Delphic Maxim 88: Tell when you know
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.
88. Tell when you know
Fun fact (well, fact): all the way back at maxim number 50, we were told to “act when we know”. Back then, I made the argument that too often we rush into action, but we don’t take the time to think. So how does that kind of argument track with today’s maxim, which is different only in that it marks out ‘telling’ as different to ‘acting’?
A few years ago when I was still working at the University of Newcastle, the student organisation set up a debate between me, a few academics, and Father Rod Bower. Rod Bower is a well-known political figure in Australia — his church signs out the front of the Anglican church in Gosford have become a social media phenomenon, and he just led a climate action network party in a movement to get into the Senate. He’s a fierce advocate for human rights and dignity, social justice and the environment. I have a lot of respect and admiration for Rod Bower, in part because he is a strong clerical voice in deeply ‘de-politicised’ Australia.
Anyway, the subject of this debate was “actions speak louder than words”, and I think it’s a pretty decent parallel for the tension between these two maxims. Fr Rod argued on the affirmative, that actions speak louder than words, and he drew on his long history of social justice work to make a very compelling, beautiful argument for acting in the world. I was on the side of the negative, essentially arguing that words speak louder than actions. Actually, that doesn’t strictly capture my argument: I was suggesting that words speak, and they speak for actions too.
It’s fine for us to act — especially if we’ve given thought to how we intend to act (so that we do, in fact, act when we know). But our actions are given context and justification through the process of telling. what made Rod Bower famous wasn’t necessarily his acts, though that’s a big part of it. His acts themselves were acts of speech (free speech, you might even say!). He put up signs saying things like “Dear Christians, some ppl r gay, get over it, love God”, and “Bless the burqa”. He creates provocations that push people towards moral reflection. He tells because he knows.
Knowing isn’t just about the learning of facts and information — that can be useful to tell and teach, but only in a given context (which is why it’s also important to know when to say it). There’s also a kind of moral knowing that we need to tell, and it’s an uncomfortable thing to speak about sometimes. I’m talking about issues around climate change, ecological crisis, human rights, and poverty. How we tell these stories is hugely important, and that is a discussion for another time.
But telling when we know is vital — we can’t let the world roll on in silence. Over the past century, Australia has started to shift its understanding of our shared history, recognising and telling a different story of colonisation and invasion. That telling fundamentally helps us to understand who we are, where we have come from, and where we might go from here. That wouldn’t be possible if people didn’t tell what they knew, in all of its variety and intensity.
Acting when we know is important because we must slow down and think about what we do next. Telling when we know adds a new dimension to that: it gives us the capability to think at all.
