Wall Street is occupied. Across America, the streets have been taken. These popular revolts are an expression of a common cause. Ordinary people are convinced that the 2008 financial crisis was a moral, economic, and political disaster. Citizens have a hard time with the state of things, so they take their grievances to the pavement.
That common cause is easy to see. Their cause is communicated beautifully by the pithy slogan: “We are the 99%”. They are referring, here, to the historically unprecedented income disparity between 99% of the population and the 1% that controls the wealth.
Yet a certain class of pundit — the kind you see on the Oct 7/2011 edition of Real Time With Bill Maher — have found it difficult to decipher what the protesters have to say. Hence, the message of the 99%s is called “incoherent”. But this claim is just weird. The 99′s message is clear as crystal: there is a state of economic injustice, this state of affairs is on the whole a bad thing, and that this state of injustice need not exist.
The more interesting question is: how is it that an educated class of people has, by all appearances, lost the ability to read? It’s as if we’re living through the Day of the Triffids, except only the cable news anchors have gone blind.
To answer these questions, we have to step back and ask a more general one. How is it that people fail to talk to each other effectively?
Some time ago, Miranda Celeste Hale took issue with a claim made by a literary critic:
What [the critic] fails to understand is that, when it comes to effective communication, the onus is on the communicator, and that, if a communicator fails to reach their audience, they cannot blame their failure on the attitudes or supposed “deficiencies” of their readers. To assert otherwise is both counterproductive and gallingly elitist.”
This is an expression of Hale’s ‘clarity imperative’. And she’s making two solid points, here.
The first point to make is that the speaker has a lot of control over the way their message is interpreted, and so they have a duty to speak clearly. Philosopher of language H.P. Grice famously pointed out that the speaker has the duty to be cooperative in various ways — the speaker should not blather on for too long, should not say things that are false, and so on. Grice is like Hale in the sense that he puts the onus primarily on the speaker, not the listener.
The second point to make is that someone who knowingly traffics in nonsense is a moral elitist. As a younger version of me argued in a 2002 op-ed:
It saddens me to report that philosophy enthusiasts, modern philosophers and modern philosophy teachers alike have no grasp on how to communicate… If you’re a philosophy student, then odds are, you’ve noticed. You notice it when you ask a question about basic logic and receive a referral to Wittgenstein. You notice it when you propose a simple critique and have its merit gauged on whether or not someone else wrote about it. You certainly noticed it when you read a post-modernist philosopher and wondered just how much wacky tobaccy the French-to-English translator was smoking at the time of writing the book.
Yet all of the above authors — Hale, Grice, Nelson — provide an uneven analysis. Hale’s clarity imperative should not be exaggerated in such a way that places the burden entirely on the speaker. The fact is, both the speaker and the listener have their duties to each other. Just as the speaker has a duty to contribute in a cooperative way, the listener has to make an effort to follow along in good faith.
Of course, there may be contexts where it is important for us to focus on the obligations of the speaker more than the listener. But the role of the speaker is not going to make much sense of the present concern. The fact is, by their own admission, the American pundit class does not understand how to read the signs.
So let’s look at it from the other direction. How is it that two people might fail to communicate, because the listener isn’t pulling their own weight?
Courtesy of Mr. Fish (clowncrack.com)
Grice suggested rules for speaking cooperatively in conversation. I intend to make some general remarks about the duties of active listeners engaged in conversational uptake. For good measure, I’ll illustrate each maxim with some topical goodies. (Be sure to click the Youtube links.)
#1. FIDELITY. The first rule is, don’t intentionally misrepresent the contents of what has been said.
If you have a lot of time and energy — for instance, if you’re a philosopher — then you ought to try to attribute as many true beliefs to the speaker as you can, so long as those beliefs are consistent with what has been said. If possible, try to get as much bang for your buck: listen for the broader message in context, to get the most information as you can. But if you don’t have that kind of time or energy — for instance, if you’re not a philosopher — then at least interpret others in such a way that they do not seem totally confused about themselves.
Admittedly, it can be hard to be charitable when you are trying to figure out the message of a crowd. But even so, there are better and worse ways of doing it.
An excellent tactic might be to look at what all the signs have in common, and judge them all on how much you think they are representative of the context. Consider [VIDEO 1]. Perhaps you don’t agree that we should abolish the Fed, but you do think that something is seriously awry with the banking system. If so, then congratulations are in order — you’ve found enough common ground to be able to say something about what is going on. This particular protester has some views to talk about, and by all indications, his views are appropriate to the context.
A bad tactic would be to single out a fart enthusiast, and draw conclusions about the nature of the protest from that.
