Sustainability

As we all know, they are existent - these keywords putting the social state of the art in a nutshell; annoyance belongs to them as well as fear, risk and irrelevance. All in all, these terms are a bit unpleasant, which disqualifies them for the have some fun and pay-slogans. Above all, they express no perspective dimensionality, but simply lament the present state.
Quite different is the case with another keyword: sustainability. As far as the author is informed, it has not entered into common vocabulary till the last 12 years. What makes it that interesting is his pardoxical construction, the contradiction between word content and use. Without doubt, it is a fashionable term which objects fashion trends. Sustainability implies austerity, circumspection, foresight, a sense of responsibilty, in short everything which is missing all the time. Especially today.
It is similarly paradoxical it is just the political elite, led by our head of government, the media chancellor, uses this term as if it was a matter of course. Just like the top managers he compliantly practices self-contradiction in action, for on modern public conditions there is no sustainable use of the word sustainability.
Sustainability is endowed with a deontic component of meaning; the term expresses an obligation, and it is very telling it had its breakthrough at one of these effectless world climate conferences. And just because they have no effects, the deontic component constantly gains splendour. The admonishing index is growing and growing.
The original idea of sustainability is an economic one - if we naively presusppose keeping house is coping with a lack. So sustainable economy is in principle a pleonasm like the notorious female woman, little dwarf or corrupt politician. But the fact sustainability counts as relevant instead of redundant is obviously due to waste as an end in itself. Above all it is the environmental resources whose waste has been causing voluptuous scenarios of distribution wars, but there is information, patience, intelligence, too. Everybody knwos we cannot go on like that, foresees the bill subsequent generations will have to pay. Therefore the term is used once more. a real invocation formula which seems to be meant to exorcize the demons of future shortcomings.
The issue of sustainability, its lasting relevance for social discourse, is based on the foolish dealing with scarcity. As the spiral continues turning, everything is running shorter and shorter faster and faster. And here lies the real, typically modern reason, for while former societies knew the problem of short goods, too, nowadays time itself is a short good, too. Less time is due to making faster and faster decisions, for everybody is running the risk of being forestalled by someone - someone who did not produce new blood or who simply has better nerves. In other words: someone unscrupulous - a tough, rational manager. Someone who will be capable of selling charterflights to the Mars as soon as the Earth will have completely been exploited. Impressive, is it not?
Of course we shall have to pose the question whether there is something that can be done in a sustained way at all. It is not accidental in the least this idea has been transferred into eternity, metaphysical. There is an air of modesty behind it the present show-offish technocrats can only despise. Who can tell anyway whether the expectations will become real? And how sustained is sustained? Which means, how long is the expected period of time during which the intended sustainability is meant to last? Temporal complexity, the acceleration involves nowadays we can only conceive sustainability as a breather which interrupts the staccato-like managing mania. This is something we ought not to leave aside, for otherwise we will confuse sustainability with making only one (albeit the right one) decision so that we can live after that till the end of all days contently and unmolestedly. Since this apparently does not work (as has been said above, risk is another keyword), annoyance and disappointment will spread all the more. Better, we will not do anything. Then we can make no mistakes. And that means any. Till then we can continue talking about sustainability. Maybe we can take some consolation from the fact desasters produce the most sustained states we can imagine.

