The road to knowledge is tortuous; this is nothing new. However, contrary to common belief, the main difficulty of the constant curves is not in the fact that they lengthen the distance to goal, but in the lack of perspective they cause.

In view of the controversy generated in our days by the reform of the abortion law, I remember that one of my best teachers at high school used to insist that we should not confuse the churros with the merinas. At that time, using analogy (which is the most primitive form of learning), I imagined a dozen churros in front of Velázquez's Las Meninas: "making a churro" of drawing could not be compared to painting a work of art. I lacked perspective. In today's industrialized world, the more vulgar version (more like those churros) of the saying is becoming more and more popular: one that talks about not confusing speed with bacon. Despite the prosaic nature of the expression, the content remains intact and translates a basic scientific principle: all comparisons require a common basis; they cannot be mixed.

In an interesting article by Jordi Soler, the writer lamented that in the hyperactive society of our time, reflective silence has been lost. But, as in the case of sheep, there are several types of silence. All of them - in Neruda's poem, in an Antonioni film or in a busy elevator - are significant. In that taciturn range, silence is as much the absence of sound as the omission of words, that which is silent because it cannot or will not be said.

A few days ago, in the session of control of the Government, the Socialist spokeswoman Elena Valenciano reproached the Minister of Justice for putting the rights of "the unborn" before those of women. Gallardón argued, in response and counterattack, that if she was now defending her own rights against those of "a conceived or unborn person", nothing would prevent her from doing so in another legislation against "a person actually born". It is striking that in both cases they refer to the embryo, or the fetus, through a grade, omitting the noun that qualifies, that subject or individual "unborn", "conceived". Meanwhile, they insist on appealing to consensus.

The dispute is reminiscent of another, narrated by the Archpriest of Hita, between Greeks and Romans. In that case, the lack of a common language provoked an absurd discussion through manual signs, whose disparate interpretation gave rise to the humorous nature of the story. Behind the omissions of Valenciano and Gallardón there is also a difference of language, a different interpretation of the signs (of the silences) that in this case is not comic.

In the long (and tortuous) discussion that frames these silences, the perspective has long been lost. It is convenient to climb a hill -or look at Google Maps, more in line with the times- to analyze the real problem, to see it in its full dimension. What is really being discussed is not what is said, but what is kept silent: an anthropological conception, the foundations of all ethics. If, in keeping silent, we speak (filling the omission with meaning) of a human being -a "person", says the minister to refer to those born-, the solution is clear, for every human being's right to life is inalienable. The questions of discussion then become somewhat different: What is a human being, a mere collection of cells, pure subject, a happy and ephemeral evolutionary coincidence? Is the good a pure convention, a social imposition? Are aesthetic experience, artistic sensibility, philosophical reasoning a mere intracranial electrical connection? Is it essential to breathe with the lungs, to have an autonomous heart or a self-conscious mind, or one capable of complicated logical reasoning, to have human dignity?

The solution to these questions involves important ethical dilemmas and silence is more comfortable, more politically correct; but it is essential to answer them. To know if something is good, if something is beautiful, if it is good, we must first go to agreement to find out what good, beauty and goodness are. It is complicated to compare speed and bacon, because in our plural society there are very few shared assumptions on which to establish true dialogue, on which to aspire to consensus. The easy way out, then, is to keep quiet, to hide the fundamentals behind convoluted circumlocutions and forced ellipses.

What really matters is, therefore, in the silences. Everything else, as the famous playwright said, is just words, words, words.