people are like the dogs who act ferocious when they’re on a leash or behind a door. But when the leash comes off, they smell the other dog’s butt and say, “It’s all good.”
I mean, look at how Hollywood and academia have kowtowed to China over the last decade. They can’t even be counted upon to oppose a foreignauthoritarian regime when doing so comes at a price. The anti-Bush vitriol was all performative bravery on the cheap precisely because there was no price to pay and, often, there was ample upside.
George Orwell made a related point as only Orwell could. People revered Gandhi for his courage in speaking truth to power against the British, without ever acknowledging that it was precisely because the British were British—i.e., a liberal people—that his nonviolent tactics could work.
Gandhi, Orwell wrote, “believed in ‘arousing the world’, which is only possible if the world gets a chance to hear what you are doing. It is difficult to see how Gandhi’s methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again.” There are any number of legitimate criticisms of British rule in India, but if the British were Hitlerite or Stalinist, no one would know who Gandhi was.
Also, a standalone line from this piece worth placing in a thousand other contexts: “One doesn’t necessarily have to agree completely with this observation to concede that it is not just plausible, but actually quite defensible.” How much trouble could we avoid if we somehow found a way to that sentiment more often? Instead, as Goldberg puts it, we get cheap “bravery” and “soul-sickening cowardice.”
On that note, and since I’m quoting Jonah Goldberg, there’s something else I want to put a pin in, from his recent podcast interview with Yuval Levin. Goldberg notes the asymmetry between the antisemitism on the left and on the right, its different “nature, motivations, and function,” and he concedes that antisemitism is more marginal, even much more marginal, on the right. But the left’s antisemitism is for the most part “couched in euphemism”; to most on the left, it’s not about being antisemitic, or even anti-Israel, it’s about (they say) being pro Palestinian, pro peace. (Arguable, and not, here, by me, argued in either direction; see above paragraph.) The right’s antisemitism, however, partly due to its opposition to political correctness, skips the euphemisms. And since “cynicism is hard to maintain,” provocative trolling and just-asking-questions speak becomes serious ideology.
“The fact that there is tolerance for that kind of non-euphemistic antisemitism on the right, however, marginal [it is],” says Goldberg, “feels to me a more open negotiation with evil than what’s going on on the left.”
A more open negotiation with evil…
“a comprehensively corrosive skepticism of all things”
But I just sat through 45 minutes of the worst, most antisemitic, misogynist, misanthropic “greatest hits” of Fuentes’s podcasting career, and after listening to it I draw two conclusions: (1) Nick Fuentes is a cynically depraved monster, sincere in his moral corruption; (2) his psychological appeal to lost and disaffected kids is easy enough to recognize. Between the rants about Jews and women I heard a comprehensively corrosive skepticism of all things and institutions, emblems of a failed world that people like him and his audience were born into, one that gave them the short end of the stick. […]
These people are not conservative in the proper sense of the term, and they likely never will be. They have nothing to conserve, no investment in “the system” or the establishment, which has let them down. The idea of respectability itself is a mug’s game to them, one that people are dealt in or out of on the basis of arbitrary political factors — and they are its losers. Fuentes speaks directly to them, and he offers Jews and feminists as an explanation for their helplessness. That is why he is a force for evil. But it would be desperately foolish to ignore why he has drawn his audience: He is tapping into a dark corner of the same “burn it all down” sentiment that is widespread among youth of all political sides. He is drawing on the same slipstream as Zohran Mamdani is — a man who, not at all coincidentally, also smirkingly offers Jews as a convenient scapegoat for the world’s problems.
My complaint with Carlson et al. is, at root, a religious one. It could not be a political one: Tucker Carlson’s politics in these waning days of Anno Domini 2025 are not worth disagreeing with, and neither are Kevin Roberts’. Like every other self-abasing servant of the digital mob, their politics are insipid, superficial, and subject to instantaneous revision as soon as necessity requires it. One might as well argue with a puddle of piss on a hot summer sidewalk—whatever there is to it won’t last as long as the argument, and all that will remain will be a stain, if that, and the knowledge that you have wasted your time. Tucker Carlson may think that he can put on Christ with no more consequence than putting on those flannel shirts he affects these days (somewhere in Maine, there is a thrift shop with a lot of Brooks Bros. bow ties for sale), but it does matter—a great deal—that men such as he purport to speak from, and for, a Christian point of view.
the overflow of our hearts
It is true: political speech, even hateful speech, is not the same as political violence.