#2. CANDOR. The listener also has the duty to not misrepresent their own level of engagement in the conversation.
If the listener is interested in the message, but finds the message confusing, then they ought to communicate their confusion (if possible). If the listener is unwilling or unable to follow along, then they ought to say so. If as a listener you find yourself bored, it may be that you are in fact listening to a boring person, and therefore should run away as if being pursued by leopards. But it may also be that you feel entitled to a circus, parade, and song, in which case you might consider relocating to hell, your proper domicile.
In ordinary talk, when a person is disengaged and feigns interest, we call it pretentious; and when they’re engaged but feign disinterest, we call it disingenuous. In both cases, at least one or more of the interlocutors is going to end up embarrassed, and usually the humiliation falls on the interlocutor who has less power. But actually, there’s not really much telling in advance who it’s going to be. Consider [VIDEO 2]. It is difficult to imagine that the visibly pretentious and relatively unknown CNN anchor in the linked clip will make a strong recovery.
#3. INTEGRITY. Provided that the listener is, in fact, engaged, he/she should be ready to make clear what type of conversation they are interested in having (i.e., the rules of their language-game).
If you expect a cooperative dialogue, then at minimum you should be prepared to say what “cooperation” means to you. Not everyone is playing the same game, or keeping score by the same rules.
Consider this exchange [VIDEO 3]. In it, an eloquent protester named Jessie makes some compelling remarks. While his responses are completely relevant to the interviewer’s prompts, he’s also playing a different game than his interrogator. NewsCorp’s interviewer wants to give credit to the Tea Party movement for inspiration, and to direct blame towards the Obama administration for inadequate response; Jessie credits the movement to the populace, and directs blame towards a mismanaged corporatist state.
Edit: Consider, also, this video from the CBC [VIDEO 4]. In it, author Chris Hedges subverts the expectations of his conversation partner by arguing that the protesters are the true conservatives, since they advocate the rule of law. Hedges also makes it clear, when being accused of being a ‘nutbar’, that he has no interest in that kind of adversarial exchange.
#4. HUMILITY. If you can’t engage in the conversation in a way you find satisfying, then consider either deferring to someone who can, or disengage with the conversation entirely.
For instance, media pundits might be having a hard time making sense of what the kids are going on about, much in the same way that Beethoven might have had a hard time listening to The Rap Music. Still, when it comes to the protests, the financial experts are having no trouble at all. Perhaps that might be worth pause.
And finally, an essential rule that applies to both speakers and hearers (which Grice missed):
#5. DIGNITY. Both the listener and speaker should treat their interlocutor as being worthy of consideration, and expect to be treated in the same way.
The vague way of putting it is to say, “Treat people as if they have some kind of dignity”. A less vague formulation would be to say, “Be willing, as far as possible, to ratify the other person’s self-concept.”
A first step, there, is figuring out how exactly people see themselves. By talking to them as if they were human beings, for instance.
A second step is to make sure you are consistent in the way you treat others, once you’ve figured out how. For example, you can’t treat someone with pomp and circumstance, and then go on to say things that are completely at odds with that sentiment. Consider the speech of the anchor in the linked clip [VIDEO 5]. If you click through, you’ll witness a bizarre interview where the anchor (in this case the speaker) goes out of her way to praise the interviewee as being in high esteem, a “national treasure”, and so on, while also making the argument that no taxpayer has any desire to support her. The incoherence is painful to endure.
This principle of dignity sounds like it is magnanimous, a kind of principle of kindness and generosity. But it’s actually a double-edged sword: treating people with dignity can be devastating. If a man presents himself as a clown, then it is consistent with his dignity for him to be treated as a clown. If you present yourself as a medical doctor, but have not actually got a degree, then it is consistent with your dignity for you to be treated as a charlatan.
Solidarity on Sesame St.
So there you have it. Four listener’s duties, and one final duty for both speakers and hearers. That’s all I wanted to say.
I don’t have any snappy ending to this post. Anyway, thanks for reading, if you did. But if you were expecting to find a song, then fine, I’ve still got you covered.
Timely thoughts, well expressed Benjamin. Thank you. I’m delighted to see you back blogging again. You bring a great deal to this site.
best
James
I think that it’s a power thing.
In general, the media do not understand or make an attempt to understand what the powerless say, that is, your 99%.
The pundits will spend pages and pages of print trying to interpret the latest remarks of the head of the Federal Reserve Bank line by line and between the lines, but will not pay attention to the voices of the unemployed.
The president of the Federal Reserve Bank counts.
The unemployed don’t count.
Amos said:
“The unemployed don’t count”
The devil in me replies:
“That’s why they are unemployed”.
