Silence—Our Most Underrated Virtue?
Donald Trump always has an answer. Over the past four years, we have gotten the impression that this man has never once paused for a moment to think about anything.
I was struck by this fact recently when Kanye West gave a series of interviews. As you may know, he was running for president in 2020 — or walking, as he said. When asked a question to which he didn’t have a ready answer, he stopped to think, or even pray, and there’s silence. Confronting this silence, Jimmy Kimmel nervously cut to commercial during their 2018 interview. And his pause on the Joe Rogan podcast in October 2020 made him the laughingstock of Twitter. This stands in stark contrast to Trump and Biden on the campaign trail who always had an answer for everything. Immediately.
But what does this say about us, that we would rather have a president who spouts off the first thing that comes to their head than one who would actually stop and think for a moment?
The activists today tell us silence is violence. Donald Trump would wholeheartedly agree. But they’re wrong. Silence is actually a virtue. We might classify it with the intellectual virtues like open-mindedness and intellectual humility, the virtues that help us reason better, think better and act more wisely.
Silence is a pause, an inwardness, a bulwark against the ceaseless noise of the world. Silence is an opportunity for us to learn about ourselves in relation to the world, to take stock of the information we have, to explore connections. Silence makes a space for our conscience to speak, and indeed it can only speak in silence.
But as we’re seeing, silence is tremendously undervalued in our world.
We can certainly understand why. Silence is difficult. Listening to that little voice inside of us is difficult. Heck, listening to anyone is difficult. Especially when we’re accustomed, as we are today, to noise, even addicted to notifications and constant streams of informational input and the ability to click away if we’re the slightest bit bored.
In fact, research in psychology has shown that people would rather administer electric shocks to themselves than sit in a room alone.
I’ve been studying the life of Nelson Mandela recently. He was the famed leader of South Africa, the first Black president, a key figure in ending Apartheid, and he was a political prisoner for 27 years. During a speech in 2000, he said:
“If 27 years in prison have done anything to us, it was to use the silence of solitude to make us understand how precious words are and how real speech is in its impact on the way people live and die.”
The fact is, without an appreciation for silence, without gifting ourselves with the space of silence, without cultivating the virtue of silence, we can never understand how precious words are.
Talk is cheap, as the saying goes. Words are thrown around like nothing. Maybe you’ve even checked Twitter or sent a text while reading this article.
And while it may seem inconsequential on an individual level, I think the effects compound across the population and over time. We’re becoming worse listeners. I think our inattention to silence, our undermining of silence, is at the root of many of the issues we see today.
But this is not a new observation. In the 17th century the philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal wrote:
“All of humanity’s problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
So how can you bring a little more silence into your life? Go for a walk outside every now and then without your phone; try your hand at painting or drawing, anything creative; start journaling. Maybe even visit a church or temple. As our society becomes more secular, we are overlooking the value these traditional places of worship bring… if they don’t give us value for their metaphysical teachings, they can still give us value for the way they steward and help us cultivate silence.
We seem to live in an age of “universal deafness and lack of understanding,” to quote the writer Milan Kundera, but we can do something about it.
It starts with silence.
