Silence and The Gullibility of Our Age
"We stand or sit there solemnly contemplating the genius of the artwork, like the passive, well-behaved bourgeois that we are, when we should be calling someone’s bluff." Iain McGilchrist
Silence is rare. And so is beauty. We are inundated and distracted by so much noise it is hard to find signal and meaning.
I wrote this after spending a summer evening at a pool with my family. It was beautiful and warm, and we decided to order some pizza and have dinner at a table overlooking the pool. As we talked and enjoyed blue sky and full trees of late summer, I realized that I could hear the background sounds of children laughing and talking and of water splashing. Something was different - and pleasant. Then it struck me. The music had been turned off. There was no pop beats; no disc jockeys talking in the background. I could hear the normal sounds of people talking and children enjoying a summer evening.
A day or two later, I was looking for something by the English philosopher Roger Scruton and I came across a short 10 minute audio essay called Tyranny of Pop from BBC’s Point of View where he discussed the problem of ubiquitous noise. Scruton begins:
In almost every public place today, the ears are assailed by the sound of pop music…the ambient sound is not human conversation but the music disgorged into the air by speakers; usually invisible and inaccessible speakers that cannot be punished for their impertinence.
The majority of this music is
“of an astounding banality. It is there in order to be be not really there. It is the background to the business of consuming things.”
Far from harmless, Scruton argues it undermines our capacity to appreciate and be moved by truly beautiful music.
Scruton once said, if I am not mistaken, that his favorite piece of music, the one he found most powerful was J.S. Bach’s Mass in B-Minor. If that is not exactly right, it was definitely Bach–as well it should be! I don’t pretend to have the musical ability, knowledge, or refined tastes of Roger Scruton, but Bach is definitely the greatest. The power of Bach of course is universal. I read once that that a number of Japanese people were considering a conversion to Christianity, and the main influence was the music of Bach.
In an age in which conventional religion does not appeal to many it may be through art that ultimate meanings can be conveyed. I believe art does play an invaluable role in conveying spiritual meaning. Schumann once said of Bach’s chorale prelude Ich ruf’ zu dir (see below) -– chosen by Andrei Tarkovsky to open his extraordinary poetical exploration of the relationship between mind and the incarnate world, Solaris – that if a man had lost all his faith, just hearing it would be enough to restore it.
Whether we put it in those terms or not, there is no doubt that here, as in Bach’s great Passions, something powerful is being communicated that is of a spiritual, not just emotional, nature. Something similar could be said of the extraordinary depiction of Christ and his mother in the ancient church of St Saviour in Khora in Istanbul
Call the Bluff
Like Scruton, McGilchrist laments our inability to distinguish between good and bad art, and how we are taken in by the banal. McGilchrist writes:
Here I must speak for myself, since these matters are nothing if not personal. When I think of such works of art, and compare Tracey Emin’s unmade bed, or even, I am afraid, so much other post-modern art, just as when I think of Bach and compare him with Stockhausen, I feel we have lost not just the plot, but our sense of the absurd. We stand or sit there solemnly contemplating the genius of the artwork, like the passive, well-behaved bourgeois that we are, when we should be calling someone’s bluff.
My bet is that our age will be viewed in retrospect with amusement, as an age remarkable not only for its cynicism, but for its gullibility.
Silence
Part of the ability to call the bluff is to listen to beautiful music. It is also to cultivate silence. For more on silence I recommend Max Picard’s The World of Silence and Joseph Pieper’s The Silence of St. Thomas. And I find this explanation of the value and purpose of silence from Dom Paul Delatte in his Commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict especially helpful:
“The fundamental purpose of silence is to free the soul, to give it strength and leisure to adhere to God. It frees the soul, just like obedience it gives the will its proper mastery. It has, like work, the twofold advantage of delivering us from the low tendencies of our nature and of fixing us in the good. It sets us, little by little, in a serene region, sapientum templa serena, where we are able to speak to God and hear His voice. So silence in its turn is related to faith and charity. And just as in obedience we are not required to be slaves…silence is a joyous work.
A version of this originally appeared at Acton.org