The power of silence in times of conflict

Why can’t silence be a legitimate option when it comes to writing opinion? 

I don’t simply mean a chance not to write, though, in some instances, it would not just be a hope that some people would choose that option but a preference; a welcome alternative to some of the glib, contrary, and downright wrong arguments raised in the endless hunt for clickbait. But what I am talking about is a proper silence that stands for something meaningful. A well-contemplated silence. A deliberate, respectful silence. The silence that accompanies the complete absence of words. It would be a silence that artfully conveys that feeling of abandonment one has when trying to track world events only to find no insight worth sharing. 

How, for example, does one begin to have some insight into Hamas’s assault on Israel’s civilian population, which left 1200 dead this weekend, with an equal number now thought to have died in Israel’s response? 

Here, right here, is where I feel I need that silence.  

Let this be the space after a moment of stifling, strangling shock, when I can start to breathe again. 

This is 2023 and we’re discussing 1200 people, many of whom were children, all deliberately targeted by killers out to hunt innocents. How do you begin to intellectualise that or even articulate it? How, indeed, do you then talk about the 1200 people now thought to have died as a consequence of Israel’s response? Many of those dead will have had no affiliation with Hamas; as much victims of their terror as those who were killed on the other side of the border. How many more will consequently suffer under this Siege of Gaza now that water and power have been cut off?  

One is caught between the pull of three equally ineffective responses.  

The first is the most familiar. It is rage, anger, and the will towards retribution. It is the natural response felt across Israel and, indeed, the world. It is understandable but also, tragically, escalatory. 

Another response is spiritual: devolving into a discussion about the nature of evil. Yet that only serves to dismiss these horrors, place them in the fringes where they will reside as freaks of the conveniently mysterious supernatural. It’s the Hitler-as-monster argument which is no argument at all. It’s just an excuse not to think about something that any sane person would choose not to think about. 

Then we have the secular response: an explanation about how violence is inherent in a system built upon age-old prejudices, fears, and hatred. Here are the facts. Here are the body counts, past and present. Here are other numbers in terms of munition sales or food deliveries or populations then and now. Yet this historicist approach is also ineffective because it doesn’t do enough to irrationalise these acts, which are still too profoundly upsetting to be understandable through facts, politics, history, or economics.  

None of the responses are satisfactory, which is why most of us live somewhere between the three: pained, angry, but impotently trying to understand what is happening in Israel, and now Gaza, as measured against the metrics of our own lives, where there is no unit of existential dread capable of measuring such unimaginable horror. Even the most brutal meme of a baby dead or suffering does nothing to describe the abject reality of a baby dead or suffering. Nor does it feel possible – or perhaps even psychologically healthy – to understand events through cause and effect. We cannot and do not want to inhabit the mental space of those Hamas killers, those cowards, those ghouls bereft of humanity. We instead need some greater explanation to quell the feeling that we live in a cold dispassionate universe in which cold and dispassionate people walk among us. 

Which brings us back to silence.  

For the moment, silence is what we need. A silence to properly convey this feeling of numbness many of us feel. We need silence so that later – much later – poetry, art, narrative, and all manner of complex voice can attempt to make sense of this moment of senselessness in the midst of our ordinary lives. As Auden wrote in his poem, ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’: 

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; 

Yet rarely are we allowed silence. Even when we mark a minute’s silence, we get polite applause meant to drown out the braying voices of people incapable of keeping quiet for a single damn moment of their miserable lives. Nor do we need the kinds of silence we’re allowed on Facebook, TikTok, Twitter or X, environments as deep as they are shallow, with their endless supply of opinions that go on forever and nowhere.  

There is no benefit in muting, blocking, unfollowing, or reporting. The Great Opinion Machines are now so vast that they are beyond our human capacity to control them. Social media turns up the contrast on every issue; blows out the white, and crushes the shadows. There’s no way to dial it down without recourse to greater automation: AI moderation, which will simply be another abstraction of our loss of control. 

We just need a break from the chatter, the claims and counterclaims, the litany of lies being spread, conspiracies hatches, and the tiresome concern of politicians spinning outrage to political ends, such as when Kevin McCarthy, the ousted Speaker of the House in the US, took little time to make it all about him. “Unfortunately, the House can do nothing without a speaker,” he said after the attacks.

Save us too from self-important billionaires who profess to know everything and fail to understand the fundamental mistakes they habitually make. Save us from those who would make this about John Simpson, the BBC, the Football Association, the Labour or Conservative parties, Jeremy Corbyn, or even Holly Willoughby (Sky News were criticised for breaking their coverage from Israel to report her quitting This Morning). We need silence from the radio phone-ins with their thin platitudes and meaty outrage. We need less spin, fewer hot takes, no more Vox Pops, and a turning down on the amplified rhetoric. Whataboutism needs to become Notaboutism. We need silence. 

We should also make space and time to reflect on the fact that turning politics into entertainment is no fun novelty or a happy offshoot of hypermodern tribalism. When politics fails, we enter the realm of conflict, war crimes, and unimaginable carnage. Politics can do so much to improve lives, but these matters are rarely easy and always too difficult to be left to extremists on either side. Brexit, 20mph speed limits, reproductive rights, trans rights, book bans, and, yes, even delayed-and-now-abandoned railway infrastructure: they all impact people who will and do suffer because of the decisions we make collectively at the ballot box. 

Democracy cannot be taken lightly. It’s not a matter of spiting the other side, demonising demographics different to our demographic, making a sport of suffering. Democracy is a potent force against those who would do us harm, but it is also precarious when tempers run hot. It demands cool heads and wise counsel. It’s why we need silence to regain our thoughts, reflect on the facts, and consider our opinions before we share them.  

Time for a little humility. Time for compassion. Time for responsibility. 

Time for a little silence. 

@DavidWaywell 

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