Alan Barker

The Human Givens approach: a short introduction

This free e-book appeared in my inbox the other day, courtesy of the Human Givens College.  It's worth sharing.  I find the HG approach very sympathetic, and, although I have no background in therapy or counselling, the body of ideas that I've found in the HG community continues to inspire me in my work on communciation skills, problem solving, creativity, persuasion and influencing.  It's also proved invaluable personally. 

 

This useful introduction is written by Julia Welstead.  Julia is a human givens practitioner with a private practice in Edinburgh. She also runs HG-based training days on mental health at work for a UK conservation organisation and workplace stress sessions for staff within companies, including banks.

 

Download and take a look, then hand it on to anyone you think might find it useful.

Download Human_Givens-The_Essentials_E-Book

Arouse, Withhold, Fulfil

Houston, We Have a Narrative:

Why Science Needs Story

Randy Olson

University of Chicago Press

2015

978 0 226 27084 5

$20; £14.00

 

Scientists urgently need to use narrative well, and Randy Olson has developed a set of tools to help them.  But the tools can easily become empty formulae, so Olson offers a strategy to help scientists develop an enhanced understanding of narrative: what he calls ‘narrative intuition’.

That summary of Olson’s new book a model he calls ‘ABT’: and, but, therefore.  Olson borrowed it from Trey Parker, one of the writers on South Park. Hollywood, claims Olson, is the place to go for such models. 

(He gives short shrift to humanities departments, who are so busy ideologising that they wouldn't know a narrative if it...  Olson is not polite about humanities academics.)

Olson has developed this material in the years since publishing Don’t Be Such a Scientist.  That book offered five key principles of good science communication (I discuss them here); this one develops practical, useable techniques.

Why does science need narrative so badly?  Partly, says Olson, because scientists tend to communicate by offering “piles of facts”.  Partly because science is signally failing to engage a non-scientific audience.  (He is especially good on the conundrum of communicating climate change.)  And partly because a lack of narrative awareness is damaging science itself.  Journals are increasingly publishing research that’s ‘significant’ rather than sound: according to scientists Olson has spoken to, many papers in Science and Nature are overstated in their conclusions.  “Most of the claimed statistically significant effects in traditional medical research,” claims John Ioannidis of Stanford, “are false positives or substantially exaggerated.”  (Olson noticeably avoids discussing the role of Big Pharma in all this.)

The other reason scientists need to understand narrative is that they’re so hostile to it.  This storyphobia, Olson suggests, is the result of a profound misunderstanding of the terms narrative, story and storytelling.  He quotes Yarden Katz, in a paper called Against Storytelling of Scientific Results: “Great storytellers embellish and conceal information to evoke a response in their audience.”

Not so, says Olson: Katz and other scientists are confusing content with form.  True, stories can deceive, fabricate and exaggerate; but they can also be “accurate, honest, true and reliable”.  Storytelling itself is as value free as E=mc².  

“The bottom line,” asserts Olson, “is that I fail to see anyone taking [a] critical approach to these terms.”  

So, in this book, he sets out to do just that.

He defines a story as “a series of events that happen along the way in the search for a solution to a problem.”  Given this definition, Olson can link narrative to both explanation and argumentation.  He claims, for example, that the IMRAD structure of experimental papers – Introduction (I), Methods, Results And Discussion – “is the structure of a story, which has a beginning (I), middle (M & R), and end (D).” 

Sleight of hand?  IMRAD is surely an explanatory structure, designed to help other scientists replicate an experiment.  My own experience of working with scientists suggests that they tend to offer, not "piles of facts", but over-elaborate explanations.  Our task as science communicators is surely not just to find the core narrative, but to help scientists explain better.

Olson goes further.  He compares ABT to the argumentation structure offered by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein in their book They Say, I Say (present what your opponents say, then what you have to say, before reconciling the two).  The two structures are the same! What’s more, they share that structure with the Hegelian Triad (thesis, antithesis, synthesis).  Narrative encompasses, not just explanation, but argument as well.

Little wonder that Olson can claim, “in science, narrative is everywhere.”

Heady stuff.  And perhaps he’s on to something.  Maybe the rhetoric of explanation and argumentation really is founded, at some deep, intuitive level, on narrative.  Maybe narrative itself instances an even deeper, musical structure of statement, tension and release: a structure that finds expression in IV-V-I chord progressions, in sonata form and the twelve-bar blues.

(Marcus Webb spoke illuminatingly on this theme at a recent conference.) 

It’s a pattern humans can’t resist: arouse, withhold, fulfil.  Maybe, if we can tap into that deeper structure, we can make our explanations and arguments more compelling.  And maybe this is useful, not just for scientists, but for anyone who wants to engage audiences in important issues.

To help us on our quest, Olson offers three tools, on three levels: word, sentence, paragraph.

ABT is the shaping tool at the sentence level.  And, but, therefore sits at the heart of his method because it embodies the narrative structure in a single, tripartite statement - and, probably, because Olson has found it the most practically useful of his techniques.  The model  bears a striking resemblance to Barbara Minto’s ‘situation, complication, question, response’ structure (which I use, substituting ‘problem’ for ‘complication’ to create SPQR as a Roman-themed mnemonic).  It also closely resembles the Freytag Triangle, although Olson doesn’t say so.

[Source]

ABT, says Olson, can rescue scientists from the structures they so often use: AAA (And, And, And) and DHY (Despite, However, Yet).   ABT informs the elevator pitch.   ABT, in short, “is the age-old structure of logic that works best for the masses.”

At the word level, Olson offers us the Dobzhansky Template.  Named after a notable Russian geneticist, this template helps us in our initial efforts to “find the narrative on a given topic”.  Which sounds very like Aristotle's "discovering the best available means of persuasion;" this template brings us close to invention, one of the five canons of classical rhetoric. 

The template goes like this:

Nothing in ___________ makes sense except in the light of __________ .

Fill in the blanks.

(Picture source: AZ Quotes)

The Dobzhansky Template gives your presentation a single focus.  It helps you stay on message when talking to the media.  It even helps you write grant proposals.

But this isn't quite invention proper.  The template focuses on a subject, rather than a topic.  The practical question for the science communicator is: how does subject [b] make sense of subject [a]?  Invention would suggest topics to answer that question: patterns of explanation, like comparision, cause and effect, categorisation...  patterns which simplify complexity.  None of this is quite narrative; but then, I've noticed that some patterns of explanation compel attention more than others - perhaps because they arouse, withhold and fulfil in a kind of narrative way. 

