Talk Silver, Silence Gold. Thanks, Dad.
Recently, during a conversation, I stopped talking and listened. For that I can thank my father.
My father had a hard life, mostly due to his own actions. World War 2 in Eastern and Central Europe was how he spent his youth. Like many, he emigrated to these United States. Those interested in Lithuanian origin stories, the buffeting of life as one flees the Nazis and the Communists, and the lives of immigrants coming to America can read my cousin’s excellent book, Klara Ponelytė Virskus: Stories & Reflections.1
While he lived my father repeated one piece of advice over and over again in his stilted English: “Talk Silver, Silence Gold.”
I assume this was likely a difficult lesson for him to learn, as it has been for myself. From my mother I received intelligence; from my father I inherited gregariousness and the inability to shut up. Listening is harder than talking, because we are mortal and frail and our voices are our cry to be heard.
The general principle of what my father had to say is more relevant today than ever before. How much of getting along with other people is simply keeping one’s mouth shut, and listening to what the other person has to say?
When we meet someone in person, there are various rituals we follow. We say hello, we may shake hands (in order to show we carry no weapons),2 and we tell each other our names.
Beyond that, circumstances dictate our actions.
If we are at a bar, socialization is likely the goal. Perhaps we are trying to attract attention, posturing to scale a social hierarchy, as we all are at some point. Talking certainly can help that. However, truly impressing someone involves conversation. Listening is key, starting with remembering the other person’s name. Listening to what another person says and repeating it back to them signals we listened and honors them with the dignity we desire for ourselves.
If we are in a class, learning is the goal. Listening becomes paramount, but there is a give and take, or should be. The same is true at work, where communication and collaboration become key, typically within the confines of a hierarchical structure that everyone hopes provides a framework and conduit for productivity.
We have evolved, over time, to be better at communication. How do I know? One communicates in place of violence, and over the last 14,000 years we have gotten increasingly peaceful, as illustrated by Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature.3
For the sake of argument, let us use nation-state formation as a proxy for developed communication.
The cultures of our prehistoric hunter-gatherer ancestors had violence death rates ranging from 0 to 60 percent, with the average being 15 percent. A 15 percent violence death rate in a society seems somewhat high to me. I am trying to visualize how it would feel to see that of 100 people I know, 15 will die from violence. Contemporary hunter-gatherer societies are better, but still have violence death rates ranging from 4 to 30 percent, with the average being 14 percent.4
On the other hand, the violence death rates for nation-state societies is markedly lower. The earliest data from pre-Colombian Mexico indicates 5 percent for a violence death rate. 17th Century Europe’s Wars of Religion produced a 2 percent rate, and the 180 million who died in wars in the 20th Century still only amount to a 3 percent violence death rate. With no disrespect to the dead, I say “only” to emphasize how utterly violent humanity was in its “natural” state.5 Hobbes,6not Lennon,7 was right.
What happened? We learned how to communicate, and organize ourselves into logical-for-us groupings to achieve our ends. We created religions to organize ourselves around the nature that awes us, trade to buy and sell things from each other, and governments to defend ourselves and fill in the gaps. All of these are primary elements of modern, nation-state societies.
The threat of violence ever present, we instead opt for peace. Empathy, self-control, a moral sense, and reason are Pinker's explanations for our evolution away from violence.8 Reason is only achieved through communication.
Communication was the answer to violence. One had to speak, as well as listen, and then there was dialogue. A handshake is better than a knife in the stomach.
Now, what happens when we meet someone on the Internet?
First, there are no formal rituals. Still, circumstances dictate our actions.
However, in these circumstances, there is no threat of violence. There is no need for a handshake.
Suddenly, something you say in person that could get you punched in the face is utterable. No one can punch you in the face online. On the Internet we feel free to say things that in person could result in violence.
Absent physical threat, Pinker’s "inspirational demons of violence" are given license; predatory behavior, dominance, revenge, sadism, and ideology become the norm.9 The impetus for communication is gone. Violence is undesirable, but it seems its threat is necessary to make us behave. That is an uncomfortable truth.
This means that on the Internet, there is too much talking, and not enough listening. We know there is not enough listening. The lack of dialogue is so obvious in the inability of disparate parties to understand one another; they’re not listening to one another. In addition, if we listened to ourselves speak sometimes we would be ashamed and be silent. Speech is feedback we receive when others listen to us.
About 5 years ago, I realized that my behavior online now followed this pattern. Compartmentalization, the nature of human intelligence,10 and the limits of online communication11 conspired to influence me to choose poorly. I frolicked with Pinker's demons.
I became ashamed and silent. I waded deep into the online environment I had created for myself, and proceeded to delete a large number of Tweets and Posts. Were one’s life so fixable. I went back in time some 5 to 6 years. This takes a great deal of time and effort, because these forums do not lend themselves to the easy management of one’s own information. It is not in their interest to do so.
In the process, I crafted some behaviors for myself. For Facebook in particular, after deleting a lot, I restricted what personal information I share, and to whom, including Page Follows, Likes, and Group Memberships. I set my Friends Visibility to Mutual Only. After all, when we introduce ourselves in person, we don’t tell our new friend everything about ourselves all at once and in great detail. Relationships take time, and we can really only do one thing at a time.12
Finally, I resolved to limit political posts to 2 topics, my support for Free Speech and my support for nuclear energy. Even here, I am anodyne. I try to post interesting (well, at least to me) things that aren’t emotionally provocative, and things that are politically neutral and positive in nature. I try to be social.
I suppose I resolved to be boring online.
Now I use Twitter to peruse what passes for news, Facebook to remain in contact with friends and family, Instagram to share interesting pictures I take, and Substack to express opinions on some of the things everyone fights about online. Perhaps this fragmentation of platform use into myriads of cultures reflects real life, and is where the Internet is headed as well.13
I still speak online, but now I also listen.
If you speak and listen online, you are being social. If you only speak, you are not.
Words are not violence, irrespective of their impact. We can say we believe words are violence, but that is a lie we tell ourselves. This lie is betrayed by the fact we speak online as if there were no such threat.
Even if words were violence, we should still treat them as if they are not. There is no reason for an injunction against speech as there is against violence, because words are ideas which are the goods of communication. Also, if we cannot speak then someone else cannot listen to what we say.
Perhaps on the Internet, words seem like violence because everyone is only speaking and not listening.
If communication is the antidote to violence, and there is a surplus of speech driving all that is negative in the online world, maybe the solution is to listen more, and speak less.
Absent a realistic threat of violence, how else will we learn how to behave?
Listening to what another person says and repeating it back to them signals we listened and honors them with the dignity we desire for ourselves.
In the process of listening, we might even learn something new. Thanks, Dad.
Talk Silver, Silence Gold.
Ibid, 48-50.
Ibid, 50.
Ibid.