Essay
Culture
Music
5 min read

Strangers and the sound of belonging

Utterly captivated by a clip of a Jacob Collier concert, and then immediately intrigued by said captivation, Belle Tindall wonders why thousands of strangers singing together has been eliciting such a powerful reaction.

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A muscian plays a keyboard on a concert stage surrounded by instruments, while multiple images of his face are projected behind him.
Jacob Collier in concert.
Jon Tilkin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

I had an empty couple of minutes to play with; so, mostly due to muscle memory, I found myself opening my Instagram app. Habitually, I do this multiple times a day, and mostly to no profound avail. But this one day, something caught my eye and sent me down a spiral of curiosity (and judging by how astronomically viral it went, it seems I was not spiralling alone).  

It was footage of Jacob Collier performing in Rome. Jacob is a singer, songwriter, jazz instrumentalist and general music prodigy. But that’s not the most captivating thing about him. The Collier phenomena has erupted because of the way he turns his audience of strangers into a perfectly tuned, beautifully united, choir. And this particular night in Rome, he managed to steer this audience to sing beyond the major scale and onto the far more complex chromatic scale, something he has been working towards for years.  

The most striking thing about this minute-long clip is not the beautifully raw sound (although, it really is something to behold), but what this sound is communicating - a tangible sense of belonging.

Watch Jacob Collier in Rome

Our need to belong

We each know how it feels to belong, and we are also acutely aware of the inverse, how it feels when a sense of belonging is lacking, and feelings of isolation creep in and make themselves at home in its absence. But for the sake of clarity, perhaps a working definition would be helpful at this point, and for that, I turn to the Psychology Dictionary. The PD defines ‘belonging’ as ‘a feeling of being taken in and accepted as part of a group, thus, fostering a sense of belonging. It also relates to being approved of and accepted by society in general. Also called belongingness.’  

The notion of ‘belonging,’ or ‘belongingness,’ has been well studied. And still, its intrinsic power is staggering to consider.  

According to research published by the Australian Journal of Psychology, belonging is a universal and fundamental human need, one that ‘may just be as important as food, shelter, and physical safety’. So intrinsic is it, that the lack of belonging, resulting in acute loneliness, is attributed to a 26% increase in the risk of premature mortality. This has led the World Health Organisation to officially recognise isolation as a determinant of health, placing it in the same category as smoking, physical inactivity, and excessive alcohol consumption. 

Further research suggests that our brains perceive, and subsequently react to, social pain in the same way they are designed to react to physical pain. Releasing opioids and other instinctive painkillers when encountering a lack of belonging, our brains are detecting literal pain within us. As humans, we are susceptible to suffering social injuries, and it seems that the subconscious parts of our brains take those injuries much more seriously than their conscious counterparts.  

The necessity of belonging is woven into our make-up.

Subsequently, when we speak of a person’s need to belong, we’re speaking of a need that has significant mental, emotional, spiritual, behavioural, and physical repercussions; a need that is intersectional, if you will. It is a central construct at the core of our humanity and a defining variable in how we perceive reality.  

It could be suggested, considering all of this, that human beings were simply made to belong. The necessity of belonging is woven into our make-up. 

Surrounded by people versus belonging with people  

Over the final scene of the 2009 film World’s Greatest Dad, Robin Williams’ voice delivers a line that is so profound it lingers in your mind long after the end-credits have finished rolling. He says ‘I used to think the worst thing in life would be to end up all alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel alone.’   

There’s a staggering wisdom in that.  

Namely, that belonging is not the inevitable outcome of simply getting people into one room. That’s the difference between the Collier concert - where the audience are truly belonging to each other, if only for an evening - and the coffee shop where I’m sitting right now, filled with people using laptops and headphones as a form of defence against the threat of small talk. Each of us belonging only to ourselves.  

If it were the case that proximity equated to belonging, urbanization and the subsequent squeezing of populations into close quarters would have surely deterred the epidemic of loneliness that the West currently finds itself in. And yet, it is not uncommon for ‘neighbour’ and ‘stranger’ to be identities that co-exist. And what about the role of social media? Access to one another has never been so readily available. The world has never been so small, and its population so ‘close.’ And yet, what social media so often provides is the affirmation and amplification of feelings of isolation.  

No. Proximity alone is not the answer.  

Will Van Der Hart writes that ‘People don’t just want to be with other people they want to belong with them’. 

The tuning fork

Christianity has a lot to say on the subject of belonging/belongingness.  

The anonymous author of the creation literature (the chapters which act as the start-line for the Biblical narrative) notes how the only thing that was unsatisfactory about our freshly created world was the initial isolation of humanity. Such solitude was at odds with the blueprint for human flourishing and defied our design as intrinsically relational beings. The Christian faith therefore offers an explanation to humanity’s fundamental need to belong, It presents a spiritual why behind the afore-mentioned neurological findings.  

The biblical narratives, the psychological research – they are united (if you pardon the pun) in their assessment of the human condition. Namely, that belonging is simply a non-negotiable, it’s buried inside our biology. 

So, perhaps it’s no wonder Jacob Collier has caught the world’s attention, he’s providing a simple soundtrack to one of our most engrained needs. It seems that what has long been communicated through ancient spiritual texts and more recently affirmed through endless psychological theories, can also be communicated with a simple harmonious sound.   

To watch that clip is to watch thousands of strangers belong: belong to the room, belong to the moment, belong to the sound. 

In 1948, author and theologian, A.W Tozer pondered the nature of unity and human connection. He asked, ‘has it ever occurred to you that one hundred pianos all tuned to the same fork are automatically tuned to each other?’ 

If ever we were looking for an answer to this profound question, we need look no further than Jacob Collier’s audience and their sound of belonging.   

