The Perfect Response | EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION IN A DISTRACTED AGE

One would think that moderns educated on the complexities of the world would shun snap judgments and favor more considered conclusions. But such hopeful flattery is probably unearned.

Tweets and other instant forms of response are doing their part to school us to accept norms that put judgment ahead of inquiry. Our taste for quick rejoinders means that judgment has already made the final turn before reasoned inquiry has left the gate.

Our public rhetoric is now consistently reactive. We look for the simplest ways to express outrage and dismay, as any sampling of online comments remind us. Most of us expect to read snappy attitudes uttered with conviction and and usually some vitriol. A person who responds to a question or thoughtful assertion with a “not sure” is likely to be seen as a little slow.

Snap judgments about the world are mostly unearned gifts that we give ourselves. A sharp claim stakes out territory we can own. But anyone who takes time to notice will see that our popular and social media are filled with advocates who are in weeds over their heads. Certainties on topics about which we know very little are as common as black flies in Maine. And their lifespan is about as long.

Somehow our public rhetoric needs to pull back to give space to the considered conclusions where accuracy matters more than an immediate answer.

Thankfully, there is a language for processes of deliberation and truth-testing. When the stakes are high, we want knowledgeable people in charge of making considered judgments. For example, will the Boeing 737 MAX fly again soon? Presumably smart people employing solid engineering practices will be make that call. We should expect that more will happen than the President’s suggestion that we simply give the plane a new name. Likewise, as a nation we should eventually determine if the same leader has engaged in the crime of obstruction of justice. My quick judgment is a firm “yes.” But I’m willing to defer to legal experts who better understand criminal and legal benchmarks. Somehow our public rhetoric needs to pull back to give space to considered conclusions where accuracy matters.

A Lexicon of Truth Testing

We can construct a kind of hierarchy of decision-making mechanisms that ought to be in our minds when we seek answers to a nagging problems. Near the top I would place the discovery process in legal proceedings. In advance of a trial, each side in criminal and civil cases has the opportunity and time to gather the facts and a full narrative. Both sides can interview credible witnesses, subpoena documents and seek outside expertise. A discovery process that is thorough, for example, is apt to use DNA evidence that can be help determine if a suspect could have committed an assault.

Serious investigative journalism has a similar process, often requiring two independent confirmations of an event before it can be reported. The hearsay of one source is not enough. Good examples of this process are found in the classic journalism sagas Spotlight (2015) and All the President’s Men (1976). Spotlight seems especially accurate in telling the story of the Boston Globe’s research of coverups of child abuse committed by priests and church leaders in the Boston area.

Drug makers seeking to introduce a new medicine will typically need to show the efficacy of a treatment by doing some double-blind studies: tests of the proposed treatment administered to two comparable groups of patients, one getting a placebo, and the other receiving the treatment. In a double-blind study neither the patients nor clinicians administering the “meds” know whether they are handling the real stuff. Will the experimental group get better? It’s usually a fair form of the experimental method to see if the new drug can outperform improvements triggered by the placebo effect in the ‘control’ group.

Among social scientists there is a great deal of fudging that turns correlational studies into unjustified conclusions that suggest causation. Human research follows the general protocols of the hard sciences, even though human subjects are not easily isolated for study. For example, fast food restaurants in an area aren’t always the cause of high levels of obesity among the residents in a nearby neighborhood. Some studies have asserted this claim with only an assumption of causation.

In many other realms we are usually open to a future leader who is doing a “listening tour” rather than a rally; or other figures who are prepared to make “reasonable inferences” or see significance in analogous situations. All are explicitly making room for logics that reserve space for more open-minded tests of a claim’s validity.

Near the bottom of the list we are left with a vast majority of public comments representing patterns of “motivated reasoning” or “confirmation bias.” These are common mental processes that allow acceptance of evidence or ideas only if they confirm what the perceiver already believes.

The conventional Hollywood backstory about the production of Annie Hall is that it was a nightmare of incoherent scenes when it was turned over to film editor Ralph Rosenblum. Somehow the film editor used some scenes as flashbacks to make it all work. More than most of his films, Annie Hall is best understood as a Rosenblum-Brickman-Allen-Keaton co-production.