Survey

In the past, when things were better, decisions could be made carefreely. All that people required were two intellectual fixed points: the current state of the world and an intentionally altered one. The actual and the target output were quite easily exchangeable, provided there were certain personalities who independently and energetically defined the states and left the realization to the enthusiastic subordinates. Both historiography and the myth of founding worked that way. And this still applies to the delegation of power.
However, gradually interfering sounds bothered that harmonious decision-making process. That decisions could turn out to be wrong, had been known before, it is true, but just like in a Greek tragedy all that was left to be done was to shrug one's shoulders and state that the Great Statesman or the patriarch of the company were subjected like anybody else to fate. Failure served as the proof of overpowering autonomous forces at whose mercy the acting mankind invisibly was. So action and decision on the one hand, fate and Providence on the other, were detached. One acted and held one's breath, and when it worked the position in the chronicle or annals of political or company history was secured. When it failed, all that remained to be done was to confide in oblivion.
Some day, when being rational had stiffened into being rationalistic, the idea was given of depriving fate of its independence, too; the more immanent distinction of internal organization and external world replaced the traditional one of action and fate. Furthermore it occurred to actively influence the enigmatic environment instead of keeping the fingers crossed. The concept was simple and clever at the same time. How about not simply deciding something and waiting for the outside world to answer but taking the answer to the decision into account before the decision? Thus an offer could be made that could not be refused. The clock struck meaningfully and rang in the birth of modern public opinion research.
Nobody knows how often the decision-makers have had to experience frustration since then. But it is certain that making decisions is not that funny anymore; for at best the environment is merely reluctant and refuses to meet the brilliant plan which was made inside with keen approval; still, nowadays the pollsters peremptorily stand by, and surveys cannot that easily be dismissed anymore. People have grown too dependent on quotas, per cents and Semantic Differentials (active or lazy), on the reflection on the own appearance in the mirror of public opinion, so to speak.
What is even worse, public opinion polls rarely present definite results; pollsters pore over increasingly thick handbooks, pull out more and more sophisticated coding books, terrified of the vicious sisters called reliability and validity, but are compelled to develop a self-consciousness where it is least needed. The author is talking about the observer's paradoxe, which is a kind of blurredness relation in opinion topics. It teaches us that a question is solved in that way in which it has been posed in the first place. After all, we can never be sure whether we would give an answer without a question. This is no news for common sense, it is true, but who claimed public opinion research worked that way? In relation to that, we notice that the environment is constantly fickle and does not maintain any definite attitudes. Then there is the additional issue of the quality of quantity; maybe 78 % are in favour of a decision an organisation has made, still - is the total of those polled really in keeping with the total of the target groups relevant enough to thwart the plans? And, if so, can we be sure that the true opinion leaders are not entirely allocated to the remaining 22%
Whoever naively endeavours to slip the pollsters' results in his decision, will usually reap worse results the next time. This is because public opinion only perceives their fickleness feeding back to practical ogranization policy. There is no denying that terms like sustainability or farsightedness are booming because they interrupt the short-winded bombarding with polls, thus at least implying there is something beyond the trend which cannot be so easily counted. After all, we should not forget that there is a special kind of irony to that culture of rat race. As mad as we are about figures, as interested we are in numerical change, too; for constancy in numeraical terms means all too often stagnation. What is more, someone who believes something has been found out will suddenly feel compelled by perfectionism and promptly order the next, more detailed survey - provided an enthusiastic financial backer is at hand.
Politics and economy are in the pollsters' stranglehold. Why do they nonetheless stick to the continuation of fortune-telling by other means? Well, for one thing, because the pollsters would otherwise get into a crisis of legitimation. For another, because it works; for it makes no difference in organization proceedings, if their decisions are backed by truth, but it makes a considerable difference to make a decision at all. Therefore pie and bar charts serve as the icons of Enlightenment which has without further ado called belief information.

