First Draft #1 - June 24th 2020
Hello and welcome to First Draft, a newsletter from Philip Collins, Josh Williams and Alex Dymoke. At The Draft we help companies and politicians build and state their case. We’re specialists in persuasion, rhetoric and argument, but we’re interested in public language in all its forms. First Draft is a monthly collection of links, observations and topical thoughts that didn’t make it into our blogs and columns. It’s everything we found interesting that you might find interesting too. Tell us what you think (of First Draft or anything else) by replying to this email, or emailing: info@thedraftwriters.com.
JARGON BUSTERS: The new normal
The "new normal" is the jargon phrase of our times. It is the salutation to every email and the rueful joke that starts each Zoom call. You can read about it in one of any number of articles. You can look at pictures of what it looks like all over the world (these are actually rather good). If you have caught yourself googling it, then you have joined the ranks of the record numbers who have done so too. What a shame then that the phrase is such nonsense. The two words, "new" and "normal", surely cancel each other out. If it is "new" then, by definition, it cannot yet be "normal". If it has become "normal" then it can no longer be "new". Blame the word "new". Tempting though its shiny newness might be, it really is a terrible word because it is so perishable. Nothing is new for very long. Name something new now and you will live to regret it when it is old tomorrow. The only purpose of the word, surely, is to illustrate that you are "Not Old" when the "Old" has become toxic. "Not Old Labour" wouldn't have had quite the same ring, but it is what was meant. JW
GREATS OF RHETORIC
This newsletter lands as lockdown is being all but lifted. The history of rhetoric has an unfortunate connection with pandemic. Rhetoric as a discipline begins in earnest with Pericles, whose Funeral Oration, as written in the version that comes down to us by Thucydides, was the first address to make the case for democratic government. This is the origin of the phrase, sometimes attributed to Shelley and sometimes to Tony Blair, “the many not the few”. But, as Pericles spoke, it was not just the enemies of the city that threatened its citizens. Athens was swept by plague and one of its victims was the founding father of rhetoric, Pericles. PC
THE UNCERTAIN EFFICACY OF RACIAL BIAS TRAINING
Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, took a knee outside the vault of his local Chase branch this month and courted cries of hypocrisy. Just a year and a half ago, his bank was forced to pay a $19.5 million settlement to six current and former employees who had suffered racial discrimination. That same settlement forced the bank to invest $4.5 million in training programmes to tackle bias in the firm. Training programmes like these are big business. Diversity consultants charge US firms some $8 billion each year according to McKinsey. The more important question is whether they do any good, and evidence suggests their impact is limited. Most diversity training programmes involve confronting people with their unconscious, or implicit, biases. Unfortunately, as this excellent review in Fast Company shows, doing so is not straightforward. Unconscious bias is hard to evaluate. It accounts for less of our biases than conscious bias does. It has less impact over our behaviour than we might expect. And beliefs are extremely hard to change, particularly if someone is resistant to changing them. Some evidence even suggests that unconscious bias training might make us more biased, not less. JW
STRANGE CORPORATE USAGE OF THE MONTH: A-ha!
This does not refer, when it is uttered in the awayday seminar room, to the Norwegian band who had a number 2 hit with Take On Me in October 1985. Instead, it is a corporate buzzword for the moment you realize something. The a-ha moment. There was an older, perfectly acceptable dreary cliché which means the same thing, which is the light bulb moment. It is just about possible to say “light bulb moment” without turning into Alan Partridge. Surely you feel daft saying this. Knowing me, knowing you. A-ha! PC
MODERN RHETORIC
A few weeks ago a speech by the rapper Killer Mike went viral after protests erupted in Atlanta following the death of George Floyd. The speech was a masterpiece of Aristotelian rhetoric. His opening assertion, “I stand here today the son of an Atlanta City police officer”, is a classic ethos (or character) appeal, adding credence to the criticism which followed. He appealed to our reason – logos, in Aristotle speak – by arguing for a house as a place of refuge which must be preserved so it can be a sanctuary, or base, in times of struggle. And his moving tribute to a fellow black man slain like a “zebra in the jaws of lion” was a harrowing display of the persuasive art of pathos (or emotion). Ethos, logos and pathos together added up to an affecting and, crucially, effective, plea for calm. AD
THE NEWS IN A POEM: Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias
Horace Smith is the great unknown poet of statues. In 1817 the British Museum announced that it had acquired an ancient statue of Rameses II. While he was spending Christmas with a friend and his wife, Smith, a banker and political writer by day, challenged his hosts to a sonnet competition.
Smith’s poem, which takes its title from the Greek name for the pharaoh, ran as follows: "I am great Ozymandias," saith the stone, The King of Kings; this mighty City shows the wonders of my hand”. Smith’s friends were Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley and Percy won the competition with the following lines: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' Nothing beside remains”.
The poem is a powerful meditation on time which is memorialised and petrified in a statue. A moment pretends to be immune to the ravages of time. The same idea is expressed by Larkin in An Arundel Tomb when he writes of the statuesque earl and countess caught holding hands: “the strange fidelity they never meant, has come to be their final blazon”. We have seen recently that, when we stop history for a moment and commit it to a memorial, the values that inspired the statue may not last.
