The Civil Tongue

Most of my attention to C-SPAN is occupied by their XM Satellite Radio feed. For the most part I do not feel I am missing anything by ignoring the visuals. However, this morning on Washington Journal, Frank Luntz came prepared with video clips from the debates of the Presidential contenders, along with an assortment of PowerPoint (yes!) slides; so I traded the radio for the television over today's breakfast. C-SPAN is about the only broadcasting source for which I am willing to sit through phone-in questions and comments. One reason is that they request voluntary classification, providing separate numbers for Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. Another is that the level of discourse is on such a different plane from commercial talk radio (and, more often than not I fear, public radio) that the callers tend to cleave to that plane.

That turned out not to be the case on this morning of Peace on Earth and Good Will Towards Men. The result was a shift in the focus of the discourse itself. It began with a caller going on a rant that departed from the usual level of discourse. There are a variety of explanations for such behavior, all of which have been better analyzed by Steven Pinker in The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature; but in this case the result was that both Luntz and the moderator agreed to cut off the caller. This eventually led to another call that challenged Luntz on whether or not he believed in free speech, to which Luntz replied rather nicely that one can exercise free speech without being uncivil about it. Ironically, this was followed by another less-than-civil call, which was again prematurely dismissed. Luntz then noted whimsically that the two cut-off calls had been equally distributed between the Democrat and Republican telephone lines.

I have been interested in Luntz since I read about his book Words that Work in The New York Review. In that review Michael Tomasky (who has been doing one of the better jobs of putting the pre-primary hysteria into perspective) described Luntz as "the Republicans' most famous spin doctor of the past fifteen years," which made it interesting that Luntz openly resisted C-SPAN labeling him as a "Republican Pollster." (His argument, as I recall, had two prongs. First, his current focus is on focus groups, rather than polls. Second, he offers his service without bias to both parties.) Thus, I do not think that Luntz was being hypocritical in criticizing the erosion of civility in political discourse. Indeed, shortly after reading Tomasky's account of Luntz' book, I wrote a critique of a column by Eugene Robinson, which I felt violated two fundamental "laws" that one could take away from reading either the book or its review:

1. You are not going to persuade anyone of your position if the first thing you do is call that person stupid.
2. Furthermore, you are not going to persuade that person if you call anyone that person clearly admires stupid.

I make this observation, because I feel it is important at a time when so much of what gets published may well be obsolete before the end of the first publishing run (or, as I have put it before, has a "knowledge half-life" that can be measured in months, if not weeks, rather than centuries, as would be the case for Plato). Here was an example of a book that had at least a few offerings of enduring value, even if that endurance may not be on the half-life scale of a Plato. Whether or not that value would turn a profit for the author is not particularly relevant, since the author's "day job" seems to be taking care of his "creature comforts" well enough.

In the long run of history, however, I may be biased towards Luntz for tilting at one of my own favorite windmills, knowing full well that his impact will be minimal. Entropy is not restricted to the objective physical world of thermodynamics. There are many other processes that inevitably devolve into chaos; and, whether we like it or not, political discourse may be one of those processes.