However, we stop far too short when we condemn political violence while excusing and contributing to a culture of political hatred.
The reason some people were prepared, quite literally, to justify or even celebrate the assassination of Charlie Kirk the man is that they had grown so accustomed to hating the idea of him. When his image would appear as they scrolled through social media, they might mutter under their breath, “F— that guy.”
One of the lies we tell ourselves is that we can cultivate hatred of someone like Charlie Kirk (or slain Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman or former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi) as “political figures,” and that this hatred will remain quarantined to the abstractions of politics. We have bought into the fiction that hatred mediated and directed by what we consider to be our “good” or “correct” political views somehow makes our hatred righteous. We sanctify our hatreds and even tell ourselves that our loves require hate. We say, “I don’t hate Charlie Kirk, I love my immigrant neighbors,” or “I don’t hate Democrats, I love the truth.” These evasions, this slipperiness, are how we assimilate ourselves to the idea of wishing others ill. It is then only out of the overflow of our hearts that we celebrate when they are harmed.
Luke 6:35-49 (Eugene Peterson translation):
35-36 “I tell you, love your enemies. Help and give without expecting a return. You’ll never—I promise—regret it. Live out this God-created identity the way our Father lives toward us, generously and graciously, even when we’re at our worst. Our Father is kind; you be kind.
37-38 “Don’t pick on people, jump on their failures, criticize their faults—unless, of course, you want the same treatment. Don’t condemn those who are down; that hardness can boomerang. Be easy on people; you’ll find life a lot easier. Give away your life; you’ll find life given back, but not merely given back—given back with bonus and blessing. Giving, not getting, is the way. Generosity begets generosity.”
39-40 He quoted a proverb: “‘Can a blind man guide a blind man?’ Wouldn’t they both end up in the ditch? An apprentice doesn’t lecture the master. The point is to be careful who you follow as your teacher.
41-42 “It’s easy to see a smudge on your neighbor’s face and be oblivious to the ugly sneer on your own. Do you have the nerve to say, ‘Let me wash your face for you,’ when your own face is distorted by contempt? It’s this I-know-better-than-you mentality again, playing a holier-than-thou part instead of just living your own part. Wipe that ugly sneer off your own face and you might be fit to offer a washcloth to your neighbor.
43-45 “You don’t get wormy apples off a healthy tree, nor good apples off a diseased tree. The health of the apple tells the health of the tree. You must begin with your own life-giving lives. It’s who you are, not what you say and do, that counts. Your true being brims over into true words and deeds.
46-47 “Why are you so polite with me, always saying ‘Yes, sir,’ and ‘That’s right, sir,’ but never doing a thing I tell you? These words I speak to you are not mere additions to your life, homeowner improvements to your standard of living. They are foundation words, words to build a life on.
48-49 “If you work the words into your life, you are like a smart carpenter who dug deep and laid the foundation of his house on bedrock. When the river burst its banks and crashed against the house, nothing could shake it; it was built to last. But if you just use my words in Bible studies and don’t work them into your life, you are like a dumb carpenter who built a house but skipped the foundation. When the swollen river came crashing in, it collapsed like a house of cards. It was a total loss.”
Luke 6:35-49 (RSVCE):
But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish. 36 Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.
37 “Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned; forgive, and you will be forgiven; 38 give, and it will be given to you; good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap. For the measure you give will be the measure you get back.”
39 He also told them a parable: “Can a blind man lead a blind man? Will they not both fall into a pit? 40 A disciple is not above his teacher, but every one when he is fully taught will be like his teacher. 41 Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? 42 Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take out the speck that is in your eye,’ when you yourself do not see the log that is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother’s eye.
43 “For no good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit; 44 for each tree is known by its own fruit. For figs are not gathered from thorns, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush. 45 The good man out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil man out of his evil treasure produces evil; for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.
