Concerning to Whom We Speak
What does it mean to speak judiciously?
On Injudicious Speech
As a culture, we love it when people are not judicious. Isn’t Reality TV premised upon indiscreet people impulsively saying ridiculous things? Think of the commercials for new episodes, which mostly contain teasers of shouted insults and whispered secrets. Add to that the audaciously brutal snarls and the dishonestly broken alliances, and you have a culture increasingly railing against the virtues of speech.
There are a lot of ways you can go wrong in speaking. You can be callous, inconsiderate, dishonest, sullen, aloof, unforthcoming, and so on. Each of these is a lousy way to speak, either because it is saying something that isn’t true (dishonest), or not saying what you should say (unforthcoming), or speaking in a vicious manner (inconsiderate), or…. But falsehood, inappropriate silence, and improper mode aren’t the only ways to go astray with the tongue. You can speak the truth in an acceptable manner and still get it wrong! Aquinas illuminatively covers such speech in his Summa Theologica, questions 72-76 of the Secunda Secundae. Fr. Gregory Pine’s recent book, Training the Tongue and Growing Beyond the Sins of Speech, is another excellent source on this topic.
Cases of Improper Truthful Speech
Let’s look at some examples to get a feel for the vices I have in mind.
Consider when a sibling rushes in to share her sister’s news about the musical casting; she’s stealing something from her sister – the value of sharing one’s own good news. Further, if the younger sister knew the older was eager to share it with her parents, it would be even worse for the little sister to rush in and blurt it out. Dad might say, “That wasn’t yours to share.”
Or think of a slumber party where you shared something vulnerable, maybe your current crush, or some secret and immoral act you had done. What a rookie move! But you were young, and you thought it was a safe space. Well, Monday came around, and you got those looks in the hallway at school. They knew! But how?
Perhaps they knew because one of your friends slunk around, whispering the juicy morsel to the cool kids. If she did it to lower your social standing, she might have been motivated by her envy of you. If she did it to increase her own standing by decreasing yours, she might have been misvaluing the goods of keeping your secret and your emotional welfare. The medievals called this backbiting, when one person blackens another’s character by secret words to injure their standing.
Or your classmates could learn of it when your so-called friend stands up in the lunchroom and yells it out for all to hear, pointing at you as you redden and wilt. She is asserting a truth, in that case, but that doesn’t make it a good thing to do. If her goal is still to bring down your luster, to dishonor you, she’s reviling you or railing against you.
Maybe instead your friend snuck off to tell your other circles of associates, in an effort to harm those friendships. Maybe because she is jealous. If that’s what happened, she was tale-bearing, trying to ruin your friendships through spreading truths others had no right to know.
Finally, maybe she made a joke of it, but in doing so revealed the truth to the other folks. Maybe you confessed your crush, and today she says, “oooh, look who’s coming over here; maybe you should go ask what he’s doing on Friday…” Everyone knows what she means. Your face turns the color of a gaudy tomato as you burn with embarrassment. The medievals would call this a case of derision.
Moral Analysis of Truth Gone Wrong
Thomas Aquinas, as was his wont, had a great way of categorizing these different varieties of asserting truth wrongly.
He wrote, summarizing them in a tidy package:
Now just as the railer intends to injure the honor of the person he rails, the backbiter to depreciate a good name, and the tale-bearer to destroy friendship, so too the derider intends to shame the person he derides. (ST II-II q. 75 a. 1 resp).
All of these are types of illicit sharing. We say that people who have a stable disposition to these activities are gossips.
While asserting the truth to more people than we should is a failure, so likewise is asserting the truth to too few. Here again we can think of people who have a right to know something yet are kept in the dark. Think of a situation where you wanted to say to someone, “You knew he was like this and yet you didn’t say anything to me? Why?” We might say that someone with a stable disposition not to speak up when she ought to is taciturn.
What might we call the person who is habitually disposed to say the truth to the right people, in the right contexts, at the right times? She’s not a back-biter or a reviler. But she’s not taciturn, either. Perhaps we can say that she and her speech are judicious.
