A singular explanation that casts an entire community as unified by a secret intention explains the temptations of costly mental shortcuts.
The stories we tell ourselves can be breathtaking in their credulity. Who could respond otherwise to an account by an old John Bircher that would have us believe a member of the Senate died because the Soviets planted radium in his chair;1 or that cartoon animators were collaborating to turn Daffy Duck into a shill for communist propaganda;2 or that Princess Diana was intentionally rubbed out by the royal family,3 or that there are about 80 “Communists” in the current House of Representatives?4 or that the Ku Klux Klan is “a leftist group.”5 Singular explanations that cast entire communities in the same mold are a reminder that we articulate what we need more than what we know.
On their face, characterizations of motives are always implausible. Groups of humans are never of one mind. That usually applies to individuals as well. Anyone who has worked in a multi-layered organization or tried to get definitive answers from others probably carries some of the shrapnel thrown off from their fractured responses.6 To be sure, humans are social animals. But it doesn’t follow that they behave with the uniformity that the grammar of our descriptions implies. We are simply not well suited to think or act in complete concordance with others. The need to define the boundaries of our own worlds is strong, and a language of simple pronouns propels us into delusions of uniformity. Our thinking is enabled by the descriptive uniformity made possible by the language of “them.” Add in the trio of “us,” “we” and “they” and we have the core terms that can map the boundaries of alien territory.
On those occasions when groups seem to be functioning as one, we are willing to pay handsomely to watch it happen: at a football game, attending a performance by a great orchestra, or perhaps watching a play, where what the writer and actors intended more or less unfolds as planned. The attractions of perfect coordination are undeniable. Synchronicity creates the impression of coherence. And from the illusion of coherence we look for shared intentionality.
The more enlightened assumption is surely to expect natural divergence. Descriptions of behavior have more credibility when they are understood in their uniqueness and variability There is even something pleasing when unimpeachable fact sabotages the smothering weight of a glib assertion. Good histories often provide this function: for example, when reminders of the impressive civil rights legacy of Lyndon Johnson defeat the instinct to place him in a rogue’s gallery of regressive Southern “pols,”7 or when we discover that Hollywood was largely invented by Eastern European Jews who were determined not to proselytize for their faith, but to create fantasies of middle-American normalcy.8 Unassailable details like these have a way of wringing out the excesses of condensed and fantasized narratives.
The justifiable caution against defining others in categorical terms is nothing less than an offense to our human nature.
Even so, the well-grounded caution against defining others in categorical terms is nothing less than an offense to our human nature. Talk gains force from categorical certainty. Against the realist’s impulse for shunning overstatements there is the even stronger compulsion to find glib generalization that will add urgency to our arguments. Aggregating “their” presumed motives tantalizes us with the kind of intelligibility that allows making sense of factions that matter, including those from whom we want to stand apart. It’s our nature to enter the fray of ordinary conversation ignoring caveats about what a gloss of simplified characterization will miss.
Interestingly, we are always willing to describe the diverse sources of action that are factors in our own biographies. We cherish our individuality and implicitly ask those around us to acknowledge it. But our search for universals that can be applied to others is unquenchable.
All of this takes on more urgency in an election year, when the compression of candidate’s comments in our news media encourages what amounts to speaking in gross overgeneralizations. This is what concerns the conservative Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson, who recently scoffed at Donald Trump’s insinuation that “President Obama might be a secret jihadist.” In addition, he went on, Trump has raised the possibility
that Ted Cruz’s father might be implicated in the assassination of JFK; that Hillary Clinton might have been involved in the death of Vince Foster; that a federal judge, presiding over a case against Trump University, should be disqualified by his ethnicity.9
Arguments and evidence tend to vanish from this kind of rhetoric, replaced only by highly inaccurate characterizations of groups and individuals reduced to single markers like age, gender, their own religious traditions, political affiliations, and their home regions. We usually know this faulty logic when we take the time to assess it. Even so, it’s always tempting to imagine uniform intentions, using them as shortcuts through a thicket of real-world complexity.
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Adapted and updated from Gary C. Woodward, The Rhetoric of Intention in Human Affairs (Lexington Books, 2014).
Steven Goldzwig, “Conspiracy Rhetoric at the Dawn of the New Millennium: A Response,” Western Journal of Communication, Fall, 2002, 492.
Karl Cohen, “Toontown’s Reds: HUAC’s Investigation of Alleged Communists in the Animation Industry,” Film History, June, 1993, Ebsco Communication and Mass media Complete, accessed April 17, 2012. Nicholas Witchell, “Fayed Conspiracy Claim Collapses,” BBC News, April 7, 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7326311.stm, accessed April 2, 2012.
Jeffrey Lord on CNN, quoted in Salon, June 10, 2016, http://www.salon.com/2016/06/10/good_lord_what_a_fiasco_cnns_shameless_trump_surrogate_is_poisoning_our_national_discourse_partner/
For Franklin Roosevelt, the villains were the Departments of the Treasury, State, and the Navy. To “change anything” was nearly impossible, he noted. See Emmet John Hughes, The Living Presidency (New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1972), 184.
