Whether or not the post is, I'm pretty sure this will be my dullest
lede ever:
I mentioned when I was
talking about hornets
and bulls that I think many of the ways we communicate with each other
politically are technai (teck-nigh)
—that’s the plural of techne (teck-nee), the Greek root from which we get
technology, technique, and technical, usually translated as “art” but in modern
English “art” has come to mean several other things, “method” is too small in
scope, and “craft” and “skill” miss some of the key elements of the idea, so
many rhetoric teachers just say “techne” rather than translating it and
dragging in baggage.*
To the Greeks, the
difference, approximately, was that a techne was what you did to do
something well, and various
other terms —episteme is the
one most often cited —were ways to do something good. A master of the techne of puppy-kicking may be
able, from a standing start, to send a beagle puppy screaming through the exact
center of a third-floor window, and we can agree that he did it well, but what
he did was not good.** A psychotic who climbs a tower and begins shooting
people may have studied exactly the same techne of sniping as the police sniper
who stops him; the techne of preparing pork strongly overlaps the techne of
cooking people; the techne of making very sharp pieces of metal is equally
applicable to guillotines and scalpels.
So all the way back at the
beginnings of recorded rhetoric and communication theory in Western thought,
there’s a split between people who think that rhetoric is (or should be) a way
to find the truth, and those who think it’s merely a the techne for getting
one’s way by persuasion rather than force. Socrates, at least as Plato reports
him, was on the “a good speaker is one who tells the truth” side, and so were
most of the Cynics and Skeptics; Aristotle, and most of the other schools of
philosophy, tended to the view that rhetoric was a techne, i.e. “a good speaker
is someone who is good at speaking. ” I usually side with Aristotle on this,
but I sometimes slip in side dish of Cynicism (as is appropriate for a guy who
named his self-pub press after Metrocles).
Most situations that are
at all interesting are on the borderline, and this time out I’m going to talk
about one of them. One of the traditional areas of concern for rhetoric is
organization; two particular organizations are overwhelmingly common in
broadcast advertising and political speaking today: Monroe’s Motivated
Sequence, and something called Burke’s organization.
Alan Monroe, back in the
1930s, came up with a five step organization, which you can read all about in
speech textbooks, if you didn’t already learn how to do it in school. I’m more
interested in its psychology today. The Monroe Motivated Sequence has five
steps:
•The Attention step is
some version of “Listen up, this is important because …” which might be an
interesting story, statistic, or something of that sort. (Martin Luther King,
in the “I have a dream” speech which is a nearly perfect MMS, began by pointing
out that since he was speaking from the Lincoln Monument, he was standing in
Lincoln’s shadow; John F. Kennedy linked “Civis Romanus Sum” to “Ich bin ein
berliner”***).
•The Need step is the
“something’s the matter here” step (King’s note that 100 years later they were
still waiting for full rights, Lyndon Johnson’s quick capsule history of prior
efforts to end segregation in his signing speech for the Civil Rights Act).
•The Satisfaction step is
“it could be better.” That’s where King said he refused to believe that the
Bank of Justice had insufficient funds; in Robert F. Kennedy’s Indianapolis
eulogy for King, it’s the section that begins with “We can do well in this
country.”
•The Visualization Step, I
used to tell my unfortunate students, was originally called the Vision step;
sadly, it had to be renamed, I suppose because we have become the sort of world
where people visualize more than they envision. It’s the step where you tell
them that it’s not just meeting this one need, now, it’s the whole world
becoming better. That is of course the point where King told his audience that
he had a dream, where JFK told the Rice University audience “We choose to go to
the moon in this decade not because it is easy but because it is hard,” where
RFK quoted Aeschylus about making gentle the savage heart of man.
•Action is just “so let’s
do it!”, is usually very brief, and is frequently omitted if it’s obvious. The
only modern speaker I know of who tended to long Action steps was Jimmy Carter,
because he’d wade into uncontrollable wonkery at that point.
There are a lot of
bastardized and watered-down versions of Monroe’s Motivated Sequence out there,
but done well and rigorously, it’s a kind of poem: a smooth glide from hey-look
to uh-oh to fixable to the key to everything. It takes your inner
not-yet-King-Arthur and sends him running to get a replacement sword for Sir
Kay’s first tournament, to seeing a simple solution (“I’ll just borrow the
sword from this war memorial”) to the moment when he pulls that thing out and
becomes King. Since I recently wrote about this over at CMOSite,
and some readers read both blogs, I’ll also point out that it’s the rhythm of
the first
Kia Hamster commercial: attention, we’re all just hamsters in treadmills,
we need to be something else, look, we could satisfy our need by driving Kias!
And in our Kia’s we’d have music and friends and the car would go
somewhere—what a vision!
