First Draft #2 - August 10th 2020
Welcome to the second edition of our newsletter. This month we're talking pronouns, presidents, atomic bombs and more. Have a thought about any of the below? Get in touch by replying to this email.
(EX) PRESIDENTIAL RHETORIC
It has been a sorry period for Presidential rhetoric. President Trump has offered little for the anthologies, though his genre-breaking inauguration - “American Carnage” - will not be forgotten. (“Weird shit,” was said to have been George W. Bush’s description.) Trump’s opponent will not take us to new rhetorical heights should he displace him. Biden is a poor, gaffe-prone orator and his campaign is most effective when Trump does the talking.
It fell instead to the previous office holders to remind us of the rhetorical power of the office last week. Clinton then Bush and Obama each delivered powerful eulogies to the lawmaker and civil rights icon, John Lewis. On a sombre occasion, each balanced reverence with levity, befitting both the man they celebrated and the ideas he represented. Great funeral rhetoric is located primarily in the past but not entirely. Like the Athenian Pericles and Lincoln at Gettysburg, who eulogised the dead to promote the causes they died for, each turned an eye to present strife. Scarcely concealed swipes were directed at the current President and each speaker addressed the relevance of Lewis’s ideals to the civil rights movement today. Shakespeare’s Mark Antony is probably literature’s most famous funeral orator. His powerful, if cynical, eulogy to Caesar was designed to smooth his own path to power. As I watched each of the Lewis eulogies, I wished any one of them would attempt the same. (JW)
NUCLEAR AGREEMENT
Well-made arguments change minds and shape culture, and there is no greater example than how we have come to view the atomic bombs detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki 75 years ago this month. Today polls reveal most people think the bombings were justified. A new book, The Beginning or the End by Greg Mitchell, traces the formation of that consensus to a single article published by Harper’s magazine in 1947. Immediately after the war, public opinion had threatened to turn against the use of the bomb. The New Yorker's John Hersey exposed the horrors of its aftermath in Hiroshima, a long article that became a bestselling book. Influential columnists ruminated on whether such devastation could ever be justified. In response, President Truman’s war secretary, Henry Stimson, submitted his own article to Harper's entitled “Why We Used the Atomic Bomb”. The comprehensive account of the weeks leading up to August 1945 was reprinted in papers across America. It contained several questionable assertions, but the central point, that the bombs saved one million lives by bringing the war to an abrupt end, resonated. The New York Times, which had raised questions over the bomb's use, declared Stimson’s case “irrefutable”. Today, Hersey’s Hiroshima is a canonical piece of 20th century journalism. Stimson’s is all but forgotten. But on the crucial question of whether the bombings were justified, the argument of the latter has prevailed. (AD)
JARGON BUSTERS. Innovation.
The word plagues every corporate document you encounter. In one FTSE 100 company’s annual report, chosen at random, I counted 44 variants. There were “innovative ways of working”, “innovation partners” and “on-trend innovations”. Management processes were “innovative” and so was the recycling. The “pioneering innovations” I expect took place in the “Innovation Centre”.
So, what’s wrong with the word? It’s certainly not a lack of history. As early as 1625, Francis Bacon argued a cautious case in favour “Of Innovations”. “He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils,” he argued. A business school might call him an “incremental innovator”: “innovateth greatly, but quietly, and by degrees scarce to be perceived.”
Personally, I am offended by its imprecision. “Innovation” just means “new” but the word is invariably used to imply an improvement which suggests something of Silicon Valley’s slavish love of the “new new thing”. But it’s real problem is its ubiquity. An overused word loses its power with each new telling. I object to “innovation” not because it means one thing and not another, but because it means nothing at all. (JW)
WHY FIGHT BULLSHIT?
