Chattering Classes _ the Economist
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Transcript of Chattering Classes _ the Economist
Bridgeman
Special report:
The art of conversation
Chattering classesThe rules for verbal exchanges are surprisingly enduring
Dec 19th 2006 | From the print edition
SIR ISAIAH BERLIN, a
Latvian-born Oxford
philosopher who died in
1997, may well have
ranked among the greatest
conversationalists who
ever lived. According to
Robert Darnton, a
Princeton historian, Berlin's friends would “watch him as if he were a trapeze artist,
soaring through every imaginable subject, spinning, flipping, hanging by his heels and
without a touch of showmanship”. Darnton reckoned that Berlin's only match in relatively
modern times might have been Denis Diderot, an 18th-century French Enlightenment
philosopher. By one account Diderot's conversation was “enlivened by absolute sincerity,
subtle without obscurity, varied in its forms, dazzling in its flights of imagination, fertile
in ideas and in its capacity to inspire ideas in others. One let oneself drift along with it for
hours at a time, as if one were gliding down a fresh and limpid river, whose banks were
adorned with rich estates and beautiful houses.”
Churchill was another magnificent talker, perhaps the greatest of the 20th century, but
often a poor listener. Virginia Woolf was given, in the words of one biographer, to
“wonderful performances in conversation, spinning off into fantastic fabrications while
everyone sat around and, as it were, applauded”. A short list of the greatest living
conversationalists in English would probably have to include Christopher Hitchens, Sir
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Patrick Leigh Fermor, Sir Tom Stoppard, Studs Terkel and Gore Vidal.
Great brilliance, fantastic powers of recall and quick wit are clearly valuable in sustaining
conversation at these cosmic levels. Charm may be helpful too—although Samuel
Johnson, one of the most admired conversationalists of 18th-century England, seemed to
manage without much of it. For those of more modest accomplishments, but attached to
conversation as one of life's pleasures and necessary skills, there is a lively market in
manuals and tip-sheets going back almost 500 years, and a legacy of wisdom with an even
longer history. One striking thing about the advice is how consistent it remains over time,
suggesting that there are real rights and wrongs in conversation, not just local
conventions.
The principle that it is rude to interrupt another speaker goes back at least to Cicero,
writing in 44BC, who said that good conversation required “alternation” among
participants. In his essay “On Duties”, Cicero remarked that nobody, to his knowledge,
had yet set down the rules for ordinary conversation, though many had done so for public
speaking. He had a shot at it himself, and quickly arrived at the sort of list that self-help
authors have been echoing ever since. The rules we learn from Cicero are these: speak
clearly; speak easily but not too much, especially when others want their turn; do not
interrupt; be courteous; deal seriously with serious matters and gracefully with lighter
ones; never criticise people behind their backs; stick to subjects of general interest; do not
talk about yourself; and, above all, never lose your temper.
Probably only two cardinal rules were lacking from Cicero's list: remember people's
names, and be a good listener. Each of these pieces of advice also has a long pedigree. At a
pinch you might trace the point about names back to Plato. Both found a persuasive
modern advocate in Dale Carnegie, a teacher of public speaking who decided in 1936 that
Americans needed educating more broadly in “the fine art of getting along”. His book
“How to Win Friends and Influence People” is still in print 70 years later and has sold
15m copies. To remember names, and to listen well, are two of Carnegie's “six ways to
make people like you”. The others are to become genuinely interested in other people;
smile; talk in terms of the other person's interests; and make the other person feel
important.
Cicero's rules of conversation seem to have been fairly common across cultures as well as
time, if varying in strictness. It might reasonably be said that Italians are more tolerant of
interruption, Americans of contradiction and the English of formality, for example. These
rules of conversation also intersect with those of politeness more generally, as formulated
by two American linguists, Penelope Brown and Steven Levinson, the pioneers of
“politeness theory”.
