Its hatred of silence

W.H. Auden in A Company of Readers: Uncollected Writings of W.H. Auden, Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling. In an essay "Apologies to the Iroquois", page 69. On contacts between industrial and agricultural societies.

I find it immensely depressing that when unmechanized societies, whether Indians or Greek peasants, come into contact with ours, the one aspect of ours which none of them, but none, can resist is that which, to me, is the most intolerable: its hatred of silence - noise-makers have replaced liquor as our most potent agent of corruption.