Soft Skills

Nowadays we have grown accustomed to reflect upon the world with the aid of computer metaphors. The author wants to make no exception and suggests describing organizations such as companies, political parties, offices, schools and other blessings of civilization that way, too. So let us assume they consist of two different components, namely the hardware and the software.
Let us further assume the hardware component comprises besides the common technical devices such as production capacities, information technologies the typically 'rational' aspects of organizations: administrative structures, rosters, contacts, organigrams, obligational hierarchies, functionaries. In contrast, the software component consists of executiing decision programmes, all in all what is old-fashionedly called human beings or person.
Providing that dealing with the worls in general, with other persons in particular, could be divided into the two domains hard facts and soft skills. Hard facts appeal to a fixed structure of states of affairs which are methodically strictly and rationally connected (the psychology of shape offers the term form); in contrast, the soft phenomena are more loosely linked. They constitute a kind of soft subsoil, th emedium, in which the form is embedded and with which it sharply contrasts. It serves as a background from which logic selects rules for fixed and factual connections. Apparently on this level logic is of no avail, since it can prove anything except its own presuppositions.
After all it is very comforting to use the hardware/software distinction. Especially software sounds somewhat more calculable than outmoded notions which still conjure up the Ghost in the Machine, but between you and me: in the end it is all about that. And here the soft skills play their part. As is widely known, in controversies we rarely fare well at recommeding our opponent like a schoolmaster to stay matter-of-fact. Often logic becomes a boomerang. And whoever is warned beforehand not to take a statement personally is bound to do the opposite. So soft skills refer to everything the hard facts aficionados shrink form just as the devil balks at the holy water: the paradoxe, the hint that order is always temorary and can be undermined every second. While hard facts fans love playing the part of the impartial transmitter of information, the soft skill party knows better, because not exactly. Hard facts use codes which only seem to be definite, whereas soft skills open the world logic has roughly closed. They depend on the single cases, not on the general abstract. Their textbook is either empty or comprises innumerable volumes.
The scientific manner which is booming since everybody wants to be a member of the knowledge society ought not entirely concentrate on hard research, but should also take cultural education into account. It should not do so jovially but remember that the nearly mystical gesture wich points at the limits of modern Science stems from quantum physicists. Second order cybernetics seems quite right in saying it is the soft skills which make the hardest demands - demands reliable logic fails to meet. And from that point of view it might not be that absurd to think that it is not the soft skills which make a cold world of facts warm, but that the hard facts are meant to let us forget about the principle of imponderability. In order to make sure nobody will get the idea to disturb the alarmed society which struggles to calm down social claims to education are transferred into privacy, universities are reinvented as technical schools; for it is much more laborious to conceive a many-valued logic which replaces the idea of only one level with the binary true-false distinction and to grow accustomed to the idea irrationally applied rationality is only an insidious kind of idiocy.
In turn of course soft skills experts gain some profit by that opposition, too; only within their domain it is possible to talk that freely and cluelessly and to unleash group vibrations in seminar rooms. That kind of subjectivity to which tribute is paid lacks any logic at all. In a relieved mood the facts can be tackled for the rest of the day. But just as hardware and software remain interdependent, a logic of subjectivity is required. After all we never can tell beforehand when to proceed solely intuitively or logically. At best we can logically prove intuition in retrospect.