I'll try the Dobzhansky Template.  And I'll let you know how I get on.

At the paragraph level, Olson offers us the Hero’s Journey, as defined by Joseph Campbell and made famous by George Lucas.  Olson, wisely, tells us to treat this one with care.

All three  of these tools can become empty formulae, but none more so than the Hero’s Journey.  Check out the hundreds of books on movie writing that rely on it, and the resulting proliferation of identikit movies, “as if,” to quote Peter Suderman, “a mad scientist has discovered a secret process for making a perfect, or at least perfectly conventional, summer blockbuster.”  (An ironically apposite image, linking Hollywood to science in just the way Olson doesn’t want.)   Scientists can go to Hollywood for technical help with narrative, but they must resist “bending the science to tell a better story.”

(Olson recommends a good TED talk by Matthew Winkler on the Hero's Journey.  Find it here.)

Olson’s wisdom consists in precisely this: understanding that we should use his models perceptually rather than mechanically.  They help us see the structures inherent in our material, but we should resist imposing them unthinkingly.  The Hero’s Journey – that most seductive model of all – works best as an analytical tool, not a creative one.  “If you get to know it well,” he writes, “you’ll end up spotting the elements, by themselves, in real world situations.”

And, when you do start to spot those elements, you’ll develop narrative intuition: “the ability not just to know the basic rules of narrative but to have absorbed and assimilated them so thoroughly you can actually sense them.”

Narrative intuition helps you decide how much narrative to include; it helps you find the specifics that bring a narrative to life; and it helps you develop what Olson calls relatability: of character (“You’re just like me!”) and narrative (“That’s just what I did!”). 

But – and here Olson displays his wisdom once more – narrative intuition doesn’t come quickly

This book, like all Olson’s work, will benefit presenters of all kinds – not just scientists.  He mentions Nicholas Kristof, for instance, who dares to suggest that NGOs should embrace the dark arts of marketing to get inside people's brains.  And John Yorke, whose book Into the Woods delves into the fractal nature of stories.  And Karlyn Campbell, who writes in her book, The Rhetorical Act:

"Truths cannot walk on their own legs.  they must be carried by people to other people.  they must be explained, defended and spread through language, argument and appeal."

"This is a source of irritation for many scientists," claims Olson, "but it's the real world."  Hear, hear.

And there's more: hints and tips, examples and case studies, drawn from his own practical experience as a trainer, from real scientific papers and elsewhere. You’ll find yourself scurrying off to all the other books he’s read, and the TED talks he’s watched (and given).  

Olson is on to something.  I think he understands that narrative has some irreducible core of mystery; it can't ever quite succumb to rational analysis.  When it works, something magical happens.  That magic is what we rhetoricians are hunting for.  Olson's book will help us.  I for one will be using his ideas in my own quest, not least in my work with scientists.

I help scientists develop their communication skills, including - well, yes - their narrative intuition.  Find out about my work with the British Science Association here.  Contact me if you'd like to discuss training or coaching in science communication.

Appearances are everything

Simon Lancaster

Winning Minds: secrets from the language of leadership

Palgrave Macmillan, 2015

ISBN 978 1 137 46592 4

£19.99

Books for leaders – and for aspiring leaders – need to combine pragmatism, intellectual credibility and flair.  Many leaders are ex-managers: they’re no longer interested in doing things right, but in doing the right thing.  They want to know how to inspire.  They want ideas that are powerful but not complicated, delivered in a style that’s racy without being superficial.

Simon Lancaster manages all this with aplomb.  Other political speechwriters have tried to transfer their attention to the broader canvas of corporate leadership, not always successfully.  Lancaster at least shows that he’s worked with leaders outside the Westminster bubble.

His aim is to link rhetoric and neuroscience.  He notes, for example, that figures of speech might have specific psychological effects.  Take asyndeton, the omission of conjunctions:  the resulting short, sharp clauses imply rapid, shallow breathing and hence anxiety (one of David Cameron’s typical rhetorical strategies).  We’re more likely to believe statements if a speaker simply repeats them, or – intriguingly – if they contain rhymes. 

But Lancaster wants to go further: he suggests that “new developments in behavioural economics and neuroscience” show Aristotle’s rhetorical theories to have been “astonishingly accurate”.  

The neuroscientific framework Lancaster chooses to structure the book isn’t, in fact, new at all.  Paul MacLean’s theory of the triune brain appeared back in the 1960s; Lancaster seeks to align it to Aristotle’s three musketeers.  Logos, for example, maps to the neocortex, and pathos to the limbic, ‘emotional brain’.  The fit between ethos and MacLean’s ‘reptilian brain’ – which Lancaster renames ‘the instinctive brain’ – feels more forced, although the point that we expect our leaders to provide security and rewards is well made. 

Lancaster fits his various tools and techniques into these three neural compartments.  He clearly thinks the ‘instinctive brain’ by far the most important: he devotes 82 pages to it, compared to 47 for emotion and only 34 for the ‘logical brain’. 

He also touches on Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrell’s APET model – without acknowledging them, which is a shame.  Griffin and Tyrell stress the importance of pattern-matching: we create meaning by filtering sensory impressions through mental patterns, some inherited and some learned, and ‘tagging’ them emotionally.  These matches are mediated by the limbic system, which regulates the hormonal responses that Lancaster is so keen on:  the book is filled with “squirts” of dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin.  So the division between ‘instinct’ and ‘emotion’ seems fuzzier than he implies.

Unsurprisingly, language is Lancaster’s forte.  The chapters on metaphor and story are among his best.  You want to understand a leader?  “Analyse their metaphors.”  What’s your personal story?  How does it demonstrate your values?  How do organisations assemble stories into cultures?  Any manager seeking to transform themselves into a leader will find Lancaster’s answers useful.

And he understands the great rhetorical lesson is that appearances are everything.  If you can’t be honest – and leaders often face that challenge – then you must create “the illusion of honesty”.  The logical brain responds, not to actual logic, but to “the appearance of logic”.

Which doesn’t set us up very well for the final section.  If the logical brain is interested only in what seems logical – well, what price rational thinking?  (But then, rhetoric and logic have always enjoyed a stormy relationship.)  It’s hard to see how tricolons have much to do with logic.  And the Ciceronian speech structure (Exposition, Narration, Division and the rest) is surely not an exercise in balance (to which Lancaster devotes a whole chapter).  When did you ever hear a great leader open a speech with “On the one hand...”?

