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.

The INHUMANITIES

You’ve got to care…

I read a well-written and provocative article on the importance of the Humanities recently.

The author certainly made a strong case about the continuing and perhaps increasing relevance of the Humanities. He didn’t need to persuade me that the Humanities are NOT an academic enterprise.

But after reading the article, I realized that he’d left out the one thing that could persuade more people than hundreds of similar articles about the importance of the humanities.

The INHUMANITIES.

Why should we learn about the humanities, whether literature, history, or the like?

Well, it would be nice to do something about the inhumanities, of which so many exist. If human-created misery is so prevalent, whether warfare, greed, cruelty, or ignorance, how do we combat such terrible things?

But, we need to do more than say, study the humanities.

We need the equivalent of vocational training to fight specific inhumanities, and then after someone's trained, they need to go out and work in a field of the humanities.

What fields?

Well...

We need The arts of peace and diplomacy to solve the issue of war.

We need the arts of sharing in order to bridge the brutal disparities that exist between neighbors and between countries.

We need the arts of language and story to overcome the appalling ignorance that marks so many, even, and, in particular, those with educational resources that should be sufficient to solve the issue, but fall short due to a lack of will.

Well, where does speech fit into this vocational structure?

Right in the middle of it.

No matter what we are speaking about, whether it’s a burning issue, on behalf of a candidate, to help people in a particular business solve a problem, one universal ingredient is required.

We need to care.

I challenge anyone to make a speech that will move anyone, despite the quality of its content, if the listeners are not sure that the speaker really cares about what he or she is talking about.

Speaking in such an unconcerned manner marks the specific inhumanity of indifference.

The next time you speak, no matter what your subject matter, I challenge you to do your part to stamp out indifference.

Stay tuned.

The Good Word

The Good Word
As I was considering what to share for my next post, I realized that the whole issue of “Word Choice” that is so “internal” to writers is an issue worth exploring.

How do we choose the words we use?

If we write for an academic audience, we tend to use specific words that, at least in theory, mean something to that academic audience. While the whole context of something being “academic” has taken on the meaning of irrelevance, among academics, the meaning of particular words is of intense importance. Academics always right toward the overriding goal of precision; however, that goal can sometimes bring about abstraction and lose of connection with potential listeners.

In fact, those same precision-intended (or should I say “Precision Guided”?) words used among the wrong listeners, in other words, misused, take on the feeling of abstraction, elitism, and yes, irrelevance, as a result. Listeners hearing the wrong word think, often correctly, that the speaker is more interested in impressing them than in communicating WITH them.

Academics also learn early on in their careers to avoid the passive tense (in which the subject of the sentence is being acted upon, rather than doing the acting), the use of first person (“I think” or “We feel”), and contractions.

If we speak to a less academic audience, or a mixed one, we might value the use of these things, in the interest of making a connection, even thought we might lose precision as a result. That’s a fair trade-off.

Or, we might not want to leave mysterious the responsibility for some action or belief. Use of the passive is a good way to not lay blame on anyone in that regard.

If you think the sometimes instantaneous, yet painstaking choices outlined above are limited to an ever older set of speakers, think again.

A number of studies have shown that the college age writer is quite aware of the difference between the “IM” culture, with its abbreviations and shorthand, and more formal discourse.

Word choice, then, far from being an academic concern limited to an ever smaller circle of speakers, has increasing relevance among young people, not in spite of, but because of the proliferation of abbreviated speech in a particular contexts such as instant messaging.

For more evidence that Computer Culture is increasingly relevant to speech and connection (the horizontal and the vertical), stay tuned.

Mirroring

I’ve talked about the perpendicular and the horizontal before.

Let’s talk about these differently.

People refer to “mirroring”, a term that means that someone identifies with someone else.

If you’re a speaker, how do you want to connect someone else’s “perpendicular” with your own when you speak? How do you get people to identify with you and what you are saying?

Simple language helps.

So does repetition.

But don’t underestimate your audience. Don’t consider a speech an elementary school session that will bore the life out of your audience due to endless repetition, and dull subject matter.

In order to engage your audience, you need the following key elements:

1-the stimulation of something new

2-surprise

Something new:
Don’t be afraid to teach your audience something, or at least remind them of it. You do not want your audience to f eel that you are talking down to them. You do not want them to think that you are part of elite, and they are not.
On the other hand, elite opinion does matter, because it helps provide clear definition and appropriate context required to fully explore and explain vital subjects.

So, you need to “frame” or set a context for your subject matter. When you do that, you need to do it in simple, yet meaningful fashion. You shouldn’t talk down to your audience by seeming to be more intelligent than they are, but you shouldn’t talk down to them by patronizing them, either, appearing to oversimplify complex matters.