That very idea, which has seen statues of Edward Colston and George Washington come down, has been an irresistible temptation to poets. WB Yeats’s first published work was a rather dreadful fairy tale in epic verse called The Island of Statues. And he also wrote an obscure poem called The Statues which the critic Edmund Wilson regarded as one of his worst. Shelley, though, gets the idea into powerful lines that leave better poets than Horace Smith in the shade.
The last poetic words on the news, and a tragic echo of George Floyd, are in a poem which is actually written on the side of the statue. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” writes Emma Lazarus in The New Colossus. PC
THE NEW PICKET LINE
For today’s business leaders, there is pressure from within and pressure from without, and the former may prove harder to ignore. A perceptive piece in the Economist explored why Twitter and Facebook have taken such differing approaches to moderating content (a subject I have also written about recently in CityAM). The Economist asks how long Mark Zuckerberg can hold out against his increasingly restive employees, whose political views are less friendly to Donald Trump’s White House than the line Zuckerberg is treading. Employee action was once a mainstay of corporate life, as this fascinating piece published by the ONS in 2015 showed. Strike action has fallen dramatically since Thatcher broke the miners, and the period after the 2008 financial crisis was remarkably strike-free. But we are perhaps beginning to see labour organising once again, and, as Facebook staff showed, they are doing so in new ways: there are no picket lines for today’s e-workers, but instead an out-of-office automated email. On Friday 19th June, Facebook changed tack for the first time, removing a series of adverts from the Donald Trump re-election campaign. While protest is changing, there is power in it still. JW
JARGON BUSTERS: Leverage
In a business conversation this week somebody said, in all seriousness, that they were seeking to leverage their skillset. Talking like this has two effects. First, it marks the speaker out as someone to be avoided at all costs. More important, it drains a good word of meaning. “Leverage” is a precise term which describes the relationship between debt and equity. It is the American equivalent of what the British call gearing. Both leverage and gearing are vivid uses of language. Both refer to a mathematically precise calculation and both give you the visual sense of uplift or acceleration that is possible with an appropriate ratio of debt to equity. The problem with “leverage” comes when people start using the term detached from that precision. It then becomes an uninteresting, imprecise and not at all vivid all-purpose metaphor. “Leverage” is slowly being consigned to the dustbin reserved for dreadful business-speak. That would be a shame and so here we leverage our skillset to start the campaign to preserve leverage for proper use. PC
IN BRIEF
Donald Trump: rhetorical master? - An American academic breaks down the rhetorical techniques employed by Donald Trump. She outlines six strategies: three which serve to ingratiate Trump with his followers, and three which alienate Trump and his followers from everyone else.
A reckoning for objectivity: the changing language of news - Pulitzer winning Wesley Lowery argues in the NYT it’s time to abandon the “appearance of objectivity” and instead focus on being fair and telling the truth. Lowery writes newsrooms too often deprive readers of facts that could expose reporters to accusations of imbalance. A cultural shift in American journalism is touched on by The Guardian’s (US-born) opinion editor Jonathan Shainin in this excellent edition of the Talking Politics podcast. The discussion explores the Tom Cotton op ed debacle at the New York Times which led to the departure of opinion editor James Bennett.
Historical echoes - 2020 is a lot like 1968: racial tensions boiling over; an unpopular president fears electoral failure; Republicans pin their hopes on “law and order”. But David Frum in the Atlantic says there’s another year which makes a more apt comparison. This was a year in which the incumbent party presided over a deadly pandemic, an economic depression and a “nationwide spasm of bloody urban racial violence”. The year was 1920. In 1920 the incumbent party suffered a crushing defeat, despite having just won a world war. “The triumphant challenger, Warren Harding, was not some charismatic superhero,” writes Frum. “He didn’t need to be.”
Dog whistles - An article Economist examines the growing body of evidence showing that while overtly racist language is in decline, implicit racism is proliferating. An example: academics designed AI machines which could identify the race of suspects based on language used in news reports
An argument for today - Samuel L Jackson narrates James Baldwin's unfinished work on the murders of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr and Medgar Evers in the brilliant documentary, I Am Not Your Negro. Originally released in 2017, you can watch it on iPlayer now.
The other pandemic - We were sad to read of the conviction of brave Filipino-American journalist Maria Ressa of cyberlibel in the Philippines last week week. We first read about her in Peter Pomerantsev’s excellent book This Is Not Propaganda, which exposes authoritarian governments’ manipulation of social media to eliminate descent. Disinformation is so rife in the Philippines one Facebook executive said it was “patient zero” in the global misinformation pandemic.
NEW FROM US
Josh bravely stands up for big oil in an article for City AM: Beyond Petroleum: Is BP finally moving from rhetoric to reality?
Phil’s analysis of a looming rupture between No. 10 and No. 11: When Downing Street neighbours fall out
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