A Safe and Effective Way for Thought Leaders to Speak Out

Iran War: The Silence Is Deafening, or
A Safe and Effective Way for Thought Leaders to Speak Out

This letter was emailed on March 11, 2026, to various thought leaders, primarily in the Albany, New York, USA, area.

Greetings to All,

I’ve yet to hear the physicists among you address the public on nuclear winter, as I asked recently, or on the safety of physics students who are not cis-het white male folk, the need for fundamental change in our way of life to avert collapse of our society, or the existential risk to humanity from unlimited research into artificial intelligence, as I had requested over recent years. When the public doesn’t hear thought leaders contesting the claims made by other forms of power, including wealth, the silence tends to refute the arguments of people who seek to promote the survival of our civilization. I know that part of the restraint on salutary speech resides on the third floor of University Hall at UAlbany and another part speaks from the pulpit of the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception on Eagle Street. Bishop Mark once implied approval of apolitical speech, but in crises and when crimes are being committed by governments, silence is political, constituting not only a failure to do good but an act of evil in itself, insofar as modeling joy when righteous indignation is indicated serves to dull the fear and outrage that might inspire decent folk to resist tyranny, zealotry, greed, and other threats to humankind. The solution I have in mind is simple and will emerge below from further discussion of the problem.

I remember being in a group of professors, graduate students, and possibly others when a high-ranking professor in the room tried to sell girl scout cookies. The department chair joked about the abuse of power, for of course, selling to people who are professionally dependent on your good opinion of them is sadistic to the extent that it doesn’t arise from ethical obtuseness. The cookie vendor seemed to pause, then proceeded as before, to no further objection.

In fairness to the cookie vendor, the university at which the cookie vendor worked solicits donations from employees. Furthermore, I was in the room and said nothing, for we forgive those who trespass against us, in hopes that our own trespasses will be forgiven. Such is civilization. However, public defiance of ethical norms should be kept in mind, along with any other infraction, so that responses to later trespasses can be calibrated correctly.

Of course, what tends actually to occur is that the trespasses of allies are forgotten and of adversaries rehearsed and studied with moralistic glee. Such is civilization as I’ve known it.

What better example can we find than the recent history of the Middle East? The communication environment in each faction damps out messages about that faction’s enormities and amplifies tales of opponents’ crimes. The result is murderous rage, abetted by the silence of thought leaders, which tends to damp criticism of the faction by its members. It’s the age-old speck-plank issue from Luke 6:41-42.

Hey! It’s like right there in the Gospels, for when thought leaders in Christian religious garb want to cool down war fever. Everyone expects that the Prince of Peace will speak when the people are meant to refrain from killing. A cowardly bishop, like a cowardly department chair, is necessary for the continuation and escalation of the trespasses. I trust that His Holiness will make a suitable response to Ayatollah Ahmadabadi, who recently called “for peace and respect for international law” in a letter to His Holiness, but will Bishop Mark say anything publicly? I think that Bishop Mark needs someone he respects to explain the fact that the silence of thought leaders sometimes constitutes political speech.

As a trained teacher, I can tell you that there are many kinds of intelligence, none to be preferred in general over the others. One kind promotes social cohesion within a faction by suppressing critical thinking. This kind of intelligence can be found in any group, including among factions of physicists. For example, I once heard a physicist I respect address laypeople, telling them that the universe began in a moment of infinite temperature and density. He may also have mentioned, and I have no doubt he believed, that known physics fails to describe that moment. So how did he arrive at the belief that the universe began in a moment of infinite temperature and density, an idea from which physics goes on to extrapolate further ideas? He made assumptions, but those assumptions became as facts in his mind under social pressure and the heat of needing to make a living that can’t easily be obtained without membership in some faction.

Assumptions become received wisdom in the social equivalent of the process that makes diamonds from lumps of coal. Like diamonds, this received wisdom is rigid, subject to transformation only via some impact, which is, unfortunately, why civilization so often requires violence or other deep suffering to adapt to fundamental shifts that could have been accommodated via deliberation, had there been fewer diamonds rattling around people’s skulls and more lumps of coal. There’s enough violence right now, not to mention prospect of far worse, to enable necessary transformation of the systems on which our society depends, if thought leaders start speaking en masse about the fears to which I know them subject, even if they disagree on solutions to the problems. How can thought leaders effectively speak, in relative safety? They can follow the traditional procedure.

