What the Supreme Court judgment said, in effect, was that his silence, lengthy as it was, did not constitute a solid statement invoking the suspect's right to remain silent under the Miranda decision.

This is is very revealing. Because silence, both in itself and (by extension) as a total absence of sound--a void--has been viewed with distrust by Western civilization since its earliest days.

The Ancient Greeks lived and worshipped noisily. Their one silent rite, the Anthesteria, was meant as punishment for Orestes' ur-sin of matricide.

They distrusted, in fact, the whole idea of nothing. The notion "nothing exists" offended the Greeks' limpid Aegean logic. If nothing truly is nothing, how can it possibly be present, even in words? Only in the trick Ulysses played on the Cyclops ("My name is no-man") and in the cosmology of the Stoics did some tolerance for nothingness emerge.

In mainstream Greek philosophy, the theory of luminiferous aether, which filled the disturbing, silent void of space with an unknown and unprovable substance, took care of the seeming contradiction. The aether theory, invented by Empedocles and Aristotle in the fourth and third centuries BC, subsisted until disproved by Michelson and Morley in the last years of the nineteenth century.

Today, in the U.S., we preserve that ancient Greek prejudice against silence. Numerous studies have shown that Americans view people who stay (relatively) silent as being more suspicious, underhanded, and untrustworthy than those who talk freely.

This kind of attitude has colored Anglo attitudes toward many Native American cultures, which tend to avoid speaking compulsively and use frequent pauses and silences in conversation. Even today, in reservation schools, Anglo teachers have trouble dealing with Dineh (Navajo) students, whom they too often view as sullen and unresponsive.

In Asia, on the other hand, and particularly in India, the retreat into silent meditation was woven into the earliest rites. Evidence exists that silent meditation was practiced as far back as 3,000 BC. The guru Patanjali in the first century BC called for withdrawal from all senses including hearing. The goal of meditation in some cases was to reduce one's own sense of self to nothingness.

It's no coincidence that the East Indians had multiple names for void, and for silence. Nor is it a coincidence that the concept of zero was an Indian concept; just as the word "zero" was a Sanskrit noun, "sunya," that evolved through Arabic and Venetian into the word we know. Until this Eastern idea of zero was imported into Europe in the late Middle Ages, Europeans had little conceptual framework for total absence.

Such civilization-wide prejudice can have solid effects even in modern times. In Japan, which has a long tradition of employing and respecting silence in communication, when a woman remains silent after being asked for her hand, she is emphatically saying "no." American suitors have found themselves reviled by the Japanese after disregarding that silence and insisting on a substantive answer.

Yesterday's Supreme Court decision reaffirms this Western refusal to accept silence as a concrete, communicative statement. And we should look carefully at our cultural prejudice against silence when judging that verdict. For even in this society, silence is often the first recourse of people who are frightened and confused, whether they are guilty or no.

It is of course self-evident that policemen must interrogate suspects. It's also true that, when interrogating someone, cops often don't have time to make snap judgments as to a suspect's true motivation for staying silent.

But it is also true that when a suspect under interrogation has refused to utter a word for two or three hours, an assumption can and should be made that the suspect has in fact communicated that s/he wishes to remain silent, and therefore should not be harassed into speech.

Given that s/he has a right to remain silent, under the U.S. constitution, the Supreme Court might more usefully have spent its energy on defining how much time must pass before silence, even in a Western society, finally carries the full weight of statement.