This final section loses momentum.  It’s a pity, because so much of the book is genuinely insightful and readable.    

There’s a hidden lesson in this book.  It’s never stated explicitly, but Lancaster’s superb examples of imaginary speeches point up a skill that’s critical for speechwriters, and probably for leaders as well: an endless curiosity about general knowledge. 

I run The Essentials of Speechwriting regularly for the European Speechwriter Network.  To find out about the next course, go to their homepage and look at 'upcoming events'.

Figure skating

The Elements of Eloquence  

Mark Forsyth

Icon Books, 2013

ISBN 978 184831621 8

£12.99

Mark Forsyth’s The Elements of Eloquence differs from his previous bestsellers in two respects.   First, it’s 50 pages shorter than either The Etymologicon or The Horologicon, which works to its advantage.   Secondly, it does more than catalogue a set of obscure linguistic facts entertainingly.   This book might actually be useful.

The title is something of a misnomer.   Forsyth himself admits that the figures of speech aren’t really the core components of eloquence, but only “one tiny, tiny aspect of rhetoric.”   The descriptive metaphor, historically, has been not so much chemical as botanical: the figures are ‘the flowers of rhetoric’, vivid ornaments that attract the attention and seduce the listener.   

They have a certain notoriety.   For a start, how many figures are there?  The Rhetorica ad Herrenium lists 65.   Quintilian deals with about 96 (some figures look confusingly similar to others).    In their heyday, however, the number rocketed.  Susenbrotus, in his popular manual of 1540, offered 132; thirty years later, Henry Peacham’s The Garden of Eloquence (that metaphor again) included no fewer than 184.   

In Renaissance society, the figures were promoted by the Humanists as essential tools of social advancement.   Tudor schoolboys were drilled in them relentlessly; would-be courtiers used them, rather as jazzers use licks, to fill the spaces of their conversation with ready-made wit.   The figures helped you cut a figure.   That’s why Shakespeare used them: the figures are inherently dramatic.

We moderns tend to neglect them.   Forsyth offers three plausible reasons: we prefer to teach information and technical skill rather than linguistic craft; we distrust rhetoric; and we labour under a confused notion of authenticity inherited from the Romantics, which makes the figures seem hopelessly artificial.    But we continue to use them, haphazardly.    Every memorable line – in a pop song, a speech or an advertising jingle – uses one or other of the figures.   The figure is what makes the line memorable.  And we use them in our own conversations.   The better acquainted we become with the figures, the more likely we shall be to use them well – which is what Forsyth wants us to do.    “These figures grow like wildflowers,” writes Forsyth, “but they can be cultivated too.”

Offer us too many, however, and we become befuddled.   (The impenetrable Greek names don’t help.)  Forsyth discusses about 38, though he mentions more without explaining them.   This puts him on a par with Jay Heinrichs, whose recent Word Hero covers about the same number.  Max Atkinson, in Lend Me Your Ears, concentrates on just three.    

The best strategy in becoming better figure-users may be to collect them, like specimens.   We could start with Atkinson’s core triad: antithesis, tricolon and the rhetorical question (of which Forsyth lists no fewer than 16 variants, although he discusses only about seven).   It’s easy enough to spot metaphor, irony and isocolon (all those bullet lists in parallel construction); listen to a few speeches and presentations, and you’ll soon find chiasmus, and even anaphora (“the king of rhetorical figures,” claims Forsyth).   Point them out and users will be intrigued, not to say flattered; suggest that they use them consciously, and they’ll soon develop the taste to use them well.   

Forsyth has written an entertaining field guide.  Thorough he isn’t (which is, I suppose, hyperbaton).  He resolutely avoids any talk of classification: no tropes or schemes here (scesis onomaton).  He provides the shortest of reading lists, and no index (which makes the asking price of £12.99 look a bit steep).  But then, unlike Heinrichs or Atkinson, he has no overt didactic aim.   As a result, he treats the subject more fully than Atkinson and more elegantly than Heinrichs.   If you really want to up your game in figure-spotting (anthimeria, m’lud), you probably need all three.

 

The roots of compulsion

Riveted: The Science of Why Jokes Make Us Laugh, Movies Make Us Cry, and Religion Makes Us Feel One With the Universe 

Jim Davies

Palgrave Macmillan, 2014

ISBN: 9781137279019

£14.44 (Amazon)

Kindle edition £9.94 (Amazon)

Gazing at a beautiful view from a log cabin; hearing a ghost story; finding yourself glued to pictures of a pile-up on the motorway; reciting the Lord’s Prayer... 

Are these experiences in any way alike? 

According to Jim Davies, they are.  “Strange as it may seem, compelling things share many similarities.”  In this book, Davies claims to do “something that has never been done before”: to show that “the qualities that are common to all these things fit like a key in a lock with our psychological proclivities.”  Generalise hypothetically from this commonality and – hey presto – we have a theory.

He calls it the compellingness foundations theory.  (The italics are his.)

Nothing as useful as a good theory, I always say.  So how useful is this one?  Well: quite a lot.  Davies – a professor at the Institute of Cognitive Science of Carleton University – posits six foundations for compellingness. 

I’ll buy four of them.

The first is social compellingness theory.  We tend to think that all patterns have something to do with social meaning, intention and agency; and we tend to believe social explanations that we hear from other people.  We look for reasons, not causes.  Faced with a mysterious or random catastrophe, for example, we assume conscious intent.  (Which explains conspiracy theories.)  We’re obsessed by status and gossip.  We have an unquenchable appetite for stories.  (Davies is good on stories, though not quite so good, perhaps, at telling them.)

Secondly, we tend to believe the things we fear or hope are true.  Believing in what we fear to be true has evolutionary advantages:  it’s safer to believe that the shape in the corner is a man-eater rather than a heap of old clothes.  Hope is a little more curious: “one of the ultimate reasons we do anything is so that we will have beliefs that make us happy.”  Thus, we prefer landscapes to abstract art; and we find gambling more compelling than regular work because “intermittent reward reinforces behaviour even more strongly than reliable reward”.   

Third, “we love patterns and repetition.”  We prefer patterns that are easy to understand.  And “we are more likely to like and even believe things that we find easy to understand.”   This fact triggers some interesting thoughts on music, and especially language:  quotations and idioms will stick if they are patterned simply.  

And fourth, we are compelled by incongruity, the flip side of pattern-recognition.  Incongruity triggers the desire to understand.  In fact, “sometimes people like things because they are confusing and hard to understand.  To explain this I created the concept of idea effort justification.” 

