The more we listen, the less we really hear

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

My favorite Bible story when I was growing up was the Tower of Babel. The tale intrigued me. Here were all these people working together, co-operating, pooling their talents and energy to build a stairway to Heaven, which I thought, was a brilliant idea.

I still remember what the page looked like in the book we used: people of all different shapes and sizes and colors were stirring mortar, gathering bricks and smiling.

But the next page showed a dramatically different scene. The same people, no longer smiling, were running around clearly in distress. Some looked angry. Some looked sad. Most just looked confused. Nobody was working on the Tower anymore. They were too busy trying to understand one another.

God didn't want people climbing up to Heaven, Sister said, so he slowed them down a bit by creating languages.

I thought it was a terrible thing for God to do. He didn't just slow them down. He stopped them dead in their tracks. He turned happy, productive people into unhappy, quarrelsome ones.

Of course, this was just a myth, not much different from a fairy tale. But I believed it was truth. My entire childhood, I thought that if God had left people alone, if everyone had always spoken the same language, people all over the earth would be one, big, happy family.

It was an assuaging thought. It offered a single, simple solution. Communication was the one imperative for understanding. If people could communicate, there would be something close to heaven here on earth.

Now I sit at the end of the 20th Century, surrounded by machines that facilitate communication: radios, TVs, telephones in homes, cars, even in pocketbooks. Everyone is talking, everywhere, these days. We talk via computers, fax machines, tape recorders, voice mail. We live in a time when we have instant access to people all over the world - and yet, incredibly, we still don't understand ourselves, never mind one another.

All the words, I think, get in the way. There are too many of them. We're talked at day and night, barraged with so many facts and figures and feelings, that we don't have time to process them. The most we can do is spit them back.

Words are everywhere, but they don't add to our lives. They spill from the radio first thing in the morning - not just music - but news mingled with chatter. There's nothing enlightening or edifying in these words. The point isn't to enlighten. It's simply to keep talking.

And that's the problem. This glut reminds me of the Roman banquets where everyone had to keep eating, gorging themselves, because this was a banquet and there were rooms full of food, and it was there to be consumed. The people ate without tasting, without differentiating between what was good and what wasn't. All food was good.

Now it's all talk that's good, no matter who's speaking and no matter what's being said. If it's broadcast on anything, even over a public address system at the grocery store, it has to be important.

The result is that people are becoming less communicative, and more isolated, our individual human words inaudible in this sea of mechanical sound. One-on-one communication is almost archaic because everyone is always straining to hear the chatter from the TV in the next room, or the program on the radio.

Even children are like this. "Ssshh," they'll say when they're watching "Barney" or when their favorite song comes on.

I read last week a little bit of positive news: Americans actually shut off their TVs and watched fewer talk shows in May than they did in April. Experts attributed this to the warm weather.

And yet, as I watch people ride their bikes and take long walks, I notice so many wearing headsets. These people don't look happy out in the world. They look angry, harried, confused just like the people in the book I read as a child. If they shut off the babel, they would hear birdsong and barking dogs, leaves rustling and children playing.

And in the absence of words, they might find heaven after all.