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Courtesy counts
The Brown and Levinson model says, roughly speaking, that Person A probably does not
want to be rude to Person B, but in the way of things, life may sometimes require Person
A to contradict or intrude on Person B, and when that happens, Person A has a range of
“politeness strategies” to draw on. There are four main possibilities, given in ascending
order of politeness. The first is a “bald, on-record” approach: “I'm going to shut the
window.” The second is positive politeness, or a show of respect: “I'm going to shut the
window, is that OK?” The third is negative politeness, which presumes that the request
will be an intrusion or an inconvenience: “I'm sorry to disturb you, but I want to shut the
window.” The fourth is an indirect strategy which does not insist on a course of action at
all: “Gosh, it's cold in here.”
The first three of those options are plain instrumental speech, and are the sort of
approaches that the conversation manuals warn you against. The fourth one alone leads
into the realm of conversation as such. Here the purpose of speaking is not so much to get
a point across, more to find out what others think about it. This principle of co-operation
is one of the things that sets conversation apart from other superficially similar activities
such as lectures, debates, arguments and meetings. Other qualities which help to define
conversation include the equal distribution of speaker rights; mutual respect among
speakers; spontaneity and informality; and a non-businesslike ambience. The last of these
was well caught by Johnson when he defined conversation as “talk beyond that which is
necessary to the purposes of actual business”.
If conversation, and politeness, do have common features across time and culture, it is
not all that surprising that newer manuals will find little to add in terms of fundamental
principles. They can, however, offer specific tips which are useful in the right
circumstances, and these, too, change little with the years. “Never recount your dreams in
public,” wrote the anonymous author of “Maximes de la Bienséance en la Conversation”,
one of the first manuals of conversation published in France, in 1618. Margaret Shepherd,
author of “The Art of Civilized Conversation”, a manual published in America in 2006,
offers the same prohibition. Among the ill-judged remarks that she calls “saboteurs of
small talk”, she includes “self-absorbed comments like ‘I had the strangest dream. You
were in it. Uh, let me try to remember it'.”
The more modern the manual of conversation, the more concrete its advice is likely to be.
Ms Shepherd offers seven quick ways to tell if you are boring your listeners, which
include: “Never speak uninterrupted for more than four minutes at a time” and “If you
are the only person who still has a plate full of food, stop talking.” Her checklist of things
best not said to the parent of a newborn baby should be memorised for future use. It
comprises: “What's wrong with his nose?” “Should he be that colour?” “Isn't he awfully
small?” “Shouldn't you be breast-feeding?” “Did you want a boy?” “Is he a good baby?”
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Old French mastersBridgeman
“He looks like Churchill!/She looks like ET!” “It's really cute!”
It is easy enough to see the usefulness of such tips, but they capture none of the joy which
comes from the mastery of conversation. For enthusiasts conversation is an art, one of the
great pleasures of life, even the basis of civilised society. Mme de Staël, a great talker and
intellectual of the French ancien régime, called conversation “a means of reciprocally and
rapidly giving one another pleasure; of speaking just as quickly as one thinks; of
spontaneously enjoying one's self; of being applauded without working...[A] sort of
electricity that causes sparks to fly, and that relieves some people of the burden of their
excess vivacity and awakens others from a state of painful apathy”.
The Athens of Socrates and Plato, in the 5th and 4th centuries BC, is often seen as home
to a first golden age of conversation. That view has relied mainly on the writings of Plato,
whose dialogues, often with Socrates as speaker, constitute “a search among friends...for
the divine ideas of the true, the beautiful, the good”, says a modern French scholar, Marc
Fumaroli.
The second golden age of conversation, among the
French elites in the late 17th and early 18th
centuries, is much better documented. Historians
associate the rise of conversation at this time with
the prestige enjoyed by women in French high
society, which was perhaps unique in Europe
before or since. Women ran the salons where the
culture of the time was created, and their presence
civilised the men they invited there. Another factor
was the leisure forced on the French aristocracy by
an absolute monarchy. Their political ambitions
thwarted, the upper classes turned their energies
towards entertaining themselves. A man without
conversation was liable to find himself devalued, whatever his other qualities: “In
England it was enough that Newton was the greatest mathematician of the century,”
wrote Jean d'Alembert, a French philosopher and mathematician; “in France he would
have been expected to be agreeable too.”