Annie Hall won several Oscars, including one for Best Picture, in 1977. More recently, the Writers Guild of America East called it the funniest screenplay ever written, calling it “a sublime intersection between compelling characters, dramatic conflict and great jokes.” If there was a museum of funny bits mining the rich traditions of American Jewish humor, the American Wing would surely want a large handful of lines from the film on display. A person may have to go back to the work of Leo McCarey (The Awful Truth, 1937) or Preston Sturges (The Lady Eve, 1941) to find comedies that were verbally this inventive. The Woody Allen-Marshall Brickman script is the rare timeless film that has some of my friends enacting the old punchline of telling familiar jokes by number; they have become that iconic.

The story centers on Alvy Singer, a sometimes comedian and New York writer. He has all of the signature Allen tics: worries about his health, the state of his love life, and a fear for the strange lands that exist to the west of the Hudson River. The script shows has Alvy in a full dither about the American fascination with Hollywood, television, and a host of strange non-Jewish traditions that occupy most of the country. All seem seem alien to his Brooklyn roots. When he meets Annie Hall played by a screen-stealing Diane Keaton, he senses his strong attraction to this unpretentious young woman who represents many of the things he fears: spontaneity, a degree of self knowledge, and acceptance of her midwestern roots. Her freshness is played against flashbacks of scenes with previous wives and girlfriends, all caught up in the pseudo-intellectualism of artists and psychoanalysts striving to make their mark in Manhattan. Allen’s sharp wit turned on creative New Yorkers like himself is a reminder that his targets are wide and varied, and somehow wrapped up with a degree of self-doubt.

Here are a few of favorite set-ups and jokes, even though they lose some of their energy confined to the page:

“There’s an old joke – um… two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of ’em says, ‘Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.’ The other one says, ‘Yeah, I know. . . and such small portions.’ Well, that’s essentially how I feel about life – full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it’s all over much too quickly.”

In one flashback we see a restless Alvy with his striver wife Robin, in the midst of hosting a party to “names” she wants to get to know. “There’s Henry Drucker. He has a chair in history at Princeton. Oh, and the short man is Hershel Kaminsky. He has a chair in philosophy at Cornell.” When Alvy later invites Robin to their bed away from the guests, she recoils and heads for the door. “There are people out there from the New Yorker magazine! My God, what will they think?!” But Alvy notes that it’s another evening of “making fake insights with people who work for ‘Dysentery.’” Robin corrects him: it’s the magazine “Commentary.” And Alvy barely misses a beat: “Oh really? I’d heard Commentary and Dissent had merged to form. . . Dysentery.”

There’s also a scene backstage at a Stevenson rally where he first meets the woman who will become his first wife, Allison (Carol Kane).

“You’re like New York, Jewish, leftwing, liberal, intellectual, Central Park West, Brandeis University, the socialist summer camps and the, the father with the Ben Shahn drawings. . .”

He wonders if he’s gone too far. “No, that was wonderful,” her scorn barely concealed. “I love being reduced to a cultural stereotype’ And Alvy admits to the truth: “Right, I’m a bigot, I know, but for the left.”

In another scene standing in line in a theater lobby he can’t help but overhear a pompous windbag who happens to teach a class at Columbia called TV, media and Culture. When he starts pontificating about the theorist Marshall McLuhan, he breaks the fourth wall to do for all of us what we’d love to attempt for ourselves. He walks over to a lobby poster and produces the real Marshall McLuhan standing behind it and ready to tell the blowhard “you know nothing about my work!”

And then there are the asides that play to Alvy’s mountain of insecurities. To a close friend he reveals what he fears about outsider’s perceptions of New York City: “Don’t you see? The rest of the country looks upon New York like we’re left wing, communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers. I think of us that way, sometimes. And I live here.”

Yet there are reasons he won’t relocate to Hollywood. “They don’t throw their garbage away, they turn it into television shows.”

These days any work by Allen exists under a cloud. But most of the collaborative arts need a degree of generosity in the process of assessing their worth. So many things came together in Annie Hall.