Davies's method in these chapters is breathless and excitable.  The connectivity sometimes suffers.  He plays the absent-minded professor, tumbling ideas onto the page, disconcertingly switching back and forth between subjects (“Returning to computer game addictions...”; “ let’s get back to miracles...”; “back to the subject...”).  With no obvious narrative arc or developing argument, he must rush us from one instant wonder to another to keep us hooked; the result is a kind of attention deficit disorder as we hurry to keep up. 

“Meditation sounds relaxing,” pants Davies as we swerve into Buddhism, “but some, this author included, find it more like taking your brain to the gym.  It’s hard work.”  I can believe it.  Nonetheless, those four chapters do provide interesting and useful material.  I found myself almost immediately using some of it in my own training work.  And Davies is never less than entertaining, despite the helter-skelter approach.  

But then his thinking gets worryingly untethered.  Where previously he’s tied his account more or less to specific loci of attention – social relationships, fear, hope, patterns and surprises – he now starts to drift around the human body, and to clock up the psychological biases without which no popular account of brain activity seems to be complete.  There’s plenty of interest here – we are more likely to give to charity after riding up an escalator than after riding down one, for example – but the links to compellingness are sometimes tenuous.  And when it comes to sex – surely the most compelling of all human activities – Davies’s account is oddly dull.

“What I have presented here,” we read at the end of his book, “is not a knock-down set of experiments showing us that all things we love are compelling for the same reasons.”  Well: for most of the book, I’d say that’s exactly what he has presented. 

By the time I hit the last chapter, I was beginning to wonder whether perhaps Davies’s definition of compellingness was a bit baggy.  His theory, after all, is essentially a theory of attention.   Some forms of attention are momentary; others have the quality of a lifelong trance.  How can we consider, say, the compulsion to watch a fight in the street, and a lifelong devotion to a religion, to be experiences of the same kind? 

The theory would need to include some mechanism that links instant focus to permanent belief. 

Perhaps the availability cascade can help.  Take the news, for example, which worries Davies a good deal.  We believe stories rather than statistics; as a result, we believe that the events portrayed in the news are more common than they are, which makes us think that they are important, which fuels our desire to know more about them, which drives further media attention...

Interestingly, Davies suggests that something similar goes on in science.  A researcher will submit a paper with unusual findings and suppress the less interesting results (this is the ‘file drawer problem’); and journals prefer to publish ‘significant’ results rather than results backing up previous results.  Consequently, compelling scientific findings sometimes win out over accurate ones.

(Which triggers a question about the robustness of Davies’s own hypotheses.  If he claims his book to be ‘super lumpy’ – to be principally about what humans have in common rather than how individuals differ – then how many of the very many papers he cites explain common human preferences?  How many are survivors of the file drawer problem?)

This last chapter lurches into a completely different register.  From explanation, Davies turns to argumentation, engaging in a lengthy quarrel with himself about why religions are so persistently compelling.  It's a dangerous rhetorical move and it threatens to destabilise the book completely.

Part of the argument is to compare religion with science.  As usual, Davies looks for shared features.  “Science and religion,” claims Davies, “have two things in common.”  First, both generate beliefs that people endorse or reject.  Secondly, both have methods for generating those beliefs: in other words, they have different epistemologies. Science, he concludes, beats religion as a body of knowledge because its epistemology has a built-in self-correcting mechanism that religion lacks.  But if you’re looking for beliefs that will help hold a society together, science, by his own admission, has not been so successful.

“Beautiful ideas are not always true,” Davies warns us, “and when we encounter a compelling idea, we must take extra care.”  He wants us to “use knowledge of what makes ideas compelling to help us make decisions about what to believe.”  It’s a big ask.  How do we start? 

I think we'd do well to stick to Davies's four really strong ideas.

“Be wary of compelling ideas that are framed in terms of people and relationships, are easy to understand, present an intriguing puzzle, or play to our hope and fears.” 

Ok.  I’ll try.

 

 

 

What shall we do?

Closing the Mind Gap

Ted Cadsby

BPS Books, 2014

ISBN 978 1 927483 78 7

£18.00

 

 

 

China Miéville sets one of his novels, The City & the City, in two cities occupying the same physical space.  Citizens of each city, partly through choice and partly through political coercion, have trained themselves to ‘unsee’ the other city: to recognize the buildings and inhabitants of the other city without seeing them.  Crossing the cognitive divide, even by accident, is regarded as ‘breaching’ – a terrible crime invoking unspeakable punishments.

Ted Cadsby, in his ambitious and enjoyable new book, similarly invokes two coterminous worlds.  We live in both, but usually recognise only one.  The consequences of ignoring the other can be profoundly damaging.

World #1 is, in his description, ‘straightforward’.  In World #1, we easily differentiate meaningful signals from noise; patterns are consistent across different situations; feedback is direct, timely and clear.  In World #1, learning is easy and prediction is reliable.  World #1 is the world “in which countless generations of our ancestors lived and in which we continue to spend much of our time.” 

World #2 is ‘complex’.  In World #2, signals are buried in noise; patterns vary across situations because each situation is unique; feedback on our actions is indirect, delayed and ambiguous.  World #2 has, Cadsby suggests, “snuck up on us”, principally in the evolutionary blink of an eye that witnessed the Industrial and Information Revolutions. 

The farmers of World #1 could reliably expect their predictions to turn out correctly (except, presumably, when they didn’t); the knowledge workers of World #2, in contrast, “cannot rely on simple cues and timely feedback to make decisions.”

Cadsby argues that our brains have evolved to navigate World #1 and are unprepared for World #2.   In fact, we have, figuratively, two brains: the ‘old’ brain, which operates unconsciously, and the ‘new’ brain, which has evolved over the past 100,000 years and which we think of as conscious.  We think automatically with the ‘old’ brain, and effortfully with the ‘new’ one.  But the partnership is unequal:  the ‘new’ brain has limited access to the ‘old’ one.  As a result of this ‘brain-brain’ gap, the way we think is not always matched to our modern world, and so we face the second challenge of a ‘brain-world’ gap. 

The challenge is to close the gaps.

Cadsby’s book works with an explanatory narrative of human cognition that has developed rapidly over the past decade or two.   The ‘left-brain-right-brain’ narrative of the 70s and 80s has gradually given way to an ‘intuition-and-rationality’ narrative, under the influence of psychology, complexity science, evolutionary anthropology, cognitive science and what’s loosely referred to as neuroscience.  Paul MacLean's model of the triune brain helped get the narrative going; Guy Claxton’s Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind, Stephen Mithen’s The Prehistory of the Mind and Chris Frith's Making Up the Mind have all made interesting contributions.  

