"and yet it moves"
affirming truth, even at a whisper
I.
For the record, I’ve always hated the sign.
But it was late 2019, the tinder year to the tire fire half decade that was about to combust, and we fancied ourselves the match strikers. My wife, to my surprise, pushed me to put it out on the front lawn of our rented 1970s-built split level house, along the curb of a sleepy street that didn’t have a sidewalk but didn’t need one. She’d cried—no, wept—on election night three years prior, and that shocked me too. It’s not that she was apolitical or aloof. She cared, as I had to repeatedly remind her and she had to begrudgingly concede. It’s just that an icy aura of indifference and complacency had crystallized over her care, until that night in November 2016 cracked it by a thousand fissures. By 2019, when she insisted I puncture the ground next to the mailbox with metal twig scaffolding supporting a vinyl cri de coeur, that ice was melting faster than an Alaskan glacier.
You know, because climate change. Because in this house, we believe. That science is real. That kindness is everything. I gave into my wife’s newfound insistence, because, well, love is love, and as a Well-Adjusted Liberal American Male I knew women’s’ rights are human rights, and theirs encompassed the right to choose the yard signage.
I certainly don’t judge or blame my wife—or any of you—for wanting to declare her allegiance to The Resistance in this public way. I honestly and earnestly agreed with every statement on that two-by-three-foot Fuck You to the fascists—I still do. I was not neutral on a moving train. I believed in the power of signalling to our neighbors and passers- and bikers- and drivers-by that they too could come out of the shadows and raise their heads, stake their signs, and cast their ballots. And when powerful people denied reality as a pandemic was killing a 9/11-amount of Americans every day, I felt a particularly compelling need to reaffirm my commitment to the scientific fucking method. Still, I could barely stand to read “SCIENCE IS REAL” and the rest of the haughty, harumph-y declarative statements emblazoned in multicolored chic Target ad sans serif font. I winced, if not literally then internally, every time it came into view as I approached our driveway (in my Subaru, vehicle of choice for WALAMs). Something about it was so cloying, so cringe, so…millennial.
Today, in the bright light of the Return of the King inferno now consuming our surprisingly flammable (metaphorically and literally speaking) republic, here’s an easy take to spot: the sign liberals knelt before as a talisman we believed held the power to change minds was just a physical stand-in for the fatal virtue signalling condescension and snobbery of the defeated intellectual elite. The sign—with its implication that other houses believe the opposite, and we aren’t those people—is everything MAGA despises about us. And, of course, that was exactly the point—as much as the sign was about branding ourselves fearless Resistance warriors, it was also about pissing off your Trump-loving aunt who had to suffer the indignity of walking by it hot dish in hand on the way to your front door on Thanksgiving. What started as a pure-of-heart recitation of first principles became a test of piety in the Church of Liberalism.
And it wasn’t just your aunt who found the sign and its implications off-putting. It was also the growing number who find the depravity of MAGA more tolerable than the demeanor of Democrats. It was the former blue voters in fading blue states who were the likeliest to see breathless messages like “THE FUTURE IS FEMALE” and “TRANS RIGHTS NOW” outside shops with All Gender bathrooms and begin to doubt their place in society. The folks who didn’t disbelieve science per se but began to wonder why the CDC couldn’t make up its mind, or why their kids’ school remained closed a year into the pandemic, or how in the world we got a safe vaccine that quickly from the same pharmaceutical companies we’ve been told are poisoning us. The folks who didn’t hate immigrants but wondered why their city seemed to have no plan to house them. The folks who said infuriating things like “I don’t like Trump, but the Democrats are gonna make me have to vote for him.” And the folks who stopped saying anything at all for fear of saying the wrong thing and being sentenced to heresy for grievous violations of the sign’s commandments.
These fellow citizens turned their back on us, the institutionalists, the Sign People. And whether we like it or not, I think that condescending sign and the smugness behind it had a lot to do with it.
