Certain things creep up on man without his noticing them. Old age, deafness, the loss of his human rights, and the loss of the quality of life. If the war in Viet Nam stopped tomorrow, if enough housing was built, enough schools, if poverty and discrimination were ended—a noisy technology would still deny us the right to rest, the right to sleep, the right to be let alone. "Technology," says Wilbur H. Ferry, "touches the person and the common life more intimately and often than does any government. Technology's scope places in the hands of its administrators gigantic capabilities for arbitrary power."
Suddenly we see that, impersonal and blind, noise hits the sick and the well, the old and the young, the student and the vacationer, the hospital patient and the doctor, the factory worker and the farmer, the judge and the prisoner. Indeed, we are all prisoners of noise. A political dictator could not have more impact on how one lives than the operators of jets and jackhammers. Democracy gives man the right to vote, but not the right to sleep; the right to dissent, but not the right to minimize the noises of social utility; the right to go to school, but not the right to be able to hear the teacher. Under the guise of waging a necessary, therefore holy, war for progress, technology strips man of his dignity, his right to meditate and work creatively, his means of maintaining the well-being of his soul.
Morale is an intangible asset. What happens to the human spirit? When New York's new Metropolitan Transportation Authority announced plans for a Second Avenue Subway, the most typical attitude was that expressed by a middle-aged veteran of city life. Throwing up his hands in despair, he cried out, "I accept it. I live in New York, and I accept what happens."
But some New Yorkers have fought. They have picketed, petitioned, testified at hearings, tried the courts. All to no avail. The public is ignored into submission. The individual "may roar and yelp a bit," says Ferry, "and declare there ought to be a law. Then he subsides to a mutter and ultimately silence, which is precisely what the noisemakers count on."
Jean-Paul Sartre, in his play No Exit, described Hell as never to be let alone. The growing noise intrusion is creating this type of hell right here on earth. Man has lost the right to be let alone. He must respond to the distractions of noises that are not even meant for his ears. Unable to shut them out, he is constantly at the mercy of the acoustic stimuli generated by others.
To Norman Cousins, "Silence is not nothingness or the absence of sound. It is a prime condition for human serenity and the natural environment of contemplation. A life without regular periods of silence is a life without essential nourishment for both the spirit and the functioning intelligence. Silence offers the vital element of privacy, without which an individual becomes something less than himself...We live at a time when thought alone represents the difference between sanity and total madness. One of the prime requirements of such thought is privacy and a little silence, at least now and then."
Cousins was addressing himself to the readers of an intellectual magazine in 1962. Five years later, in 1967, Life Magazine, addressing itself to a much broader readership, showed the same concern for the destruction of solitude by noise. "The escalating noise problem," it editorialized, "may require the widespread rediscovery of the personal value of silence. Most religions throughout human history have insisted that man needs regular intervals of silence for spiritual health."
It erodes one's belief in human decency to observe what society does even to the sick.
The telephone rang one sunny day in the CQC office. It was a member of our Board of Directors, the late Dr. William Vogt. His wife, I knew, was a cancer patient at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, one of the leading hospitals in the United States.
"My wife has been in a coma for two weeks; she is dying. There is a construction project outside her hospital room. The noise is dreadful. Ask someone to do something. Call the City!"
Call the City—! He had forgotten that construction noise is the legal price of progress and that city noise must be endured in payment for the amenities of a civilized society.