If you had asked any woman to name the principal vice of her sex (back when she had a sex, rather than the “contested site of meaning” that currently confronts her in the mirror) she would have said gossip, vindictive speech, idle chatter—some lack of restraint in regard to her tongue. Now, if the female sex has any vice at all it is the opposite. Too easily, women restrain themselves. Too often, they stifle and smother the creative stirrings of their tongues in unenlightened obeisance to some patriarchy or other, disobeying the commandment to speak their mind by unduly minding their speech.
And if you had asked the same woman to name the predominant vices of the male sex, she would have complained of his propensity for pompousness, for pedantry, for giving speeches unasked for and sermons unedifying to whatever congregation had the misfortune of being trapped at his dinner table. Yesterday, we were morally abashed by the blowhard. Today, we search the streets for him, and are abashed only to find a waifish man who does not “speak truth to power,” who trembles to “speak his mind.”
Socrates cursed the unexamined life; Jesus, the unfruitful life; we, the unexpressed life. But our grandmothers remember a world of expression governed by propriety, that mysterious virtue by which one knew the difference between the word that ought to be spoken and the word of which the proverb said: “Let it perish along with you. Have courage! It won’t make you burst” (Sirach 19:10). The punishment of breaking with propriety is shame, of which our grandmothers were said to die. Now, no one dies of shame, and if we so much as get sick with it, it is not on account of a lack of propriety but of its lingering presence: one is ashamed to find that one is not as shameless as one’s fellows, and sets about conquering this problem through therapy.
It is always suspicious when a performance is praised that takes very little work to perform; a scam, wherever intelligent adults gather around some unintelligent happenstance of paint and call it a masterpiece. The human voice is only so loud, and when it cheers it is pretty near its loudest. Yahoo, hooray, and grow breathless over every humdrum accomplishment—you'll have neither breath left to sing the praises of hard-won virtues, nor volume left to cheer a genuine stroke of brilliance. Something like this seems to be happening in our incessant speechlessness over the merits of human speech; our never shutting up about never shutting up. For self-expression is something any toddler can do, and will, unless trained otherwise. No one, to my mind, has obeyed the mandate to “speak his mind” so thoroughly as the child throwing a tantrum at the toy store. We praise the embittered rant against a perceived injustice as something difficult and daring even when it is self-evidently not; when it is approved of by all in earshot; when complaint is simply what the untrained human being does under the weight of injustice.
The people most likely to say things like “your voice matters” are the ones for whom our voices most decidedly do not. Government agencies, consumer surveys, and complaint departments are all dripping with respect for the power of the human voice, but no one, informed by a recording that “your call is important to us” imagines for a second that it is. We are wise, I think, to the scam. This native skepticism towards such corporate clichés as “we want to hear from you” should be applied to the larger case of our widespread, cultural adulation of speech.
No one yelling their complaint to an electricity company imagines their speech is effective, beyond scraping what discount its policies allow from an official carefully crafted to be neither capable enough to solve the problem nor responsible enough to be blamed for being incapable. If some man, forced to listen to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons for an hour, was elated by the power of his speech, we might humor him—but only because he is humorous. We know that our voices do not matter to corporations; but, somehow we believe that they matter very much to a society made up of corporations. We know that speaking truth to power rarely moves the powerful in any particular case, and yet, somewhere in the movement from the particular case to the general platitude, we grow stupid. Behold, a life of frustrated complaints to entrenched and immovable institutions, and yet we kneel down before our children and solemnly teach them: your voice matters, express yourself, speak your mind.
Scripture knows better. It always does. If moderns encourage wielding righteous words against whatever real power confronts us, the wisdom literature of the Bible encourages the opposite: “Do not go to law against a judge, for the decision will favor him because of his standing” (Sirach 8:14).
Christ knew better. He always does. He presumes that, in a wicked world, the truth will be despised by the powerful. He recommends annoying them instead, as in his parable of the widow who is not vindicated by a wicked judge because of the righteousness of her complaint but because she “kept coming to him” until he relented: “Though I neither fear God nor regard man, yet because this widow bothers me, I will vindicate her, or she will wear me out” (Luke 18:1-8).
St. Paul said, in what I can only imagine as a grim, muttered certainty, that “the Kingdom of God does not consist in talk but in power” (1 Corinthians 4:20). Our billionaires, public schools, and politicians have been busy tweezing the sting from this doctrine, insisting to those over whom they lord that the kingdom consists “not in power, but in talk”—and to their own obvious benefit. Thus we live in a topsy-turvy world in which it is possible to affirm the following facts without blinking:
I. that never before, in all of human history, have our rulers been more exposed to the power of our speech; their evils, errors, and idiocies the subject, now, of nearly universal talk, and
II. that never before in all of human history has a ruling class uninterruptedly amassed as much wealth, property, and power, as our own.
A casual observer might imagine that the latter is made possible by the former; that when talk is made sacrosanct, action becomes vulgar and alarming; that a people encouraged to speak their minds against their tyrannical rulers are obviously not a people encouraged to, say, hang them. The wisdom of the child who sings “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me” becomes, in the socialized adult, “sticks and stones are illegal to throw but words will change the world.”
This is simply liberalism doing its dirty work: the gradual elimination of all sources of power and authority besides that of the state—that sole leviathan actor in a world of talking plankton. What remains obvious is that, if an entire generation can be convinced that their power is in their voice, they will devote that much more caloric energy, time, and spirit to gaining a voice rather than to gaining power. It is telling that those activities that actually take power, distributing the capacity for action and world-building into many hands rather than few, are not packaged into any culturally acceptable cliché. “Speak truth to power” finds no sister in “own property against power,” even though the latter works and the former does not. “Speaking your mind” will always find its defenders. “Hiding your mind while you build up strong communities of families”—will not, for the simple reason that this latter practice has the danger of being efficacious. “Your voice matters,” which we know to be false, enjoys cultural supremacy over “your gun matters” or “your friends matter”—which we know to be true. “Asserting yourself” against “power” is an unexamined good, but freeing yourself from those relationships of rent whereby power is actually amassed is considered Amish. We are lauded for using our phones to comment on the crimes of the wealthy; viewed as psychopathic for suggesting that we destroy those same phones whereby we continually make them wealthy. We are brave if we speak out against injustice; lunatics if we seek to administer justice. It is preached, constantly, that the pen is mightier than the sword, but whatever it once meant, it has come to mean that wherever and whenever a people are in obvious need of a sword, some hapless educator runs around, passing out pens.
Religion is not the opiate of the people—speech is.