Making Space for Silence
Instead of focusing on new content, we should focus on new forms.
The most important moments of our lives happen in silence: in the development of life inside the womb; on the quiet walks when we have a flash of self-awareness and come to know something essential about ourselves for the first time; at the mysterious moment we fall in love with someone; even in the precious moments before death. These things happen in the space between the noise—in the silence of our own hearts.
Modern society is making it harder to fully experience or appreciate these moments. Almost everything conspires against them. Noise presses in on us from every side. There are strong incentives to become yet another voice, competing for attention.
Times of silence are one of the few remaining ways that we express a widespread, shared experience of sacredness. On the anniversary of September 11, there are sports stadiums packed with 60,000 or more fans that pause to observe a minute of silence broken by the flyover of jets. Numerous heads of state have observed a minute of national silence to honor lives lost during the Covid-19 pandemic. On a recent trip to Gettysburg, my wife told me that after months of studying the battle in her high school history class, she and her classmates took a trip to Gettysburg and walked across the field in silence, reflecting on what they had learned and what had happened there in a less heady and more visceral way. They were some of the most transformational minutes in more than twenty years of formal education.
Silence functions like a universal language. It encourages reflection, and allows information and experiences to sink in. Why, then, do we limit structures of silence to the remembrance of national tragedies? They should be built into the fabric of our institutions, our cities, our culture.
Most people in modern economies admit to being overwhelmed with content. But they are still consuming more of it. Content producers, from influencers to streaming services, are making money by satiating the growing demand for more. We are in a non-stop and endless feedback of content, and we have no hope of real progress unless we find a way to step outside of it.
The consequence of our content-addicted culture is non-stop diversion from having to come to grips with the big questions of life. The American social scientist Herbert Simon wrote: “The wealth of information means a dearth of something else—a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.” This has been detrimental to civil discourse. When information consumes our attention, we lose sight of the real people behind it. We lose sight of humanity.
The answer to the flood of content is, for many, to make more content. This is often done with the best of intentions. Because so much of existing content is low-quality or superficial, they reason, there is a need for something different, something better—and thus creating new content will be a positive contribution. But they are fighting fire with fire.
It’s tempting. There is a natural desire to make our voice heard in the cacophony. When confronted with loud voices, discord, and disagreement, the reflexive (and mimetic) response is simply to get louder. To say more, and to say it more forcefully. To do more, and to do it faster. To add rather than to subtract.
The great media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously wrote, “The medium is the message.” That means, in part, that the vehicle through which content is received determines how it is perceived and the way in which a person engages with it.
Anyone who has witnessed two or more people on Twitter debate such weighty topics as, say, God, knows how quickly the words and the conversation seem to lose contact with the object of discussion. The big questions simply don’t lend themselves to the medium. Social media is designed to cycle through content rather than encouraging people to sit with it, to understand it at a deeper level. New content is the fuel on which these platforms run.
Instead of focusing on new content, we should focus on new forms. The most important question to ask is: what are the new forms out of which better content, qualitatively different, might emerge?
I believe the best way to do that in the coming years will be creating new spaces where people can come together with none of the social anxiety associated with typical conferences and events saturated with content. We can find ways to make contemplative, re-creative experiences both attractive and accessible to more people.
These experiences have not been tried and found wanting; they have simply never been tried by the vast majority of people. But those who have been fortunate enough to participate in a well-run contemplative retreat often describe it as a life-changing experience.
I believe that we can build something that offers people a chance to participate in these new types of experiences, punctuated by silence and other opportunities for reflection. And they must be offered—because they no longer emerge naturally in the world that we live in. In other words, people don’t naturally fall into them or opt-in to them. They cannot. But if they are offered at scale, there is the potential for widespread and profound cultural change.
This practice will require, but also cultivate, intellectual humility.
“I have discovered that all of the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber,” wrote Blaise Pascal in his 1654 work, Pensées. The ability to sit silently in a room is the mark of a healthy person. But one recent study showed that people would rather be electrically shocked than sit alone with their thoughts for as little as six to fifteen minutes. There is a pandemic of noise that is causing us to lose our faculties of reflection. It is reflection, not experiences, that lead to learning.
Can intellectual humility be cultivated? I believe so. Intellectual humility recognizes the limits of one’s intellect, how easily it errs, and the sheer number of things that we do not yet know. But intellectual humility is also the acceptance that we often need more time to digest and understand something—even of our own experiences in life—before moving to the next thing. And one way to learn this lesson is having to sit with something, including yourself, for more than fifteen minutes at a time. If people aren’t given a space in which to do that, it may never happen.
I am not sure if Pascal’s statement is true—at least, I am not convinced that all of humanity’s problems stem from this inability—but I do know that at least some of my own problems have been recognized and ultimately addressed because I have been able to go on an annual silent retreat for most of the past twelve years. I only attended the first because I was encouraged to by a wise mentor. That experience was planned and made frictionless for me; it was not something I would have chosen on my own. And yet this practice has changed my life.
We can change the culture not by saying more, but by creating better spaces of encounter.
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This past weekend, Cluny Institute hosted its first silent evening at Earth in Manhattan. Sign up at www.cluny.org to stay updated about future events.
A version of this essay was originally published by Templeton Ideas.
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