II.
On June 22, 1633, in the Dominican convent adjoining the Church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva in Rome, a Holy Tribunal of ten inquisitors appointed by Pope Urban VII found a frail, elderly, grey-bearded man guilty of heresy for insisting on the truth.
Galileo Galilei knelt in judgment of the Catholic Church for discussing, even hypothetically, the Copernican model, despite having been admonished to abandon his belief in it. The inquisitors, cardinals all, some of whom—like the Holy See himself—knew and even admired the renowned and learned man from Tuscany, issued their pronouncement thusly:
We say, pronounce, sentence, and declare that you, Galileo, by reason of the matters which have been detailed in the trial and which you have confessed already, have rendered yourself in judgment of this Holy Office vehemently suspected of heresy, namely of having held and believed the doctrine which is false and contrary to the Sacred and Divine Scriptures, that the Sun is the center of the world and does not move from east to west and that the Earth moves and is not the center of the world…Furthermore, so that this grievous and pernicious error and transgression of yours may not go altogether unpunished, and so that you will be more cautious in the future, and an example for others to abstain from delinquencies of this sort, we order that the book Dialogues of Galileo Galilei be prohibited by public edict.1
The tribunal entreated Galileo to “abjure” with a “sincere heart and unfeigned faith” his heresies, which he did. What happened next has become the stuff of some myth-making. Author Dava Sobel explains:
It is often said that as Galileo rose from his knees he muttered under his breath “Eppur si muove” (But still it moves). Or he shouted out these words, looking toward the sky and stamping his foot. Either way, for Galileo to voice such undaunted conviction in this hostile encounter would have been beyond foolhardy, not to mention that the comment suggests a defiant feistiness beyond his means to muster then and there. He may have said it weeks or months later, in front of other witnesses, but not on that day…For he believed in his own innocence, he had admitted committing a “crime” only because his confession had been part of a deal."2
I read of this account in Sobel’s Galileo’s Daughter in 2021. By then, enough time had passed to understand the lethal consequences of the New Rasputins who’d spread disinformation about the virus that had claimed millions and the vaccine that could’ve saved millions more. Before reading Sobel’s book and its debunking of this apocryphal version of events, I’d envisioned the “and yet it moves” (this was formulation of the Italian-to-English translation I’d heard and that is more common than Sobel’s) moment as the climax of an Enlightment drama, in which the protagonist defiantly confronts his dogmatic accusers with conviction. It had always induced in me a reflexive, fist-in-the-air reaction against imperious religious cults and backward authoritarians. But in the new context of a society suddenly teeming with people who’d rather risk congregating in churches then believe a lab coat-wearing so-called expert’s empirical evidence on the benefits of social distancing, the words “e pur si muove” gripped me like a gravitational force. I was moved as I moved.
The phrase stuck with me as people dosed themselves with hydroxychloroquine or bleach or claimed the virus was caused by 5G internet. I watched the purveyors of “New Obscurantism” establish a foothold in the rift that had opened up in the world, and tout “magical solutions, an aura of spirituality, superstition, and the cultivation of fear.” It wasn’t just the line that resonated with me but its context. The vilification of Dr. Anthony Fauci and Robert Mueller in congressional hearings echoed the Holy Tribunal’s discrediting of Galileo. But more than just a wrongful prosecution, Galileo’s trial represented the corruption and perversion of the truth-seeking function of an authoritative body. As much as this corruption and perversion is put to use by the powerful to prosecute those who espouse threatening truth, it is also put to use by the powerful to defend themselves from the truth. The deceitful defense of the president offered by his congressional sycophants (who were also his jurors) during his first impeachment is a prime example of the power of power to protect power. To borrow another phrase from liberaldom I’ve grown to resent from overuse, we were being gaslit. It pissed me off, enough to make me want to organize around a set of thoughtful written principles spray some pithy slogan on a sign like “FACTS DON’T CARE ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS.”