Each month we take an example or two of business jargon to task, following in the footsteps of the great Lucy Kellaway. We do so mostly because it is fun, but we also hope for constructive reasons too. Jargon erects a barrier between reader and audience. Within that gap, obfuscation and downright deception can lurk. It was this moral imperative that so exercised George Orwell in his 1946 essay Politics & The English Language. But jargon isn’t just bad for society, it’s bad for businesses too. The business commentator Scott Galloway wages war against the tech bullshit in the US. His chart of bullshit levels in company “mission statements” against performance after IPO is a masterpiece. And this 2017 Guardian Long Read (journalist jargon for “essay”?) tells the story of jargon’s destructive power, when Pacific Bell, a telecommunications firm, spent $40 million embracing bullshit so impenetrable that California’s utility regulator was forced to intervene. (JW)
A DEBATE ON CALLING FOR A DEBATE
“We need to have a debate about that”, said Keir Starmer when pressed by a GMB presenter on the issue of trans women in sport. Translation: “I beg you, don’t make me talk about this”. Rarely a week goes by without a politician calling for a debate about something. The funny thing is, most of the debates called for are already taking place. To call for a debate does not advance debate. It is often to affect high-mindedness while sneakily avoiding saying anything at all. Want a sensible, adult debate? Make a sensible, adult argument. (AD)
WHAT'S IN A PRONOUN?
Pronouns are the new battleground of the ever-raging culture war. More interesting than whether to affix one to your email signature, however, is the linguistic problem that has provided the ground on which to fight: Why does the English language not have a satisfactory gender-neutral pronoun?
Amia Srinivasan explored the long history of the hunt for a better pronoun in her excellent essay in the LRB last month. The French have “on” but “one”, our equivalent, is too pompous. Coleridge liked “it”, but history has shown us has the dangerous dehumanising power of the word. “Their” has long been used - and wins the approval of The Economist’s Johnson - but in certain instances it pulls one up short, in particular when the subject and the pronoun disagree in their number. “Josh (singular) has lost their (plural) keys,” immediately encourages the question: “whose keys?” In pursuit of alternatives, linguists of the 19th century and 20th century sought new pronouns entirely, which leads us to the highlight of Srinivasan’s essay:
“In 1978, a school board in Florida formally adopted e, together with the accusative form ir. The board offered the following dialogue to show teachers how to use the pronoun, apparently unaware that it was encouraging them to speak in a Dorset accent:
question: Why did e miss ir bus?
answer: E was afraid to go home.
question: Who was e with?
answer: E was by ir self.”
Well worth reading the whole thing. It’s a long essay but you have time: this debate has raged for centuries, and will continue for centuries more. (JW)
CIVIL CULTURE WAR
Not everything is civil on Twitter but Teresa M. Bejan always is. She is a Professor of Political Theory at Oxford and author of the excellent Mere Civility, published by HUP in 2017 and Ms Bejan is a model of good sense, civilly expressed. In a long thread last month she provided a clear guide to the arguments at stake in the debate over the “cancel culture”. I do no more here than summarise her argument which is best read at length in her book. Bejan makes an important distinction between parthesia, the Greek word for “saying it all” and isegoria which means “equal speech in public”, the right of all citizens in ancient Athens to take the speaker’s platform and the democratic assembly. The proponents of the cancel culture, says Bejan, want something desirable – the equal freedom of all citizens to be heard. In an unequal political culture we are a long way from that happy outcome. But there is an obvious risk that the pursuit of isegoria will harm the prior and more important value of parthesia. The strategy of refusing to hear opinions that are thought disagreeable will reduce parthesia while doing very little to add to isegoria. (PC)
LANGUAGE AND BEYOND
We enjoyed 1843 Magazine’s round up of corona-era dating neologisms from around the world. For the Cuomosexuals among you.
The Lincoln Project’s podcast interview with Rita, a septuagenarian repentant Trump voter from Texas, is surprisingly moving.
Anne Applebaum on how to cut through in a world of information bubbles.
Every week NYT tech columnist Kevin Roose re-posts the top performing posts from US Facebook. The list - usually dominated by Trump, Ben Shapiro and other figures on the fringe right - offers an interesting insight into the platform’s political impact. Read Roose’s thread on the bizarre reason child-trafficking stories do so well on the platform.
Like everything he writes, Quentin Skinner’s new book From Humanism To Hobbes is full of insight about the importance of rhetoric in Western philosophy and literature. It contains an essay on the rhetorical personification of the idea of the state in the work of Thomas Hobbes and another on the use of rhetorical redescription in the work of Machiavelli. But the real gems are on Shakespeare - on Portia’s speech in court in The Merchant of Venice and the use of rhetorical technique in Coriolanus.
This on the fading religion of Zoroastrianism is brilliant.
A thought-provoking analysis of what the remote work revolution will mean over the long term in the Atlantic.
The Daily's interview with Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, in which he expresses regret over the site's incentive structure based on retweets and likes, is worth your time.
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