Nation's public discourse gets dumb and dumber

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 17, 1995 | by Tom Shachtman

The inarticulate members of this society will be quite content with their lives, untroubled by attempts to analyze or critique current events, by intellectually provocative artistic endeavors or by behaviors that have reference to anything other than what is held in the audience's current memory or in the pictorial files of the computers or television banks. Revolt of the inarticulate masses against the status quo will become increasingly impossible, though change in rulership may be frequent, since the seizing of power will require only gaining control of the communications apparatus.

As for the literate and articulate, they may speak only to one another, renounce television as an addictive drug and surround themselves with books. Such pariahs will have very little likelihood of reaching a broad audience and may give up trying to do so. Rather than being missionaries inspired to proselytize the word, the articulate will become monks in hermetic cells.

For the United States to avoid becoming the inarticulate society, it needs a coordinated national program to counter inarticulateness and to sponsor and reward articulate behavior. It is a program that cannot be left to the government to organize or operate, though government must play a part in it. It cannot be left to the educational system, though schools and teachers bear a large share of the burden. Nor can it be left to producers of culture, though they must change some of what they do. Everyone must take part. And the greatest responsibility for it may fall upon each individual.

In many and varied ways, the program must celebrate the word and all that devolves from the word, including literacy, political debate, speech as an art form, conversation as entertainment and as education. It must insist on full literacy, not on that which comes from secondhand ways of acquiring the language. It will exhort speakers of all sorts - in government, in entertainment venues, in classrooms, in businesses, in families - to aim higher. Aiming higher will not (as many producers and politicians believe) result in products that go over the heads of members of the public; rather, it will foster products that have the possibility of pulling the audience up to them. There is no in son why a president delivering a State of the Union address to Congress, a business-group leader exhorting his or her team, a parent discussing the implications of the day's events with children at home, an educator conveying an idea in the classroom or a talented writer scripting a mainstream motion picture should feel the need to pull rhetorical punches: These are occasions and situations in which the audience can be presumed to be listening with full attention, expecting to strain a bit for comprehension and eager to be challenged and not coddled.

The program will focus on four arenas: the home, the educational system, the media and the political culture.

Positive challenges to enhance articulate behavior must begin within the family, and they mean much more work for parents who have abdicated such efforts to the schools. Children must be encouraged to learn that articulate expression is valued by their parents, is something to which they should aspire and that it is something that win require work. Parents must treat the home as more than a pit stop for refueling family members and undertake to champion and reward desirable behavior. This may mean a reconsideration of when and how parents work outside the home and who or what institution will serve as substitute parent when the parents have no economic choice but to work outside the home.