Silence

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a
New York magazine report on Whisper, the latest in social media. Whisper users post their
updates, secrets, and statuses anonymously. Other users can “heart” or reply. User
stats aren’t public, but the company says it gets over 3 billion page views per
month.

The article’s author, Kevin
Rose, views Whisper as an advance in honesty. On Facebook, “with our names attached to the things
we do, we curate vainly, posting and tagging only what makes us look good, and
removing what doesn’t.” Whisper permits “the transparency that anonymity can
breed.” Exactly what we are supposed to see through the transparency isn’t
entirely clear. We certainly don’t get to see the
person behind the status. Perhaps Whisper
is honest because it’s transparency all the way down.

After trying Whisper for a few days, Rose admits it doesn’t
escape the Facebook temptation: “Despite the site’s guarantee of anonymity,
there is still a pressure to perform. Users who want their posts to be popular
will be tempted to embellish their own secrets, or appropriate someone else’s.”

Pressure to perform is one of
the few constants of online conversation. We talk all the time, says
sociologist Sherry Turkle in a recent interview, but “all of this talk can come at the expense
of conversation.” Web communication “favor[s] showmanship over exchange, flows
over ebbs. The Internet is always on. And it’s always judging you, watching
you, goading you.” Online, we talk “
at each other rather than with each
other.”

Person-to-person conversations,
by contrast, “are messy—full of pauses and interruptions and topic changes and
assorted awkwardness.” Turkle, the author of
Alone Together, doesn’t think this is a design flaw: “The messiness
is what allows for true exchange. It gives participants the time—and, just as
important, the permission—to think and react and glean insights.”

The German-American thinker Eugen
Rosenstock-Huessy agreed that speech is
always a two-step, and that the listener’s role is never merely receptive or
passive: “Language is not [only] speech, it is a full circle from word to sound
to perception to understanding to feeling, to memorizing, to acting, and back
to the word about the act thus achieved.” Silence is as essential to conversation
as speech.

When
I moved to a small town in Idaho fifteen years ago, the stillness spooked me.
The only nighttime sounds were coyotes and owls and the breeze through the
leaves. Now moved to Birmingham, Alabama, I see the cars zipping down Interstate
65 from my back deck, and I’ve had a hard time finding any place where I
can’t hear the hum of traffic.

Surrounded
as we are by blustery buzz and clattery chatter, equipped with our
always-tuned-in devices, we’re tempted to nostalgia for the hush of past ages
and isolated prairie towns. But silence as such is not a Christian value. We
serve a chatty God, as Robert Jenson has put it, a God who creates by word,
redeems by an incarnate Word, whose Spirit delivers long, complicated texts to
a community whose assemblies are full of words.

In
such a world created by such a God, silence is not an unalloyed good. Walter
Ong got it right when he observed that sound is
the key sign of life. You can see, touch, smell and—if you so choose—taste
a corpse. You will never hear it. For the Psalmist, God’s silence is terrible,
as is His wrath that overawes the whole earth. Living men and women talk,
shriek, sing, call, command, cry; the shades of Sheol are in a world beyond
groans. Even the most mystical of Christian mystics practiced silence so as to attend
more closely to the ever-speaking God. They were still because listening is the
first movement of prayer. We cultivate silence not for itself but to master the
art of conversation, which is, as Turkle says, a dance, “slow,
slow, quick-quick, slow.”

Social
media break the rhythmic silence of listening and so all too readily become tools
of anti-social bravura. Whispers turn into
Look-at-me! shouts. That’s
worrisome, because there’s no conversing at all unless our talk is answered
with a smile, unless telling corresponds to remembering and teaching to
learning, unless command is met with obedience, argument with understanding, prophecy
with zealous and active repentance. There’s no society worthy of the name unless
our speech dances with another’s silence, and with our own.

Peter J. Leithart is president of Trinity House. He is the author most recently of Gratitude: An Intellectual History, forthcoming from Baylor University Press. His previous articles can be found here.

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