To identify that procedure, let’s consider this week’s Sunday Gospel reading in the Roman Catholic Church. Unfortunately, John 4:5-42 contains overtones supporting modern-day Jewish control of the Holy Land, as does the Old Testament reading for the same day, March 8, 2026. If I’d been in charge of the world in 1945, we wouldn’t have made it to 1946, probably, because no one person can safely rule the world on their own, but I would have given North Rhine-Westphalia to the Jewish people as their homeland. Making Palestine serve as the Jewish homeland not only created a legitimate grievance among the Palestinians, from which the world has never recovered, but also furthered Hitler’s intention of eliminating Jewish people from Europe, by promoting emigration. The Ruhr, within North Rhine-Westphalia, had been a longstanding bone of contention between Germany and France, hence a flashpoint for war, to the control of which neither country should have been seen any longer as entitled. The villain in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is European antisemitism and Christian eschatology, which is apt to be the death of us all.

The thing I see as central to understanding the Gospels and using them to communicate with Christians is that the stories are analogous to lead sheets, which encode songs without the details of arrangement that determine how the song is performed. To see what I mean, please consider the difference between the song “Iron Man” performed by its creators, the band Black Sabbath, and by the modern-day cover group Jazz Sabbath. These two performances are of the same song but are made radically different by the arrangement, not that the finer points of making music are known to me.

The original performance seems suited to the song’s lyrical theme, of the superannuated hero who goes on a murderous rampage, motivated by feelings of having gone underappreciated. The song does not present an edifying model for emulation but rather an all-too-common occurrence since ancient times, at least as far back as the days of Roman legionaries who, having been demobilized without a grant of land for farming, resorted to the life of the highwayman. Retirement does not appeal to everyone, and we suffer today from the reluctance to retire of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Joe Biden, Donald Trump, and Benjamin Netanyahu, among many others.

But the jazz arrangement has value, too. There are people who would not listen to the original, and the murder spree of the former hero can be understood from another point of view as a cause for sadness. One’s mind might even turn to Jesus on the cross, underappreciated at that moment, to be sure, but above the temptation of lashing out, even to save Himself. In this way, the song might deepen our appreciation for self-restraint.

Hey! The crucifixion of Jesus is another Gospel story that could cool war fever, cited appropriately by courageous thought leaders, including ones who do not speak from pulpits. In fact, anyone can create the equivalent of their own arrangement of a Gospel story, to facilitate communication with others familiar with the story, or willing to read it. Here’s my take on this past Sunday’s Gospel reading, the story of the Samaritan woman in John 4:5-42.

Jesus is hanging out by a well in the Samaritan town called Sychar. Up comes a woman to draw water. They bandy words a while. Eventually Jesus induces her to remark that she has no husband, to which He replies, “You are right in saying, ‘I do not have a husband.’ For you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true.” This gets the attention of the woman, who acknowledges Jesus as a prophet and questions Him about whether a Samaritan can benefit from a Jewish religious movement. Jesus reassures her on this point and reveals Himself as the Messiah. The disciples show up just in time to be amazed by the fact that Jesus was talking to a woman and to mistake some of the wordplay of Jesus as literal truth, which is, incidentally, an error not made by the woman, though she quips as if she were making that mistake. The townspeople are intrigued by the woman’s report that Jesus, “… told me everything I have done.” Jesus is invited to stay in town for two days, at the end of which the townspeople tell the woman, “We no longer believe because of your word; for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the savior of the world.”

This past Sunday, on which the story of the Samaritan woman was read, was International Women’s Day, a fact concerning which the priest at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception was deafeningly silent. The story is packed with meaningful ideas, not least of which concerns the instinctive disrespect men show women, evident, for example, in the joke with which the story ends. In our times, that joke would run slightly differently: A woman would propose an idea that would be dismissed. Two minutes later, a man would propose the same idea in slightly different language and to great acclaim. This joke or trope transcends culture, having appeared in the Chinese television version of Three Body Problem as a male colleague reporting a female physicist’s insight to a superior as if it had been his own.

