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.

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.

Finished up the Socratic dialogs for this course and am now into Aristotle.  I need to sit down and gather my thoughts about the dialogs and capture it here.  The last one I did, Sophist, was a bear in that they kept going off on tangents about all kinds of things while obstensibly trying to define what a sophist was/is.  And Plato — which is who wrote/wrote down the Socratic dialogs — continued what appears to be his habit of letting his speakers explore every corner of a side issue even though the whole reason to bring it up is to shoot it down.

Luckily, sometimes the asides are as interesting as the main conversation.  But sometimes they’re not.  Anyway, I’ve got to gather my thoughts.  A lot of good stuff in there, and not all of it on my intended topic — leadership communication — which is a bonus.

It’s funny how little nuggets of wisdom are in places you hardly expect to find them.  I mean, I am reading the Great Books, but it’s easy to think you’ve got a piece figured out and then get surprised.

The Socratic dialog Timaeus is basically a run-down of the formation of the universe and everything in it.  There’s a lot of talk about how the the four major elements of creation — fire, water, earth and air — are made up of triangles and how that affects certain things. Here’s a tidbit:

But when the roots of the triangles are loosened by having undergone many conflicts with many things in the course of time, they are no longer able to cut or assimilate the food which enters, but are themselves easily divided by the bodies which come in from without. In this way every animal is overcome and decays, and this affection is called old age.

I started reading at a faster clip, but embedded within to the discredited science I found eternal truths or things that shine light onto the modern world — at least my dim understanding of the modern world.

Here’s one:

That which is apprehended by intelligence and reason is always in the same state; but that which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason, is always in a process of becoming and perishing and never really is.

That pretty much describes all political messaging and commentary, as far as I can tell. Also logical versus emotional argument that makes so many relationships so much fun.

And, more to the point of my language studies, there’s this:

Thus, then, as the several elements never present themselves in the same form, how can any one have the assurance to assert positively that any of them, whatever it may be, is one thing rather than the other? No one can.

And this one sums up where I come down in the “lock ‘em up” versus “addiction is a disease” argument:

…and is for the most part of his life deranged, because his pleasures and pains are so very great; his soul is rendered foolish and disordered by his body; yet he is regarded not as one diseased, but as one who is voluntarily bad, which is a mistake.

Which explains why Portugal, which decriminalized drugs, is having more success than we are filling up prisons.

If you want the deep discussion these guys have it. If you want to read it for yourself, here you go.

Bust of Socrates at the Louvre by Eric Gaba.

Just got done reading Plato’s Cratylus, which is a dialog between Socrates and Hermogenes and Cratylus.  It’s about names, and whether or not names represent a thing because they convey or represent some truth about, or the essence of, that thing, or if they are just a bunch of name tags we’ve all agreed to use so we don’t confuse each other. There’s a lot of talk about the nature of things and lots of tracing Greek words back to their original meanings — sometimes their constituent letters. For a bit there is was kind of like reading Genesis: and the oo sound, which is the essence of the expression of awe, begat goo-goo ga-ga, which begat good, which begat goodness, which begat the Goo-Goo Dolls.

This dialog is under the Great Idea of language, hence the 30 or so pages about the naming of things.  Oddly enough, this is something I wrote about back when I was writing commentaries.  It’s not at all surprising to find out somebody else has done a much better job of thinking about it, and that I wrote a confident commentary without any knowledge of the existence of classic texts on the subject, much less what those texts said.

My main point before, which came up when we were deciding on a name for our daughter, agreed with the position that there was something inherently appropriate about a good name. That the name, or the sound of the name, was somehow right for that person or thing. I was very conscious, for example, that the fact that my two favorite first names for our daughter, Alexandra and Regina, said something.  Nothing “my little princess” about those.  Of course another thing I said in my old commentary was that people with the wrong name — a name that didn’t suit them — usually ended up being called something else. I have a brother-in-law and an old friend called Butch. I also know a guy who outgrew “Butch” and went back to his given name. So I don’t think there’s any one perfect name for a person — at least no one a parent can pick out while the child is in the womb — but I do think you can saddle a child with something so far from his personality that he’ll end up being called Butch or Rusty.

Knowing that to be the case, I argued for our daughter’s middle name to be very different from her first name, hence Alexandra Skye.  At the time it was more about wanting a nice flow and after the long Alexandra the simple Skye seemed to fit.  But also, I knew she might end up not wanting to carry around a big name like that, or might be some kind of retro-hippie-vegan, and then Skye would come in handy.

Well, the upshot of all that Socratic dialoging was that to know the name of a thing is not the same as knowing the thing — at least it’s not sufficient. That was kind of the start of the discussion, and kind of the end, too.  Here’s how Socrates put it:

How real existence is to be studied or discovered is, I suspect, beyond you and me. But we may admit so much, that the knowledge of things is not to be derived from names. No; they must be studied and investigated in themselves.

It struck me as I typed that quote that it’s a pretty good argument against book learning, which is kind of ironic.

Interesting Op-ED at the NY Times today about how universities ought to change to meet new challenges.  I don’t think most people realize the modern system dates back as far as it does, and that it was apparently adopted from Germany. The Germans have an even more rigid system where your future academic life — and in some ways your ability to educate yourself into a better life — are set early on — 3rd or 5th grade. Can’t recall which.

The author beats on the tenure system pretty well, and I must say that, while I’d like to protect academic freedom as much as the next guy, that system is probably a little too protective of professors.

The thing I really got from it was what the author said about specialization.  They make kind of a big deal about this in The Great Conversation, one of the cornerstone books of the program I’m in at Harrison Middleton.  I never really thought about it much, except that I was personally lucky to be able to do what I wanted at the undergraduate level and then wrap it all into a BA in liberal arts.  I had to do some interdisciplinary work, of course, but that was the good part for me (except for the math parts, of course), as my goal was to become a better writer.  So I wanted a wide range of things.  At the graduate level I was narrowed down quite a bit, of course, but still, the writing classes let me investigate some other things.  That, combined with my electives and the ability to range from hifalutin theory to green-eyeshade journalism made it a good program.

So I think more people could benefit from things like the Great Books, that expose you not only to a wide range of things, but to famousely smart people who were themselves extremely well-versed in a wide range of things.