Find the silence that enables you to be with yourself, says Mark Vernon

I want to talk about silence by way of a medieval detour. It illuminates why the figure of Thomas Aquinas – perhaps the greatest of all the medieval Western philosophers – argues that silence is relevant to “enshittification”, to borrow Cory Doctorow’s phrase, and our times now.

The interesting observation that Thomas Aquinas made is his remark that if people are never alone, if they are never with themselves, and if they’re never in silence, the devil will win. What he meant is that the thing about the devil is that the devil doesn’t know your inner thoughts – that was the understanding – but works hard to affect your actions, no less. That might be through temptations, it might be through prompting emotions, it might be by trying to fill your mind with confusing thoughts. The devil can affect you from the outside in, but you have a kind of interior castle that the devil can’t directly tamper with.

So, if you know about your inner castle, if you know about your inner thoughts, if you can find the silence that enables you to be with yourself, then you have this secure foundation for your life. You will never be completely subject to that which is going on around and about you.

That’s a spiritual way of putting an observation that’s made in other forms, not least as the Stoics had it, when they said: it’s not what happens to you, but how you respond that matters. I think that’s another way of saying the same sort of thing. If you don’t understand your responses, what comes from within you, then you’re rendered passive, a victim, buffered around by events, or by fears, or by pleasures. And, of course, buffeted around by screens.

So time for silence is a hugely important thing. And you might want to consider joining me, because over the Easter weekend I’m going to be helping to lead a silent retreat. It will be at Broughton Sanctuary in Yorkshire, just outside Skipton. It will be led by John Butler, who is an extraordinary practitioner of silence. For decades he sat in Bakewell Church in Derbyshire and was discovered during the lockdown. He’s one of the handful of people I know who really know how to hold silence, and that can be a tremendous thing when you want to find out what silence can really bring, and the ways in which it can support life. It’s one of the best practices that we can cultivate that avoid the effects of “enshittification”.

You might say that “enshittification” is itself a symptom of this failed resistance to the devil, this failed ability to be aware of your responses and so have an inner fortification that helps resist the buffeting, the manipulation, the passiveness, that otherwise seems to render us so responsively helpless to the platforms that would, like the devil of old, feed us desires, feed us with fears, feed us with temptations. Without the silence that is the protection against them, they lead us, therefore, in all sorts of damnable ways.

To find out about the retreat, click here.

This Thought for the Week was presented at Thursday’s “A Drink with the Idler” featuring Enshittification author Cory Doctorow.

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