The relevance of the Gospel story to women doesn’t end there. The unnamed woman is obviously good with words and respected enough to be listened to by townspeople in the first place. Nevertheless, she carries water, probably for hours each day, because carrying water was women’s work, arduous, tedious, and unpaid. The woman was certainly aware that Roman citizens had running water in their latrines, and the contrast between the availability of water to Roman poop and the availability of water to a Samaritan of significant capabilities probably reduced any aversion she might have felt to making common cause with Jewish people.

Besides the Samaritan-Jewish split among the subject peoples in the region, there was a divide between Jews who followed traditional ways and Hellenized Jews, who inclined toward Greek culture, with its earthier morality. There are many back stories to imagine for the Samaritan woman: Perhaps the number of her “husbands” owed to something other than her choice. A woman who had been raped or sexually abused as a girl may have had trouble getting married. Perhaps she had actually been married five times, losing husbands to death or divorce, and had since been unable to find a man willing to marry her. Let’s suppose, however, that the woman simply followed a relatively permissive sexual morality, as the priest at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception seemed to assume in talking about sin and God’s merciful acceptance of us despite our sins. What should we infer from the story, under this assumption?

Once again, silence speaks volumes, for Jesus treats the woman’s sexual history as a fact unworthy of comment. He tells her what she had done without saying word one about it. There may be some of you who haven’t discussed sexuality with a person who expects you to be tortured eternally, with God’s acquiescence, for what you consider to be unremarkable behavior, but I can tell you from experience that people of exceptionally restrictive moral codes often like to signal the virtue of tolerance by saying such phrases as “below-the-belt matters” or “Who am I to judge?” and so forth. Jesus, on the other hand, in this story, says not a thing.

What was John up to here? Clearly, the story says that the Jesus movement is not parochial but rather is open to non-Jews. To me, John is also clearly saying that the notoriously rigid, if not tumescent, traditional Jewish sexual morality is not demanded of the followers of Jesus, who, let’s recall, was soft on adultery and, I would argue, mocked pious revulsion at masturbation with the cutting off of hands and gouging out of eyes business, juxtaposed with looking at a woman lustfully, in Matthew 5:27-30.

I appreciated that the priest at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception mentioned the story’s theme of being seen or understood as a common human need. He may also have been attempting something I would find praiseworthy in principle but that didn’t quite hit the mark, in my estimation. I’m available for consultation if further feedback is desired.

For all the good intentions behind the homily at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, however, failing to connect this past Sunday’s Gospel reading to International Women’s Day left the congregation poorly served. Women were crucial to the Jesus movement. In Luke 8:2-3, we learn that women of means supported the Jesus movement financially. To me, the Jesus movement was an effort by the coalition of Mother and Son to oppose the excesses of the Father, and the mental gymnastics demanded of most Christians to suppress this seemingly obvious fact renders them, and many others bound to them socially, impaired when reasoning about, among other things, ecology, geopolitics, economics, social policy, morality, and causality, including in physics.

What am I suggesting? All our perspectives are both valid and incomplete. To communicate with each other, so as to form a more perfect superorganism, or union, let’s treat the Gospels as what they are, collections of lead sheets for everyone’s use in organizing their ideas for presentation to groups large enough to contain wildly divergent ways of thinking. We can end wars, both cultural and shooting, if we think clearly and communicate effectively.

Thus, I suggest that some group of you, Christian and non-Christian, scientist and non-scientist, of all major political orientations, combine to generate a collection of essays, each providing the author’s perspective on some Gospel story, chosen to help communicate something the author would like readers to know.

The moment of maximum plasticity in human belief approaches. Let people of good will seize this opportunity, for people of ill will are bound to try.

Yours in God, regardless of models of God,
James

P.S. Because collections of lead sheets are sometimes known as fake books, I’d love to be able to lead off a discussion like the above with the title “The Gospels Are Fake Books,” but that line shouldn’t come from anyone but Christian religious leaders, whose audience might stick around long enough to find out for sure what the title meant.

P.P.S. Maybe the New York State Writers Institute could organize production of the essays.