John Snider
English
Northern Montana College
"It is disgraceful to remain silent and allow barbarians to speak."
Over the last fifteen years I have written perhaps a dozen letters to the editor. Usually these letters condemn an idea that strikes me as stupid or hypocritical. For the most part, when I write these letters, I am naïve. I know there is a section of the newspaper called Letters to the Editor, and so I send my letter in simply wanting to say something which I feel is important. Of course, like anyone who writes anything, I know I am calling attention to myself, but since I have vainly imagined myself as a champion of truth, I could not indulge in the fantasy for long.
What does surprise me about the letters I have written is the response from my work mates and friends. Invariably they fear for my safety. The cannot believe I have written a letter critical of the boss, the government, or religion and not been packed off to jail or sent to the unemployment line. They genuinely fear for me. They ask if it is legal to say what I have said. They are astounded that I have written anything at all. Some of them tell me that they have been planning to write letters for years but have never gotten around to it. Their fear and astonishment are mentioned first, but next--and I am profoundly embarrassed by this, perhaps because I cannot help but want to believe it--they tell me that I have guts, that I am a modern Thomas Paine, that I have pushed the darkness back. The truth, of course, is nothing of the kind: I have merely written a few letters which as far as I can tell contain no original thoughts.
The reaction which I have witnessed a dozen times in different places where I have lived has lead me to conclude that we Americans are a frightened people. What other explanation can there be for our silence and our astonishment at people who speak. Our fear accounts for our silence--a fear so deep few can give it its proper name.
I know this fear of breaking the silence is, at least, in part rational. Workers do lose their jobs for writing letters, and my career has been made more difficult because of public statements I have made. But the fear has grown out of proportion. It has become a national malaise, a profound hesitation bordering on catatonia, a mental paralysis. We are frozen inside ourselves. We will tolerate a great deal. We will watch while a woman is raped on a pool table or stabbed in a public street; we will calmly eat our dinner and watch for years a war brought to us via television news. These indignities are, at least, the subject of occasional editorials, but we daily put up with far worse assaults upon us: the shopping mall, football, college, breathable panty liners, ball point pens that can write across glaciers and will last into the coming ice age. These we will tolerate because we do not see the connection between them and the rape on the pool table or the burning thatch hut in the rice paddy. As Robert Bly tells us, "We are in Vietnam because the aluminum shade business is doing so well."
Our silence makes us narrow and our narrowness encourages our fear. The ideas deemed acceptable grow fewer and more fragile everyday. Once while watching the news I had the horrifying experience of changing channels in mid-sentence only to come upon a different channel where a different commentator completed the first commentator's sentence. Indeed, our subjects all have their appropriate predicates. I explained this to a friend who was not the least offended but only remarked, "Yes, different stations cover the same stories because they are important." Truly 1984 is upon us.
We are schooled in timidity, but we disguise it by a fraudulent tolerance that proclaims a willingness to accept different ideas. My students especially call for openness but more often than not sit mute waiting for the master to command--speak! The more astute among them recognize their socialization; they use the word hoping the odd sound and number of syllables will elicit sympathy, and justify their silence by blaming the system. This is a pathetic dodge, and if my mostly middle-class students are permitted to indulge in it, they will one day drink the cool aid and call it hemlock.
It is silence they seek and if not silence then the absence of any unpleasantness. One can disrupt most meetings by asking a question. Arguments are anathema; Dale Carnegie, not Socrates, is our teacher. Everywhere in the liberal universities conflict "resolution" is the byword. "Struggle" is a dirty word. The message is that police and peace-loving folks do not disagree; they will sit in a circle and come to a consensus. That is rule by the tyranny of the silent majority or, worse, rule by the facilitator who sits in the circle smugly and quietly manipulating the discussion. In such an atmosphere real ideas are scorned.
The circle, I feel, is a poor symbol for an idea. An idea is a sharper and harder thing. It has edges; it cuts, and if pierced it bleeds real blood. Dostoevsky reminds us that "Thinking causes pain." What we want is all of the appearance of thought without any of the hard work. Try to think of a really worthwhile idea, one that has in some way changed your life, that has not been at first glance repugnant to you. When we first consider that there is no God, we are terrified; when we first learn that our country is committing mass murder, we feel betrayed; when we first confront our own selfishness, we feel ashamed. And in all these instances we violently reject what we know to be the truth. Once we have considered any of these truths, there is no turning back; we cannot hide behind the smile button for long.
