Silence Divine, An Allegory
Silence is a right in part because it is presupposed by the articulation, declaration and understood acceptance of all other rights. (Enshrined in the law, even police say: ‘you have the right to remain silent’). No obligation is binding upon someone unless it is understood by the party whose obligation is to uphold the right, and no understanding occurs unless a sufficient period of silence is allowed to appreciate the rationale for the obligation. Now I’m not suggesting to cultivate an air of silence wherever one must intrude upon the public sphere, in spite of my insistence that the ‘inside voice’ be used as a matter of decorum; but I’m inviting the reader to see the importance of maintaining a silence, and by so doing allowing others’ silences to flourish through one’s conscious act of charity which the micropenises couldn’t care less about⁷.
I remember having my dissertation idea at a loud bar, the main concept, nothing of particulars. Those I worked out largely from a literal armchair at a largely deserted writers retreat in Connecticut where my company was the wind, rain, birds and crickets, swaying trees in the scope of my Adirondack chair. But I think about how many conversations have been lost where I live now, or foundered in a direction that later (by research standards) proved useless, because they occurred at an inopportune moment. Not that fate somehow comes down from the heavens and determines things should go a different way, not at all. Some micropenis with little to lose and nothing better to do, decides to make his own enduring contribution to humanity by posturing at the Yale campus on his vehicle. Even if he originates from a posh suburb of Old Saybrook, the quaint coastal town, it’s part of the lifestyle.⁸
He ventures out smiling under his ski mask, which they sell as ‘ninja masks’ (the packaging is littered on the sidewalk), oblivious to the minor role he might play in delaying the development of a new treatment for a type of cancer to whose affliction he succumbs, revving his gas before the wellspring of its conception. Silence thus can be ‘spoiled’ in the literal sense that its products are unusable. But those people. People he thinks look at him because his noise commands respect, not because they were about to have some such idea, not because in their gaping silence he almost sideswipes them. Not that he is alone in his attitude; while occupying one extreme, those who fail to adopt the ‘inside’ voice in public places are blameworthy too.
In the Kantian sense their actions betray maxims which are not universalizable⁹. The failure of willing the maxim as a universal law is manifest in that the silence the micropenis decries would in some circumstances have helped him. Relative to the non-human natural world noise, if it is not an involuntary effect of celebration, joy, ecstasy, has a well-defined purpose besides that of parading the ego’s flashy red flag. And hence for that reason occurs in the non-human world more infrequently and when it does occur, less obtrusively.
7. Besides micropenises, parents and their young children deserve special mention for the multifarious ways in which they have managed to violate this right. Not only is the ‘indoor voice’ (meaning the volume should be lower in indoor public places than outside) not enforced but the parents are guilty of the same mistake, and appear completely oblivious to those who might be hard at work, whether at a café or on a long flight, or within the confines of one’s down domicile where through the walls an incessant din strikes through each day with its trivialities, its frustrations all stemming from the main problem of desire’s pathetic treadmill. But should you ever say anything, should you ever wish to assert your right to silence, then prepare for the death stare or worse, for who are you to question someone else’s parenting ability, some weirdo who doesn’t have kids because the planet is already too far gone. Not for a moment will it occur to them that you might be right. Personally, if I were a parent, I would want to elicit responses from others as to whether I was doing a good job, precisely because others have an unbiased perspective. That’s an aside.
8. Objectors will say they have nowhere else to ride, why not set aside recreational land in state parks, as if there were not already the enough noise there, e.g. trail walkers who carry their insipid beats and lyrics with them as they hike, without so much as a passing consideration as to whether others might prefer the absence of reminders of contemporaneous urbanity, i.e. natural sounds. Not to mention the erosion of those grooves, insect habitats, loss of vegetation, each of which coincides with exploiting areas in the state parks for motorized use. If a lifestyle represents an ecological evil perhaps it should be rethought.
9. Kant is sometimes described as having a rigid, unfeeling, absolutist moral system, but it is none of those. The flexibility of maxims ensures that it is non-absolutist. And we should remember the sense in which Kant thinks we are like divinities in our ability to determine our own ends; it is an inner feeling of ‘reverence’ before the moral law that informs the character of one’s motive being a motive to do one’s duty for the sake of doing one’s duty (rather than merely acting in accord with one’s duty). Then you can picture how from the Kantian perspective and before the cosmic mistake has been made, how when prior to the world and bound within the stillness of the moral law the distinction between ‘creation’ and ‘personal expression’ would have been a distinction without a difference. Obviously I have been scheming to move these two concepts as closely together as possible; maybe there is some residual purity ethic here, but I’m not suggesting that silence is intrinsically good and noise is intrinsically evil, although I suppose I sometimes entertain this thought (screaming fire trucks in background).