"Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream"
About this Quote
There is a bleak comedy in imagining humanity’s great broadcast to the cosmos as a single, unbroken shriek. Murdoch takes a familiar sci-fi fantasy - benevolent aliens tuning in to our “signals” - and turns it into moral indictment. The line is speculative, but the target is painfully terrestrial: if our communications add up to anything coherent, she suggests, it’s distress.
The phrasing does a lot of work. “Perhaps” keeps the claim from hardening into prophecy; it’s a thought experiment offered with a philosopher-novelist’s caution. “Some wavelength of ours” makes human culture sound like electromagnetic leakage, not intentional dialogue. We aren’t sending a message; we’re radiating ourselves. That “continuous” is the knife. A scream is usually an event, a spike of panic. Continuous means normalized crisis, a baseline noise of fear, violence, humiliation, need. It’s also a comment on modern media: the acceleration of news, advertising, politics, entertainment into an always-on feed where outrage and alarm travel fastest because they’re hardest to ignore.
Murdoch’s broader work is preoccupied with moral attention - the discipline of looking at others clearly, without fantasy. Here she flips the lens outward. An alien listener becomes the ideal impartial observer, the one audience not caught in our self-justifications. The subtext is that what we call civilization may be legible, from far enough away, as suffering we’ve learned to live with. The “scream” isn’t only pain; it’s complicity, too.
The phrasing does a lot of work. “Perhaps” keeps the claim from hardening into prophecy; it’s a thought experiment offered with a philosopher-novelist’s caution. “Some wavelength of ours” makes human culture sound like electromagnetic leakage, not intentional dialogue. We aren’t sending a message; we’re radiating ourselves. That “continuous” is the knife. A scream is usually an event, a spike of panic. Continuous means normalized crisis, a baseline noise of fear, violence, humiliation, need. It’s also a comment on modern media: the acceleration of news, advertising, politics, entertainment into an always-on feed where outrage and alarm travel fastest because they’re hardest to ignore.
Murdoch’s broader work is preoccupied with moral attention - the discipline of looking at others clearly, without fantasy. Here she flips the lens outward. An alien listener becomes the ideal impartial observer, the one audience not caught in our self-justifications. The subtext is that what we call civilization may be legible, from far enough away, as suffering we’ve learned to live with. The “scream” isn’t only pain; it’s complicity, too.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
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