Silence

Our culture's cradle is situated by comon assent in Hellas, that loose confederation which invented Occidental philosophy we are so fond of conjuring up in ceremonial adresses even though we cannot distinguish Ancient Greek letters from the Cyrillic alphabet. Maybe this is what makes it attractive. For philosophizing as the expression of non-technical Rationality devoid of time and accordingly money constraints has become quite unfashionable in Western countries, banished to the circles inhabited by melancholy unsalaried lecturers or in its trivial form by people who have just drunk their fifth beer. Today education means above all knwoledge which is applicable, exploitable, useful for the market - in short any information which is not an end in itself.
Only that person will be held competent who is the first to answer any undecidable question. We nearly imagine we hear the buzzer when it comes to discussing problems of integration, economical measures or balancing the welfare state. It is good form to send the employees to rhetoric seminars as a further training. Talk shows dominate the political discussion. We do a lot of talking.
In past times it was a little different. A philosopher is meant to think, and thinking was always easy to distinguish from speaking: Either temporally by conceptually preparing a stetement or factually by wisely abstaining from speaking. To present ears the ancient reproof a speaker has forfeited his philosopher's status might sound amazing: If you had been silent, you would have remained a philosopher. If we take that statement seriously, we will inevitably draw the conclusion nowadays nobody wants to be a philosopher anymore and that is the way it is.
In public discourse it is only the word that counts, not the silence. Who begins to speak and then to be silent, will be regarded a loser. Who is silent in the first place, will live in the shadow. The latter might be all the more risky, as people easily suspect someone is saving his communicative efforts for strategic tricks and is up to something unpleasant. And as social systems are based on communication and due to their survival instinct experts so elegantly call autopoiesis cannot perish silently, in case a member refuses communication they make do with excluding the member, making that person redundant, or with communicating about instead of with such a person. If necessary, they will produce rumours which will keep them going. Often the both options are causally linked - someone is silent and gets suspected to be an eccentric, philosopher, sodomite (for all these attributes equally mark the opposite term to being normal), so that the talkative majority can expel him from the group. Any conviction can be excused - except that silence is valuable.
However, it can be. Sometimes it does make sense to stockpile rehearsed sound emissions. Contrary to the gabbily demanded communication culture there are still some places which insist on silence. A clear case in point: the working place, the hotbed of asymmetrical communication. Whenever a superior wants to bring his (her?) power to bear, he (she?) will order the employee to enter an open dicourse while insisting on his (her) right to speak. A subordinate who contradicts three times is anyhow about to change the job, a happy single person who need not be woried about paying the rent. Or take the communication forms characterizing the social system armed forces. If the instructor barks out a command, not even a reception signal, a communicative feedback will be appropriate: Stand still! OK, why not? Do not get worked up.
To the person keeping mum, silence serves as a consolating chance of making sure he or she is only inferior in terms of power, but not of intellect. Thoughts will be free, even if the body must stand to attention, bow or be kept on the leash. From that perspective any kind of repression quitely proves the superior's inferiority who is compelled to surrender to such a provocative passivity. Maybe this gives a less obvious reason why we still have to offer language courses to immigrants or why denseness is thriving. How can I be blamed for offending the ground rules if nobody taught me them?
No matter if silence is approppriate or tabooed - it is a genuine means of communication, equal to talking. Given the psychological conviction we cannot avoid communicating the lack of words means proceeding a conversation in its own way. There is telling silence, because the difference of speaking and silence which starts any system formation is repeated, copied, absorbed within the boundaries of that emerging inside. If I do not have anything to talk to a person, I must distinguish if I have nothing to talk to a person or not. To put it differently: It makes a big difference if someone disregards another person who is trying to open a dialogue (the German service problem) or someone prefers to keep his mouth shut when confronted with his superior's suggestion (who is looking around, eagerly waiting for objections he might use against the objector).
Qui tacet, consentiri videtur - the phenomenon of fellow travellers whose claim to be innocent makes them guilty is widely known in Germany. Which raises the ultimate question whether there is really too much public talk about socially relevant issues - or whether talking without consequences is only meant to legitimate silence. As can be seen, silence, too is subject to the (not so) New Confusion.

