In Defense of Silence
Leadership in the Age of Moral Outrage Inflation
Check out my new poem: This Poem Is Cancelled.
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Every time there’s a crisis in the news, a great number of clergy, professors, and other “thought leaders” feel “called” to speak up.
Because the media thrives on a constant stream of calamities, there is no end to punditry, no end to organization-issued statements, letters of solidarity, social media posts, sermons about the fierce urgency of now.
I have several criticisms of this widespread cultural phenomenon. In offering a critique, my aim is not to tell specific people they shouldn’t be speaking out about specific issues, but to reflect on a more general trend that I think diminishes the power and gravity of any particular statement. Just as I wrote about the risk of emotional hyperinflation, I worry that a knee-jerk sense of moral outrage ultimately benumbs us to a genuine sense of concern.
Here’s an incomplete list of quibbles I have with the social-justice-ization of clergy, the professorate, and the “[thought] leadership class” more generally.
Unless you have been speaking out about an issue regularly, why does it take a crisis to activate your concern? Why now?
Unless you are wading into a debate about policy, what does it add to the conversation for you to use (an unearned or dubious) authority to simply say something generic that people can read in the newspaper or watch on the news for themselves? Do what distinguishes you from other voices—don’t be a mediator of content people can just get directly.
Unless you genuinely care about an issue, and have made it your life’s work, what makes you think you know enough to have a credible and productive view on a topic you have only recently learned about? So you’ve read an article or two, maybe even a book, and now you’re an expert? Given the complexity of any particular issue, isn’t the presumption of simplicity by a drive-by moralizer not only ineffective, but net negative, as it raises the temperature without allowing for the experts to weigh in?
In an attention economy where demagoguery is rewarded by more eyeballs, your participation in the casino of winner-take-all moralizing serves to direct attention towards those who know how to manipulate the social media algorithm, but not necessarily improve things on the ground. If Yeats were writing today, he’d say something like “The best lack all distribution while the worst are full of passionate retweeters.”
Ask yourself—does this statement (of which there are thousands just like it) help the people reading it live better lives?
Here goes my most provocative challenge: Hannah Arendt claims that Eichmann’s evil was the result of “thoughtlessness.” He spoke and thought in cliché. To the extent that you agree with Arendt, shouldn’t you use speech that is differentiated, poetic, thoughtful? And yet why does your organizational statement read like focus-group workshopped ad copy?
Only you can know when it’s right for you to speak up. But unless you are adding something to the conversation, consider that, rhetorically speaking, you may be contributing to a tragedy of the commons, in which everybody is outraged and nobody cares.
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