The Civic Duty of Silence
Arlington Cemetery, The God Particle, Civility, and the Rules of Civil Procedure.
I often work by having multiple tabs open, both metaphorically and I suppose, also creatively. When writing, I hold multiple ideas about an argument or concept in holding pattern while I address whatever is in front of me. It’s a bit noisy, so to speak. It gives my husband hives, so before handing him my computer, I’ll often save links to multiple sites and winnow down the list to one or two tabs. I’d say, shhh don’t tell him, but he reads this Substack.
Lately I’ve been thinking about silence. Not only of my own thoughts, but also, the generosity sometimes needed for allowing someone to be free from their own thoughts.
For a linear thinker like my husband, working from multiple thoughts at once is madness. I suppose some of this terrible habit of working in a kaleidoscopic way might have been generated when I was a bankruptcy attorney, a specialty that we used to joke wasn’t really a legal specialty. Instead, it was more of “everything law in a hurry specialty.” For example, a retail commercial lease dispute might normally run a few months. In a bankruptcy, a landlord has a compressed amount of time to squawk. It was not so much the need to be able to shift from banking to real estate law in a moment that drove the need to be able to craft arguments along with narrative facts, but the need to pound a complicated response to someone else’s motion in four days. Always four days.1
When I switched to commercial litigation and was assigned a response brief, I remember asking the partner if he wanted the draft in two days. He looked at me in horror. “Isn’t it due at the end of the week?” I asked. It was not. I then learned the luxury of a 20 day response times. But you don’t really care about the Rules of Civil Procedure, what you hopefully are interested in here is why writing fast made me into the sort of person with an alphabetized spice drawer, but 17 tabs open in Chrome (it would be more, but I closed two before I began writing this).
Writing fast, for me, often meant drafting the fact section and the law section simultaneously. Sure, sure, some folks write the argument and then circle back to the facts. I’ve worked for those folks before. They do good work. It’s just not my way. Determining what details are important to your argument sometimes happens as you are making your argument. As in, when writing about a corporation’s board acting prudently and conforming with the law, you circle back to include the number of board meetings and their length in place of a phrase such as “the board met frequently.”
In essence, I’m no stranger to realizing an important fact has been left out in the middle of my terribly persuasive argument (we can only assume). I’m going to assume that happened with the various visits and arguments about the use of Arlington Cemetery as a backdrop for political campaigning in the 2024 Election. Apparently fact checking is very de classe in some political circles these days, so we might not know.
Having multiple tabs running is also my way of not losing a train of thought. When reading case law, I’d often find a cite to a case I might need, but rather than pop off the current case I was noodling in and read the linked case, I’d open it in a new window to dig into later. Listen, Lexis was hella slow in the early 2000s.
I still leave multiple tabs open as a way of reminding myself to do or check out something. It’s why I currently have a recipe for apple butter snickerdoodles (vegan AND gluten free) open next to a YouTube video on bibliotherapy. It’s also how I have a tab open from a news story from April 2024 about the passing of Peter Higgs who opined on the Big Bang Theory. “He theorized there must be a subatomic particle of certain dimension that would explain how other particles — and therefore all the stars and planets in the universe — acquired mass. Without something like this particle, the set of equations physicists use to describe the world, known as the standard model, would not hold together.”2
His work went on to win him a Nobel-prize and be deemed the “God particle.” In short, he found that we need something to bump into to hold it all together.
My brain works this way too, many tabs open all at the same time, feeding from each other. Sometimes it will seem as though a task or thought will remain open and burning through system memory in my brain until I metaphorically close the tab by completing the task. Sometimes those things are as simple as remembering to refill a prescription, other times it may be a thought or speech I heard recently that I want to circle back on. Most often, it’s a reaction to a news item that is lodged in my brain, like a thin splinter or cactus needle. I can’t quite see it, but it feels like it’s catching on to every breeze.
I’ve been thinking also about our outrage industry, that portion of the news media that gathers likes and clicks by providing yet another thing to be angry about. Intellectually, I can usually flip the channel away from such stuff. I know for some sexual assault survivors, having a constant news coverage of a particular crime or event across the news can be difficult, it can feel like they can’t get away from memories they have worked hard to turn the heat down on. I think that’s why the news coverage of Arlington Cemetery and the anniversary of the withdrawal from Afghanistan cactus-needled me lately. Any breeze stabbed that wound again.