III.
The New Rasputins and the autocrats they’ve wound up and set loose upon the world remain empowered. After the 2024 election in the United States, I’m convinced more than ever of the futility of shouting down, shaming, or shunning those voters whose justified contempt for elite institutions was exploited by the purveyors of chaos, cruelty, and corruption. We need more empathy and less enmity for the hoodwinked and instead fix our arrows on the enablers. Yes, we’ll need slogans and clever turns of phrase to expose the fundamental weakness of these tools in catchy ways. We’ll need to keep signalling to others around us that we own our communities and are united—sometimes yard signs do that. But we need, most of all, less smug certainty in the rightness of our cause and more faith in its justness. In other words, we just need to stop being such insufferable little snots who think we’re smarter than everyone else. We must dispense with our own papal infallibility.
“E pur si muove” has become for me a silent prayer—ironic given its original context and my own strongly secular slant. I return to it when I feel the bowing arc of history creak and slip from the hands of my fellow (or, in my case, former) Sign People. I suspect it was a prayer for Galileo, too, a whisper from the lips of a faithful Catholic to the ear of his maker—conspiratorial but not wicked, confidential but not confident, as the disciple was aware of how much he did not know (and yet it moves?), and perhaps feared truth behind Saint Augustine’s joke about God creating Hell for those who seek to scrutinize the deep mysteries.3 There is wisdom not only in Galileo’s dissent but in how he conveyed it—not in a manner that was “beyond foolhardy” and which would have only forced a much harsher reaction from a pope and his cardinals already ambivalent about what they were doing to the greatest mind of their generation. Galileo picked his battle. He didn’t make more enemies through useless antagonism. He chose dignity and humility in defiance, not prideful soapboxing.
A prayer is not a slogan or yard sign. Nor does it have to be an appeal to heaven. At its core, prayer is an act of profound humility. It is the exact opposite of pretentiousness, of pride, of certainty. It’s the embrace of “I don’t know.” Prayer is a feeling, an exultation of belief. Writes Irish poet Padraig O Tuama, “Prayer…is always in movement.” It’s not a stubborn, immovable trust in the salvation of truth. It’s revelry in the awesome mystery that truth-seeking works, knot by knot, to unravel. It is faith in the work.
This substack, which I begin on the eve of my 37th movement around the sun, is my small contribution to that work. It’ll likely be insignificant and insufficient and largely ignored, but I am not afraid of speaking into the ether—I’m more afraid, even as I type this, that I’ll actually have nothing more to say. In this space, I’ll endeavor to post thoughts, photographs, poems, and other distillations of the richness of the human experience that I hope will reveal more of what I don’t know than what I do, where I should go rather than where I’ve been. Here, I’ll share what moves me. I’ll aim to be reflective and not reactive, but also strive to find a courageous voice to meet this dark and turbulent moment. I’m sure I’ll fall short. I hope you find something to take and keep with you along the way.
So, in a time when we are told to ignore what is plain, to betray truth, to discount knowledge and experience, to abjure the heresy of forsaking counterfeit god-kings; when we are told to scroll, shop, and sleepwalk our way through the end of self-rule; when we are told black lives don’t matter, women’s rights are negotiable, some humans are illegal, science isn’t real, love is hate, and kindness is weakness, I respond not with pontification but with prayer:
e pur si muove….
IV.
When we moved from that sleepy street to another state in 2021, I thought about throwing out the sign. For reasons I’m at pains to explain, I couldn’t do it. Instead I begrudgingly nailed it high on the wall of my garage, next to its blue BIDEN HARRIS bedfellow, where it makes its point vehemently and incessantly to the opposite wall and no one else.
Views expressed herein are personal to the author.
Dava Sobel, Galileo’s Daughter (New York, Penguin, 2000), 274.
Id. at 278.
Saint Augustine, Confessions XI.12 (Harmondsworth, UK, Penguin, 2002).