joe ferrare's blog

Read an interesting look at the role of eloquence in decision making and persuasion.  It was written by Sir Francis Bacon, and what he did was break down how we think things through by looking at how affection and reason act on how we think.  Here’s the quote.  It’s short, if a little heavy going.

The difference is, that the affection beholdeth merely the present; reason beholdeth the future and sum of time. And, therefore, the present filling the imagination more, reason is commonly vanquished; but after that force of eloquence and persuasion hath made things future and remote appear as present, then upon the revolt of the imagination reason prevaileth.

I think he’s using the word imagination slightly differently than the where-we-make-things-up kind of imagination most people think of these days.  If he’s not, I am, so I’m going to switch to calling it thinking.

Basically, things that are more immediate carry more weight in our thoughts.  So, of the things we’re thinking about, the things we like are  immediate and the things coming from our reason are distant.  Affection wins not because what we like is better, but because we feel what we like more and give it more weight in our thoughts.

But if we apply a little eloquence in the service of persuasion, it brings those distant things closer, giving them greater weight. Once that happens our perspective changes and reason prevails.

I think this explains, among other things, every pep talk every given. Take the Braveheart speech, for example.  Here’s the relevant bit:

Wallace: And I see a whole army of my countrymen here in defiance of tyranny. You have come to fight as free men, and free men you are. What would you do without freedom? Will you fight?

Veteran soldier: Fight? Against that? No, we will run; and we will live.

Wallace: Aye, fight and you may die. Run and you’ll live — at least a while. And dying in your beds many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that for one chance, just one chance to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom!!!

Wallace and Soldiers: Alba gu bra! (Scotland forever!)

Those guys clearly had great affection for their own lives and limbs and would dearly liked to have kept them. Wallace uses eloquence to transport them into an imagined future — making “things future and remote appear as present,” as Bacon said.  And so they fought.

I use this as the parent of an 8-year-old all the time.  Kids are much closer to their feelings and rely on their reasoning less, obviously.  So you have to explain things to them in a way that makes them feel the distant and remote and save part of their allowance for the future.

It also explains lots of sales pitches, especially for things that don’t fill an immediate need or want.  You need that gold. The future is bleak, the dollar is inflating/deflating/being gnawed at by a mouse in your mattress.  Suddenly, paying a bundle for a piece of metal that somebody else may end up actually holding for you makes sense — at least for the salesman.

Was reading William James last night to finish up some homework. He wrote about a fringe or overtone that accompanies words that is pretty interesting. At first blush it seems to be part of this great code talking phenomenon we’re seeing these days, the kind of code where there are normal words that mean something completely different to certain groups or people — socialism, for example.

James sums it up this way:

Each word, in such a sentence, is felt, not only as a word, but as having a meaning.  The “meaning” of a word taken thus dynamically in a sentence may be quite different from its meaning when taken statically or without context. The dynamic meaning is usually reduced to the bare fringe we have described, of felt suitability or unfitness to the context and the conclusion.

That suitability part is also important.  He talks about how we put this fringe or associate meaning on words, and it becomes more important that the word fit the sentence or meaning than pretty much anything else. He claims that you can slip words in that are wrong, but fit in the general tone and meaning, and no one will notice or object.  Use the right word that goes against the perceived tone and meaning, however, and it throws people off.

I guess this is how things like the misuse of the word socialism jump the shark and take on a life of their own.  The word seems to fit, and all the logical discussion and dictionary reading in the world isn’t going make some people think it sounds wrong in a discussion about how the government is going to take their money and use it to benefit other people.

Same for mean-spirited, I think.  What some people see as kicking someone out of the nest, others see as mean-spirited.  It doesn’t matter that they’re now flying where once they only sat on their feathers and achieved nothing.  It was mean to upset them.

It also explains, I think, how you can watch someone deliver a speech and have it seem to make sense, but when you read it or listen to it later you realize there was not one coherent sentence in the whole thing.  I run into this sometimes trying to write a speech story.

I need to work this into what I’m doing, of course.  I’m studying leadership and communication, and this is right at the heart of some parts of it.

Read this blog post today, and couldn’t agree more.  I’ve been using Groklaw as an example for years, particularly when I was teaching public affairs at the Defense Information School. My point basically was: woe be unto you if this kind of community/site organizes around defeating you. I also made the point that Groklaw was more than a bad time, it was a great resource for SCO, had they used it.  But instead of reading what others were saying and trying to get on the side of right, they bulled ahead toward the cliff.  A good PAO would have followed the site, gone into the boss and laid out the other side’s case.  You’ve got to be prepared to be hated, but you owe it to the boss to do it (at least in the Army).

Of course, this is another benefit of using Linux.  I would never have found or followed Groklaw had I not been a Linux user.

If you’ve ever been here before you can see the new look.  I’ve decided to give the blog a serious go and see if I can actually maintain some momentum.

The theme is based on the jillig WordPress theme, but I changed the top graphic and some of the text colors.  The graphic is just a bit of a photo of a fountain in Rome.  Actually, it was a photo of me and my daughter, but I liked the orange-green-blue progression of the basin of the fountain.  So I pulled it out, manipulated it (just blurring and a Lomo filter, mostly), and threw my name on there.  Didn’t like the WordPress blog-name insert, though I may mess with the CSS and put it back if I get it looking better.

Until then, happy Easter.

In Leviathan Hobbes wrote:

For commentaries are commonly more subject to cavil than the text, and therefore need other commentaries; and so there will be no end of such interpretation.

If that doesn’t describe and explain flame wars — and perhaps the whole internet, nothing ever will.  It also explains the whole cottage industry of political writers who do nothing but parse other people’s words.  I’m going to write something long on parsing soon.  It’s the scourge of our age.

The day shot by after the long (six-day) snowcapalyse weekend I had. Went from meeting to meeting so fast I couldn’t catch up on the old e-mail until after I was supposed to be gone. Now I’m getting ready to read some of Hobbes’ Leviathan.  I’ve read parts of it before, and the underlining pen got a workout.

Dante's Paradiso

Read some of Dante’s Paradiso for home work.  Only one line really stood out for me.  He has Beatrice, his personification of love (and real girl he never got) say:

You make yourself dull with false imaginings so that you do not see what you would see had you cast it off.

Ain’t it the truth?  In fact, it’s so true it reminds me of a story from The Onion, which maybe isn’t Jon Stewart credible, but is right up there with the opposite of whatever Colbert seems to be saying on the surface.

The biggest false imagining is that we have an inkling of what the hell we’re talking about, of course.  It’s that certainty — especially dogmatic certainty — that closes off our ears.

The rest of it (that I had to read, a couple of cantos), we very nice, but just more stuff to read, really.  Wonderfully written, but it boils down to one guy’s best guess at what heaven would be like.