Silence and Sovereignty
Could there be a better way of subverting that traditional link between music and healing than by replacing it with a simulacrum of the same?
BY THOMAS HARRINGTON
View original article at Brownstone.org.
When persecuting his domestic political opponents, Mussolini frequently did so in what by today’s dictatorial standards was a surprising, genteel manner. He would send them to live in remote villages far from their homes, often in the poverty-stricken center and south of Italy.
There, while constrained by daily check-ins with the police, and a mostly enforced ban on leaving the village, they were—depending on the humors of the local podestà—often otherwise free to live their lives, receive family visits, and in some cases, bring along their wives and young children to share in the experience.
One such confinee, as such people were called, was the Turin-born physician, painter, political activist, and writer Carlo Levi, who in 1935 was sent to the village of Aliano in the province of Matera, part of a larger historic region of Lucania, known for extreme poverty during its long history of violent resistance to Bourbon and, after 1860, when the Italian government attempted to impose their control on the territory.
Nine years later, as German troops roamed the streets of a suddenly post-Mussolini Florence looking to detain and torture political dissidents much like him, a hiding Levi produced a lightly fictionalized account of his time in Aliano. Eighty years after its publication, that book, Christ Stopped in Eboli(Cristo si è fermato a Eboli), is still widely viewed as a classic work of contemporary Italian and European literature.
In addition to its often stunningly beautiful prose, the key to its success lies, in my view, in the way that Levi flips the script on the assumptions underlying the authoritarian social order forged by Mussolini in the years after his 1922 March on Rome.
The great majority of the confinees in Mussolini’s Italy were, like Levi, products of the country’s industrialized and presumptively more sophisticated urban north. In exiling them to the “savage” south away, in the case of the intellectuals from their cafés and galleries, and in the case of the union leaders and labor agitators, from their workers’ clubs and meetings, Mussolini sought to psychologically break them. He was saying to them in effect, “Think you have a better idea of how to run the country? Great, go see how that works out with the illiterate and violent peasants of the mezzogiorno.”
Levi, however, subverted the plan by deploying one of the weapons that ruling authoritarians most fear: empathy. While never resorting to condescension, nor denying his own identity and social extraction, he simply regarded his new neighbors with an equanimous and loving gaze, viewing them on their terms, and in the light of the historical and geographical realities that had shaped their destinies.
He had been sent to one of the poorest places in Europe, one where, as the title of the book suggests, not even the basic ideas and values of Western culture had supposedly ever penetrated, and he found not the expected deplorables, but imperfect people like those up north shaped, however, by a different and quite rationally coherent set of civilizational imperatives.
When a book moves me deeply, I often seek to visit the places portrayed in its pages. I recently had the good fortune of spending an afternoon rambling around the streets of Aliano, visiting houses where Levi lived during his confinement, sitting in the small square where he listened to Fascist harangues with his fellow villagers, and gazing out on the stark and steep clay mountainsides he rendered so beautifully in his paintings and by way of words in the book.
I finished up with a visit to the graveyard located on a hill above the main part of the town, where he would seek relief from the summer heat by lying down in half-dug graves and would request to be buried upon his death in 1975.
As I moved toward the gates of this cemetery in this still forgotten and still quite poor corner of Europe, filled according to most available statistical measures even today by a less than “developed” population, I saw a plaque whose message stopped me in my tracks: “Silence and cleanliness, two proofs of civilization..”
And then I said to myself, “By the first measure, at least, I am a citizen of a very uncivilized culture.”
Like Levi, I had found new wisdom and clarity in an unexpected place.
Silence and Spiritual Sovereignty
I have always had a very acute sense of hearing, and perhaps for that reason have long been quite sensitive to loud background noise. Whenever I would go to a rock concert or a discotheque with friends in high school or college, I would soon find myself counting the minutes until the moment we would leave. As I grew older, I solved the problem by simply avoiding such situations.
However, in recent years, especially since the beginning of the Covid operation, this has become much more difficult to do. Wherever I turn these days, I am subjected to loud music or, worse yet, unintelligible noises not of my choosing.
I used to go to hockey and baseball games to watch what was going on and exchange conversation with good friends. In fact, I can remember going to Boston Bruins games in the 1970s and 1980s heyday of New England’s sellout after sellout love affair with the team and still being able to hear the players talking to each other on the ice.
Neither of those things is possible now. To enter a hockey arena or a baseball stadium is to know that for the next several hours you will be assaulted by noise and will strain to hear the voices of your friends, and be forced to talk back to them, presuming you’ve been able to make out what they said, in throat-straining yells.
Does this really make the experience more enjoyable? Perhaps more importantly, did any of us ask for this?
Even more alarming is the situation in restaurants. Music has long had a role in restaurants, especially in ones at the higher end of the price scale. But it was always as a soothing background accompaniment to what rivals the consumption of food as the centerpiece of the dining experience: good conversation. No problem there.
Now, however, it is nearly impossible to find a restaurant that does not put music on at dialogue-impairing levels.
If there was a consumer movement to promote this disruptive tendency, I guess I missed it. And yet it seems that very few people have anything to say about it.
And since the Covid operation, what was a largely US practice has become a worldwide tendency. If there is a more historically vigorous, talk-at-the-table culture than that of Spain—where affection (and disdain) are expressed not so much often with pointillist precision but through promiscuous torrents of words—I don’t know it. To enter a Spanish bar or restaurant for lunch was, until quite recently, to enter a place defined, above all, by the animated exchange of voices.
All that, however, is beginning to change, especially in the country’s larger cities, as loud music is increasingly imposed upon the clientele in such places.