46 “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and not do what I tell you? 47 Every one who comes to me and hears my words and does them, I will show you what he is like: 48 he is like a man building a house, who dug deep, and laid the foundation upon rock; and when a flood arose, the stream broke against that house, and could not shake it, because it had been well built. 49 But he who hears and does not do them is like a man who built a house on the ground without a foundation; against which the stream broke, and immediately it fell, and the ruin of that house was great.”
origin of species :)
In one of the nonbiblical writings, it is said that the devil, wishing to sink the human race, transformed into a mouse and began to gnaw the bottom of the ark. Noah then prayed to God and a lion sneezed, releasing from his nostrils a tomcat and a she-cat, and they strangled the mouse. That is how cats, who are still a rarity in our land, came about.
Here Prince Parfeny comments:
In Nifont’s text we find apocryphal pieces of information that the modern reader will regard as steeped in legend: I have in mind the story of cats. The details, which show the difference between storytelling and Darwin’s ponderous prose, are wonderful and all that is wonderful is true in some way.
And there it is: the origin of a species, without being dragged out over hundreds of pages. What can be seen clearly here are cats, and there you have them: flying out of a lion’s nostrils, meowing as they flip in the air and land on four paws. Without forgetting their super-objective, they end up next to the mouse in one leap and then scritch-scratch! I say scritch-scratch because I have in mind that the duel was unusual to the highest degree. Did the cats know who they were up against? That’s a good question.
It is true that these pieces of information do not fully correspond with Darwinism but that’s more likely a problem with Darwinism. Its founder simply would not have understood the story about cats. It seems to me that he didn’t know how to smile.
On a serious note. Given my considerable age, I am often asked about my attitude toward Darwin. What can I say? His ear that caught the rhythms of evolution turned out not to hear the pulse of metaphor and (more broadly speaking) poetry. Only Charles’s inability to hear metaphor can explain his pouncing on the Holy Scripture. Only his insensitivity to poetry prevented him from understanding that he was not contradicting a biblical text. I think the deceased now understands that.
from a space far above and beyond the camps
James Alan McPherson (1993):
Meanwhile, while we retreat into a debate over which group is more victimized and deserving of close attention, the larger and more important issue remains: just who, even under the purview of the old Roman Jus Gentium, remains a foreigner, and what is left of the Romans who maintain the remnants of the old Jus Civile? The antagonistic cooperation, the creative tension, between the rule of law and a settled code of conduct, could be ripe with human possibilities. The Americans of the coming centuries will emerge, and mature, out of this tension. According to my own thinking, they will be the ones who act, and who encourage others to act, in areas beyond either a fixation on Civil Rights or on the preservation of the more negative and reductive aspects of the white status quo, both of which have produced nothing more than human stasis. They will be the ones who accept the greater challenges and goals of full and equal citizenship, of a higher ethical responsibility towards the human individual, in a space far above and beyond the fires of two radically opposed camps. But after the destruction of most of the country’s large-souled men, and during this time of fear, such people, even if they do exist, have no good reason to announce their presence among us, even if they were welcomed.
A near perfect match for that 1930 Karl Jaspers quote I never tire of:
The truly real takes place almost unnoticed, and is, to begin with, lonely and dispersed. . . . Those among our young people who, thirty years hence, will do the things that matter are, in all probability, now quietly biding their time; and yet, unseen by others, they are already establishing their existences by means of an unrestricted spiritual discipline.
the little americans
The “Little Americans” finally are getting their way. I hope they get full—and eternal—credit for the results.
You know the Little Americans. They are our version of the Little Englanders, self-proclaimed nationalists who advocate a smaller, less ambitious, less engaged nation, hostile toward international trade and international alliances, hostile toward immigrants (and, often as not, native-born citizens of recent immigrant background), driven by resentment, sneering at our highest national ideals, demanding to know why all the money being spent in Ukraine or Israel or wherever isn’t being used to fill potholes in Sheboygan or to increase grandma’s Social Security benefits, strangely envious of less important countries such as Belgium or Ireland. It would be a lot easier and a lot cheaper, they insist, if the United States would just give up and allow itself to become just “another pleasant country on the U.N. roll call, somewhere between Albania and Zimbabwe,” in the words of George H. W. Bush, who had bigger things in mind.