At the core of a good
Monroe Motivated Sequence there’s a movement from the mundane desire for things
to get better to the overarching vision**** of a world made better and of
dreams fulfilled.
Hang onto that vision a
moment because now we’re going somewhere ugly …
Burke’s organization is
unfairly named for the same reason that Hansen’s disease is: you shouldn’t name
diseases after the people who try to cure them. Kenneth Burke was one of the more amazing
minds of the twentieth century and there isn’t room here to begin to cover all the interesting things about him.
(And again, a point I often repeat since quite a few nerdly types read this
blog, and some of them are given to posing online and at science fiction
conventions: having read what follows does not mean you know Burke any more
than reading a Sherlock Holmes story means you know London!)
Burke started out by
looking at fire-and-brimstone preacher speeches, and then looked at speeches by
such folks as Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin, and observed a four-part
structure:
•Guilt/shame: You, my
follower, are a loathesome bag of scum.
•Victim: But only because
you have allowed The Bad People (or the devil, or the low-priced deodorant) to
make you into a loathesome bag of scum.
•Redemption: Rise up and
slay The Bad People (or cast out the devil, or stop buying that nasty stuff).
•Salvation: A world
without Bad People (or where you are free of the devil, or using better
deodorant) is a far better world.
It’s the script of a
ghastly little well-meaning song that I am forced to admit I learned all the
words to in my extreme youth, One Tin Soldier. It is, as you might expect from where it was
found, Hitler’s script, and Stalin’s, and the script of every major genocide of
the past century. It’s all those weight-loss and cosmetic-surgery commercials
that make women scream and throw things at the television. And it’s used all
the time to drag alleged sinners back into the clutches of an angry god —because
that’s the only kind it can sell. Abusive partners use it (you’re a miserable
little sack of shit, but honey, you know I love you and it’s not your fault,
it’s your shitty friends and family. Promise me you’ll never see them again and
we’ll have such a happy little home).
Now, on to the point,
however slowly… if rhetoric were purely a techne, then the choice between the
Monroe Motivated Sequence and Burke’s organization would be purely a technical
matter —what do you want people to do and which is likelier to get them to do
it?
But the two approaches are
utterly different at the heart. Monroe depends on a good vision, and although
there probably are some twisted shits out there whose faces light up with an
angelic glow when they imagine exterminating their enemies, for most of us a
good vision has something or other to do with brotherhood, prosperity, freedom,
maybe peace and love among humanity, that kind of thing. Something I pointed out
to my students, again maybe too often, is that the underlying message of a
Monroe Motivated Sequence is We can take a step toward the Kingdom of God,
right here and now, and you are worthy to take that step. To
the white people of America (by far the majority of his audience for the “I
Have a Dream” speech), King implied despite all of history, you are worthy
of the honor of being the generation that ends segregation. Kennedy implied we were good enough to go to the
moon; and his brother, in that must-have-been-pretty-scary situation in
Indianapolis (most of the crowd heard that MLK had been murdered in that
speech; Kennedy begins by telling everyone to lower their signs, quiet down,
and listen to the terrible news), implied you are strong enough to bear
this, go on, and do the right thing.
There’s no way to know whether that was why, of course, but it is true that
Indianapolis was the largest American city not to have riots that week.
Monroe offers not just the
hope of heaven, but the hope that we’re the people who can build it.
Burke, on the other hand,
has a target at its heart. It demands, not only a villain, but one evil enough
to be annihilated, one responsible for everything the hearers feel is wrong.
One of those useful self-help formulas is Hurt people hurt people, and Burke’s organization wounds the listener, to
get the listener to wound someone else. (This, incidentally, is why I’m
ambivalent about putting most of talk radio in as an example of the Burke
organization. There’s certainly plenty of scapegoating but for the most part
talk radio hosts affirm rather than degrade their listeners. They certainly
encourage anger and polarization, but to really get your followers to hurt
people, you’ve got to really hurt your followers. (A secret known by too many
sergeants and football coaches). If one of the big name talk radio types begins
to start programs by laying into the listeners for their weakness,
ineffectiveness, and cowardice —and then adds that what has made their mostly middle-aged white male listeners
become such feeble cowards is those Democrat liberals and treehuggers and
feminists —that is the time to
catch the plane out of the country.)
Despite my theoretical
leanings, I find it hard not to see a moral difference between Monroe and
Burke. Yes, if someone’s value system is warped enough so that the vision that
makes their heart leap up is a vile one, you could use Monroe’s Motivated
Sequence to manipulate such a person to do greater evil; sure, if the people
you’re addressing really have become miserable pathetic wretches under the iron
heel of their oppressors, you could use Burke’s organization to make them rise
up (but even then it seems to me you’re asking for a Reign of Terror if the
revolution wins). So reluctantly, I’m forced to say that some of those choices
are just not technai ….
