AFTERTHOUGHTS AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

When the wealthy Boston merchant Nicholas Boylston died in 1771, he left Harvard University £1,500 to establish a new chair in rhetoric and oratory. The university accepted the money, but then inertia set in. Eventually, after three decades had passed without any visible action on the part of the university, Boylston’s nephew, Ward Nicholas Boylston, filed a suit to recover the bequest. He abandoned it only after Harvard agreed to fill the chair at once—and consented to appoint his cousin John Quincy Adams, a US senator and future president, as the first professor.

Asking a nonacademic with practical experience of public language and politics to lecture on the subject of rhetoric was an intriguing idea. But the potential downside must also have been obvious. When Adams eventually stood up in Harvard Hall in 1806 to deliver his inaugural oration, he began with a kind of apology:

In reflecting upon the nature of the duties I undertake, a consciousness of deficiency for the task of their performance dwells upon my mind; which, however ungraciously it may come from my lips, after accepting the appointment with which I am honored, I yet cannot forbear to express. Though the course of my life has led me to witness the practice of this art in various forms, and though its theory has sometimes attracted my attention, yet my acquaintance with both has been of a general nature; and I can presume neither to a profound investigation of the one, nor an extensive experience of the other.

Well, I know how he felt. In early 2012, Mark Damazer, the former controller of BBC Radio 4, the present master of St. Peter’s College Oxford, and one of my closest friends, rang me to ask if I would consider becoming a visiting professor of rhetoric and “the art of public persuasion” at that university. Certainly not, I thought at once.

Nonetheless, that November, having convinced myself and the organizers that I might have something to say on the subject, I gave three lectures at St. Peter’s, followed by a public discussion that was moderated by Andrew Marr and included the government minister David Willetts and the journalists Polly Toynbee and Will Hutton as well as myself. This book has grown out of the talks and some of the ideas that were raised and discussed by the panel and audience.

The publisher George Weidenfeld came up with the idea of the Oxford visiting chair as part of his Humanitas Programme of visiting professorships, and this book wouldn’t exist without him. George, who once had a desk at the BBC a few yards from that other “George,” Eric Blair or George Orwell, was at home in most of the political and cultural worlds I reflect on in this book and glided amusedly between them. He knew many of its leading characters personally. At the time of the lectures, I was about to move from my job as director-general of the BBC to become chief executive of The New York Times. Before the first lecture, George sat me down on a sofa in the master’s lodgings at St. Peter’s and gave me the first installment of what he called his “Proustian” guide to New York. I last spoke to him at dinner on the Upper East Side three years later, a little reduced inside the pin-stripes, but still presiding puckishly. He died a few months later in early 2016 at the age of ninety-two.

The lectures were dedicated to Philip Gould, a brilliant and kindly man who appears several times in this book as one of Tony Blair’s political advisers. I know, because I discussed it with him, how passionately Philip cared about the relationship between politicians and the media, and about the future of the BBC in particular. I hope he would have agreed with at least some of what I have to say. I am sorry he is not here to tell me how wrong I am about the rest. The lectures were sponsored by Philip’s last employer, Freud Communications. I am also grateful to Matthew Freud, another old friend, for his support of them.

But let me return to John Quincy Adams and the inconvenient but unavoidable facts about my own inadequacy as a guide to public language. Although I too have witnessed “the practice of this art in various forms,” and read a little about its “theory,” I am by no stretch of the imagination an expert in rhetoric. I’m familiar with a decent amount of classical literature, but that hardly makes me a classicist. This book doesn’t claim to be a work of philosophy, but it does deal with the history of ideas, so I should probably confess that I am not a philosopher either and have no training in any of the many other disciplines the book touches on—modern history, political science, social psychology, linguistics, marketing, and so on—though I have bumped into most of them, one way or another, over my career.

So I must apologize to professionals in all these disciplines for crash-landing on their fields. I hope that the critical faculties and pockets of knowledge and experience that I can bring to bear compensate to some degree for these deficiencies and that, while my congenital intellectual overconfidence may have frequently led me astray, it may also have allowed me to bushwhack my way to a handful of insights that might be hard to make out from any one of these established academic paths.

This is the age of data, and of the quantitative analysis of language; yet, while not quite data free, my book is firmly rooted in the qualitative—in examples, personal experiences, criticism, and opinions. In this, as in other respects, it falls well short of contemporary scholarly norms. I have spent the past twenty-five years trying to understand the tidal wave of digital innovation that has transformed our world. But I was brought up in the humanities.

My school, Stonyhurst College in Lancashire, was originally founded by the Society of Jesus in the late sixteenth century in northern France. The Ratio Studiorum (plan of studies), the early modern Jesuit system of education—itself based on the medieval Trivium, which had introduced students to the liberal arts by teaching grammar, logic, and rhetoric—still influenced teaching at the school. Even in the 1970s, each year group was named after a given stage in the learning of Latin, “Lower Grammar,” “Upper Syntax,” and so on. The final year, which I entered in the autumn of 1975 to prepare for the Oxford entrance exam, was called “Rhetoric.”

