Jennifer Horgan: Have we lost the ability to simply say nothing?

I was once told that you should only break silence if you can improve on it — in today's noisy world, it's difficult to live by that credo 

Bob Geldof has been accused of being 'the worst of us' merely for remaining silent on Gaza, something he confessed he didn't know much about. Does this really make him as bad as those doing the killing? File photo: Sasko Lazarov/RollingNews.ie

I’m writing at the end of a far too long working day, one spoilt by an utterance that could have remained unsaid. It didn’t achieve anything good.

You don’t need to know the details but it has me thinking — have we lost the ability to be silent, to bite our tongue, to not say the thing we could say, to keep schtum, keep the peace, keep our very many beans unspilled?

It feels like the world’s audio has ramped up so much in the last few decades, and I’m not sure we’re better for it. I was told once that you should only break silence if you can improve upon it and it stuck. Annoyingly really — it’s not the easiest bar to set for a weekly columnist.

But there is a lot to be said for silence, and for guarding it. Surely, at the very least, there should be space for silence without judgement. Silence, after all, is complex. Unless it is in response to a particular question, it has the potential to mean anything.

In a response to his book club, his online community of readers, writer George Saunders wrote recently: “We seem to be losing the ability or desire to just be silent on certain questions. Silent and sad; silent and interested; silent and alert.” He suggests we consider the consequences of sharing or not sharing a thought.

I tried Saunders’ silence out last weekend. Somebody brought up a topic I knew I could debate, but it was also one I feel genuine sadness over which means I can get easily upset. I mean, I have opinions aplenty but when I thought about Saunders and whether or not our debate would improve the experience for anyone, I stayed silent — silent and sad. 

I knew we weren’t likely to agree. So, I changed the subject. I brought up something light and frivolous and we carried on having a good time together.

How often do people these days hear something with which they utterly disagree and simply say nothing? I’m betting it is less likely to happen now than it did 30 years ago.

In a world already filled with division and hate, I don’t believe silence is so bad.

We used to respect the avoidance of certain topics to keep the peace. No religion, no politics, etc. Should we revisit this forgotten social rule perhaps? Certainly, there is a time and place for debate but it doesn’t have to happen at every time, in every place. 

Indeed silence might offer us more than we think if we pay it just a little more attention.

John Cage was so fascinated with it that he composed a piece of only silence, stretching over four minutes. You can listen to 4′33, on Spotify but it’s an even more bizarre watch. 

One version online shows the soloist William Marx coming onto the stage in a tuxedo. Sitting ceremoniously at the piano, closing the lid, he starts his timer. He raises and closes the lid a few times, then stands and bows to applause.

Silence online

Silence is varied, and as far as I’m concerned, increasingly misunderstood. Better out than in? Not always. Not for me today, and I blame social media for a lot of it.

I had a brief exchange with a writer over the summer about communicating online, our modern version of breaking silence, which provided food for thought. We were reading at a literary festival, shooting the breeze before we had to go ‘on’.

I was confessing that I struggle with self-promotion via social media. Her reply: “Well, I don’t think it’s a bad thing for an Irish woman to feel proud of her achievements. If anything, I think we need to be more vocal, bigger.” 

The comment stung. I felt like I was being reprimanded for being a bad feminist.

It was weeks before the comment bopped up in my head. Wait a second, I realised, I never mentioned anything about not being proud.

How is it that we’ve allowed social media to be so powerful that it assumes anything that doesn’t happen online simply doesn’t happen? That a feeling if unexpressed is no longer a feeling?

Her assumption was that being proud and posting online were one and the same. As if, without posting online, and keeping silent, I was declaring my lack of pride and self-belief.

It’s a view of silence that’s doing the rounds, held by people across a whole range of topics. Silence online is often perceived as non-engagement, or worse.

It’s getting to the point now when people believe they can judge not only what you write or say, but they can also judge what you don’t write or say.

This is because for too many people, silence is one thing. It is singular. Simple.

Before social media the term ‘silence is complicity’ made sense. It related to real-life events and was a kind of understandable shorthand encouraging people to act. If somebody was being sexually harassed or racially abused in front of you, you had a moral duty to speak up and out.

In the age of social media this has warped into a vile kind of judgement. Now it seems that if you don’t post online about a topic that most people are posting about it, you are silent and therefore complicit.

Silence as complicity?

Silence in this instance, meaning not speaking up online, or being pictured speaking up online, is assumed to be complicity.

But silence can be a lot of things.

I understand that social media does wonderful work at times, gathering people in who tend towards expression, feel empowered by it, but it also minimises the complexity of silence. If somebody doesn’t speak out on a given topic online, they are considered immoral, damned. 

This was the criticism levelled against Bob Geldof when he didn’t choose to speak out on Gaza for some time. Jane Goodall was similarly attacked before she died.

When Geldof did eventually post something last July, explaining that his expertise was always in Africa and that he didn’t have anything useful to add, one post replied: "Those like Bob Geldof that have turned a blind eye to horrendous atrocities that Israel has been committing in Gaza for 21 months, and now speak out, really are the worst of us. An insult to those children that burnt to death in the tents of Rafah, and those shot dead in cold blood."

The worst of us. Really? Silence as complicity now becomes silence as the worst action imaginable, worse than the people, the governments, the soldiers, doing all the killing, the starving, the torture.

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For what it’s worth, I don’t believe that silence is necessarily complicity — not always, not now, in a world of social media where agency is redefined. Silence can be prayer. It can be outrage, numbness, despair. It can be the quiet of action. It can be a look in someone’s eye, a quiet, unspoken connection.

If you are silent today, it might be a positive silence. It might prevent hurt. It might help quiet the global noise.

If you’re breaking silence today, I hope you’re bettering it.