Like its predecessor, the ‘intuition/rationality’ narrative relies on a satisfyingly simple dichotomy.  Where the earlier explanation concentrated on a lateral division between left and right brain, the new one emphasizes a vertical division, the ‘new’ brain (represented by the neocortex) sitting on top of the ‘old’, intuitive, emotional brain (represented mostly by the hippocampus and the amygdala). 

This new narrative has considerable explanatory power.  Cadsby argues that “our minds are meaning-making machines”: we predict the nature of reality by intuitively pattern-matching to pre-existing mental models, some inherited (like the ability to recognize a face), some learned (like the ability to ride a bike).  ‘Constructive realism’ is useful in World #1 because in this world the pattern-matches are usually more or less accurate; but in World #2, constructive realism falls prey to “greedy reductionism”: we oversimplify complexity and conclude overconfidently.   

Type 1 thinking, intuitive and automatic, will help us solve straightforward problems, but not complex ones.  It will help us read a novel but not write one; eat a meal but not cook it; watch tennis but not play it.  If we want to understand complexity more effectively, we need to invoke Type 2 thinking.

The catch is that Type 2 thinking requires concentration.  Where Type 1 is quick, Type 2 must be slow; where Type 1 operates in parallel, Type 2 can operate only one task at a time.  Much of the book is devoted to the strategies necessary to develop Type 2 thinking: study the problem landscape more carefully; pursue missing information; analyse causal relationships; and so on.  Cadsby suggests that we need to develop two types of Type 2 thinking:  Type 2.1, which helps us model complexity more accurately; and Type 2.2, thinking about thinking, which “brings us as thinking agents into the process of thinking”.  Cadsby calls Type 2.2 ‘metacognition’ and, with a Buddhist inflection, ‘mindfulness’. 

But we’re not inclined to do either.  We prefer Type 1 thinking.  For one thing, effortful thinking requires – well – effort, and we need to conserve cognitive energy.  Worse still, we’re addicted to certainty: we need to know, we need to be in control, and we’re desperate to enjoy the calm, pleasurable (intuitive) feeling of knowing that we have figured something out.  Ambiguity and doubt create too much discomfort.

Closing the Mind Gap develops this thesis in great detail.  Cadsby synthesises huge quantities of information and explains it elegantly.  This may not be quite a popular science book and it may not be quite a management book; but it's certainly a page-turner.  Cadsby is much influenced by Daniel Kahnemann (Thinking Fast and Slow), although he also cites the work of Robin Hogarth, Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Keith Stanovich, along with a host of experimental evidence to support his argument.  Along the way, he offers excellent accounts of theory of mind, the workings of the emotions, Bayesian probability theory and much more.  For anybody interested in understanding why we so often fail to think as well as we can, this book will be useful (though I wish his endnotes indicated his sources more precisely). 

And yet, and yet.  Something bothers me. 

To begin with, I’m not sure about these two worlds.  How do we distinguish #1 from #2?  Are they not both simply mental constructs?  After all, as Cadsby himself says:  “our earliest forms of conscious awareness enabled language, culture and innovation, and we began to create a new world for ourselves.”  We find ourselves paradoxically limited in our ability to understand the cognitive complexity that we ourselves have generated. 

And then, understanding complexity is never the whole story.  The primary function of a brain is to enable an organism to move.  If “all life is problem solving” – as Karl Popper suggested – then, as Cadsby points out, “the brain interprets its environment so it can motivate actions that are conducive to thriving.”  Or, to quote José Ortega y Gasset:  “Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do.”  The truth, however complex, matters less than the solution, which is not an answer but an intervention in the world.

Cadsby touches on decision-making.  He discusses the Taylor-Russell diagram; and he acknowledges, entertainingly, the provisional quality of all decisions.  But his advice on how to decide better is somewhat negative: we should qualify our conclusions with ‘probably not’, ‘could be’ or ‘it appears to me that...’  I’d like more emphasis on how to choose what to do, and how to manage risk. 

Perhaps Cadsby has picked up Kahnemann’s pessimism, along with the undoubted insights of behavioural economics.  It seems that that the best we can do is overcome – effortfully – our inevitable cognitive shortcomings.  For example, we read a lot about confirmation bias, availability bias and myside bias, but nothing about optimism bias: the tendency to assume that everything will turn out ok, which becomes a useful learning tool when surprised by failure or the unexpected.  (I’d like to see more in the book about learning.)  Rather than celebrating our successes in combining Type #1 and Type #2 thinking – in collaborative research, artistic production, business and diplomacy – Cadsby invokes the quietism of Stoicism and Buddhism to help us outmanoeuvre Type 1 thinking and the depressing negativity bias of our emotions.  (“The marginal value of eating and sex declines rapidly once we have had our fill, but the marginal value of avoiding danger never declines.”  Hm. ) 

What’s missing?

The clue may be in the ‘cultural big bang’ that Cadsby describes early in the book.  It’s a critical part of the narrative.  This was the moment, perhaps 50,000 years ago, when human consciousness seemed to take a sudden leap forward, “fuelled by the ... ability to communicate complex ideas and generalize learning by applying insight from one task to different ones.”   Something happened to our thinking; something that allowed us to transcend the difference between Type 1 and Type 2 thinking and combine them; something that offered us the opportunity, not merely to generalise, but to create wholly new ideas.  Cadsby acknowledges that this cognitive leap expanded our working memories and enabled us to speculate about the past and the future.  But there’s a more radically significant element in this new ‘cathedral of the mind’, as Stephen Mithen has called it.  And Cadsby, I can’t help feeling, has missed it.

That element is metaphorical thinking.   

“The metaphor,” said José Ortega y Gasset, “is probably the most fertile power possessed by man.”  Metaphorical thinking has generated the massive potential for creativity that continues to drive our cognitive development.  Where, I wonder, might metaphor might fit into Ted Cadsby’s splendidly articulated argument?

Talk about it

The Roar of the Lion: the untold story of Churchill's World War II speeches

Richard Toye

Oxford, 2013

ISBN 978 0 19 964252 6

£25.00

20 August 1940.  Winston Churchill visits No.11 Group Fighter Command with his military secretary, General Hastings Ismay.  Throughout the afternoon, the RAF is battling the waves of German fighters crossing the Channel.  At one point, every squadron has taken to the air, with no reserves remaining.  According to Ismay:

I felt sick with fear.  As the evening closed in the fighting died down, and we left by car for Chequers.  Churchill’s first words to me were: ‘Don’t speak to me.  I have never been so moved.’  After about five minutes he leaned forward and said, ‘Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.’

