There is a kind of quiet that arrives only after an argument has exhausted itself. Not agreement — agreement is loud, it wants to be marked. Not defeat either. Just the minute in which both people know that one more sentence will change nothing.
We usually fill that minute. We say fine, but, or we change the subject, or we laugh. We rarely stay where the argument ended and look at what is left.
The pause as method
Silence is not the absence of thought. It is the one place where a thought can change shape without anybody watching.
A person who cannot bear a pause will usually repeat what they have already said — only louder.
This is especially true of public argument. On television, or in a feed, a pause is a loss: it is time in which somebody else is talking. So nobody stops. And so nothing moves.
What it costs us
Two things.
The first is the chance to be wrong quietly. A thought that has not been said can be abandoned for free. A thought that has been said is a position, and positions have to be defended.
The second is listening. This sounds banal, but listening is not waiting for the other person to finish. It is allowing that what they say might alter something.
A great deal has been written lately about our inability to talk to one another. That is probably true, and incomplete. The problem is not that we talk too much. It is that we never stop for long enough to let the words do anything.