The tyranny of noisy politics

Our previously-scheduled "moment of silence" has been postponed indefinitely.

“Speech is silver, silence is golden,” the old saying goes. It’s not entirely clear from where the proverb comes, but my research tells me that it’s possibly a twist on a different Talmudic proverb that originally appeared in Aramaic: “if a word be worth one shekel, silence is worth two.”

But I think we can infer that these proverbs mean a little more than just “shut the hell up, I’m trying to think.” What really is “silence”, and why do we crave it? Why do we consider it “golden”? And why is it so damn hard to come by?

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As a political scientist who specifically studies American elections, I always knew that the Fall of 2024 was likely to sap me of what few energy reserves and silent moments I’ve recouped since the pandemic really began to recede in 2022.

Boy, was I right. The noise of the presidential campaign increased in volume again and again (disastrous debate, assassination attempt, new candidate, floating piles of garbage), well past the limit we hoped was in place on whatever cursed stereo blares the strange music of American politics.

What I saw on the horizon, though, was a light at the end of the tunnel. The election could not — would not — last forever. And regardless of its outcome, there would come a time when we could stop checking the polls, stop reacting to the racist rallies, stop catastrophizing about candidates’ media strategies, and slow down into the blissful quiet of normalcy, at least for a little while.

Obviously the outcome of the election made the comedown from the noisy highs of the campaign complicated, difficult, and rife with tough questions. What does a second Trump term really mean? What can he, and can’t he, do within the bounds of the law? How likely is he to break the law? How does one actually move to Canada? These are the questions I understand I’m likely to get from friends, family, and the media as a result of my job, and I genuinely don’t mind answering them (or at least, attempting to).

But what I hoped for all of us to get over the next couple of months was, at the very least, a moment of silence. I wanted a reprieve, a between-space where we could catch our breath, an intermission between the screeching Act One of the 2024 campaign and the possibly-catastrophic Act Two of a second Trump presidency.

I wished for something we were all so unjustly denied, for example, in 2020. The high-pitched wail of a President using every rhetorical and legal (and thankfully not literal) weapon in his arsenal to subvert a free and fair election made such a silence impossible. We were given no space to breathe after the election actually ended; instead, we got a nonstop crescendo of political idiocy culminating in the events of January 6, 2021.

Oh well. At least we got Rudy Giuliani making a fool of himself at Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

The only genuinely funny thing that happened between Election Day 2020 and Inauguration Day 2021.

Yes, I was braced for such a result this time if Trump had lost. But since he didn’t lose, I at least thought we might get to enjoy the thinnest of silver linings: that the election wouldn’t be seriously challenged or conspiracized in the months to follow; and therefore, that I and everybody else could do something resembling an unplugging from the noise that always accompanies a presidential campaign.

But no. Instead of a breath of fresh air, we get a Fox News anchor running the Pentagon. Instead of stability, we get the breaking of core functions of Congress through the threat of recess appointments. Instead of self-care, peppermint tea and long, wistful gazes out our back window in hopes of feasting our eyes and souls on the first snowfall of the season… we get Matt Gaetz.

Your moment of silence has been postponed indefinitely. Please wait.

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Many of us might think of “silence” simply as the absence of noise. The dogs won’t stop barking and breaking my train of thought; the landscaping team across the street decides to get started at 8am and ruin my morning; the dinging notifications from my phone/computer/watch/microwave oven refuse to grant me a moment’s peace and concentration.

Maybe no space feels more “noisy” these days than the one between our two ears. One recent study from the academic journal Perceptual and Motor Skills (yes, it’s a real journal) scientifically examined what researchers call “elliptical inner speech”, and which we more commonly call the “inner monologue”, or maybe “the giant annoying hamster wheel inside our heads.” They found that most people have to endure something like 320 State of the Union Addresses worth of elliptical inner speech every day. One (zero, if I’m honest) is enough for me.

“All the noise,” write Justin Zorn and Leigh Marz in their fascinating 2023 book, Golden, “can interfere with what might be our biggest goal of all: to consciously choose how we spend our time on this planet.” And when silence is elusive — when “noise” of various sorts (not just audio) crowds out all our free time and space — we feel robbed of all the actions, work, and hobbies we would choose to fill that space if we had the chance.

But noise also robs us of a deeper experience of silence that has value beyond just the “useful” things we could fill it with. Sure, we’d love to turn down the volume in our brains so we can hear ourselves think more accurate thoughts and plan out our days. We might strive to declutter the desk so we have space to put a second computer monitor to increase our productivity. And nothing, it seems, would be sweeter than to slow down the pace of the world, the news, and our lives to have more time for meaningful hobbies.

None of these goals are bad: planning, productivity, and structured hobbies are important and have their places. But these actions can fill too quickly the blessed silences and blank spaces in our lives that might be better left untouched. Recognizing our tendency to do this reflects an appreciation for silence in its own right that artists, poets, and scientists alike have arrived at independently.

To explore this idea some more, I’ll let the late Mexican poet David Huerta set the table with this section of his fittingly-entitled poem, “Silence”:

It lies obliquely in the tender or harsh words 
of every day. It is an inevitable presence 
in which every human voice recognizes itself 
before or after speaking.

In the lightning bolt it is the pure light of imminence and in the reliable thunder 
it is like the blackness of the blast, its negative face, its flip side 
of potentialities, its deep mirror.

I recognize in this long, smooth hand 
reaching for my face in the morning 
its wealth of unspeakable meaning.

I am grateful to silence like him who is enamored of invisibility 
and the power of a divine gift.
It inhabits certain texts whose printed or handwritten muteness 
barely hints at its defiant plenitude. For it is not the same 
as the muteness of those signs, which it sustains, nourishes, completes, 
fertilizes and makes possible its display of form and meaning.