Article
AI
Culture
Digital
Education
6 min read

Could thinking and feeling become futile pastimes in the future?

AI, and more, is eroding our agency, we need to act now

Jamie is Vicar of St Michael's Chester Square, London.

A seated teenager stretches back bored, a phone is on the table in front of them
Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

Jane Austen is an author universally acknowledged. So much so that she was acknowledged on the £10 note in 2017. The quote the note bore is not the immortal opening sentence from Pride & Prejudice, but something less obvious:  

'I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading.' 

So concise, so inspiring. However, the quote belongs to her character Caroline Bingley. She isn't reading for pleasure, she's just trying to impress the dashing Mr Darcy. Jane Austen, well before 2017, has always been on the money. Her parable of disparity shows that despite the odds, Lizzie Bennett has agency as she comes face-to-face with Darcy to thrash out their differences. 

Such human agency is now being lost in many ways, as the art of empathy, reality itself, and even thinking are under attack. 

 Firstly, there's what Simon Burton-Jones startlingly outlined Seen & Unseen recently. Our empathy for our fellow creatures, which is taking a nosedive, has a direct correlation to our lack of seeing each other face-to-face.  

Secondly, he noted that reality, or reality as we've known it up until now, might only be really experienced by the wealthy. The fullness of life that is available to each of us is diluted and diminished because we don't suck the marrow out of life, we simply observe it from afar through digital lenses. 

The next, equally startling way agency is being lost is detailed in Mary Harrington's guest essay in the New York Times about how 'thinking is becoming a luxury good'. Only the Caroline Bingleys, and not the Bennetts of today would be reading and expanding their minds for pleasure: 

'In a culture saturated with more accessible and engrossing forms of entertainment, long-form literacy may soon become the domain of elite subcultures… as new generations reach adulthood having never lived in a world without smartphones, we can expect the culture to stratify ever more starkly.'

In other words, there's an ever-widening gap. As our digital and real worlds blend, we need to narrow the gap not just between women and men of different classes, but also where our agency truly resides: our appreciation for our own thinking and feeling. 

This is a tall order, given our devaluing of thinking. We shortcut our brains with AI and cut short the careers of those who've been taught to compute and analyse. The edifice on which many have constructed their careers is crumbling. So, there's the equal danger that thinking becomes both elitist and also perceived as futile. 

It might not be a silver bullet, but education can still lead the way. Parents can't delegate responsibility to schools and must surely be part of the solution. And neither is confining thinking and feeling to those who appreciate Shakespeare. As veteran educationalist Sir Ken Robinson noted, there is an inherent creativity, not necessarily academic, in children that is often flattened beyond all recognition by the education system itself. Any parent of small children will know, as I do, that there is an intriguing inquisitiveness and playfulness in our early years. As a father, I want that to come alive in my children. 

Education can close the gap between pleasure and thinking. The teachers I remember well took the kindling of dry subjects and ignited them. Philip Womack recently said, in The Spectator, that children's literature is increasingly becoming 'easily translated, and easily disseminated, but will it sing in a child's mind, or set it alight?'. 'With a massive decline in children reading for pleasure, this trend will become worse, as publishers attempt to lure children away from screens with increasingly desperate pandering.'  

So let's remove the competition: we must implement Jonathan Haidt's pleadings around banning smartphones for the young. They steal away resilience. 

The division between head and heart is the sort of false dichotomy that works well on an Instagram reel but fails to account that thinking and feeling are not in opposition.

But in a reactive world, what else can we adopt to ensure each child grows up with agency over their thoughts and feelings? Where might deeper resources come from that we can build upon? The Christian tradition offers us a solid foundation. This might not seem instinctive, as Christians can take a dualistic approach to thinking and feeling. I've often heard talk about 'head knowledge' and 'heart knowledge', among some of the Christians I hear. The former is dry and irrelevant at best, and something more sinister at worst. Blaise Pascal wouldn't have recognised this. Sadly, sometimes the more exuberant expressions of Christianity have championed anti-intellectualism. The division between head and heart is the sort of false dichotomy that works well on an Instagram reel but fails to account that thinking and feeling are not in opposition. Advertisers have long understood this.  

Looking back historically, there was an understanding that one's heart comprised both the emotions and thinking. Tennyson encouraged us to 'keep your head about you', and someone losing their temper might phrase it as 'I'm losing my mind.' If our heads are online, it's not just our heads that are on the line. 

Further back, St Paul writes about the Gentiles' 'futile' thinking. There's that F word again. He writes that: 

'They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, and they are full of greed.' 

To be desensitised to an incarnate life is to numb our thinking and feeling. And the numbing that Paul writes of here is to be separated from the life of God. Paul wants his fellow believers to have 'the eyes of their hearts' enlightened. And the enlightening here is the revelation of who God is. 

This was the gift of the printing press at the time of the Reformation - that power resides not in the pulpit, but in the people's hands. We are now at danger of delegating our thinking and feeling not to a priest but to AI. The Bible is not a straightforward life manual that will tell you which school to send your children to or which car to buy. You have to think deeply, to connect the dots of the grand narrative, to engage your head and your heart. This takes us not only deeper into ourselves, but out of ourselves to one another. Paul's letter to the Ephesians emphasised the closing of the gap between types of people made possible by the cross. For this same Bible warns against being too wise in our own eyes. Ultimately, God’s thoughts are higher than ours. In him we ultimately find the place to process and develop our thoughts and feelings. 

As we convulse through another great revolution, we need to take courage that we each have agency to feel and think, if only we give them enough airtime in our crammed headspace. It's enough to make us think. And to rethink. But we can fling open the gate to an enchanting and enriching hinterland we can never fully traverse. 

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