What was going on in Churchill’s brain during those five minutes?  Richard Toye’s absorbing and vividly narrated book, The Roar of the Lion, offers some tantalizing clues.

On the one hand, we see a man of high emotion.  There’s no reason to disbelieve that initial remark to Ismay.  Toye doesn’t mention Black Dog, but we do see other instances of his behaviour that suggested to others signs of mental turmoil.  On the other, Toye also reveals that the words he finally utters in the car were not entirely inspired.  Churchill had used a very similar construction at least three times before: in 1899, in 1906 and in 1907. 

As a young man, influenced in part by the barnstorming rhetoric of his father and the Democrat Bourke Cockran, Churchill had educated himself in the power of language.  (He had, famously, done poorly at Harrow.)  At the turn of the century, in his early twenties, he had drafted The Scaffolding of Rhetoric, an article designed to get him noticed by the heavyweight periodicals.  Unpublished during his lifetime, it’s very much a young man’s piece: overwrought, passionate, recklessly revealing. 

The direct, though not the admitted, object which the orator has in view is to allay the commonplace influences and critical faculties of his audience, by presenting to their imaginations a series of vivid impressions which are replaced before they can be too closely examined and vanish before they can be assailed.

Throughout his political career, as he defected from the Tories to the Liberals and back, as he railed equally against the dangers of Nazism and against reform in India, Churchill used his speeches, not only to influence, but also to survive – politically and, perhaps, psychologically.

By the 1930s, as Toye points out, the effect was wearing thin.  “To MPs who had, as it were, heard it all before, his speaking style seemed not majestically impressive but overblown and hackneyed.” 

But his constant interventions in the Commons over India seem to have jolted his rhetoric into a new register.  In a letter to his wife, he writes that he is now speaking “with garrulous unpremeditated flow.  They seem delighted.” 

Churchill carries this new rhetoric into the war with him.  He has reinvigorated his Victorian Ciceronianism by injecting the plain English championed during the 1930s by Greene, Hemingway, Orwell, and others.  His speeches, according to Harold Nicholson, now combine “great flights of oratory with sudden swoops into the intimate and conversational.  Of all his devices it is the one that never fails.”  The synthesis will allow him to speak, more or less successfully, both in the Commons and over the airwaves.  (One of Toye’s most intriguing discussions is about Churchill’s discomfort with radio.) 

But Churchill learnt another lesson in the wilderness years.  In that same letter to his wife, he suggests that the art of public speaking “all consists in my (mature) judgement of selecting three or four absolutely sound arguments and putting these in the most conversational manner possible.”  This was a revelation to him.  “There is apparently nothing in the literary effect I have sought for forty years!”

During that pregnant silence in the car with Ismay, then, we can imagine Churchill wrestling unruly passion against the need to articulate the plainest possible expression of the military reality.  Somewhere in that struggle, he drags up a couple of past rhetorical successes and presses them into service.  And the moment of inspiration follows.

But then, in uttering the sentence, Churchill is not merely reacting to the moment.  He’s also trying out his words on his audience. 

It’s a typical ploy.  Like any great performer, he can simultaneously feel the weight of the sad time and observe the effect on others as he expresses it.  That doublethink is essential to any rhetorical method.   And Churchill’s listeners sometimes came perilously close to seeing through it.

The book’s central thesis, in fact, concerns how Churchill’s speeches were judged by his many audiences.  Toye uses material both from the Ministry of Information and from Mass-Observation: a remarkable project that’s only now, thanks to the work of James Hinton, becoming clearly understood.  This material – including polls, reports and diaries – “is extraordinarily rich and variegated, and reveals the complexity of responses to Churchill, including surprising levels of criticism and dissent.”

It’s hard to imagine the pressures the man was working under.  He needed to satisfy what one diarist calls ‘the turbulent people’ of the United Kingdom: a people as hungry for information as for inspiration; sometimes cheered by Churchill’s truculence, often frustrated by his bluster.  But he was speaking also to global audiences: to the Empire and to the wavering Americans; to the enemy; to the movements of resistance in Europe.  He was battling a hostile press, especially on the left, and his own party, which continued to suspect his motives.  And he was running the war.  He was in his late sixties.  He contracted pneumonia at least twice, and seems at one point to have suffered a minor heart attack.

By 1942, after the disastrous fall of Singapore, Mass-Observation was reporting a sense among the public that Churchill might not be up to the job.  “The breaking of the oratorical spell is thus a shock as well as a disappointment.”  In the Commons, however, on 23 April, he seemed to find a way forward. The MP ‘Chips’ Cannon reported: “No humour or tact, little oratory, no mea culpa stuff, but straightforward, brilliant and colourful, a factual resumé of the situation.”   Something extraordinary was happening: “as the catalogue of catastrophe continued,” writes Toye, “MPs began to cheer up.”  The sheer mass of fact and argument seemed to ground the speech in an ethical appeal that steadied a fractious House and increased MPs’ confidence.

For Toye, Churchill’s ability to explain, narrate and argue his case before parliament and the people matters more than the few remembered phrases or the occasional miscalculation.  He never gave up speaking.  “Hitler and Mussolini, when things started to go wrong for them, retreated into silence,” he writes; “for them, this was a luxury; it was also a chronic weakness of the political systems they operated.”  Churchill had no such luxury.  He was operating in a political system that forced him to justify his actions.  He used rhetoric to inspire his electorate, cajole his allies and deceive his enemies; but he used it also to submit himself to the democratic power that kept him in office, and for which, ultimately, everyone was fighting. 

Toye’s conclusion is itself powerful and inspirational.  It closes a book that offers a remarkable insight, not only into these most famous of political speeches, but also the complex, conflicted society that responded to them.

Finding a new language for Europe: Luuk van Middelaar in conversation with Frank van Hoorn

The French apparently have a favoured descriptor for the European project: la construction.  The metaphor seemed apt last Thursday evening, as the European Speechwriter Network opened its conference in the Residence Palace in Brussels, currently being renovated for use by the European Council.  (Estimated completion date: last year...) 

 

Having negotiated the tarpaulins, scaffolding and concrete heaps, we settled down to a searching conversation about the role of language in fostering Europe’s future, with a man who is helping to create both.