Benjamin,
Just in case you missed the very obvious: Strictly from what you wrote, I wondered if what the pundits meant was not that the underlying message was incoherent, but what the protestors want to be done is.
I’m so glad you wrote this piece. I’m not sure I learned a great deal from it, but it’s good to be reminded, in so clear an exposition, of our responsibilities as speakers and listeners, for example, in these pages as well as more general situations.
You and I (together), as it happens, is a case in point. The last time we communicated was a year or so ago. (At that time I went under the name Ralph. The reason for my adopting my alias “GRA” was to try and sneak back into the TPM group, historyless.) Anyway, at that last exchange of words, I struggled with some of the points spelled out by you in the above. I believe you thought I was being pretentious (see above:your definition) but at the same time worried that I thought you pretentious (you used that word at that time.) It was a mess and I took the easy way out and got lost for a while. So, what is my point? Sometimes, communicating is not so cut and dry, even when two people respect one another and think they’re being honest with their opposite.
Hello Ralph,
Welcome back.
Thanks, Jim!
GRA, it may be about demands. If that’s the case, then the bare minimum demands were laid out a few years ago by the Obama administration. Since that time, the government has failed to enact the reforms that are required.
Paul Krugman has had some good things to say. The fact that the 99s don’t have a unified set of policy proposals should not suggest that they don’t have a unified message. That’s the sense in which the guests on Bill Maher — PJ O’Rourke, Nicolle Wallace, and Maher himself — missed the forest for the trees. (Luckily, Alan Grayson was on hand to set them straight.)
On your comments from a year ago. It’s ancient history to me, but I appreciate the spirit of your reply. And of course, I can work on being more succinct and clear as a writer, and gladly welcome comments on that. Still, I hope the post above clarifies the kinds of practices that I find pretentious, in the literal sense of speaking only on pretence.
Is all numbers!!! 99-1, it is what it is. I guess the objective is to increase the 1, and decrease the 99. Again that will always be the case for the progressive.
I guess the points and meaning of #1 – #5 in the article, a good article, is the essence of what we need. Numbers matter, but the truth is, like many statictics in life, a “bell curve” – are the happy, the majority in the middle?
Sometimes you can make things perfectly clear but the listener is of an ideological bent that the message doesn’t get through or is ignored. What can you do about that?
Benjamin,
In your response to my comment, it all sounds good.
Amos,
Thanks.
I have a new computer. Your email address went with the old one.
rrsvvc@yahoo.com
Phil, the short answer is, you can’t. You can only improve your own sense of dignity or credibility in a conversation by developing some useful social habits and trying to apply them generally. When speaking, we can all be more like Grice. When listening, we ought to follow the maxims I formulated above — candor, fidelity, integrity, and humility.
The long answer is, you can, but only when the stars align in such a way that you are both interested in being on the same page.
Some research in social psychology (the Yale Attitude Change Approach) has shown that there are some non-rational features of a situation that help to produce attitude change.
1. Be attractive. People are shallow. They listen to pretty people.
2. Don’t argue, explain. People have a terrible habit of being defensive towards attempts at influence or persuasion, and receptive to the rest of the chatter. That is awful, but it’s true. Indeed, this maxim is essentially a proscription against critical thinking. Oh well. Still…
3. …if you’re going to argue, then present both sides, and do a good job at refuting your opponent. So it turns out philosophy is good for something after all.
4. Make sure your audience is distracted. Oddly enough, if people are distracted during your attempt to communicate, it is more likely that they will be persuaded. However, their attitude change is probably not going to last.
5. Be like Socrates; corrupt the youth. Young adults, aged 18-25, are highly impressionable.
6. Target those with low intelligence. Relatively speaking, they are easily persuaded.
7. Also, target those with moderate self-esteem. People with high or low self-esteem are hard to get through to.
To Yale’s list, one could add…
7. Be a choir, not a lone wolf. Deliver a single message to a single target from multiple, independent speakers. For example, in the modern age, every government has enormous credibility in speaking, despite the fact that they oftentimes lie or distort the facts. That’s because they disseminate information to the press, and that information is often repeated verbatim by multiple, independent news agents. In this way, while you’re actually being fed groupthink-fashioned information, you fall under the illusion that you’re being given objective facts that have been multiply confirmed.
8. Tailor your message to your audience’s interests. Examine your audience’s material and psychological needs. What are they looking for? Connect your message to their interests in a credible way, so that they would be insane not to give you a hearing. For instance, all the major news channels are comically overproduced in such a way that every story, no matter how banal and moronic, is sold as a dire event. This is actually a mark of incompetent delivery, since nobody cares about the boy who cried wolf. If you want to be taken seriously, you have to rely on *credible* threats.