Robert Caro, “The Compassion of Lyndon Johnson,” The New Yorker, April 1, 2002, 56-77.
Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own (New York: Crown, 1988).
Michael Gerson, “A Delegate Revolt has Become the Republicans only Option,” Washington Post, June 21, 2016.
Robert Hughes illustration by John Spooner Google Images
It’s little wonder women are more likely than men to agree to couples counseling. Counseling to mediate serious differences requires more than just serialized opinion-giving.
Generalizing about gender and communication is fraught with problems. As we would expect, there is considerable variability within individuals. And the idea of gender is undergoing tectonic shifts. But research in the area persists, always with interesting and sometimes conflicting outcomes.
One conclusion of special interest is the idea that men are more assertive. Based on research over the last several decades, analysts such as linguist Deborah Tannen have proposed that advocacy composed of open declarations, frequent opinion-giving, and summary judgments tend to be dominant in a typically masculine communication style. While admitting many variations from person to person, this trait is thought to be in contrast to a feminine style that emphasizes asking questions, giving feedback, and withholding early judgments.
I’ve always thought the distinction—though fuzzy—carried some validity. To be sure, the exceptions are numerous and notable. Take the case of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. People would come out of meetings with her with the complaint that they’d been “handbagged to death” with unilateral demands. That’s in sharp contrast to men like Bill Clinton, who can be more tentative and feminine in his relational patterns. Even so, listen to a group of men compare notes on the state of nation or likely matchups for a professional sports showdown. The odds are that you are probably going to hear a lot of opinion-giving, all freely offered to any and all listeners. Typically, each opinion is given serially, with each individual taking a turn, sometimes with an opposing introjection, but not as a part of a sustained search for agreement.
This is a feature in the political rhetoric of Donald Trump that can be so annoying. Qualifications, expressions of puzzlement, empathy, or the desire to first hear what the other side thinks: all of these seem to alien forms of address to the presidential candidate. By contrast, Hillary Clinton started her Senate career in 2000 with a “listening campaign.” And by all accounts she did listen, especially to upstate constituents. By contrast, Trump pontificates. Endlessly.
In my field some have made the claim that academic debate as a structured form of public discussion is a uniquely masculine style. Debaters learn not to over-qualify, not to admit to more than is necessary, and especially to cling tenaciously to the claims they’ve laid out in their case notes. It’s not such a big jump to the conclusion that women are much more likely than men to agree to couples counseling. Counseling to mediate serious differences requires more than just serialized opinion-giving.
What can be annoying in a political candidate like Donald Trump can be winning in a gifted thinker or writer.
But there’s a twist: what can be annoying in a political candidate like Donald Trump can be winning in a gifted thinker or writer. We often like decisive rhetoric if its well conceived. Think of Ernest Hemingway, Gore Vidal, William F. Buckley or David Remnick. The annoying comments of Uncle Fred at family get-togethers may just be a common variation: opinion-giving stripped of grace and wisdom.
My favorite writer in the masculine style was Robert Hughes. The native Australian who was Time Magazine’s art critic for many years has left us a body of provocative criticism, including wonderful books on Francisco Goya, the history of Rome, the unusual origins of his home country, and rise and fall of New York as a cultural mecca. His gifts for incisive criticism were formidable: occasionally ill-considered but always rich in following historical arcs. Consider Hughes dim view of American television after an unsuccessful stint in the late 1970s as a co-host on ABC’s 20/20:
You cannot watch network TV without being shouted at or wheedled, every two minutes, to buy something. This saturation is now so extreme that many cheesed-off viewers feel that commercials are the actual content of network television. And they may well be right, particularly if you agree that the chief purpose of network TV is to create an entirely fictive paradise of desire to which daily reality is merely a backdrop, a world so carefully rearranged that we don’t have to experience it. In this Paradise, information is replaced by infotainment, as events are constantly altered to fit the requirements of TV editing.
For millions upon millions of people, a vast audience, much larger than print can claim, TV has taken over their image banks, their modes of social expression, their dreams, their fears. TV creates the icons to which they look and the forms of homage they pay to them. And yet there are some things TV cannot do; and because it knows this, because it is not made by fools, TV favors and strives to create a mindset in which those things are not values. They include, for instance, the ability to sustain and enjoy a nuanced argument; to look behind the screen of immediate “iconic” events, to keep in the mind moderately large amounts of significant information, to remember today what some joker said last month. Instead it wants us to be content with a seductive blizzard of images, a fast surface a few electrons thick, full of what is called “information” but is in the main just emotively skewed raw data. It’s content lurches between violence and blandness, and it never, ever, stops. (The Spectacle of Skill, 2015).
All of this from a writer who died before having a chance to polish these words as part of a planned biography.
It’s perhaps a given that we expect critics to have opinions. That’s why we read them, whether men or women. And when they are this good, they elevate what can otherwise be an unproductive mode of address. So if it exists, the masculine style has its limits, especially as pertains to developing an empathetic interpersonal style. But it can also be bracing in the critic or analyst who has opinions worth listening to.