Scheme

Communication consultants' perspective suffers from an interesting blind spot - maybe because they run the constant risk of harbouring dubious cross professionals, one aspect of communication remains notoriously underexposed: to remain in the picture, its shady side. We can understand by that ethically dubious or even immoral actions. And it is all the more interesting, as the consulting clients, often enough induced by career motives, expect valuable hints right here: How to mob someone? How to manipulate a person? How to denigrate a competitor? Consultants often balk at these questions - officially. Inofficially these mean tricks do become an issue by organizing seminars meant to protect the participants against them (and implicitly giving insight into how meanness works).
And as taboos will be - they will arouse the highest interest. But should we really leave being insiduous to the naturally talented? Is it not high time to conceive communication solely to two or more parties being involved, not to whether what is communicated actually is morally all right? Beware - manipulation! Advocatus diaboli is fond of Rhetorical Questions. Therfore the reader ought to keep in the back of his/her head the author is acting very unethically - but revealingly.
Take for instance the scheme - a very captivating topic which has at best been reluctantly added to the textbooks of managing social contacts since the days of Machiavelli (who, by the way, was subjected to a similar mistrust). And this is although communication psychologists teach us a phantom which has become a topic is no longer a phantom at all. Schemes are quite ill reputed, probably because they are closely linked with lies, as can be seen from Shakespeare's plays as well as German tragedies of Enligthtenment. However, this is only partly true. Lies are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for scheming - presupposing we are referring to the content of what someone is blamed for. But lies do play a part when they are meant to dissimulate the scheme. But let us proceed by turns. Advocatus seems to be carried away by the insight potential the topic involves. Sorry.
Schemes are quite a complex form of communication, because unlike the standard cases we have to take as basis there are not two participants (speaker 1 - speaker 2; he - she; writer - reader) but three, namely 1) the schemer, 2) the victim, 3) the audience. The schemer is the person to put the meanness into work, to plan and practice it. The victim is the person to sustain the plot; he or she is the schemer's target. The audience takes no part in planning the plot, still it indispensable for its success. That is, the audience is the force which, induced by the schemer, punishes the victim. As is not difficult to see, this is a very abstract model. And it has to be, unless we want to close our ears in the first place, motivated by ethical disgust, and scream 'My heart is pure'. So these three functional roles need not be identical with single real persons; without further ado we can imagine the roles are filled with groups of people. It depends on the situative constellation.
The determining factor is the displayed and the concealed intentions are strictly detached. The schemer has the concealed intention to denigrate the victim - for instance, because he or she wants to occupy his or her post within an organization and must get the competitor out of the way. This aim remains secret. The schemer constructs an offence which is serious enough to justify the audience's sanction. Construction can but need not mean lying. It plays no part for the production of a scheme if the reproach is based on facts or not. That at best will have its impact on the prospect the plot may have. The exact kind of offence is variable, too. But as it aims as doing damage to the vistim's reputation, it is meant to undermine his or her credibility. This means the reproach concerns either the character disposition or the competence the victim has. In the first case the schemer indicates to the audience the victim is a schemer (!), in the second the victim is incompetent. But this indication (or denigratiuon) is anything but concealed. Quite the contrary, it must be as open as possible, so that the audience, maybe a little slow, will understand the offence is really worth sanctioning. The next steps are open as well: the indignated measures the audience will take, the victim's desperate struggle for self-defense. In other words: The schemer can behave open as long as his or her motivation is not at issue. Information is free, but the ulterior motives are concealed.
And it is just that difference between what is factually said and what is implicitly meant which makes scheming a typical form of communication. Common language use levels out this difference between, as pragmalinguistics calls it, the locution, the utterance, and the illocution, the speech act, or, as the theory of social systems puts it, between the information and the message as far as possible - it has to, because talking would cease completely for the sake of speculation what might be meant. Nonetheless, the difference still remains.
Modern schemes characteristic of media democracies increasingly fall together with scandals which display a similar three-piece structure. After all, the very concept of audience implies the public component. However, the public of today is not a cultivated gathering of culturally inclined citizens who watch the actant present the victim from an aesthetic point of view, but it has to act as a judge and punish the victim, too. The public means are entirely about changing the victim's reputation. The victim will count less than before the scheme. The schemer triggers off a loss of credibility, of face. The victim cannot show him- or herself in public without seeing accusing fingers pointing in his or her direction - fingers whose possessors do not want to realize it is them who as the audience factually decide if the scheme will be successful, thus potential victims of their own.
After all, only on a more abstract level the functionality of schemes reveals itself entirely. They serve as a permanent medialization, a dissolution and recombination of seemingly constant forms of occupying social positions. To put it differently: By making someone bearing a function attackable they help detach the function from the bearer. No matter how the merry-go-round of personnel may turn, no matter how many specimens of circumstantial evidence are gathered for the day of reckoning - the post itself will not be doubted. It will be merely filled by another person. The more candidates compete with each other the more probably it will remain intact. And schemes actually serve to maintain the systemic difference between position and person by pretending to warn against their entanglement. So personal replacement seems to be the only way to import a minimum of dynamics into predominantly static organizations. The respective scheme victim will take only a small amount of consolation from it, but after all we have gotten accustomed to thinking big, have we not?
Needless to say, there are various techniques of scheming. The author likes to put forward the thesis schemes can as it were form a recurrent interlocked network. It works in accordance with the principle of level skipping. An office-holder who wishes to protect himself from a scheme conceived by his direct subordinate will be well-advised to induce the latter's immediate subordinates in turn to plot and scheme, thus converting the potential schemer into an actual victim. If he acts particularly skillfully, the executors will believe to be the schemers rather than the audience. Like any organization of a modest complexity the answer to the question of who is cheating who only refers to circular structures. And it is exactly that kind of structure which eases moral indignation. Basically all that remains is the question if someone has deserved to be a victim to a scheme.