Surprise:
Repetition can help make your audience comfortable. But you don’t want your audience to be TOO comfortable.

Remember in an earlier post when I talked about people’s minds insisting on a totality and so showing discomfort with silence.

You can also lead people down a road and suddenly bring them to a sharp turn that they did not anticipate, just as composers put in elements that bring in a new key or a new tempo, or even sudden loud notes to get their audience to pay particular attention.

Get people to identify with you, your thoughts; make that horizontal as strong, varied, and stimulating as it can be.

Stay tuned.

Content and Cadence and Yes We Can

What do composers and speechwriters share in common?

They both need to balance the interplay on the one hand between elements of content, whether pitch for musicians or text for writers and on the other hand, elements of duration, rhythm for musicians, cadence for Speechwriters.

What happens when one element or the other needs to govern in a particular creative situation?

In the late Renaissance, composers, particularly those active in the fledgling art form of opera, decided that the rhythmic elements of speech had to take precedence over concerns of pitch. This philosophy, self-consciously harking back to the dramatic arts of the ancient Greek stage, was known as "Prima Practica".

If text and cadence are two perpendiculars, what sort of horizontal can unite them to make a brilliant speech?

Well, consider two, an inviting silence, and the human mind of the audience.

If you've ever been in a situation of observing speaker and audience, neither element is happy with silence. It's thought of as the equivalent of "dead air" in radio.

But the skillful speaker uses silence to crucial effect. He or she does the same thing with the human minds of the member of the audience.

Since the speaker knows the audience abhors a vacuum, they are more than willing, with the right cue, to help provide the totality that their minds demand.

The most visible example of this horizontal between the perpendiculars of speaker and audience are Barack Obama's "Yes, We Can" answers from the audience.

Which do you think are more important, the questions he asks, or the fact of repetitive and empowering response?

He'll take the rhythm of the response every time over the content of the questions he's asking.

Prima Practica, alive and well in the 21st century world of politics. Stay tuned.

The Perpendicular Problem

In my last Post, I talked about the difference between the message of a prophet and a genius, how the first, according to Kirkegaard is pertuated in more of its totality, mystery, and essence, while the second, no matter how brilliant, still gets broken down and somehow dissolved.

Well, let's return to the problem of how a speaker considers that difference when deciding how to approach his or her audience.

Each potential speaker, whether in private or in public, considers how to connect with some sort of audience, of one person, a few, or a crowd. Picture the potential speaker as a vertical entity, with a point of view, images, and ideas. Other vertical entities exist in the form of the audience, irrespective of size.

What horizontal connects these verticals of speaker and listener?

In the last post, we talked about the insistence on "takeaways". This insistence is akin to the notion of repetition, or being "on message" for a political campaign. We have to say the magic word or phrase, over and over, like some sort of superstitious incantation, lest we step on the crack of the political sidewalk and break the campaign's back as a result.

This is the same approach that commercials use, bludgeoning listeners' minds, particularly in radio, with a repeated, and, as radio ad reps term it, "intrusive" message.

That notion of enforced repetition is the language and idiom of fascism.

Should we be surprised at the coarsening of political dialog, with the suspiciousness and anxiety that the wrong thing might be said and the right thing might not be repeated enough?

And, when politicians see a particular audience, because they've polled that audience exhaustively, they think they know what the audience's perpendicular is, and they think they know what horizontal will "connect" the speaker with those voters.

Add to these concerns of the horizontal and vertical, the problem of market segmentation. What's that?

Well, you love your very small music devices because you can control exactly what you listen to on it. Your choice rules the device. You've never had more choice in this regard, in these smaller and smaller, sliced pieces of media that bring you exactly what you want. Niches...market segmentation...advertisers love these phrases, and so do consumers, who are able to make individually imposed choices and intense satisfaction.

What a perpendicular feast!

But can voters get the same satisfaction in a democratic universe where compromise is a prized value? Are they more inclined or less inclined to get the whole in a world where they are used to getting exactly what they want as consumers?

Notice the perceived famine for the horizontal as a result.

Part of this phenomenon is the localized, messy, deconcentrated, and particularly American democracy, designed in its splendid quirkiness by the Founding Fathers who distrusted the public and each others.

Market Capitalism and democracy raise expectations.

Market segmentation and consumer choice challenge politicians to create a horizontal that can join their vertical to that of the voters. Who will do a better job in discovering or creating the better horizontal in the coming elections?

In short, who will bring "axis grease" and balance the vertical and horizontal most effectively?

Stay tuned.