I suspect that our fear is so deep that it defines our personality and our national character. We are unsure of who we are. We know what daily humiliation we have put up with in this land of Mammon: the lies we have believed, the honor we have sacrificed, the false idols we have worshipped. Recently I was fired from a job and freed from the necessity of being polite to people for whom I felt no respect. I suddenly realized what a liar I had become. Humans are cows, gregarious and longing to be liked, and it often takes a shock to wake us up.
Perhaps, then, it is not the ideas that frighten us so much as the signing of our names to them. In this land where unspeakable deeds are done in our name, we have no name left. We have abandoned it through our silence and our inaction; we have given it to the technicians of the status quo. But this gift of our good names has not quieted our fear. We are still afraid because the word is alive and like all live things it is dangerous.
When we speak we are taking a chance. We are casting something of ourselves out into a void. Life is a risk and saying something important is a risk. Language and ideas are more real than we ever so pragmatic Americans would like to believe. We think we can dispose of irksome ideas by simply burning the books or banning them, as is done every so often in the high school libraries across the country. But here as well we fool ourselves. The books are burned because the words and ideas in them have already burned in someone's soul. It is a case of internal combustion. The books light themselves on fire, consumed by their own heat, despite the fact that it is the intolerant who deceive themselves into thinking that they have put the books to the torch.
Risk is what makes writing exciting. There are those writers who have risked their lives by writing. Thomas Paine could have been hanged for what he wrote; Anne Frank was under death sentence every hour she wrote in her diary in her attic; and we should never forget the Jew who escaped from Treblinka in a railway car stuffed with clothes taken from dead Jews. All night in a passion of creativity he wrote again and again on the forlorn clothes, "This piece of clothing belonged to a Jew who was murdered by the Nazis at Treblinka." This Jew from Treblinka died once. We die each time we choke off an honest sentence, each time we swallow a decent thought. We scoff at conviction until we have abandoned belief itself. We are so fooled by our willful self-deception that we can no longer distinguish between honest speech and lies.
We have separated what is true and just so effectively from our daily expressions that we think nothing of writing what is not true. Indeed modern students and pedants scorn the notion that truth and justice are essential for decent writing. Imagine such academics writing, "When truth and justice fail through insufficient advocates, the skilled rhetorician will set this right," or "One ought not to persuade people to do what is wrong." Aristotle, who wrote these lines, was not embarrassed about linking the instruction of rhetoric with the quest for truth and justice. For all the classical rhetoricians the two were inseparable: one studied to be a good orator by becoming a good person. Imagine a modern composition class where integrity, honesty, courage, and a fierce love of truth were prerequisites. Today in colleges and universities we have replaced these virtues with wholesale expediency in the form of Business and Technical writing. In such classes form is paramount while the ethical implications of what one writes are irrelevant. The student practices writing a memo to control workers, a vita to get a job, a technical manual designed to make home repair more difficult, a letter to sell a worthless or dangerous product, or any of a thousand other lies. In every instance writing is wholly a means to an end--an end which is never even discussed.
Can a dishonorable person be a good writer? We say, yes, because for us it is all done with mirrors. We are surface only. We invent the word processor so that we can have another excuse to watch television. But we cannot crawl into the television and hide; sooner or later we will have to be alone with our own thoughts. What we lack is simply the insistence that we write about things that matter, that we write only what we believe to be true, that we write with conviction, and that we accept the consequences of what we think and write.
Not too long ago I spoke with a friend of mine who told me a moving story. He decided to go to a meeting of right wing bigots who had organized to protest certain rights of American Indians which are guaranteed by treaties. He decided to go to this meeting because he has seen the violence that bigotry can cause and because he wanted to try to understand the bigotry as well as stand against it. In the course of the meeting many false and hateful ideas were expressed. Finally, despite his fear he felt bound to stand and denounce the hate around him.
Such a man understands something few academics do about language: he knows that the word is of the world and belongs in the world. He did not retire to his study and send his words long distance. He went into the world and took the word with him. Our responsibility is clear and simple, for more often than not we know what needs to be said. We do not need another conference on the evils of nuclear war; we do not need a sociologist to tell us that lynching is wrong; we do not need to form a committee to discuss the relative merits of an old woman living on a heating grate. Such exercises insult time. We can step out of line and flee into the jungle. There, we can ask ourselves who we are, and we can honestly face our own cowardice.