Pope's calm speaks volumes about a societal need

Shortly after the proclamation of the new pope, a television reporter told his audience that the Catholics of Latin America "have waited 20 centuries for a pope to come from this region."

Well.

There were, of course, no Catholics in Latin America until about 500 years ago. We all make mistakes, but in this case the error is probably explained less by exuberance over a new pontiff than by the inexorable demand of the medium for gab unceasing.

Contrast the endless and largely pointless chatter of the modern world with the minutes Pope Francis spent standing silently on the balcony before addressing the thousands in St. Peter's Square and the hundreds of millions around the world.

The silence was beautiful, eloquent, projecting both a sense of peace and a sense of occasion. An even longer silence followed, when Francis asked the faithful to pray for him — a silence, evidently, that was mimicked in Catholic households and schools around the world.

We live in a loud time. Anything above 85 decibels can damage the ear if we listen long enough. Manhattan traffic alone creates a good 79 decibels. And according to the National Institutes of Health, the sound of music through headphones often runs — wait for it — about 110 decibels.

This loudness can harm our physical health. The larger challenge, however, isn't so much the noise as its constancy. Silences are increasingly difficult to find. The endless chatter and clack and beep and blat is going to destroy democracy. Seriously.

We need silence, in other words, to think both clearly and charitably. In a world of constant sound and stimulation, it is harder to be accurate in our reasoning and empathetic in our listening. Genuine democracy cannot survive such corruption.

The mobile phone has made us louder. All through history, until the past decade or so, people walking alone on the street usually walked in silence. No longer. If you pass 50 fellow pedestrians while strolling a city block, the chances are you have been forced to listen in on 45 conversations — unless, of course, you are too busy forcing your own conversation on others.

In the Catholic as so many other religious traditions, reflection and contemplation are virtues. In the stifling silliness created by the merger of secularism and technology, they are vices.

Politicians and activists, commentators and bloggers are supposed to have instant responses to whatever news may arise. To meet a difficult question with "I need to think that one over" is seen as an evasion, or perhaps a failure of the intellect. In the words of the theologian Cornelius Plantinga, "it's boring to watch a person think." Yet time to think matters — at least if we're interested in getting the answers right.

Consider chess. Under international rules, if a player's mobile phone makes any sound during a tournament game, he or she loses immediately. The rule's origin lies in a concern about distracting the other player.

Hannah Arendt, in "The Life of the Mind," writes: "Thinking is always out of order, interrupts all ordinary activities and is interrupted by them." Yet we need to do it. Socrates, she reminds us, didn't always have the answers, and wasn't always interested in dialogue. Again and again, Arendt says, we see him going off alone to think.

All of which brings us back to the reporter and his 2,000 years of Latin American Catholicism. He was working without a script, reporting live. His job was to fill the air with commentary. In Catholic terms, there was no time for the intellect to reflect upon the words that suggested themselves before the will gave consent to speak them.

That's our problem in a nutshell. If we lack the time to seek out silent spaces, we lack the time to think clearly, and thus we lack the time to do democracy well.

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