The solution I wanted to the outrage was not the right talk, the right words, but instead no words. I wanted silence around Arlington. Respectful, mournful, silence. My father is buried there. And I’d prefer to keep my grief about my father buried as well. I don’t think I’m alone in considering Arlington to be a place where grievers can be left in silince.
I acknowledge that silence isn’t always a gift. Some thinkers have asked whether the absence of sound is tranquility or could be something more sinister. Something leaning towards the verb silencing. Yet, “what is silence?” may be a question with many answers.
I devour most everything on the Marginalian, so I was happy to find an essay on Peter Goodman when I went searching for thoughts on this topic. Peter Goodman considered the qualities of silence and classified them into nine types.3
[H]ere is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy; the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face; the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts; the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, “This… this…”; the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity; the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear; the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud and subvocal speech but sullen to say it; baffled silence; the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos.
It’s the latter silence that Goodman discusses that interests me. The silence of peaceful accord and communion with the cosmos. Among the tabs open in my brain is whether we can redefine faith into something that lives and breathes outside of church. I think the idea of communion of silence as spirituality fits within that. There’s more on that subject for another post. But that peaceful accord silence Goodman mentions is what’s on my mind with the chatter earlier this autumn around Arlington. It’s the lack of civility in the noise generated by the politization of Arlington that I stumble over. This may be the opposite of the God particle – we are stumbling over each other instead of coming together.
I used to have a quote on my computer that said “Civility is civilization. Manners are morality.” I cut it out from a retrospective in Elle Magazine in the 2000s from the Ask E. Jean column. That quote went on my computer to remind me of my civic duty of civility.4 And yes, I did just mention
in the same context of a Nobel-Prize winner. That was not a mistake.When asked about civility, experts will say similar things to E. Jean. American University queried some of their alumni leaders on this topic and their responses were relativity uniform.5 Those interviewed responded that how we treat each other is part of our governing agreement, a rules of civility, if not rules of civil procedure. “Civility is civilization—the foundation of democracy and the social contract. It's resolving to respect each other's rights. Civility is e pluribus unum: out of many we are one people, one civilization. That which unifies us is civil. That which divides us is not.” Others were equally eloquent. “Civility is rooted in recognizing each other's humanity.” The one I found most basic, and therefore most helpful was about civility as a balance. “Civility is not advancing one's own rights and interests at the expense of other people's rights and interests.”
My anger these last few weeks is not directed at the politicians who brought their politics to Arlington (though, sheesh), but at the families who used their memorial – not even a burial, but an anniversary – as a way to advance their own tribal politics. Those families stomped all over my, and other families who have loved ones at Arlington, rights. Their political stunt absolutely fit into the category of advancing their rights and interests at the expense of other’s rights – my right not to be reminded of my father’s passing (of a heart attack not from battle. He carried those scars on his heart). It was loud. It was uncivil.
Law professor and author Steven Carter’s call for civility unifies my thoughts on the the God principle, civility, and my want for silence. In a review of his book in the Hollywood Progressive, John Peeler summarizes Carter’s work as “for him, being civil toward strangers, toward opponents, follows from an acknowledgment that every person is as much God’s creature as we are. We therefore owe it to others, even opponents, to treat them with respect, even awe. We are to love our neighbor.”6
Holding all these tabs open had brought me to the conclusion that we owe each other the right of silence as both a spiritual and civic duty. Maybe the first step toward ending our partisan animosity is to grant each other some amount of silence. Perhaps the best way is to lengthen that response time. We don’t need everything in a hurry least we skip facts. We too can remove the four day response pressure. We could begin with a new silence of waiting. Not the “fertile silence of awareness” or the “alive silence of alert perception” but something new.
A silence of caring for others, a caring silence.
Yes, I know it isn’t four days, it’s 7 under Rule 8013 but when you combine that with the equally restrictive Rule 9006 and local rules that add additional details which potentially shortens that even more, you can see how it’s possible to end up on hours’ long conference calls about when something is due. And also, how things end up being due in 4 days. Even when they are complicated. Oh, and there is no limitation on the length of responses as there would be in state courts, so welcome to drafting 20 page motion responses in 4 days. But I digress…
Another E. Jean quote that went something like “if Joan of Arc could clap on the armor and raise an army at 18 you can get out of bed,” – lived on the fridge. It took up kitchen real estate until 2021.
I identify with your open tab issue so much. I just closed 22 open tabs on my computer. I know I probably have another 20-25 to go through on my iPad!