Wednesday 6 March 2024
A Cool Mind
In The Arena is a 1905 collection of short stories about political life written by Booth Tarkington. One story has the title Hector, depicting the political rise of a young man called Hector J. Ransom, his outstanding political abilities, power of oratory and his remorseless ambition.
“And you think Hector has only his oratory?”
“I think that's his vehicle; it's his racing sulky and he'll drive it pretty hard. We're good friends, but if you want me to be frank, I should say that he'd drive on over my dead body if it lay in the road to where he was going.” Lane rolled over in the grass with a little chuckle.
Hector’s oratory, extraordinarily powerful in its effect on an audience, is still familiar enough to us today. Rhetorical gymnastics, nonsense dressed up as political convictions which would not bear the analysis of a cool mind.
Not that what he said could bear the analysis of a cool mind: nothing that Hector ever did or said has been able to do that. But for the purpose, it was perfect. For once he began at the beginning, without rhetoric, and he made it all the more effective by beginning with himself.
But Hector did not aim his oratory at cool minds, he aimed it at politically persuadable minds.
The noise grew thunderous, and when it subsided Hector was master of the convention. Then, for the first time, I saw how far he would go—and why. I had laughed at him all my life, but now I believed there was “something in him,” as they say. The Lord knows what, but it was there; and as I looked at him and listened it seemed to me that the world was at his feet.
Tarkington doesn’t say what that something in him might be, perhaps because a cool observer cannot quite know what it is beyond observing it. Yes there are words about emotions, needs, social conformity and so on, but once said they tend to resist further analysis. Stirring rhetorical nonsense is stirring for some, but often puzzling for a cool mind.
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5 comments:
Rhetoric has changed a lot over the past century. People used to be stirred by speeches that were essentially belligerent, casting other nations or social classes as the implacable enemy. Now, they treat that sort of thing with suspicion, and are persuaded by pseudo-rational appeals to science and modern bureaucratic virtues like efficiency and welfare. "War on want" and the "War on Terror" straddle this divide.
Perhaps this change has occurred because we all know there are no more prizes to be delivered by conquest, and we just need to manage our expectations and get along together. Or maybe it's because voters have not spent time in the armed forces, but have worked in offices with bureaucrats.
Either way, I'm not sure whether rhetoric is any sort of virtue. Being combatively fluent seems to have served Galloway well, but he's obviously no more than a second-rate rabble-rouser.
I was listening to some of Churchill's speeches at the time of the Battle of Britain. They are rhetoric, barely grammatical, a non-musical tone poem perhaps.
But where would we be without them?
Sam - I think we often see a different type of belligerence today, toned down but still stridently divisive in the "with us or against us" sense. Climate politics can be very belligerent in the older sense, with its loud lack of interest in nuance or uncertainty.
DJ - yes, enough people seem to expect leaders to address them with high-flown stirring nonsense rather than coherent arguments. As if this is a common perception of a leader. Sunak and Starmer don't have it and this comes across as a lack of something essential, without which the nonsense isn't quite as acceptable as it could be.
Is there some super leader somewhere, hiding in the wings?
James - possibly, but I don't think the role is attractive enough to anyone who could do it.
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