The recent political debacle in South Carolina, where a clearly unqualified Alvin Greene can regularly be heard stammering through interviews with confused reporters, got me thinking about the phenomenon of talking (or writing) without saying anything. It’s particularly poignant in the political arena, wherein avoidance of real issues, and issuance of benign platitudes are rewarded instead of lambasted.
I remember back when I was reading daily White House press conference transcripts, being regularly upset by the roundabout say-nothing question “answering” by Ari Fleischer. Here’s a good example, stemming from some vocal racist idiocy by Louisiana’s Representative Cooksey:
Q: Has the President had any communication with Representative Cooksey regarding his comments on Sikh Americans? And does he have a message for the lawmakers and members of his party in particular about this issue?
A: The President’s message is to all Americans. It’s important for all Americans to remember the traditions of our country that make us so strong and so free, our tolerance and openness and acceptance. All Americans—and we come from a very rich cultural heritage, no matter what anybody’s background in this country. And that’s the strength of this country, and that’s the President’s message that he expressed in his speech to Congress and as he has done when he visited the mosque a week ago Monday, and in the meetings that he’s hosting here at the White House today with Muslim Americans and Sikh Americans.
The first half of the question was left unanswered (ostensibly because the President had not talked with the Representative); the second half waved a couple of politically correct messages through the aether, and promoted the President’s Muslim/Sikh-friendly meeting, but really did not actually answer the question. A possible answer would have been: “The President has spoken with Rep. Cooksey and made it clear that his racist idiocy will not be tolerated. And the President’s message to lawmakers is that terrorism will not be defeated by stereotyping and fear-mongering.” Another (more honest) answer might have been: “The President has not spoken with Rep. Cooksey, because he doesn’t want to be associated with such a negative figure. Bad for the polls. Also, the President doesn’t really have a message for lawmakers on this one, because saying something substantive about a controversial issue will alienate too many voters, one way or the other.”
Alas, instead of one of these sorts of answers, we were given empty speech, in the guise of something non-empty.
There are at least three reasons for speaking but saying nothing:
1. Stupidity
2. Obfuscation because you’re embarrassed to address the issue
3. Obfuscation because you think you’ll seem “deep” if you make your speech labyrinthine
The Ari Fleischer quote above clearly falls into category 2, as does much of the non-speech generated by politicians and other public figures.
Stupidity is another path to saying nothing when you speak. This scene from the movie “Bedazzled” is fiction but is so funny exactly because it is not far from reality.
Watch the sports news any day, and listen to athletes being interviewed. Either because the questions are stupid or because the players are (or both), we are treated to a non-stop train of banalities.
The third category of empty speech — deep obfuscation — is harder to root out, because there’s often a fine line between the peculiar and hard-to-follow words of a genius, and the peculiar and hard-to-follow words of someone trying to look like a genius.
In fact, even genuinely brilliant people sometimes still come up with empty turns of phrase that are meant to be deeply meaningful. Take engineer and scientist R. Buckminster Fuller, for example, from his nearly impossible-to-read book, Synergetics:
Generalized design-science exploration is concerned with discovery and use by human mind of complex aggregates of generalized principles in specific-longevity, special-case innovations designed to induce humanity’s consciously competent participation in local evolutionary transformation events invoking the conscious comprehension by ever-increasing proportions of humanity of the cosmically unique functioning of humans in the generalized design scheme of Universe. This conscious comprehension must in turn realize ever-improving implementations of the unique human functioning as well as an ever-increasingly effective concern for the relevant ecological intercomplementation involved in local Universe support of humanity’s functioning as subjective discoverer of local order and thereafter as objective design-science inventor of local Universe solutions of otherwise unsolvable problems, design-science solutions of which will provide special-case, local-Universe supports of eternally regenerative generalized Universe.
After several decades of reading and re-reading this passage, I am none the wiser for my efforts. Now, it’s not exactly fair to say that the above text is meaningless, as there is something to be gleaned from it — namely, the idea that humans have an active role in planetary affairs. But is that idea really worth that many words, in a paragraph that difficult to parse?
Many philosophers and religious figures can be placed into this category of saying very little with the most meaningful-sounding language. Hegel comes to mind. And I would start listing religious tripe-sayers here, but I’m not sure I want to view the ensuing flame wars in the comments. At any rate, my favorite example of someone in this category is the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein scholars will chide me and say I just haven’t plumbed the depths of good old Ludwig with sufficient effort and brain power. But even they have to admit that in all of the vast literature on Wittgenstein, the ratio of meaningful analysis to fancy-sounding noise is incredibly low. Wittgenstein himself might even agree:
My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)
I leave you with the hope that in your marketing and communication adventures you will try your best to say something, and with the following gem from my favorite contentless politician, Dan Quayle:
Hawaii has always been a very pivotal role in the Pacific. It is in the Pacific. It is a part of the United States that is an island that is right here.