As an opening session, this set the bar high.

 

 

Luuk van Middelaar is a political philosopher impatient with scholarly solitude.  His hero is Machiavelli, not just because he’s a good writer but because he understands that politics is about how events shape the systems by which we rule ourselves.  (A copy of The Prince made its way to the podium during his interview with Frank van Hoorn, and leaned approvingly against van Middelaar’s new book, The Passage to Europe.)

We need, says van Middelaar, a new vocabulary for Europe.  Enough with the acronyms. 

 

The fights in the Union have always been about words.  De Gaulle and Thatcher both resisted the translation of the Assembly into the Parliament, a word that threatened their sacred notion of sovereign states.  They lost.  Since then, according to van Middelaar’s analysis, the European dream has been described in two ways: as a membership of states; and as a unified community.  Each metaphorical frame has its intellectual adherents.  Economists love the metaphor of integration and align themselves with the Commission.  Historians prefer to talk of cooperation and collaboration, and focus on the political dance of European states.   

Our metaphors determine our political positions.  So much of the European conversation is ideological.  Van Middelaar sees his role as helping to articulate a third description: ‘the intermediate space’ between the teleological – even theological – ambitions of the federalists and the apocalyptic scaremongering of the eurosceptics. 

Van Middelaar has a way with imagery.  His ability to figure forth the complexity of European institutions as three spheres helps to make The Passage to Europe clear, navigable and - shout it loud - deeply enjoyable. 

Since December 2009, van Middelaar has been a member of the cabinet of Herman Van Rompuy, the first permanent president of the European Council.  Imagine the Council, he suggests, as a kind of Purgatory through which Europe is passing from the Inferno of 1945 to the federalist Paradiso.  The Council emerged, almost without anyone noticing, as a by-product of the treaty-based Union: a space where national leaders can meet as members of the European club. 

This space is deeply paradoxical.  To begin with, it's easy to confuse with the Council of the European Union, otherwise known as the Council of Ministers.  They even sit next door to each other on the Rue de la Loi.  The European Council, formalized as an institution in 1974, has no legislative power, but it’s charged under the Lisbon treaty with defining  "the general political directions and priorities" of the Union.  It’s a kind of collective presidency. Van Rompuy is known as both president of the Council and president of the Union.  Prime ministers and national presidents can enter this space only if they’re members of the Union; but their conversation is not bound by the treaty of membership. 

This curious space, van Middelaar suggests, is where new hybrid European institutions and agreements can be made.  (Think of the contradiction contained in the term ‘constitutional treaty’.)  It’s where European and national interests meet; the place – perhaps the only place – where European leaders can rise above the rule-bound institutionalism of the community and address the crises that threaten the Union.  

Van Middelaar detects a kind of invisible glue holding Europe together; a glue manufactured by the language of deliberation and debate, carefully spread by the Council of Europe and its president.  And it seems, sometimes, to work; witness the Union’s survival of the euro crisis in the last year or so.   

“Reinforce the intermediate sphere”: that is what van Middelaar has tried to do in his four years at the Council.

As Van Rompuy’s speechwriter, van Middelaar occupies a privileged position.  Van Rompuy is that rare animal, a politician who composes haiku.  (He also has a fondness, apparently, for Elvis.)  Perhaps the high point of their collaboration was the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech.    Van Rompuy knew that his words had to rise, in a Shakespearean way, to the occasion.  Van Middelaar wanted, he told van Hoorn, to “open up the space, to open up the time” of the occasion. 

The opening of the second part of his speech achieves this ambition with breathtaking simplicity.

War is as old as Europe. Our continent bears the scars of spears and swords, cannons and guns, trenches and tanks, and more.

2500 years of history, as van Middelaar put it, in 23 words.

He has learnt much in his four years as speechwriter.  Engaging the speaker’s trust is essential.  The writer needs to observe and understand how the speaker’s very body alters as he shifts between languages.  The goal must be to bring the speaker’s natural speaking habits into their formal speeches.  When the arguments don’t – can’t – convince, tone becomes vitally important to define the direction of the conversation. 

In 2013, Europe’s most urgent task is to engage with its citizens, for whom the Union remains distant, monolithic and irrelevant.  We need a vision for Europe.  Many are now calling for a new language to conjure that vision; something more than platitudes, brochures and directives. 

If anyone can help us find the words we need, it is Luuk van Middelaar.

 

Capax imperii...

The Wit and Wisdom of Boris Johnson

Edited by Harry Mount

Bloomsbury 2013

ISBN 978 1408 1835 26

£9.99

On my beside table, I currently have a copy of Mark Forsyth’s The Etymologicon.  It’s one of a fast-proliferating breed of book: designed to look more like books than books, with extra thick pages, big type and textured covers.  Sort of hyper-real books.Not-quite books. Waterstone’s counter yesterday was awash with them. 

Boris Johnson reminds me of this kind of book.  He’s a not-quite politician.

When he was appointed shadow Arts Minister in May 2004, his response was:  "look the point is...er, what is the point?  It is a tough job but somebody has got to do it."  Anacoluthon and erotema - interrupting the syntax of the sentence with a rhetorical question - are carefully placed in the service of a precisely calibrated impression of what Boris has proudly called imbecilio. 

"Boris," says Harry Mount, in an introduction to this book that's considerably more interesting and insightful than I was expecting, "is in fact a brilliant calibrator."  He can shift his register precisely as the kairos demands. 

In particular, his "magical gift for surreal, amusing apology" works "like a sort of bulletproof armour."  When Eddie Mair called him "a nasty piece of work" earlier this year, Boris drew the venom with relative ease.  "If a BBC presenter can't attack a nasty Tory politician," he suggested the next day, "what's the world coming to?"

Clever.  Tory politicians are nasty; BBC presenters are inherently anti-conservative; 'twas ever thus and 'twill ever be thus.  By holding up a mirror to our own prejudices, Johnson implies a level of honesty that actually increases his credibility.   He knows that the only politician the public will now believe is a parody of a politician. 

He uses his lack of ethos to magnify his ethos.

There's no doubting, then, the man's rhetorical flair.  (Open this book at any page.)  "That facility," claims Mount, "is largely to do with having studied classics."  He has the classicist's command of language, playing off Latinate against Anglo-Saxon just as he plays off class against class.  And his schooling allowed him to rehearse to perfection a role based on the archetypes of privilege, public school and ivory-tower academia:  "Billy Bunter meets Bertie Wooster meets Professor Brainstorm."  It's a "well-practised, mock-bumbling, Latin-loving routine that never fails him in “that crucial Johnsonian mission – to get him off the hook.”

