Some months ago I wrote a longish entry, filled with good links, “Creativity and conversation”. One of them was to Douglas Rushkoff’s blog where he describes giving five talks in the UK about his Demos book, Open Source Democracy. What struck him was that, “instead of engaging in conversation, most of these folks played high school debate. This sort of banter looks fun when it’s people playing ‘Parliament’ on TV, but it’s not so very productive.” He went on to describe his frustration about the way “The majority of government ministers with whom I spoke seemed bent on finding ways to prevent themselves from considering new ideas – as if even wrapping their minds around a new concept for a even a moment would wreck the sanctity of their current established methodology.”
I was reminded of this by an article by Martin Kettle in the Guardian, who was talking about Robin Cook’s gifts as a conversationalist. Drawing heavily on an essay by Robert Louis Stevenson, Kettle contrasts Stevenson’s enthusiasm for the virtues of conversation with what passes for public talk today:
“… it seems to me that our public talk in this country is now being relentlessly drained of the elements that make such talk rewarding. Politicians, indeed, are now trained specifically not to answer interviewers’ questions. Instead they are told to remain focused on making the predetermined points in the party ‘line to take’. Their interrogators are no better, seeking little more than to hector, embarrass and oversimplify. The consensual creativity and freedom of true talkers, trusting and trusted, is wholly absent, almost wholly subordinated to egotism, adversarialism and melodrama.”
I will leave the last word to Stevenson, which despite to modern ears carrying the implication that good conversation is something that just takes place among men, which is certainly contradicted by my experience, is something of a delight :
“THERE can be no fairer ambition than to excel in talk; to be affable, gay, ready, clear and welcome; to have a fact, a thought, or an illustration, pat to every subject; and not only to cheer the flight of time among our intimates, but bear our part in that great international congress, always sitting, where public wrongs are first declared, public errors first corrected, and the course of public opinion shaped, day by day, a little nearer to the right. No measure comes before Parliament but it has been long ago prepared by the grand jury of the talkers; no book is written that has not been largely composed by their assistance. Literature in many of its branches is no other than the shadow of good talk; but the imitation falls far short of the original in life, freedom and effect. There are always two to a talk, giving and taking, comparing experience and according conclusions. Talk is fluid, tentative, continually “in further search and progress”; while written words remain fixed, become idols even to the writer, found wooden dogmatisms, and preserve flies of obvious error in the amber of the truth. Last and chief, while literature, gagged with linsey-woolsey, can only deal with a fraction of the life of man, talk goes fancy free and may call a spade a spade. Talk has none of the freezing immunities of the pulpit. It cannot, even if it would, become merely aesthetic or merely classical like literature. A jest intervenes, the solemn humbug is dissolved in laughter, and speech runs forth out of the contemporary groove into the open fields of nature, cheery and cheering, like schoolboys out of school. And it is in talk alone that we can learn our period and ourselves. In short, the first duty of a man is to speak; that is his chief business in this world; and talk, which is the harmonious speech of two or more, is by far the most accessible of pleasures. It costs nothing in money; it is all profit; it completes our education, founds and fosters our friendships, and can be enjoyed at any age and in almost any state of health.”