It should be pretty
obvious that for the last few elections, presidential candidates have usually
flown high and Monroevian and left the Burkean dirty work to the vice
presidential candidates. In 2008, Barack Obama beat a pretty Burkean Clinton
campaign with something very Monroe, and then Monroe’d the rest of the way to
the White House past McCain’s inept Monroe and Sarah Palin’s incomprehensible
goulash.
This time around, if we’re
talking about speeches anyway, Romney and Paul have been relatively Monroevian
…. and other than those two, the Republican field has gone solidly for the
Burkean dark side, with Rick Perry’s “Strong” being just about one minute of
solid Burke. It’s kind of fun to watch the ‘pubs use it on each other, in the
sense that watching two cats shaken in a pillowcase is fun if you’re basically
evil.
At a guess, once he’s
really running, Obama will try to go the Monroe route again —he’s never done
anything else, and he’s certainly good at it.
Except, I was just kind of
thinking, there’s a much older organization, called Corax’s organization
because the Greeks said he codified it (little survives of his writings, and
the one story about him involves a lot of slick wordplay and general cheating
of the type that would seem to indicate that Corax was on the techne side if
anyone was).
The Coractian method works
like this:
•Introduction: Why I’m
here and what I want to do
•Narration: Here are the
facts as I see them.
•Argumentation: Here is
how I assemble the facts to arrive at my conclusion.
•Refutation: Here is how
my opponents came to mistakenly believe something else, and why they are wrong.
•Conclusion: So we should
do that thing.
It’s not poetry at all,
neither the soaring poetry of Monroe nor the bloody war-drum of Burke. It
doesn’t invite us to go straight to heaven or straight to the other direction.
It just makes a case that we ought to do something. Attorneys still use it in
criminal cases, constantly:
Introduction
|
Narration
|
Argumentation
|
Refutation
|
Conclusion
|
I’m the prosecutor and
I’m here to ask you to send this guy to jail
|
here’s what the witnesses say he did
|
here’s the law it fits
under
|
here’s why the defense
is misleading you
|
now jail him.
|
Hello, I’m the defense
attorney and I want you to set this man free
|
here’s what the witnesses (or some
different witnesses say)
|
here’s why that doesn’t
prove he did it or why it wasn’t actually against the law or both
|
here’s how the
prosecutor is trying to trick you
|
please let this guy go.
|
Some other very fine 20th
century speakers were fond of Corax; the American masters of it were Franklin
Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and Malcolm X.
And here’s what I’m
thinking; Corax is the organization you use when you want the listener to
follow, not their passions (noble or base), or their hopes or fears, but their
heads: it asks that they see things the way you do and reason as you do, and
presents that as a choice. In that sense it is respectful of the listener
(although the argumentation and refutation can certainly be twisted into
aggressive and corrupt forms; what I mean is, it doesn’t require the listener to become naïve and trusting, as
Monroe does, or paranoid and enraged, as Burke does). You can still lie and
advocate absolute evil with Corax’s organization, but it doesn’t require it;
you can still get people carried away by irrational hopes and dreams, but it
doesn’t require that either. Perhaps Corax is the one that is truly a techne —a
morally neutral means to an end chosen for (we hope) moral or ethical reasons.
And I find myself thinking
… I would really like to have a chance to vote for someone I agreed with who
used the Corax organization habitually. I might even be tempted to vote for
someone I didn’t always agree with if they used Corax enough. Because honestly,
in the current best and worst of times, I don’t actually want to go straight to
heaven, or directly the other way. I’d kind of like a
president who said, “Here’s my best guess; if you back me, let’s do it.”
*As an example, if for
some reason the works were translated into classical Greek, The Techne of
French Cooking, Zen and the Techne of Motorcycle Maintenance, Djikstra’s A Techne of Programming, and Le Guin’s Steering the Techne would all make sense (though the last would lose
its pun). But Panofsky’s Meaning in the Visual Technai, Stanislavski’s My Life in Techne, McCandless’s A Techne of Lighting the Stage, The Techne of the Peaceful Warrior, and The Druidic Techne of the Wise would not make sense.
**At least I hope we all
agree on that. No doubt I shall be the object of vituperation on the
puppy-kicking blogs.
***Yes, by now, thanks to
the endless-echo of the internet, we all know it should have been Ich bin
berliner. It is exactly the
mistake that, for example, a Dane, speaking English to an American, might make
if he said “I am a Danish.” We shall not here contemplate how the inhabitants
of Hamburg or Frankfurt are supposed to explain themselves. Now go back to the
main text, that’s where the good stuff is.
**** never should have
given up that word, Alan! Since your passing the world has filled up with
visualizers and suffers a genuine dearth of visionaries.
