Competing Goods and Inhumanity

Speaking about humanities and inhumanities necessarily leads to a discussion of needs and a hierarchy of needs.

One way of organizing needs, at least in a political sense what I tend to call a Pentagon of Ends.

What are these five ends?

Freedom, Wealth Creation, Social Protection, State Survival, and Group Identity/Actualization.

Does the pursuit of these ends by governments and/or individuals lead to a harmonious, balanced, and comprehensive result or series of results?
Unfortunately, while all of these ends are worthy in themselves desirable in combination, the pursuit of them individually leads to a kind of competition.

Let’s examine each of these “ends” in turn, and use the United States and the most prosperous countries of the EU as testing grounds for how these ends play out.
Freedom in these countries exists in a reasonably comprehensive manner; so does the ability to create wealth through starting businesses, with protection of efforts to create and grow wealth promised by the rule of law.

Both of the above ends speak to absolute goods.

Meanwhile, social protection, the existence of unemployment insurance, health insurance, and similar measures, while sharply different in the United States from the countries of the EU in certain respects, provides recognition of issues of relative means and inequality.

State survival and group Identity/actualization are non-issues in the wealth states of the first world. No one worries about these governments collapsing or about the safety of certain ethnic or religious minorities, despite discrimination, because of the rule of law and overall stability.

But consider new countries in the shadow of the old empires that these new countries used to belong to. Georgia, a former Republic in the Soviet Union (and Stalin’s native land) has experienced an uneasy coexistence with its behemoth neighbor since its independence in the early 1990’s.

Georgia’s territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, with large Russian populations pose puzzles for Georgia and Russia alike, indicative of the problems in the Balkans that resulted in “ethnic cleansing” in the 1990’s. Should any region with a majority of a particular ethnic group secede from the government it belongs to? Should a government endangered by such a possible succession forcibly keep such a region tethered to the larger entity, often at the expense of the ethnic group that has majority status in a particular province, but minority status in the country as a whole?

In such situations, the last two ends, the survival of the state, in this case, Georgia, and the actualization of a particular ethnic group, in this case, Russians, compete. Both Georgian and Russian authorities accuse each other of aggression and “ethnic cleaning”. If Russia overspreads Georgia and takes it over, it will obviously liberate ethnic Russians inside Georgia, but at the expense of the Georgian government and ethnic Georgians. If Georgia somehow fights the Russians off and forcibly reasserts itself over territories with large Russian populations, Georgia’s government will survive, but at the expense of ethnic Russian safety.

Inhumanity has become the result of this clash and the competition for governmental and ethnic survival.

Stay tuned.

Learning and Listening

In my last post, I talked about sharpening and deepening our use of the Humanities…how? By making a negative into a positive, by using the indisputable horror and suffering of the INHUMANITIES as a plea for taking a marginalized, academic, poorly funded “niche” and making it the center of a new kind of learning.

Let’s talk more about the humanities, and let’s take a broader approach to positively defining the humanities and what they mean to speech and speechwriting.
Certainly, a core ingredient of the humanities is the notion of education, in the broadest sense of the word.

How do people learn?

Hundreds of years ago people thought that reality existed in terms of either universal objects that we knew about from pictures in the heavens or in our minds from before birth OR because we read about them in a book. As a result, thinkers were idealists, affirming the existence of objects that we know about even before we have labels for them and nominalists, thinkers who affirmed the primary reality of names.

Another way to think about the question of how people learn is via right and left brain, the creative vs. the rational.

A third way, perhaps the most relevant to speechwriters and speakers, is the notion of using narrative, or stories as opposed to simply relating facts.

Good speakers employ both sorts of approaches, the visually evocative and the literal, the creative and the fact-based, and finally, the story (narrative) and common-sensical, commonly held truth.

Have you ever noticed that good speakers (or comics, for that matter), like to start things off with a story, or even sprinkle them inside a talk? Sermons and homilies, with ethical strictures as their core, are leavened with parables, fables, and legends, right brain material that soften and convey otherwise harsh, stark, and unmoveable and unmistakable ethical truths.

Speakers utilize such things, such stories, because it makes an immediate connection with the audience, bridging the gap between them, relaxing both parties, making for commonality that simple fact presentation might not provide.

Why do presidential politicians talk about individual citizens, using stories about “a disabled woman in Akron, Ohio”, or an “unemployed textile worker in Raleigh, North Carolina”, or the like? They know that simple “facts” do not convince audiences…nor do most of the audience insist on ideological consistency. Political audiences do insist on getting to know a candidate, and successful candidates understand that truth and provide the personal information that audiences crave. As a result, stories are the currency in which political speakers and their audiences deal.

So, remember, if you want to reach your audience, you need to blend elements that will help your audience learn what you wish them to.

Stay tuned.