9. Shape the dialogue. People often learn through a technique called “shaping”, meaning that you start by only teaching them the abstract scheme of how things are, the basic message or narrative. once that’s completed, then and only then should you add more and more details to the story (depending on your audience’s tastes). Start people off with the simple stuff, the basic points, and then improve their understanding as time and resources permit. If people need more information, provide them with an avenue to get it.
e.g., David Hume’s Treatise fell stillborn from the press, but his Enquiry sold like hotcakes, and the Enquiry helped to make the way for the success of the Treatise.
Re GRA: If you are the Ralph I think you are, I wondered where you were, and have missed your clear and often incisive down to Earth Contributions.
Ben:
What you say above about the results of social psychology are a bit disheartening, but do ring true.
I wish that I had read them with attention 40 years ago.
Ben,
It would seem from the CNN article (see below) that that the lack of a set of demands for the protest is not an oversight.
http://money.cnn.com/2011/10/11/technology/occupy_wall_street_demands/
Re Benjamin “Some research in social psychology (the Yale Attitude Change Approach) has shown that there are some non-rational features of a situation that help to produce attitude change. “
I am sure the points made here are valid. Mostly people protest with their hearts rather than their heads and an appeal to the passions will often work with them. I have often wondered what sort of reply I would get if I approached someone protesting about the financial situation of the country or perhaps any other subject. I would say “but this is what the government see as the best solution so what do you suggest then”? I suspect I would get some vague answer like rob the rich not the poor or I’ve worked all my life and now I feel thrown on the waste heap. Often people can only judge things from their own viewpoint, and this makes them susceptible to passionate influences rather than rational ones.
I Hasten to add I am not denigrating protests as such, and doubtless there are many protesters who have have rational and persuading arguments to support why they are there.
S.Wally, I ignore the insights from social psychology as well. If you worry too much about gaming the context, you become a horrible, soulless PR kind of person. I can clean up nice, but I loathe dressing up too nice, because I’d rather be Columbo than James Bond. I don’t explain how things are, I go straight to an argument, because that makes it OK for me to change my mind if suitably engaged.
In the grand scheme of things, these are small preferences, but they actually have enormous consequences. The self-conscious decisions I make about myself empower me as an agent by giving me a genuine sense of ownership over myself and my actions. But they disempower me as a part of the social structure, since that structure (more often than not) is based on networks of people that negotiate trust on the basis of shallow cues.
Hope that makes sense.
GRA, thanks for that link. It certainly makes good sense.
Don, thanks for your thoughts. But I’m puzzled by your assumption that the state of affairs is what the government deems best. Who is “the government”, and what state of affairs are you referring to?
The administration does not think that enough has been done, and the President verbally expresses his frustration at the inability of the legislature to commit to regulatory reform and to funding for the relevant agencies. (You can see a short clip of the President expressing his frustration at the start of Video 4.) The Bush-era tax breaks are only conceived of as the best option by one of the two major parties; the other party waxes and wanes between ambivalence and opposition. Perhaps the bailouts were the best temporary solution in that situation, and there was some agreement across party lines, but only sequentially (i.e., Obama and Bush), not simultaneously (i.e., Obama vs. McCain). By all indications, the government itself is dissatisfied with the way things are. Perhaps we ought to be dissatisfied as well.
Ben:
Thanks for your answer.
God and genes condemn me to being Columbo rather than James Bond, although at times I fancy myself George Smiley.
Don:
As you may be aware, for the last 5 months or more, students in Chile have occupied high schools and universities in demand for better and free education.
They have marched, they have demonstrated.
Their demands have changed over the months. Some have been inappropriate (nationalization of all copper mines); some have been trivial (free all-year transit pass for students); some have been too vague (education is a right); some have been overly moralistic (education cannot be a business).
However, in spite of all the above, the students have managed to make education the central issue of Chilean society.
85 to 90% of Chileans support the students’ general demands, if not always their methods (marches, occupations of schools).
Previous to the student movement, everyone knew that public schools were of low quality, that university education was far too expensive for a middle class family to pay for without taking out loans at usury rates, that
the differences in education between the rich (who pay private schools), the middle class (who pay subsidized schools) and the poor (who go to free public schools) make economic inequalities and class differences even more rigid.
Today everyone discusses what to do about education in Chile.
It seems clear that in the future poor and low middle class students will have access to the university without paying, even though the students’ demand for free education for all perhaps will not be granted.
It seems clear that lots of resources will go into preschool and elementary school education to try to deal with the differences between public and private education.