Being judicious is a good trait to have. We all want our friends to be judicious. No one wants a friend that can’t be trusted with vulnerable information. Similarly, no one wants a friend who doesn’t share needful and owed information when he ought. We want people to be sandwiched between being a gossip and being taciturn, in the sweet land of judicious virtue. But the virtue goes undersung in our contemporary discussions. We lack a shared concept, a communal term for calling out this excellence in one another. How often do we sing the praises of judiciousness anymore?
How to Tell if You are Being Judicious?
How do you tell whether someone is being taciturn, judicious, or gossipy? Consider a situation in which I witness you sharing some delicate information with someone. If you claim to be acting judiciously and I say you are indiscriminately spilling the beans, what sorts of evidence might we point at to justify our claims?
Generally, like with lying, we can sometimes tell by knowing the person’s intent in speaking. Even if she deserved to know, but he only really told her because he wanted to ruin her friendship with you, he’d still be doing something morally wrong in tale-bearing. The goal of an action colors the morality of that action.
A second thing to ask when determining whether an act was judicious is whether the person needed to know. Is this knowledge pertinent to her life and choices in an essential way? If you know a guy habitually cheats on his girlfriends, and your friend starts dating him, that information would be an essential component in her informed decision to remain with him. If she’s entering into a business deal with a guy you know to be bankrupt and unable to fulfill his side of the bargain, she needs to know.
One final question you may ask takes after the golden rule. When considering whether you should spread a truth that will reflect negatively upon the person you are talking about, a good question to ask yourself is whether you’d feel wronged if a friend knew the truth and didn’t share it with you. If you were dating a guy and your friend didn’t tell you of his cheating ways, you could reasonably see yourself saying to her, “You should have told me.”
On the other hand, suppose your friend learns an embarrassing story about a mutual acquaintance, something you’d delight in knowing because it diminishes her good name (you monster!). If she doesn’t tell you about it, you won’t feel like she acted immorally in not telling you. She didn’t wrong you by not sharing it.
How to Grow in Judiciousness
If you want to cultivate the virtue of being judicious, where’s a good place to start?
Part of the solution comes from mastering your passions. Many things are said in the heat of the moment that cannot be taken back, and as an effect, many relationships are ruined. As such, patience and meekness are necessary to guard one’s tongue.
We also need to safeguard against seeking the pleasures of gossip. This, too, will require tempering our love for our own status–few things lead us to want to denigrate the goods of another like envy.
In addition to cultivating virtues of endurance and moderation, we also need to safeguard against impulsiveness. How many times have you blurted something out and immediately wished that you could shove the words back down your throat? Here, carefulness is key. You could habituate carefulness in weighing the relative values of keeping the secret vs. not. Weigh them for you, but also, importantly, for her, and for those who learn the truth. You might also institute a waiting period before you talk, a double-checking opportunity. If impulsiveness leads you to speak before considering whether the whole group needs this information, stopping and checking first might be a good practice for you.
And when all else fails, don’t forget the golden rule. Maybe you are tempted to share this juicy bit of gossip you got at the sleepover. But how would you feel if you had naively revealed your soul and one of them turned your vulnerability into a clout ATM?
Conclusion
In sum: judiciousness is the golden mean between being unforthcoming with what you should say and being too forthcoming with what you shouldn’t say. Judiciousness is a stable character trait we want in those we love. No one wants a spouse who can’t hold his tongue, or a child whose envy leads her to poison the friendships of others.
To measure whether some activity was at the mean of judiciousness or at one of the vicious extremes, we can investigate the intention of the speaker, the need for the audience to learn the fact, and whether, if the tables were turned and it was someone else speaking to us, we would have felt wronged in not being told.
To grow in judiciousness, we could fight the vices that hold us back: impatience, wrath, envy, excessive delight in gossip. We can also institute a waiting period for response or make a stable intention of following the golden rule.
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