To rise above cancel culture, we need to listen better and speak less

The moral contempt behind online acts of ostracism has damaged the power of speech. Let’s give the respectful voice its place back in the public sphere.

It’s an awful song with a catchy title written in 1967 for the inanely named Herman’s Hermits. The evocative title is There’s A Kind of Hush. It is a timely reminder of how the human spirit needs and yearns for a quietness, a stillness, a pause.

And a reminder of how little of this there is in the loud, raucous and competing noises in our universe. Every day we are greeted with the pings of our phones, the loud, violent voices on our screens, angry sounds in our meeting places. There’s so much unquietness, dissatisfaction, rage and angst.

What keeps me up at night is all those enraged polarised opinions. To borrow the memorable lyrics of Paul Simon: “People talking without speaking. People hearing without listening.” Listening is one of the most practical constructive forms of silence.

Silence is at the heart of every Jewish prayer. You can’t go into a synagogue service - and if attentive - not experience a silent, meditative Amidah. And, of course, on Shabbat we stop and replace loud protest with a quiet pause. It is like the pauses in Mozart’s music which Biblical commentator Aviva Zornberg says create its exquisite eloquence.

Judaism has always recognised that silence is potent and powerful, that it can heal wounded hearts, that it can mend fractured relationships, that it can calm conflicted communities and soothe troubled societies.

In his masterful and perhaps most well-known passage about timing, King Solomon notes “to everything there is a season and a time – a time to keep silent and a time to speak”.

The problem today is that we have lost the art of silence and damaged the power of speech.

In the latest Quarterly Essay, Uncivil Wars, Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens crystallise our contemporary crisis. They write that the problem today is not so much one of anger but rather, of contempt. Even though anger can be extremely damaging, there is a place for righteous indignation, for a show of anger to create a change of behaviour.