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To say that noise is a relatively weak issue because it is less momentous than world hunger or global climate change is to make an incomplete statement. Noise is a weak issue also because most of those it affects are perceived, and very often dismissed, as weak. The ones who dismiss them, in addition to being powerful, are often the ones making the noise.

In using the word weak I am not referring to personal capabilities, to someone’s IQ score or muscle mass, though these factors may come into play. I am thinking rather of a person’s social standing and political power. Make a list of the people most likely to be affected by loud noises (though not all noise is loud), either because of their greater vulnerability to the effects of loud sound or because of their greater likelihood of being exposed to it, and you come up with a set of members whose only common features are their humanity and their lack of clout. Your list will include children (some of whom, according to the World Health Organization, “receive more noise at school than workers from an 8-hour work day at a factory”), the elderly (whose ability to discriminate spoken speech from background noise is generally less than that of younger contemporaries), the physically ill (cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy, for example, are often more sensitive to noise), racial minorities (blacks in the United States are twice as likely, and Hispanics 1.5 times as likely, as whites to live in homes with noise problems), neurological minorities (certain types of sound are especially oppressive to people with autism), the poor (more likely than their affluent fellow citizens to live next to train tracks, highways, airports), laborers (whose political weakness has recently been manifested in weakened occupational safety standards), prisoners (noise, like rape, being one of the unofficial punishments of incarceration), members of the Armed Forces (roughly one in four soldiers returning from Iraq has a service-related hearing loss)—or simply a human being of any description who happens to have less sound-emitting equipment than the person living next to her (who might for his part have car speakers literally able to kill fish) and no feasible way to move.

Garret Keizer, The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want: A Book About Noise (2010)

No matter how obscure the subfield of science, there is bound to be some crazed egghead out there who finds it fascinating. When it comes to the biology of our individuality, issues are raised that should be fascinating to each of us for the simple reason that we are all asked to function as behavioral biologists on some occasion. Most importantly, those occasions matter: We serve on juries and decide the culpability of someone regarding something awful that they have done. We are asked to vote on referendums about expenditures of public funds to try to fix some social ill, and we have to decide if we think it can be fixed. We see someone stymied in their learning, claiming to be at their limits, and we must decide whether pushing them harder represents inspiration or cruelty. And perhaps we will have to watch a loved one decline with some terrible disease, watch their personality be transformed, and have to learn that this is due to the illness and not to them.

Insofar as we are forced to be practicing behavioral biologists, we might as well be competent at it.

Robert Sapolsky, The Trouble with Testosterone: And Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament (1997)

“So, it has descended to this,” the enraged contestants might say, glaring in hatred at one another—but even that was only an attempt to continue to hide from the most humiliating fact of all: that it really was this, all along.

Philip Roth, My Life as a Man (1974)

Wittgenstein sagely remarked: ‘If a person tells me he’s been to the worst of places, I have no right to judge him. But if he tells me it was his superior intelligence that enabled him to go there, I know he is a fraud.’

Will Self, “On Writing Memoir,” Why Read: Selected Writings 2001 – 2021 (2022)