Without it music would possess neither substance nor structure 
and many poems would be drained of their tangible magic, 
turning at last into tepid shells, 
useless or unplugged machinery.

Huerta is doing some very cool linguistic work here. Silence, he says, has a “wealth of unspeakable meaning” — both literally unspeakable (because, you know, “silence”) and figuratively unspeakable, in that it’s elusive and can’t be easily quantified. And in a short, blink-and-you-miss-it three lines in the middle of the poem, Huerta tells an entire love story: a hand reaches tenderly for his face in the morning, and nothing needs to be said. In fact, it’s the silence itself that creates and gives shape to little moments like this, ones far heftier with meaning than if (let’s say) Huerta were loudly awoken to his partner bashing some cymbals together and screaming “I LOVE YOU” at the top of their lungs.

Huerta is most convincing when he writes of the power of very literal silence in music. Without silence, Huerta writes, music “would possess neither substance nor structure.” Actual legendary musicians across history have echoed these observations: the impressionist composer Claude Debussy once wrote that the music is not in the notes that are played or written, but in the spaces between them; the jazz icon Miles Davis put it similarly: “It's not the notes you play; it's the notes you don't play.”

For an audio example of this kind of musical mastery, here’s Punch Brothers covering Debussy himself in 2015, each virtuosic member of the band fading in and out of the foreground to highlight the variety of sounds and instruments:

Restraint, space, and patience. These are some of the most difficult actions to practice in any aspect of life, but they’re immensely valuable when it comes to making music, or art of any kind. Certainly this is true in writing, at least according to Shakespeare (“brevity is the soul of wit”); and to Huerta, who finds that silence “inhabits certain texts” and clearly improves them. Meanwhile, if a poem over-explains rather than leaving some things unsaid, then Huerta argues that it is “drained of its tangible magic” and amounts to little more than “useless or unplugged machinery.”

Doing less when you could do more, being silent even when you could fill that silence with something productive or useful, illuminates the importance of blank spaces in and of themselves. In showing restraint, in leaving room for blankness and quietude, musicians and writers who embrace silence give clearer tangible shape to their creations, which must include space for their listeners and readers to interpret and glean what they will from the art.

This is true not just of audible silence, but visual silence as well. In visual design, this is commonly referred to as “white space,” or “negative space” if we’re talking about photography. By choosing not to fill the canvas entirely with the subject, the artist can force the viewer into a “visual pause” so they can hunt around a bit for the subject, as well as put the subject into bigger context. Take, for example, this absurd photo that I (neither an artist nor a skilled photographer) took of my dog Rhody during a dreary visit to the Oregon coast in 2020:

Oregon coast, Fall 2020.

In this case, Rhody’s dumb face and comically long tongue are a silly contrast with the enormity of the beach, ocean, and sky surrounding him. His infectious joy (and vibrant adorable color) also is interesting when laid against the backdrop of the dreary greys of the beach, the ocean, and the cloudy sky.

In visual arts, in writing, and in music, this is often exactly the point. Silence of all kinds —whether it’s the absence of audio input, a mostly-blank canvas, an uncluttered desktop, or an unexpected stretch of free time in the middle of the day — is crucial beyond just what we can fill it with. Silence, blankness, quietude (even boredom!) is what gives shape, context, and substance to the words that are written, the notes that are played, and the minutes that haven’t yet been spent. Silence draws attention to these precious commodities that they couldn’t get otherwise, if instead they were simply lost amidst the noise of the week.

In fact, in the interest of actual brevity (a concept my readers know is entirely alien to me), I’ll stop droning on here and leave the big picture of this lesson to a poem by Laozi (or Lao-Tzu), the ancient Chinese philosopher and author of the Tao Te Ching:

Thirty spokes converge on a hub
but it's the emptiness 
that makes a wheel work 
pots are fashioned from clay 
but it's the hollow 
that makes a pot work
windows and doors are carved for a house 
but it's the spaces 
that make a house work 
existence makes a thing useful 
but nonexistence makes it work

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I’m sorry to report that, in order to close the loop on this post, I need to bring it back to politics for a minute.

I think I’m not alone in suggesting that politics could benefit from more profound and extended silence. We’re currently in a period of time that — at least, prior to eight years ago — has traditionally been among the quieter stretches of most Americans’ experience of politics. This is a period of presidential “transition,” when one president is fading slowly into obscurity on his way out the door, and another hasn’t yet taken office. It’s also a “lame duck” session of Congress, where the legislature usually kicks up their feet and chills while those who retired or weren’t reelected slink out the back door and make way for the new class. Not much typically happens in Washington during these couple of months.

Such a silence is unavailable, currently. It’s on to the next emergency. Fine. But we shouldn’t have to rely on this “down periods” to find a politics that doesn’t make us want to permanently submerge our heads in a bucket of cold water. Some structural features of our politics — consistently high stakes, razor-thin election margins, and an increasingly horrific media environment — make it really difficult to zero in on some silence on the canvas for our leaders to paint on.

But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can do, or that we have no reason to ever expect anything different. For example, Kamala Harris didn’t win the election, but her historically short campaign — a little over a hundred days between when President Biden dropped out, and when the election took place — could offer us a sliver of hope that future presidential candidates may not feel the need to showcase their intentions to monopolize our time quite so early in the process. Wouldn’t it be nice if we didn’t have to think (or hear, or read) about the 2028 presidential election until, at the earliest, the Fall of 2027? Would voters maybe appreciate politicians more if they did less campaigning and more legislating?

Maybe. In the meantime, I’ll try to think of some ways to locate blissful silence amidst the din of American politics. If I find any, you’ll be the first to know.