Again, I am aware of no movement in which Spanish bar and restaurant-goers voiced their strong preference for impeding long-standing oral practices with one-size-fits-all noise delivered at high volume.
So, what’s really going on?
I got my first insight a few years back when talking to a colleague and fellow Hartford resident about the cars that sometimes pass through my neighborhood with stereo volumes that shake the windows of my house, and that can still be heard for at least a half-mile away after passing by.
After listening to me, he said, “Oh, those unfortunate people. They’re just self-medicating.”
I had never thought about loud noise as curative. But I suppose that, if for you, life is unbearably painful, tedious, or spiritually empty—and I assure I am not making light of these realities—loud noise can provide relief by making it largely impossible to meaningfully contemplate your ability to make any sense of the world, an inability made possible, perhaps, by never having been given the chance by the culture and its ever-blaring music to pause and think about why you might be here, and what you might want to do with your life.
The second clue came a few days back while listening to Brownstone’s always incisive Sinead Murphy on a podcast centering on her book, Autistic Society Disorder. At one point in the conversation, she speaks of how autistic children like her son Joseph, who are largely unable to filter sensory input, can provide us all with insight into the true nature of, in her words, the ever more “aggravating” world in which we have come to live and work.
She goes on to speak of how the fast-paced and ever-changing nature of metropolitan life requires us to be practitioners of what she, channeling the ideas of the Italian philosopher Paolo Virno, calls “shallow virtuosity,” a posture that requires us to perform seamlessly in aesthetically grim, impersonal, scripted and often sensorially overwhelming environments.
What this way of living does not and cannot, of course, offer, is any time for wonder or contemplation, mental activities that virtually every cultural tradition before our time has seen as absolutely central to achieving the sort of spiritual and/or psychic depth that has long been associated with maturity and the ability to exercise discernment in our daily affairs.
The Ur-example of this within the Christian tradition is Jesus’ decision to spend forty days in the desert to clear his troubled mind and to prepare himself for the enormous sacrifices he knew lay ahead in his life.
His example was the inspiration for the many monastic practices that arose in the Christian world during the so-called Middle Ages. It was and is also the model for the many pilgrimage traditions that arose during the same time, and that have served since then as a sort of lay correlate to the practices of the cloistered clergy.
The idea that sustains these long-standing cultural institutions is as simple as it is profound: in order to find out how to spend our limited time on this earth doing things that really matter (a.k.a. things, large and small whose impact might be still remembered or felt by others, especially your loved ones, after you’re gone), we must be acutely aware of how the rhythms of daily life will, if allowed to perpetuate themselves without breaks for reflection and intimate dialogue with thoughtful others, eventually turn us all into benumbed servants of the system.
And in order to create those spaces of introspection and meaningful dialogue, we need a certain measure of calm and silence.
I know, however, that if I were a member of a super-elite cadre bent on further extending its control over the lives of the many, I’d do everything in my power to ensure that such moments of silence and relative calm become ever more scarce in society. And what better way to do so than by constantly foisting unrequested noise at high volumes onto the citizenry in the name of entertainment or musical enhancement?
Not only does this serial bombardment of our senses rob us of reflective silence and the possibilities of intelligent dialogue, but it also arguably prepares the psychological ground for other unwanted assaults on our bodies.
A few years back, a very brilliant musician and music therapist friend said to me, “Tom, don’t forget that music is above all, and unlike reading or seeing, a whole-body experience. That is why, unlike those activities, it has long been linked to the search for physical and psychological healing in most cultural traditions.”
Could there be a better way of subverting that traditional link between music and healing, rooted in communal dynamics of a bottom-up nature, than by replacing it with a top-down simulacrum of the same, designed to cancel out its healing features, and to habituate people to elite-supplied assaults on their physical integrity in the name of health and well-being?
Am I suggesting that the latest surge in noise pollution in our former places of contemplation and dialogue might be part of a plan?
Well, let’s put it this way. If, through their massive and interlocking ownership stakes in millions of businesses, entities like BlackRock, Blackstone, and State Street working in concert with governments could pull off the enormous logistical coup of insuring that store aisles worldwide were adorned with directional signals within weeks of the declaration of the pandemic, I see no reason why they couldn’t similarly engineer a concerted turning up of the volume in our formerly restorative third places.
Indeed, when we remember the well-documented role that unrelenting loud music played in the torture regimes designed to induce learned helplessness at Abu-Ghraib, Guantánamo, and other US black sites during the so-called War on Terror, and the disdain with which our political class treated our bodies and our spiritual well-being during the Covid operation, this notion takes on an even greater air of credibility.
Think about these things the next time you are assaulted in a public place by vastly over-volumed third-party noise masquerading as musical enhancement, or as a contrived indicator of social excitement and happiness.
If you have already lost hope in the possibility of ever establishing meaningful dialogues with others and a measure of spiritual and/or psychic sovereignty for yourself, you might, as that colleague stated years ago, very well experience these assaults as pleasing medication.
And as a member of that group you might even want to engage in what seems to be the latest post-Covid social craze: exhibiting your withered humanity by loudly sharing the sounds of your personal medicine machine (a.k.a your phone) with all others in your immediate vicinity without any regard for their possible desire for peace and quiet.
If, on the other hand, you’re still engaged in the struggle to grow in personal consciousness through contemplation and dialogue, perhaps it’s time to acknowledge that these modes of being are seriously under attack through third-party noise-mongering, and to think about ways we can restore much-needed spaces of calm to our lives.
"Levi... subverted the plan by deploying one of the weapons that ruling authoritarians most fear: empathy." Important thought.