This article is taken from the June 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking. (Matthew 6:7)
In the early weeks of spring I made a 72-hour trip across the ocean to New York City, one of those modern unkindnesses to the body which, in this case, was made tolerable only by the wedding of a dear friend and the chance to roam around the antiquarian book fair at the Park Avenue Armory. The spirit of Manhattan was in its usual perennial bloom — brash and energetic, with its characteristic $90 mediocre lunches and the concomitant taxi rides during which one’s entire life flashes in full view somewhere on East End avenue between 66th and 79th.
The conversations randomly encountered on public transportation were memorable as always, such as one with a young man on the 6 train inquiring about my new purchase of a volume of Wallace Stevens and then waxing inspiringly about his interests in 20th-century American poetry and a curious monologue on Akhenaten (mostly in tongues, I think) by a local addict accompanied with laminated visuals. It was the magnificently unpredictable city that I’ve experienced on every professional and personal visit.
The conversations at the wedding were just as memorable in that there was a refrain so consistently encountered amongst these rather well-off people that I wondered whether I had missed a pre-nuptial directive. The usual niceties opening a relaxed evening conversation in the United States — these days mostly about shows on streaming — were replaced by some variation on the motif that things in the US are bad.
A simple “How’ve you been?” would elicit an impressively confident jeremiad on tariffs plus a helpful reminder that your interlocutor was, in case you weren’t aware, a morally upstanding person. I have never heard the Kennedy Center, a place of artistic importance to the cultured New Yorker on par with a village hall in a Berkshire hamlet of some 15 families, so lauded in all my life.
Most of this was harmlessly amusing, even to a person who shares the general disquiet amongst progressive Americans about current politics. Sometimes, however, it got just plain uncomfortable. At least one member of the wedding party, nicely ensconced in a gentrified area of Brooklyn, would ask me how I was doing and then proceed to glare as I answered in a way not conforming to her conviction that all should be seen in various shades of misery (my answer was, “Very well, thanks”). It felt like being forced to make some sort of acknowledgement in a dystopian game show where I had to improvise whilst inebriated.
Since returning to Europe, my sensitivities to this kind of performative behaviour have been sufficiently piqued that I now note a strange recent habit in emails. My correspondents by and large no longer commence with the admittedly vomitrocious “I hope this finds you well,” but with something like — to name two real examples — “I hope all is as well as can be expected with everything happening around us” or, even more thrillingly poetic, “Daily whiplash and disbelief notwithstanding … ”
If you’re not angry you’re not paying attention
These and other perambula are addressed by lovely, well-meaning people, but they have become so frequent that, even in a short span of time, the mind treats them as pro forma commonplaces along the lines of the now ubiquitous symbols of goodness listed alongside professional titles in email signatures from American institutions.
Unsure how to respond, I mostly just address the central matter at hand and let it be. I know how I feel about the political direction of the leading superpower and the attendant risks of the globe falling into a great conflagration, but stating that in an email thread whose main purpose is to establish the location of viola parts for a concerto is not going to achieve much. Later, one of these same correspondents asked about what she called my “mental health” as I’d not made any reaction to the recent US presidential election.
As I have lived in the former Eastern bloc for almost a decade, an irrepressible cynicism leads the mind to anecdotes from friends in Prague of what life there used to be like. One slogan often recalled as an example of the absurdity of those times is the inimitably arch Čest práci (literally “honour to labour”), a state-mandated greeting encountered in daily speech and written communication.
After 1948 this became a required substitute for the presumably unacceptable Dobrý den (“good day”). One can only imagine the burning energy of a Czech counterpart to the aforementioned Brooklynite in chiding us for saying the day is good when in fact, if you’re not angry you’re not paying attention. Failure to greet thusly in even the most innocuous situations came with “consequences”.
My father tells of similar experiences in the first few years of the revolutionary regime in Iran, when a simple Salaam aleikum (Arabic for “peace be upon you” but, alas, now part of modern Persian) became the fulsome “peace be upon you and Allah’s mercy and blessings”, a phrase previously heard from members of the clergy and a few stalwarts of the faith.
Then there was the more frankly aggressive ya hagh which calls in the vocative case upon one of Allah’s ninety-nine names, in this case “the Just”. As with asserting honour to the labourers, the Islamic authorities and their dependant class of thuggish social theorists took a dim view of the omission of such mottos.
Words are deprived of value without much reflection as to the consequences
Work is indeed honourable, and only the most strident advocate of a sort of undergraduate atheism would chafe at wishing blessings and mercy on one’s fellow man. It is only when these sorts of phrases are repeated atavistically that the benevolent content of their intention rots from within. Many of us have heard the Soviet-era joke: “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” In a society wherein the innate value of work is undermined by a state apparatus whose incompetence and cynicism batters the dynamic instinct, a phrase such as “honour to labour” thus acquires a bitter taste.
When these mottos are repeated out of cowardice — that is to say, to avoid interrupting the soothing calm of learnt social behaviours considered preferable to living in truth — then sloganeering indeed acquires a moral dimension. To wish “Allah’s blessings and mercy” in a society wherein women are rounded up for failure to conform to hijab laws and sexually assaulted and murdered by security forces is only quantitatively different from stating one’s solidarity with the workers in an internal departmental letter about, say, the replacement of urinal cakes in ministerial lavatories.
But context is ultimately meaningless to party apparatchiks, just as it is to the sort of person who chides silence on politics over post-wedding Armagnac, because it is the performance of righteousness that trumps all other considerations. Funnily enough, before my flight to New York took off, a German colleague wished me a “good trip in Trumpland”. I am glad she felt good about herself as I was about to strap myself in a metal tube suspended in air.
Some mad persons will no doubt take these admonishments to mean that one is comparing Western progressive rhetoric to Soviet communism or, worse, to an Islamofascist regime. I am not doing that. The general point here is rather to underline the importance of one’s words and to understand how words are deprived of value without much reflection as to the consequences. Slogan repetition, as in the manner of binary code issued by automatons, leads to material fit only for lampoonery.
Of course, mindless repetition is not all bad but repetition does lead to a selective forgetfulness about the meaning of one’s words. Thus is the golden laudability of “believe all survivors”, a motto with which I am in deep agreement, tarnished when it is inexplicably not applied to the experiences of women in the 7 October attacks by Hamas. So much for feeling better.
To repeat phrases as a part of reinforcing one’s own sense of self is a practice as old as time and is a matter of personal choice surely not prey to the assault of petty judgements. To force slogans on others, however, is another matter. And to feel compelled to repeat words in a society that essentially manufactures our consent to do so by raising the spectre of ostracism is unacceptable.
After experiencing the moment of euphoria in asserting our moral stances, all we are left with is a sort of verbal inflation wherein one of humanity’s most precious duties is discarded in the most cavalier fashion, namely the responsibility to say what we mean and mean what we say. If the socially just thing to do is more verbal work in order to protect oneself, then I intone with the same solemnity: honour to idleness!