Sadicissm

Humanist philosopher George Berkeley is widely unknown apart from his peer group. His notion of reality is too one-sidedly sensualistic. It seems to stem from the old days - before Kant's copernian turn could end the quarrel between the Rationalists and the Empiricists by assuming synthetic judgements a priori. However, Berkeley's motto esse est percipi hits the nail right on the swirling head of media images. Only what is perceived is considered true; nothing is invisible. As a consequence, a whole generation has grown up widely undisturbedly whose socialization mainly is based on conveying visual knowledge. What is written or even spoken is remakably second to what is graphic.
If you have nothing better to do, you may enjoy comparing university textbooks from the 1970s with recent ones. While letter columns pattered upon the groaning reader before, while the bold print or grey frames were considered to be the peak of progressive didactics, nowadays cartoon figures and charts are grinning at the viewer in a true lightning of colours. A kind of graphic stimulus satiation bears witness of how grim the competion for attention has become. The perception distance to the video optics is meant to be as narrow as possible. And only what can be seen is real. Permanent availabilty of photographs spreading via internet suggests to every user he or she takes part directly. From this point of view (!) the websites only radicalize the common construction of reality moving TV images convey.
It might be a telling sign of the present Marquis de Sade actually is in contrast to Berkeley widely known outside his peer group. Oppressing others in a mean way belongs to the basic social rules at the work place (à propos bullying) and practice makes perfect, does it not?
How much imagery has become the lingua franca of the global media society can be seen from the sadistic photographs published via WWW. Right here de Sade and Berkeley meet halfway. Regardless if babies are maltreated, dogleashes are tested on human beings crouching on the ground, one's peers are eaten or a fellow student is forced to bare himself - the camera is always there. While traditional sadists liked to resort with their victims in gothic vaults reminding of the motto of Dante's Inferno, perversion as an end in itself is not sufficient anymore. Instead it has to be made medially available; the nightmare is meant to leave the depths of the subconsciousness. The air of authenticity requires banishing it on film and giving the modern oh so normal WWW Peeping Toms the licence for mental masturbation. A remarkable leap in the evolution of homo homini lupus, for the culprit's perversion magnifies by including once excluded spectators, thus making them second degree accomplices, while the victims even lose their right to global silence. Humiliation alone is not enough anymore - the whole world has to know about it.
A very intersting anchronism, indeed, for atavist contempt of humanity has united with the state of the art of modern technology. The result is even more repulsive than the classical version. Within the global village de Sade has finally turned into a heinous figure and maybe it is not till now that Benjamin's view mass reproducabilty robs the work of art its aura has been confirmed. And the human dignity, too.
This highly developed bestiality whose testimony can be wateched in the internet has nonetheless its positive sides. After all, while in former times the whole prosecution apparatus struggled for concise evidence, today's culprits are more and more ready to catch themselves at maltreating others. Can it be merely accidental the culprits' next generation has been accustomed to daily talkshowsfrom a child watching miserable people make a monkey out of themselves in front of a giggling TV audience? As can be seen, we will be nothing if not noticed by others. So this truly narcisstic drive embraced more than ever as can be seen in WWW lives it up to the logical self-accusation.
Since the beginning of time the past has been using pictures for self-assurance: Look, how much fun we had then. And to make sure not to miss the slightest valuable moment we record everything. For reasons of selection. Perhaps it is just that which makes up for the sadists' narcisstic motivation. Maybe they cannot believe themselves they did something so reprehensible. For that reason the camera is running. Internet publication serves both purposes - the miserable souls' craving for admiration as well as the seemingly noncommittal image.