The exact solutions will probably not be those the students themselves propose and will come from experts on education, economists and politicians, but the students have been generous enough by protesting to give future generations in Chile a better chance at having access to a quality education without going bankrupt paying for it.
I imagine a similar process may well take place with the protest movement in the U.S.
Re. Benjamin S Nelson Oct 12th:-
I was endeavouring to make a generalisation here. I had no particular government in mind and no particular state of affairs. I was making a psychological point rather than making a philosophical or political point. For instance a substantial body of people protest against a situation which has arisen by virtue of the imposition on them, by those who have the authority, so to do, of say, certain rules or regulations, which the body of people deem unfair, unjust, or maybe just plain wrong. There are accordingly I believe common behaviour patterns which can be identified in nearly all forms of organised protest. That is to say there are some non-rational features of a situation that help to produce attitude change. And these may be apparent in the organised procedures of protesting as a body of people.
Hey Don. That’s fine, but it’s also not unique to crowds. Non-rational attitude change is a deep feature of all social phenomena, including the comings and goings of formal organizations. (Advertising, for instance, is a highly organized and sophisticated attempt at non-rational attitude change.)
Re.S Wallerstein 13th Oct:-
Many thanks for your most interesting account, which provided more food for thought concerning how how the expression of a demand can swing in many different directions before it reaches approximately the destination originally hoped for.
So far as education in England is concerned I think the powers that be, have lost the gist of it. The predominant theme in state schools seems to be not education in itself, but fitting pupils for some sort of a job when they leave school. To this end elementary English and Mathematics is stressed. Whatever teaching occurs in relation to the numerous other subjects which were once thought to complete an education are scarcely if ever discussed. An overall enlightenment of the mind, and the ability to make connections within one subject and also across to others seems neglected, Such is the case with learning how to voice and/ or write acceptable explanations. The inculcation of pride in the school, pride in oneself seems to be similarly neglected. Almost half of teachers leave the profession within five years of qualifying with the most frequent reasons cited for leaving being pupil abuse and violence. Again almost one half of young people who sat GCSEs this past summer did not get a grade C or better in elementary English and Maths. An article in ‘The Times’ recently drew attention to a substantial percentage of semi literacy and semi numeracy in the police force. Some officers cannot give evidence clearly concisely and accurately; the same goes for their written reports apparently.
The latest suggestion is that Pupils who reach the age of fourteen and show insufficient academic ability should leave school and be instructed in how the handle the implements of manual labour. At Fourteen I was something of a dunderhead. By the time I reached seventeen I had changed out of all recognition. This was the result of good teaching, encouragement, and a kick up the backside as and when appropriate.
I am not saying that all state schools underachieve here, in fact some are very good, and of course education is free; however if I had young children now and could afford so to do I would be seriously looking for private schooling for them. By the way, the intention here is now to close all public libraries, and make university fees so exorbitant that rather than encourage young people to attend, they are discouraged. Education it seems is slowly being stamped out of sight.
Don:
That they’re closing public libraries is horrid. A crime against culture and enlightenment.
I have educated myself more in public libraries than in schools.
Besides that, libraries provide a place to sit and read for so many souls who may live in crowded or noisy dwellings, for retired people who otherwise have no access to new books, for students who use them to do their homework, for those who want to read the newspapers and to check up on past issues of such publications.
Since you cannot tell a book by its cover, public libraries give you the possibility to select a book and experiment with reading it, without expending money on purchasing it, since many times books which look promising at first glance disappoint.
Not everyone has access to university libraries (I don’t) and Google books tends not to show exactly those pages of a book that I want to read: they have quite diabolic software which senses where one is going in a text and then makes it inacessible.
Re S Wallerstein Oct 15th:-
I agree with what you say. As an enthusiastic autodidact a large part of my own education was by virtue of using Public Libraries both for study and borrowing. I love the atmosphere of a library and fortunately have access to, and can borrow from, the Uni Library about ten minutes drive away. To sit there in silence reading surrounded by endless shelves of erudition and then glance out of the window at grass and trees is very pleasant. Thanks for your mention of Google Books I have not looked at it for years it seems to be of some use I think.
Sure is a good thing that some sites like Wikileaks exists.
The Occupy movement has taken root in Canada as well, with people camping out in the nation’s capital Ottawa and other cities. It is not clear what the specific purpose is here in Canada, other than a lot of complaining about various issues (homelessness being a top mention). I think it is just riding on the trend and momentum of Occupy worldwide.
City authorities are beyond asking the Occupiers to pack up. Police have been sent in to move their tents away. And there are legal battles brewing in court. As confrontation unfolds, some violence has erupted. (Aside: It is sad to see people fighting in Black Friday shopping confrontations.)