Silence. Total silence.
Even a pin dropping does not do justice to the absence of sound.
Where am I, you ask? I’m not at church or a funeral. It’s not 11am on Remembrance Day. I’m on a train in metropolitan Sydney, Australia. Apart from the occasional interruption from the PA system and the whimsical clickety-clack of the wheels, it is breathtakingly silent. Sydney’s most iconic landmarks roll past—the Sydney Opera House, Sydney Harbour, Luna Park—and yet, unlike tourism advertisements that spruik Australia to the world, this montage has no sound. It’s a film reel without an audio track—a silent movie.
Why? It turns out every single person in the train carriage has earphones in (including me, to be fair). Every single person is in a microcosm of their own, powered by Bluetooth and a smart device. Every passenger has inexplicably found themselves in the horror movie, A Quiet Place, but instead of living in fear of killer extra-terrestrials, they are just on their way home after a day’s work.
This is surely one of the more subtle phenomena that has crept into Western society. The world is now one big conversation: our cities have become more populous, our cityscapes have become punctuated with new developments or redevelopments, and our interactions with one another closer than ever before by virtue of the intersection of family, work, study and leisure. Yet if you look around you (especially if you are reading this on public transport), I suspect you will see most people switched off to the world’s conversation and switched on to their headphones. As a society, when it comes to listening, we are further apart than ever before, and we don’t even have COVID-19 to blame.
It’s not just my qualitative analysis that attests to this phenomenon; the raw quantitative data is compelling. According to Statista, it is predicted that just under one in two Australians will purchase a brand-new set of headphones this year.1 Looking ahead to 2029, that number is only going to go up.
The evidence is clear: we are spending more time and money to listen to those around us less.
I want us to engage in a brief navel-gazing exercise by looking into our ears and, hopefully, a bit further into our hearts, souls and minds.
The still small voice in our ears
As a society that craves social interaction, why have we moved towards shutting out the outside world and controlling the conversation that goes on inside our ear canals? Let me propose three reasons.
1. Time
Firstly, we have become incredibly time-poor as a society. This is one of those obvious statements that doesn’t need unpacking. But it’s worth, at least, restating it in the context of our listening habits.
Our weeks are still constrained by the fact that they’re made up of seven 24-hour days. The amount of time we have at our disposal is limited. At the same time, the amount of information that our ears can consume is limitless—music, radio, podcasts, audiobooks, to name a few.
Therefore, any “dead time” in our lives—driving to work, walking to the shops, sitting on the bus, going on a run or to the gym—needs to be used constructively. These are all times when we highly functioning mammals can multitask. We are constantly wheeling and dealing in the commodity of time, and our ears have become the trading platform where we can buy and sell with ease.
2. Convenience
Secondly, like time, we crave more convenience in our lives. The customer is always right: we expect and demand service. We expect technology to meet our needs and demands. Thus, convenience becomes our north star in making decisions as consumers. We don’t want to be tangled up in wires, so we demand wireless. We don’t want to hear background noise, so we demand noise cancellation. We don’t want to be encumbered with heavy burdens, so we demand in-ear earphones.
Conveniently, we have tuned out the world. We are no longer willing to be inconvenienced. We are no longer willing to hear noises, sounds or conversations that we do not want to hear. Slowly but surely, we as a society are being inoculated against endurance, patience and forbearance. We are being inculcated towards the state of having ears and yet not hearing (Ps 115:6).
3. Isolation
Thirdly (and this is the deep dark secret that we don’t want to admit, but we know is true), we love it. We want to live in our own bubbles, lost in our own thoughts and ideas, or those of someone else. We crave the protection that being cut off from others brings. We revel in the independence, the self-determination and the freedom of being the captain of our own aural destiny. Yes, at times, we crave social interaction, friendship, conversation. But at other times—especially the times that suit us—we have either white or matte black “Do not disturb” signs in each ear.
Perhaps there is a more insidious notion underlying our isolationism: we have forgotten how to interact and relate with one another. We have been culturally programmed to look within first, before looking outwards. We have been trained by those around us that it is socially normative to be aloof. We want to be an island—like Tristan da Cunha, the most remote island on earth, located approximately 2,787 kilometres from Cape Town, South Africa. A good set of noise-cancelling earphones means that we can island-hop our way to Tristan da Cunha without passport or visa.
He who has ears, let him hear
So what do we do in response? Should we throw our beloved audio wear into the trash? Should we only listen to monastic dirges penned by 12th century Benedictine monks?
At this point, I could steer us towards Christian legalism—moralism at its finest, with diktats as to how, how often and when we should put on our earphones, and maybe also a few recommendations on what content we should be listening to.
But perhaps the best thing to remind ourselves of is one of the diagnoses of spiritual malaise that Jesus encountered in his earthly ministry: deafness. “Wait: deafness?” I hear you say. “Are you saying that listening to my podcast will make me deaf?” Physically deaf: possibly. Spiritually deaf: maybe. Hear Isaiah’s enigmatic and evocative prosecution of Israel for its spiritual deafness in Isaiah 42:18-20:
Hear, you deaf,
and look, you blind, that you may see!
Who is blind but my servant,
or deaf as my messenger whom I send?
Who is blind as my dedicated one,
or blind as the servant of the Lord?
He sees many things, but does not observe them;
his ears are open, but he does not hear.
Note that Israel’s deafness is not apparent: their ears are open and yet they do not hear. Primarily, they do not hear the imposition of God’s word upon their lives. However, secondarily, they do not hear those around them—the cries of the fatherless, the widowed and the afflicted. Israel’s failure to hear betrayed a deeper, more insidious truth: they only wanted to hear what they chose to hear.
Our listening is ultimately a choice: what have we decided to hear? But so many virtues espoused by Jesus demand that we actively choose to open our eyes and ears to the world around us. It is difficult to “Let brotherly love continue” (Heb 13:1) when we can’t hear what our brother is saying to us. It is nigh on impossible to “show hospitality to strangers” (Heb 13:2) when we choose to be an island. Our gravitation towards time management, convenience and isolation seems far removed from the virtues eschewed by Jesus: patience, self-control, charity, benevolence, brotherly love.
You might well argue that it’s a bit disingenuous to equate putting in earphones to spiritual deafness. But at least for a moment, it’s worth thinking about the extent to which we have stopped listening—the extent to which we have shut off—the extent to which we fail to notice brothers demanding brotherly love and strangers crying out for hospitality.
Imagine if our Lord and Saviour, instead of being “gentle and lowly in heart” (Matt 11:29) and someone who did not break the bruised reed or quench the smouldering wick (Matt 12:20), had decided to stop his ears to the cries of the afflicted, the poor, the destitute and the blind. Imagine if he had instead put his fingers in his ears.
So perhaps the question for us is this: have we put our fingers in our ears by putting on our earphones?
Paul Rajkumar has completed his third year at Moore College.
Scripture quotations are from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Endnotes
1 “Headphones—Australia”, Statista, June 2024, https://www.statista.com/outlook/cmo/consumer-electronics/tv-radio-multimedia/headphones/australia.