In truth, rhetoric wasn’t much taught at Stonyhurst. It had gone into decline almost everywhere in the nineteenth century. In due course, that Boylston professorship at Harvard became a chair in literature rather than rhetoric, and today is always occupied by a leading poet. By the 1970s, and despite a modest mid-twentieth-century revival, rhetoric was a fairly obscure branch of the humanities and scarcely the stuff of sixth-form studies. But studying Latin and Greek made it unavoidable. Indeed, when I finally opened the Oxford exam paper, I was confronted by a passage of English rhetoric—I think it was a gobbit of wartime Churchill—which the candidate was invited to turn into Greek in the style of his or her favorite Athenian orator.

Even back then, most educationalists would have dismissed this as not just elitist—how many candidates from state schools could compete with this kind of demented hothousing?—but worthless from any conceivable economic, social, or cultural perspective. Many readers of this book may well agree with them. All I can say is that by this point, the Ratio had rolled up its sleeves and got down to serious business inside my eighteen-year-old head, and the interwovenness with which all the arts were taught—classical and modern languages, literature, history, philosophy, theology—meant that I began to feel a connectedness among all of them, and between the deep past and the present. This tendency was further encouraged by the two men who most influenced my education, Peter Hardwick at Stonyhurst, and John Jones at Merton College Oxford. Both taught me English literature, and much else besides.

Despite all of the digital talk, then, I discover that I have written an old-fashioned essay. Many people have helped me in the course of its development. Professor Abigail Williams, who teaches English at Oxford, was the academic adviser on the lectures and was encouraging and inspirational throughout. Her classics colleague, Professor Matthew Leigh, added many insights and suggestions as well as casting an eye over my tendentious and rusty renderings of the Latin and Greek extracts. Both Abigail and Matthew kindly offered advice on this book as well. In addition I received helpful guidance on the lectures from Ben Page of Ipsos MORI, and Deborah Mattinson, who has played such an important part over the years in the Labour Party’s strategy for reaching out to and convincing the public. Sebastian Baird supported me during the development of the lectures with research and fact checking.

I also received a great deal of help in expanding the ideas in the lectures into a book. The political philosopher and Harvard professor Michael Sandel suggested readings to me during the course of my research. Patrick Barwise, a thoughtful and indefatigable defender of public service broadcasting, who is emeritus professor of management and marketing at the London Business School, gave me valuable advice for the chapter on the role of marketing in the development of modern public language. Former senator Bob Kerrey gave me several ideas in a series of conversations about rhetoric. Dr. Frank Luntz, who features in the book and is a kind of P. T. Barnum when it comes to public language, also talked to me about his take on the subject. Svetlana Boym, a playwright and novelist who was, until her death in 2015, professor of Slavic and comparative literatures at Harvard, helped me understand a little about the rhetoric of Vladimir Putin. My sister-in-law, Dr. Rossella Bondi, added some fascinating suggestions about modern Italian political language. Rhys Jones helped with research and fact checking.

I received advice and support from many past and present colleagues. At the BBC, David Jordan and Jessica Cecil provided ideas and comments on the lectures and both read early versions of the book. They were part of the team that routinely helped me think through difficult editorial questions and controversies at the BBC, including the ones I cover in this book. I can’t mention everyone who influenced my development as an editor and the approach to journalism, free speech, and impartiality that is set out in this book, but I am particularly grateful for the good judgment and fast reactions of Mark Byford, Alan Yentob, Caroline Thomson, Ed Williams, and Helen Boaden, as well as wise counsel from successive BBC chairmen, governors, and trustees.

I received plenty of support for the project at The New York Times, including from Diane Brayton, Eileen Murphy, Joy Goldberg, Meredith Kopit Levien, and Dorothea Herrey. Both Diane and Licia Hahn read the whole manuscript and provided ideas and comments. Amanda Churchill and the team in the DG’s office at Broadcasting House helped greatly with the logistics of the 2012 lectures. My executive assistant at The Times, Mary Ellen LaManna, has supported me and my book with astonishing 24/7 dedication. I also thank my literary agent, Caroline Michel; Stuart Williams, Jörg Hensgen, and their colleagues at the Bodley Head in London; and George Witte and Sare Thwaite and all of their colleagues at St. Martin’s Press in New York.

I thank everyone on this long list for their great generosity, and absolve them from any responsibility for any error or offense the book may contain. The case of Mark Damazer is different. It was he who got me into this business in the first place, and it seems only fair that he should take his fair share of the blame for it. But in the unlikely event of there being any credit, he should take most of that as well. He has been an unfailing enthusiast, stern critic, gracious host, sympathetic therapist, and devoted friend throughout.

