While I personally can’t understand people who talk in shul, if only from a perspective of derech eretz and consideration for others (and you can eliminate “under” in “understand” in order to more accurately get at my true feelings about them, but I digress), to be a bit Reb Levi Yitzchak style here, I was talking about this with my friends and my friend brought up a really interesting point. We’d actually just been learning about the Puritans in APUSH, and it came up how they had so much discipline and were so silent during all their prayer meetings, etc, and why can’t Jews be that way. So my friend pointed out that in some ways, the whole lifestyle was a culture of sort of drudgery- your fate is predetermined when you’re born, there’s no objective to connect with God, it’s basically just wake up, sit through church, go back to bed. There’s no feeling of comfort with God. With Jews, however, perhaps we feel TOO comfortable with Hashem that people think it’s fine to talk while at an audience with the King (though I don’t like the metaphor because it implies that an audience with the king is a rare occurrence), but at least we don’t treat shul as something to dread because of how dull it is, sitting straight and staring at the bima or whatever. We really feel like shul is a place to LIVE, because Hashem’s not only here, he’s everywhere, to paraphrase our favorit Mitzvah Man- shul is a place to express, not suppress, and that’s really vital in achieving dveykus.
That’s not to say I condone talking during shul- it’s disrespectful on levels of both bein adam laMakom and bein adam lachaveiro. However, I know that I personally needed a good way to look at it, and this works for me to at least be like R’ Levi Yitzchok and say, in some way, “mi ke’amcha Yisrael!”