Rhetoric

There are countless ways of illustrating the national decay everybody is complaining (or simply wailing?) about. No matter if it is about the youth, the economy, politics, culture - the elegies are on the rise. Quite certainly not without reason. All the same, one, maybe the sufficient criterion has hardly been brought up. Even if he is wearing professional blinkers - the author has the language use in public in mind.
To avoid the risk of hasty rejection or enthusiastic approval: It is not about the increasing impact of (pseudo) Anglicisms on our pure, purer, purest German mother tongue. That kind of suspicious control should be left to the professionals, the amateur linguists who are desperately seeking entrance to the chat shows. Instead, this text is about the decreasing capability of composing well-formed German sentences that are in keeping with grammatical and orthographical demands. All we have to do is spend a day in front of the TV set to find out praised journalists apparently have never learnt how to handle their tools: words. If we have a look at the inserted news texts, we cannot escape the conclusion they were produced by dyslexic trainees. So it is speculated in Germany that the development will cost us intelligence, reluctant childs cannot be teached, dedectives in exonomics are needed, it is better as the latest year, it is one of the most extreme experiences or becoming increasingly harder, we are seemingly getting more and more stupid (although we are apparently doing so) and much more of that kind. There are so many issues on this notice of defects and they are still on the rise. It is only a matter of time till the most ignorant speakers will be rewarded with special awards for their outstanding gift for unpretentious languages. That is the way German elementary pupils are motivated. What about the British ones?
Anyway, these remarks are merely incidental. Let us turn to the epitome of the public culture of speaking, that kingly discipline which has enobled cultivated and mature democracy ever since, practically the soul of occidental philosophy of state: the parliamentary speech. Thanks to the archiving efforts of a programme wich is orthographically slightly firmer we get the opportunity to watch historical debates every Sunday afternoon and compare them to recent ones. Even though things were not wholly better in the past (which can be seen from the notoriously underexposed pictures from the 1970s), the cultural shockis painfully striking. No doubt, a lot of nonsense was uttered then, too; of course any controversy was presented as a manichaeic battle between chavinism and communism. Still, the speakers' inclinations to pointed statements matched their rhetorical skills. When the chancellor attacked the opposition leader, the latter could at least rely on a member of his fraction would be able to respond something appropriate. The confrontation was quite entertaining. Moreover, the rhetoric training seemed to comply anything but complacent evading precise comments which often hurt but hardly bluntly offended. So who did not realize then the politicians were competent has to apologize in the year 2004. After all, what was sober, original, self-confident, vivid, supportive of the State, determined, vernacular or committed in former times, now is dull, would be innovative, pompous, unimaginative, hectic, uninspired, nagging, demagogic or shrill. Remaining doubts can be dispelled by comparing the names of relevant politicians now and then.
Is this just another case of solding politicians? Not quite, for our representatives are eager to please the imaginary majority, after all. And the decline of parliamentary debates is of course due to the inflation of statements in 'political' talk shows which are not even meant to resemble a forum anymore. Or to the hectic waylaying journalists, competitively waiting to get a half-minute statement from a politician on his way to a committee meeting. Political speech in the narrow sense is discernibly (which makes the present form specific) no more a debate. It merely interrupts the steady decision-making process which takes place outside the plenum. And by now really all speakers know exactly where the camera has been installed into which they deliver a text they are reading for at best the second time.
When was the last time a relevant political speech impressed the public opinion by its rhetorical skill? Since the author has been allowed to vote, for 14 years, he has some difficulties in remembering one. The so-called "swing" speech a former Federal President held seven years ago was no rhetorical highlight in spite of media promotion. And that lack of skill cannot be excused by the speakers' concern they might induce the stupid people to lead a total war once again if they display rhetorical brilliance.
Unfortunately, the original unity of rhetorical demands, content and shape, seems to have split up anyhow. The parliament is predominated by the austere content, upright, predictable, official occasions in comparison by a more stylized, but vague address. However, if striving for eloquence simply counts as recreation from everyday practice, we can have no right to complain about our political culture.
Apparently we Germans are content with consoling ourselves by digging up the outdated image of the 'poets and thinkers' and outsourcing its realization. But there is hope: model experiments with E-Campaigning via WWW suggest we can give up rhetorical contortions in future and form our opinion in favour of an election platform by means of 20 simple questions. And perhaps there will be soon the virtual representative - endowed with an integrated oratorical function which allows the sophisticated user-voter to stipulate the number of metaphors, chiasms or even coprolalies per speech unit. After all we only hear what we want to hear and disregard the rest.