President Obama signing the Affordable Care Act in 2010
The melioristic perspective is a useful indicator of how an individual has constituted the future and their role in it.
When most people use the term “rhetoric,” they usually mean it as the name for a verbal facade: an artificial construction far removed from what a person actually thinks. But a University of Chicago thinker a generation ago made a convincing case that our rhetoric tends to have its own unique “signature.” Our words, he noted, always “mark” us.
Richard Weaver
Richard Weaver never demonstrated his point more convincingly than in his observation that the sciences have a “melioristic bias.”1 His idea was that those working in the social sciences have faith in their abilities to find solutions to human problems that will make things better. That’s the essence of the bias: a conviction that human institutions tend to evolve rather than devolve. His point was that our scientific discourse reveals how much we operate on the underlying assumption that we can ameliorate social dislocations. From this perspective, a program like Social Security is an answer to the once chronic problem of old-age poverty. It’s the result of the kind of progressive lawmaking in the mid-1930s that many of us still admire.
Here’s the interesting thing about the melioristic bias. Operating on the assumption of the transformative power of institutions is what gives political progressivism its energy. Challenging social conditions are seen as opportunities for fixes, reforms and new policies that can further the cause of social justice. This belief is the core catechism of American liberalism.
Weaver became an important figure in the evolution of conservative thought in the 1960s. It seems clear from his work that he viewed the “true” political conservative as someone who is more willing to accept certain human tendencies as givens and less amenable to bureaucratic fixes. In simple terms, societies are not going to be significantly transformed for the better simply by using the rhetoric and machinery of social change, which ask for more than it is in the nature of institutions to deliver.
This belief in the need to recognize certain “essences” of human nature was central to Weaver’s view. From his perspective the rhetoric of change and the realities of change are two different things. We may idealize a solution—increased access to medical care in the Affordable Care Act, for example—but the actual organizational response to a given social issue is always going to be problematic. A conservative usually can’t imagine so complex a piece of organizational planning as likely to be effective.
This skeptical stance is representative of a baseline view that puts greater faith in individual human agency rather than bureaucratic power, a difference that explains the “government-is- the-problem-not-the solution” logic that thrived in the Reagan years and survives in the current Republican Congress. Somehow massive corporations are mostly seen as immune to the same problems.
Of course this simplified view of the world overlooks how individuals can be dispersed along the continuum that separates these polar opposites. Nonetheless, it remains a useful kind of insight to look for the melioristic perspective as a sign of how an individual has constituted the future and their role in it. See the world as a place of eminently doable reforms–still my view, even though its picked up some dings over the years–and you have a reasonable indicator of a political liberal. In contrast, identify someone who sees progress largely through individual rather than organizational initiatives, and you have probably discovered a classical conservative. Either way, the bias is easily discovered when a person’s rhetoric drifts toward consequential topics.
1Richard Weaver, The Ethics of Rhetoric (Chicago: Gateway, 1953), 194-200.
The challenge for all of us is to know when we are part of a true audience: when our presence is part of the presenter’s consciousness.
The Broadway actress Patti LuPone is apparently at the end of her tether. As was recently reported in the New York Times, during a performance of a play at Lincoln Center she grew frustrated with an audience member who texted continuously through an entire act. The texter was downfront, just a few feet from the actors. Finally, at the conclusion of the last scene LuPone grabbed the offending phone from the audience member as she left the stage.
The problem of audience members otherwise engaged has been more common in recent years, notwithstanding pleas from theater managers that audiences shut down their arsenals of personal hardware before the lights go down.
As for LuPone, the multiple Tony winner reports that she is utterly defeated by audience members staring into blue screens. With dismay she notes that she may give up working in live theater.1
Anyone who makes any kind of presentation to a group knows how daunting it can be to remain effective when an audience member visible to the presenter has decided to opt for an electronic environment over the one they are in. Any electronic surrogate that gets more attention than the human who striving to connect is bound to produce some justifiable anger. Making a choice in favor of the device not only signals a kind of aggressive indifference to the performer, but other audience members as well. In its own small way, it’s an tacit act of sabotage against a presenter who has a right to expect at least minimal responsiveness.
To say that as a culture we have a problem with granting others our sustained attention is obvious, and not completely attributable to our growing obsession with constant connectivity. Commanding the interest of others always requires the mastery of a very narrow path that threads its way between vast spaces of boredom and distraction.
Cayleigh Goodson aptly illustrates this lack of focus that seems to make attention deficits an emerging norm .
Research on the nature of the fickle human attention span includes a lot of cautionary conclusions. Among them,
Attention Is Intermittent Rather Than Continuous. We make a serious mistake if we believe that humans give themselves over to just one thing at a time. This only happens in times of emergency. Otherwise, our attention to one object wonders, turning on and off faster than lights on a traffic signal. This is why oral presentations need some tactful redundancy.
Demands On Americans For Attention Are Enormous. It comes as no surprise that we have immersed ourselves in environments that flood us with messages. In the pre-electronic world it was not always this way. Previous generations more or less chose their communication moments, especially when work was a more solitary process. Now the arrows are mostly reversed. Those moments mostly choose us: a result of the constant connectivity of e-mail, texts and other proliferating forms of social media.
The Rate Of Decay For The Retention Of Content IsVery Steep. We could not function effectively if burdened with the cognitive consequences of all that we take in. So our brains protect our sanity by discarding most of the data that washes over us. With its emphasis on ceaseless mayhem, news alone would drain our abilities to act on the premise that every event is potentially transformative. So our restless information-processing requires that we ignore a lot, sometimes making us useless as engaged interlocuteurs.
From this last perspective, Patti LuPone is just another momentary intrusion in a continuous parade of incoming stimuli. But she has a right to be ticked off. The challenge for all of us is to know when we are part of a true audience. There’s a simple imperative we need to honor: When our presence is part of the presenter’s consciousness, we should act on the clear obligation to be responsive to their efforts.
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1Erik Piepenburg “Hold the Phone, It’s Patti LuPone,” New York Times, July 9, 2015.