For some, the image is a disguise.  Daniel Hannan, Conservative MEP, believes that “there’s a smooth machine under the buffoonery.  It’s not an exaggeration,” he claims, “to call him a genius.” (What is it, then, I wonder?)

Ian Hislop’s comment on Boris is more ambiguous.  When people ask Hislop, “Is Boris a very clever man pretending to be an idiot?’, Hislop simply replies: ‘No.’

What Eton and Balliol failed, apparently, to instil in our man is any "capacity for long, concentrated periods of work" (Mount's words).  When he missed a First, they say he went alone to the cinema and cried.  When he was writing for the Daily Telegraph, he consistently failed to file his copy on time. When Mount asked one of Boris's old classics tutors about his chances of making it to Number 10, the man replied:

"Capax imperii nisi imperasset."

 

This is Tacitus on the Emperor Galba:  "He was up the job of emperor, as long as he never became emperor."

 

 

Johnson's practised incompetence may allow him, very effectively, to hide what Jonathan Coe has called “his doggedly neo-liberal and pro-City agenda”. (I'm seriously indebted to Coe's recent article in the LRB.)  Whether it also gives him cover for his lack of political competence is another matter.

For the moment, we can hold off the question about his ability to rise to the demands of high office.  What matters is why people vote for him.  His wit gains him support because it taps into a very British contempt for anything outstanding.  "Boris," claims Mount, "manages to pull off the trick of being ambitious and successful, at the same time as implicitly mocking ambition and success.  You end up forgiving him his ambition, and not begrudging him his success, because the whole act is so funny and endearing."

Ah.  Endearing.

So Boris scores because he has incorporated satire's mockery of political hubris and incompetence into his own act and utterly emasculated it.  Johnson knows that he has nothing to fear from the public’s laughter, because the public’s ridicule for politicians has become undiscriminating.  He knows, to paraphrase Coe, that the best way to deal with satire is to create it yourself.  Mount quotes Stuart Reid, Boris's deputy editor at the Spectator:  “people of all social classes and most political persuasions will vote for him, precisely because he reduces everything to a joke.” 

Wit and wisdom for our time.

Telling it like it is

Rhetoric: A Very Short Introduction

Richard Toye

Oxford, 2013

£7.99

ISBN 978 0 19 965136 8

At the heart of Richard Toye’s excellent new book is “the problem of meaning and intention.” 

Rhetoric is the art of persuasion.  How can speakers be confident that the audience will be persuaded?  (Think of Blair at the Women’s Institute conference in 2000.)  Can we decide what, exactly, a speaker means?  “This is what seems to fascinate us,” he writes, “although pinning it down is infuriatingly difficult.” 

 

Difficult, partly, because we can’t argue without using rhetoric.  When Kennedy famously said: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”, he wasn’t just employing antimetabole for fun; the repetition of words in reverse order actually formulates the idea.  “Rhetoric,” says Toye, “is not merely the means by which ideas are expressed, it is also the means by which they are generated.”  

 

This is one of his major themes.  Another is that rhetorical meaning is generated socially.  Too much discussion of rhetoric stalls at geeky chat about figures of speech.  Toye deepens the conversation.  Rhetoric isn’t solely about style; its reception depends on the norms of the society in which it’s delivered.

We’re invited to analyse St Francis’ sermon to the birds.  Did he really think that he could talk to the birds? Did the people who circulated the sermon think that he could?  Or were they trying to convince the audience that he could?  And if so, why?  How do we know that what we’re reading even remotely resembles what he said?  These questions both enrich our understanding of the text, and demonstrate the impossibility of deriving a final, authoritative meaning.

Rhetoric both reveals and conceals.  It’s this epistemological slipperiness that Plato found so offensive.  Aristotle, in response, sought to codify rhetoric into a set of rules, instigating a project pursued with varying levels of enthusiasm ever since.  Toye outlines the story in a superb potted history.

He’s particularly good on the great 20^th figures, who redefined the terms of the debate:  Richards, Ong, Austin, Burke.

 

By the 1950s, some intellectuals on the Aristotelian wing became convinced that “science would eventually be able to foretell with precision how human minds would be persuaded.”  Such an approach “now looks,” writes Toye, “too mechanistic and not a little frightening.”  Too mechanistic because rhetoric’s effects are “inherently unpredictable”; frightening because, on some level, rhetoric does seem to operate mechanistically.  While the Mad Men were developing Edward Bernays’ advertising  techniques, Alfred Hitchcock was honing his rhetorical skills – both verbal and visual – to unprecedented levels of coercive mastery.

 

 

Toye uses Hitchcock’s 1935 English 39 Steps, in contrast, to demonstrate rhetoric’s playful ambiguity.  Richard Hannay’s improvised hustings speech – “I’ve known what it is to feel lonely and helpless” – gains layers of meaning from his situation: impersonating a parliamentary candidate when, in fact, he’s on the run from sinister agents of a foreign power and playing for time.  Rhetorical analysis identifies “the social meanings of particular statements or symbols in given contexts.” High-flown and complicated?  Well, Hitch’s audience has no trouble doing it.

 

Toye favours political rhetoric over others – unsurprisingly, given his position as Professor of Modern History at Exeter University.  He gives valuable insights into the shift, during the 19th century, from 'laudatory' rhetoric, praising the politician's character, to 'hortatory' rhetoric, linking voters  emotionally to policies - "the model of rhetoric that informs modern programmatic politics".  And he gives a strong account of the concepts of the  'rhetorical presidency' and the 'anti-intellectual presidency' in modern American politics.  Other forms of rhetoric are somewhat sidelined; but Toye shows that rhetoric, of whatever kind, is never politically neutral; rhetorical analysis therefore provides insights into how a society generates its governing ideas, and “the way it talks about the way those things ought to be talked about.” 

Rhetoric matters.  To explicate this shaggy beast in 35,000 words is no small challenge, and Toye succeeds with a consistently light touch.  (I’d like a few more pointers to some of the scholars he quotes.)  He even provides a ‘basic toolkit’ of rhetorical techniques.  He wants to empower us; but he also warns us about the limits of such empowerment.  Above all, he says, understanding rhetoric “helps people to assess the validity of arguments and to avoid being misled by plausible but flawed appeals.  It can also provide tools that will help counter them.”

Spot on.