There was a kind of sorry consistency to the old-school Little Americans, men such as Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul, who advocated a general American withdrawal from international engagements and international institutions. (Paul, to his credit, remained a free-trader while in public life, describing that position as a “policy of peace.”) Today’s Little Americans have a strong scent of Norma Desmond about them: They expect to withdraw and command at the same time, that the United States can give up its international commitments but still expect to get its way more or less on demand, as though the U.S. position as a big and rich consumer-goods market should be enough to ensure that the rest of the world defers to Washington. (In case you hadn’t noticed: It ain’t.) They are the political equivalent of the old guy in the blue blazer complaining about the corkage fee at the country club and threatening to cancel his membership. Their sense of America’s metaphysical destiny is undiminished, and they remain committed, as only a Protestant can, to the notion that the United States of America is at the center of some kind of biblical narrative. (Some of them don’t know they are Protestants.) But they seem to think the nation can maintain that imperial pretense while living out a nickel-and-dime philosophy day to day. […]
Of course, the Little Americans hate the Ivy League—and Wall Street, and Silicon Valley, and the cities where the people and the GDP are, and Hollywood, and Broadway, and the big New York book publishers, and the newspapers, and the philanthropic foundations, and the think tanks, and the big global companies with the cosmopolitan management teams that create most of the profits and the jobs, and most of the churches, and any institution that has not been mau-maued into making an oath of fealty to the idol of the moment—because they love America, or at least a full 18 percent of it. They are nationalists, of a sort, but nationalists whose friends are all in Moscow and Budapest and whose enemies are all in Los Angeles and Boston. Xi Jinping knows what they are: chumps, albeit dangerous chumps—but less of a danger to his interests today than they were a few years ago.
——
Take in, if you will, the sorry spectacle of U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer.… Beijing, which aims to finish the trade war the dolts in Washington started, has announced new export controls on rare-earth products, including magnets, and has targeted not only the United States but the world at large, empowering Beijing to use selective enforcement of its new licensing regime to make it very expensive to be a friend of the United States. Greer, whining on behalf of the government of these United States of America, protests that that move is “not proportional.” He continued: “It is an exercise in economic coercion on every country in the world.”
I kind of pity the poor silly bootless bastard having to stand out there in the late October wind in nothing but the moral equivalent of his skivvies and pretend that “not proportional” and “an exercise in economic coercion on every country in the world” was not the plainly stated flippin’ policy of the imbecilic and incompetent administration he has chosen to serve for some ineffable reason. Does no one remember the “proportionality” of the so-called Liberation Day tariffs, “proportions” that were simply made up? Does no one remember that the administration targeted every country in the world and a few that were made up?
——
Donald Trump is a man with a short attention span, a toddler’s sense of entitlement, a high-school mean girl’s thin skin, and the approximate IQ of today’s lunch special at Joe’s Stone Crab, none of which leaves him very well suited to the kind of long-term administrative and management work that effective policy development requires. The Trump administration does not do implementation. Instead, Trump simply tries to bully his way through every disagreement, assuming—wrongly!—that, as the president of these United States, he’ll always have the biggest stick in the fight. He thinks he is the president of a country club or, as he himself has put it at times, the manager of a department store, a tyrant overseeing a petty domain in which he can rearrange the lives of human beings, nations, and institutions like chessmen. But even within the well-defined borders of a tennis court or a golf course, the real-world math can get pretty hairy pretty quickly, and the world is not a tennis court or a golf course—and Trump does not understand the game he is playing.
——
Xi is 100 percent tyrant and 0.00 percent fool—Donald Trump’s proportions are somewhat differently mixed. It is strange to me that so many of my friends take that, even now, as a comfort.
nobody
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!
I counter with “Yes, but Trump truly is worse because he does it right out in the open, shamelessly.” If hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, it joins smoking and drinking on the very short list of vices Trump doesn’t practice. Otherwise, his brazenness coarsens every thing he touches and everyone who cheers him. For a guy so enamored of gold leaf, he’s oddly opposite King Midas.
I never thought I would lament the loss of hypocrisy.