Every day I say a bright “hello” to at least one perfect stranger as I walk our city’s streets. Most people don’t hear me, however, because their ears are stopped up with little white pieces of plastic. Never before, I suppose, have so many peoples stopped listening to the outside world: a friend’s greeting, a bird singing, the wind in the trees, a dog barking, the waves on the seashore. But it’s worse than deafness, because everyone is hearing … something—a podcast, a piece of rap music, a Google ad, a political message. Never before has commercial media had the ear of just about everyone on the planet. Never before has it been so easy for so few to captivate so many. We don’t hear the sounds of nature as we run through the park; we hear what someone else wants us to hear, and we do what we are told rather than listen and think for ourselves.
It is said that Mark Zuckerberg, that young genius who so widely portrays our brief cultural moment, had a texting exchange with a fellow Harvard student in 2004: Zuck: “Yeah, so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard, just ask. I have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS….” Zuck’s Friend: “What!? how’d you manage that one”? Zuck: “People just submitted it. I don’t know why they ‘trust me.’ Dumb f*cks.”
Mark was only 19 at the time, and most of us have said far worse in the folly of our youth. I mention Mark’s youthful indiscretion to point out something he grasped at the dawn of social media: that most of us don’t want to think for ourselves. We really are “dumb;” that is, largely incapable of intelligent speech, because we do not listen well. We unthinkingly stop our ears to the sounds of Nature, and to Nature’s God, preferring to listen dumbly to every manipulative sound that either tickles our emotions or covers over our fear of the outside world.
One of our older parishioners came to me in tears the other day. An exemplary Catholic for 80 years, she told me she is losing her faith in God. She is frightened and depressed: her children have all left the faith, wildfires are destroying Los Angeles, a fascist antichrist has been elected president, we are destroying the planet, the economy is tanking, and a terrible unnamed virus is set to unleash at any moment. “Are you spending time with the people you love and keeping your mind engaged in the world?” I asked her. “Yes, of course!” she said with an anguished expression. “I’m on Facebook with friends many hours a day. I watch CNN all the time. I read the San Francisco Chronicle religiously….”
When will we “dumb f*cks” unplug our ears and again listen to the birds and the wind? We are so easily controlled. When will we believe more in what we see with our eyes and hear with our ears rather than what we are told to think and believe through our earbuds?