The conversation of the French salons and dinner tables became as stylised as a ballet.
The basic skills brought to the table were expected to include politesse (sincere good
manners), esprit (wit), galanterie (gallantry), complaisance (obligingness), enjouement
(cheerfulness) and flatterie. More specific techniques would be required as the
conversation took flight. A comic mood would require displays of raillerie (playful
teasing), plaisanterie (joking), bons mots (epigrams), traits and pointes (rhetorical
figures involving “subtle, unexpected wit”, according to Benedetta Craveri, a historian of
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Bridgeman
the period), and, later, persiflage (mocking under the guise of praising). Even silences
had to be finely judged. The Duc de La Rochefoucauld distinguished between an
“eloquent” silence, a “mocking” silence and a “respectful” silence. The mastery of such
“airs and tones”, he said, was “granted to few”.
Conversation was also flourishing across the channel in the early 18th century, but for a
different reason. This was the golden age of the British coffee house. Whereas the French
salon excluded politics from polite conversation, in the British coffee house politics was a
main preoccupation. Foreign visitors remarked both on the free range of speech there and
on the mingling of classes and professions. A modern German sociologist, Jürgen
Habermas, linked the coffee houses with what he called the “rise of a public space”
outside the control of the state, or, as we might say now, civil society.
But if British liberals were keen on free speech,
they were much less preoccupied than their French
contemporaries were with its forms and flourishes.
Dr Johnson was considered so great a talker that a
contemporary compared his conversation to
Titian's painting. But he also could sit stonily silent
through a dinner that bored him, or contradict and
interrupt in defiance of all common etiquette. Even
Boswell, his devoted note-taker, acknowledged his
“dogmatic roughness of manner”.
Strong and silent
Johnson was far from the only Englishman to have matched a love of conversation with a
reputation for occasional difficult silences. As he himself said: “A Frenchman must always
be talking, whether he knows anything of the matter or not; an Englishman is content
when he has nothing to say.” In his book “Democracy in America”, Alexis de Tocqueville
refers to the “strange unsociability and reserved and taciturn disposition of the English”.
But for Charles Dickens, another foreign visitor to America in the 19th century, it was the
Americans who seemed taciturn. He blamed this on a “love of trade”, which limited men's
interests and made them reluctant to volunteer information for fear of tipping their hand
to a competitor. The idealisation of silence remained strong in American culture into the
20th century: think of the laconic heroes of Western films, or of Hemingway's novels.
More recently it has been neither trade nor taciturnity, but the distractions of technology,
which have seemed to threaten the quality of conversation. George Orwell complained in
1946 that “in very many English homes the radio is literally never turned off. This is done
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StilltalkingBubbles
with a definite purpose. The music prevents the conversation from becoming serious or
even coherent.” The television attracted similar comment when it became commonplace
two decades later.
In 2006 an American essayist, Stephen Miller, published a book called “Conversation: A
History of a Declining Art”, in which he worried that “neither digital music players nor
computers were invented to help people avoid real conversation, but they have that
effect.” A reviewer of Mr Miller's book found it “striking” that past generations would
“speak of conversation as a way of taking pleasure, much as a modern American might
speak of an evening spent browsing the internet”.
Conversation has survived
worse challenges (Johnson
thought it might be killed
by a return of religious
zealotry), and it will
doubtless survive more.
For evidence that it thrives
still, go into any smart
New York restaurant,
where the noise level will be deafening. Or go into a Barnes & Noble or Borders bookshop
and look at the shelves of manuals on how to talk better. Most of them are aimed at
people who want to talk more persuasively and engagingly in order to get on in their
careers, not at people who want to engage in conversation for the sheer pleasure it
affords. But these motivations are far from exclusive. Making friends and influencing
people, to borrow the language of Dale Carnegie, amount in the end to much the same
thing. Both of them require charm, courtesy and the desire to understand the ideas and
opinions of others. And whatever the strategic objective, those will never be bad tactics.
From the print edition: Special report
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