The Death of Silence
“…the greatest menace to our capacity for contemplation is the incessant fabrication of tawdry empty stimuli which kill the receptivity of the soul.”
— Josef Pieper
I sat writing last weekend in a wonderful, dimly lit living room in my wife’s family home. Her younger brother, aged 13, made his way into the room and plopped himself upside-down on the couch. Seemingly bent on ruining my train of thought, he began violently ruffling through some old magazines by the couch.
The thoughts that flew through my mind immediately were: “It’s a Saturday... it’s the 4th of July. How does he not have anything to do? Go on the computer? Play a video game, learn something, please do ANYTHING so I can concentrate and continue writing.”
Just as I was about to scold him, it hit me: he was bored.
My wife’s family has a very meager digital presence: no television, one locked computer, one locked smartphone, but many books. In our current age, these restrictions seem tantamount to child abuse.
Taking a moment, I asked myself, “when was the last time I was bored?”
Recounting experiences from the past week and at first finding no evidence of my own “idleness,” I was compelled to reexamine the word. Whether at the DMV, the doctor’s office, or even at home, I could recall scrolling through my Twitter feed, playing Candy Crush or browsing Reddit every single time I had a spare moment. It’s almost as if I was afraid to be idle, or worse, I was idle but in a noisy way.
The challenge that confronted my young brother-in-law was a virtue that had slowly begun fading at home, at work, and in my relationships with people: an appreciation for contemplative silence.
In my recent piece on Pope Francis’ encyclical, I touched on this notion of “information overload,” but I think Max Picard, a Swiss writer, explains the problem just as accurately:
Man is not even aware of the loss of silence: so much is the space formerly occupied by the silence so full of things that nothing seems to be missing. But where formerly the silence lay on a thing, now one thing lies on another. Where formerly an idea was covered by the silence, now a thousand associations speed along to it and bury it. In this world of today in which everything is reckoned in terms of immediate profit, there is no place for silence. Silence was expelled because it was unproductive, because it merely existed and seemed to have no purpose. Almost the only kind of silence that there is today is due to the loss of the faculty of speech. It is purely negative: the absence of speech. It is merely like a technical hitch in the continuous flow of noise.
The great contradiction of silence is that, without it, everything else is meaningless. Every pause between the words I write (as you read them in your head) is an opportunity to grasp an idea or reality unavailable without those spaces. Beautiful orchestral masterpieces and symphonies thrive on silence and crescendo. Those beautiful pauses between notes give music meaning. Without silence, Mozart sounds more like grindcore.
More from Max Picard:
“Silence stands outside the world of profit and utility. It cannot be exploited for profit; you cannot get anything out of it. It is “unproductive,” therefore it is regarded as useless. Yet there is more help and healing in silence than in all useful things.”
We take the utility of silence and the meaning it brings to our lives for granted. We only see it as a void to fill with something else — or an eerie place to sit alone with our thoughts and actions.
But hooray! We don’t have to — right? The rise of the internet, video games, movies, pornography… you can binge on B-rated Netflix movies and then watch porn until you pass out. Have even more time? Play some Candy Crush or Flappy Bird. Or if you’re a “professional,” how about a podcast or a TED talk? The possibilities are literally unlimited.
Sarcasm and morality aside, it’s this busy noise that has begun to decay our social cognition and learning. The creativity that our grandfathers bequeathed to us through their wisdom is fast-disappearing.
“In our bourgeois Western world total labor has vanquished leisure. Unless we regain the art of silence and insight, the ability for non-activity, unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our culture — and ourselves.” — Josef Pieper
The Greeks had many words for the different types of knowledge and they held different amounts of importance. Techne (derived from τέχνη), implied an informational understanding of knowledge. Often translated as “craftsmanship,” it referred to an accumulation of practical knowledge: how far apart to plant crops, how often to milk cows, etc.
Logos (from λέγω), however, indicated a rational mechanism that processed knowledge and speech. Translated, “to count, tell, say, speak” or “word,” logos is the intrinsic wisdom of man. It is the king that orders the other lower parts of the soul, techne being one of many. This type of knowledge was much harder to learn — in fact, some of the Greeks thought true wisdom was impossible to attain. And it did not come through books but encounters with other men.
Why do I belabor this point? We deprive ourselves of silence because of envy. We yearn for great wisdom. We want to be really smart, really informed, really witty. The great irony, though, is that logos is unattainable when we thwart silence and seek an overload of information (techne).
Worse yet, we find ourselves empty inside and without introspective qualities. Unable to spend the smallest amount of times with ourselves, we find that our flaws are overlooked and our strengths are exaggerated.
Nothing has changed the nature of man so much as the loss of silence. The invention of printing techniques, compulsory education — nothing has changed man so much as this lack of relationship with silence; this fact that silence is no longer taken for granted, as something as natural as the sky above or the air we breathe. Man who has lost silence has not merely lost human quality, but his whole structure has been changed thereby.
— Max Picard