Last, my family. In Jonathan Dorfman, I am lucky enough to have a brother-in-law of astonishingly wide reading in politics, literature, and culture. Many of Jonathan’s suggested quotations and astute observations made it into the book. And I received colossal intellectual and moral support from my wife, Jane Blumberg, who is not just my academic senior but the best literary critic I know, and from my three strong-minded and imaginative children, Caleb, Emilie, and Abe. Thanks to these four above all, for their backing and for their ideas.

*   *   *

There is a vast literature, ancient and modern, taken up with the themes of this book, and I have no doubt only scratched the surface of it. But even a list of the works I consulted would run for pages. Rather than a bibliography, let me mention some of the books I found most useful—and that a reader who wants to pursue the subject further might enjoy. To this list, the reader should add the works cited in the notes.

The ancients are easy to find. You can enjoy them all for nothing on Perseus, Tufts University’s excellent classics site (www.perseus.tufts.edu/). I tended to use the Loeb and Penguin Classics editions, mainly for old times’ sake. If you are not familiar with them and can face only one ancient work, read Thucydides. The History of the Peloponnesian War isn’t a book about rhetoric as such, but about the collision of politics, public language, deep national culture, and transient public mood. Somehow it manages to be a compelling commentary, not just about the war between Athens and Sparta and their respective allies two and a half millennia ago but also about every Western war that has taken place since then. I recommend The Landmark Thucydides (edited by Robert B. Strassler, Simon & Schuster, 1988) for its many maps.

You Talkin’ To Me? by Sam Leith (Profile Books, 2011) is an excellent general introduction to rhetoric ancient, modern, and contemporary. I also enjoyed Brian Vickers’s more academic but still eminently readable In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford University Press, 1998). Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment by Bryan Garsten (Harvard University Press, 2006) is a masterly and original analysis of the main lines of argument for and against rhetoric and perhaps the most persuasive defense of persuasion that I read. I also found Adam Adatto Sandel’s The Place of Prejudice (Harvard University Press, 2014) interesting and valuable. Kenneth Burke was one of the mid-twentieth century’s most influential writers on rhetoric. I read A Rhetoric of Motives (Prentice-Hall, 1950) and sections of other works but—though this is no doubt more of a reflection on me than on Burke—rather struggled with his approach. Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader (Guilford Press, 1999) was one of several collections of essays I examined to get a sense of academic thinking about rhetoric at century’s end. Though it is only indirectly a book about rhetoric, I found Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (edited by Barbara Cassin, Princeton University Press, 2014; originally published as Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles, Éditions de Seuil, 2004) alarmingly moreish.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson’s Eloquence in an Electronic Age (Oxford University Press, 1988) is an important and engaging study of how mass media influences political speechmaking. I also benefited from Stephen Fox’s classic The Mirror Makers: A History of American Advertising and Its Creators (Morrow, 1984, though I read the 1997 Illini Books edition).

On George Orwell, in addition to the great man himself, I looked at Christopher Hitchens (especially Orwell’s Victory, Allen Lane, 2002), and Orwell and the Politics of Despair by Alok Rai (Cambridge University Press, 1988). Masha Gessen’s The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (Riverhead, 2012) is a white-knuckle introduction to the man and the system he has created.

There is a groaning bookshelf of tomes analyzing the various ills that afflict our politics, media, and public language, and new works arrive by the week. I’ve read only a tiny fraction of them and, in any event, have relied more on transient digital sources for evidence and contemporary commentary. But in addition to the several titles mentioned in the body of this book, I read Blur by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel (Bloomsbury, 2010) and unSpun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation by Brooks Jackson and Kathleen Hall Jamieson (Random House, 2007), both of which deal with information overload, facts, and spin. Unspeak by Steven Poole (Little, Brown, 2006) is an angry, compelling complaint about the way politicians and others twist apparently straightforward words—nature, community, abuse, and so on—to mean whatever they want them to mean and, as a result, deliver highly partisan messages through seemingly neutral language.

I quote John Lloyd’s What the Media Are Doing to Our Politics (Constable, 2004) in this book. In fact, I have found his muscular take on the media during his years at the Financial Times unfailingly interesting—and often convincing. I could say the same for David Carr, who was a media columnist at The New York Times when I arrived in 2012 and who became an informal mentor to me, as he did to many others, somehow combining the need for strict journalistic impartiality with a passionate enthusiasm for what The Times could be at its best. David died suddenly at The Times in 2015. Writing on media by Lloyd and Carr, as well as by Emily Bell, Margaret Sullivan, Jim Rutenberg, Jeff Jarvis, and Steve Hewlett, is well worth seeking out on the Web.

“Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,” John Keats claims at the start of “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” I’ve returned from my own journeys in the realms of the Internet to confirm what you already know: it is not all twenty-four karat. Yet, more than anywhere else, it is where our public discourse is happening and where it must be studied. Readers must and will find their own way. But let me finish with a word of praise for Wikipedia, that inevitably imperfect but—especially for a project like this—invaluable resource, a neural network for the world and the start of so many cultural and intellectual departures. This is people power (demokratia) at work in aid not just of opinion but also of true understanding, another modest cause for hope in a troubled time.