TALK

by Kevin Carey

G21 Staff Writer

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Kevin Carey

I am sure that anthropologists have very long Greek or Latin names for the phenomena but when I was a child, before we had a television, we had fixed patterns of conversation. The first, for the dullest of evenings, was the round which started off with a theme and then went through a series of topical routines until it drew to an imperfect cadence before starting again, going through the identical series of topics with variations as mild as the change of light on a long Summer evening in the temperate zone. This, being the staple, was at once the most apparently plain yet the most subtle. On evenings of greater tension we had what might be described as the concerto, one dominant voice with a vibrant topic, sometimes in dialogue, sometimes in competition with the general orchestration of the rest of the conversants. This was a somewhat more cluttered version of the Pinter play in which characters forever talk past instead of to each other.

The most exciting form of talk, however, was that which took place on the great days when something really important had happened.

The theme would be explored at great length, with an amazing dynamic range, colour and subtlety. Having apparently burned itself out, secondary material would be introduced, like the second theme in sonata form, before the original would return, again, like sonata form, in a different key. It did not matter what new material was introduced, what old stories of past triumphs and humiliations were retailed, the grand theme was never far away. I re-discovered all three patterns many years later when I lived in Central and East Africa for some years without benefit of the television programme"Frazier."

Strangely for the graduate temperament, except in cases of very hot dispute the dialogue was not a favoured conversation form. In both cultures there was a propensity to weave wonderful patterns around difficult problems but they were only faced head on when it was too late.

I regretted this as a teenager at home and as an adult abroad, but having now lived in a variety of cultures and in a variety of intellectual environments, I have reached the sad conclusion that dialogue is not a natural linguistic transaction; like chess and haggling it has to be learned.

No wonder there was no serious complaint when British Prime Minister Thatcher famously said, in respect of her policies, that: "There is no alternative", an instant refusal of dialogue. No wonder the state did not totter when President Reagan did; whatever we did want from him it was not Socratic; nor is that, apparently, what we really want from George W.

At one level this is perfectly usual and, in the sweep of history, quite unremarkable. I don't imagine that the miscellaneous Rogers and Tancreds who marauded on the borders of the Byzantine Empire were very Socratic. At the level of popular culture there is always a nostalgic bias in favour of our forebears being more diligent and erudite than we but I see no evidence for it. I don't imagine your average Victorian bourgeois pillar would have ploughed through Trollope if "Dallas" had been on offer.

At another level, however, this problem of dialogue is now becoming critical.

In previous eras there was a small class of people whose training was in dialogue; they studied philosophy and advocacy, oratory and rhetoric and forged a method of handling difficult subjects without necessarily resorting to the sword and the axe.

Even as late as my time at Harvard -- which exactly coincided with the Nixon Impeachment proceedings -- there was still a vestige of the dialectic tradition but I fear that we cannot rely any longer on our academics to conduct our dialogues, distilling evidence and arguments down to a set of propositions that can be handled in popular culture. No wonder that the public cannot handle dialogue when those we traditionally relied upon to frame it and render it in digestible pieces have stopped trying.

The medium most often blamed for a lack of both private and public discourse is television; we are supposed to be dominated by its presence; it is supposed to force politicians into sound bites and celebrities into indiscretions; and above all, it is said to have forced sane people out of well-considered positions into instant comment. All of this may well be true but it misses the central point. Dialogue, like all forms of competitive sport, is an important social regulator of otherwise violent tendencies. It may well have attained effete trappings at the couches of Socrates but for most of Western culture it has been a bulwark against high temperament and bloodshed.

It is difficult to analyse the causes of its decline.

One root is certainly the political emergencies into which we were forced in the middle of the 20th Century when central government necessarily ruled by fiat; you don't argue when there is a necessity to build a ship a day.

By the time that this dirigist tendency was under severe pressure, the age of television celebrity had arrived. Reagan would not have gone a single round with Plato but, then, if Adlai Stevenson is anything to go by, Plato would never have gotten into the White House.

At the same time, in the late 1970s, the quite necessary requirement in universities that people should not speak solely to cause offence became horribly tangled up with a much more dangerous idea which was that people should not speak at all if what they said would cause offence and, worse still, might be thought by listeners to cause offence.

Dialogue has been under attack in a serious way from conservatives since the attempt by the Reagan administration to install Robert Bork in the Supreme Court; it failed in that but, almost as bad, Clarence Thomas succeeded where Bork failed. Matters, however, have been made infinitely worse by liberal support for censorship as the result of a quite understandable repugnance in the face of chauvinism and pornography.

In a famous episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus a character in a slum ghetto full of criminals claimed to survive by employing sarcasm and irony. It isn't probable nowadays, even on university campuses, that such tactics would be understood, even if the difference between the two terms was.

My sad conclusion is that the art of dialogue, passed on as a valuable tool, for the intellectual elite, is falling into desuetude from which recovery will be difficult. We will, I suspect, always be able to turn to a kind of manneristic word play but as a way of defusing civil crisis its days are numbered.

KEVIN CAREY is social entrepreneur, economist and Director of the UK's humanITy. He can be reached via e-mail at "humanity@atlas.co.uk".

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