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¶ Introducing the Power of Spoken Word
Hello and welcome to the Arts and Ideas Podcast with me, Anne McKelvoy. This week, as the war rages in the Middle East, I sat down for an interview with the UN General Secretary, Antonio Guterres, about how it could end. What struck me was the way he curved questions back to a narrative, the traits of a veteran message crafter. and yet he wasn't a showy orator Guterres is Portuguese, and functioning in his second language, with lots of quirks all of his own.
And that set me wondering about how the spoken word works on us so powerfully, from this radio programme, we hope, to a speech on the stage, or maybe just a personal conversation we never forgot. It somehow never leaves us. Which oral cultures have thrived in the ancient world and today around the planet, and does it make a difference if things are said rather than written?
Over the next hour or so we're going to be tracking ideas about sharing knowledge, the art of public speaking, and a buzzword in education about what skills we should be teaching these days, Orasy.
¶ Guests' Journeys in Public Speaking
To begin, I'm going to ask my guests about their relationship with public speaking and the spoken word, and maybe what was a memorable occasion for them. Edith Hall, professor of classics at Durham University, and a champion of classical rhetoric. And the spoken word, I imagine you must be a dab hand at it.
I um spend all my time um conversing with ancient Greeks did write down at a certain point everything that they thought, but that was building on at least six, seven hundred years of a very sophisticated oral culture. So I'm highly sceptical whenever I hear uh Pearl clutching about children not reading long books, because these incredibly sophisticated and intelligent people operated their sophisticated intelligent society without ever reading any continuous prose.
More as we have it on that, Edith. Uh Philip Collins, you are a former speechwriter to Tony Blair, who was never short of a word or two. Now you're editor of Prospect Magazine, a written publication, but presumably some very talkative editorial magazine.
Extremely talkative. Um, mostly uh dominated by me talking all the time. Uh there's no doubt that's the the starter for this program. I I l enjoy public speaking a lot and the And I teach it uh quite a lot and so I I'm intrigued by that relationship between telling other people how to do it and the capacity to do it myself.
And it's a skill that you can get better at. And this was one of the great classical insights. Of course, the sophists regarded this as a teachable skill, which I think it is.
Tom Wright, you're a historian of rhetoric at the University of Sussex. Lecturing to students must give you ample opportunity to hone that speaking craft.
Yeah, well and you've uh hung out with enough academics in this studio to know that we Uh don't need much encouragement to grab the microphone. Um but you know, growing up and and way into adulthood I was terrified of public speaking and um now I do it for a living like Edith and um like other people round this table. But I think you're fascinated by the things you're scared of. And I've managed to turn that into something that I talk about all
Uritika Sobramanian, you're based at the University of East Anglia, you're currently a researcher in residence with BBC Radio four. What a nice gig. You also host a a podcast, so a seasoned broadcaster. I did uh ask everyone if they had a a memorable occasion about public speaking. Does one uh spring to mind for you?
I think so too. I mean in terms of um like as of now I also teach and you know I'm a lecturer but at the same time I also run this podcast and, you know, that's given me ample opportunity to speak to different people and, you know, use my Podcaster voice, use my lecturer voice and you know, sort of navigating that has been quite an interesting experience overall.
You have a podcast for it.
Uh I think I do. I mean I think I'm a little more serious in some way, but uh more than that I am as a teacher. So yeah, that's something I'm still exploring and figuring out.
I like that idea that we have different voices depending on the medium. So we m we might touch on that as we go along tonight. And Stephen Batchelor, you're a secular Buddhist teacher and writer, the author of Buddha, Socrates and Us, Ethical Living in Uncertain Times. You're on the line from France. How much do you like to project in public as a teacher? And yes, do you have a Buddhist teacher voice?
I probably do, but I'm not really aware of what it is. I've spent many, many years uh speaking in public, both to smallish groups as to large groups. And it's something I become in entirely at ease in. I remember initially I was had a lot of stage fright and so on, but once I get into the th in into the swing of it
I find the words pour out almost to my surprise. I don't even know what I'm gonna say sometimes next. And I find that very revealing, but also I find it taps into the uh direct communication I'm having with the audience. Uh so I can't think of a particular experience in particular, but uh it's certainly been a very rich way not only of communicating my own ideas, but also about learning. I think public talking leads to Coming to experience and feel what you're saying from another perspective.
¶ Speech Impact, Classical Rhetoric, Oracy
Philip Collins, we've seen in the news this week the impact of a speech. Angela Rayner addressing a selected bunch, it must be said, of the Parliamentary Labour Party in a pub in Westminster, and that led to a huge amount of analysis. uh of her speech and what she said there. We're running out of time. The Labour Party is best when it's bold. There were lots of sort of talking points put together there.
Some of which, to be honest, didn't strike me as th the most elegant speech making, and yet there's something in the fact of where it's delivered, how it's delivered. I mentioned uh Antonio Guterres again at you know, at the top of the the show. It's not necessarily all the most beautifully crafted. which get the most attention. Can you give us some ingredients that maybe Re Reina was using there to get the impact?
Yes, I I mean you're right. It's it wasn't the most elegantly constructed speech, but what you've just pulled out there are the essential components of what makes for a good speech, which is to say, can you summarise for me quickly what you're trying to say? Do you have something that at roots you're trying to get across? And Angela Rayner did. She had two thoughts. One is we're not doing very well. And the second is by implication we'd do a whole lot better if I was in charge.
And so you're the very fact that you were able to summarise that speech without doing violence to it tells you that it was therefore quite a good piece of communication. Lots of speeches fail, even though they're more elegantly constructed, because at bottom there's nothing in them.
So most of the speeches I we d I have a company we do a lot of corporate writing, corporate speeches, and most of those fail because the speaker in the end really doesn't have anything to say. And we are the masters of elegant nothing. We can speak at length and say nothing, really beautifully, and yet that the no act of communication takes place because the speaker is not concerned to to
say anything and Angela Raynor clearly was. And so that's why it did work, even though it's probably not Winston Churchill.
I remember an editor, the Daily Mail used to say, to the terror of anyone in conference, if you didn't think that it was clear enough what when you've said that, what have you said? Which it seems to be exactly
Question.
What you're saying, Phil. Um Edith Hall back in November the government announced plans for a new Orasy framework to ensure more young people could become confident and effective as speakers as part of a revamped national uh curriculum, with the emphasis uh on communication as a core part of the classical world. You said something really nice in your intro about you were sort of in conversation, you said with
ancient Greeks, the way that some of us might think we had to chat with our neighbour o over the the wall. Do you think the ancient world could help us think about what Orycy A phrase that I think some people are still struggling with, but you know, the idea is maybe getting clearer. Would they get some help there from your ancient friends?
textbook on how to persuade other people. It's called The Art of Persuasion is Aristotle's rhetoric. I do not understand why we can't have a national rhetoric programme. This word ORIC I do not like. Aristotle wrote um an extraordinary treatise. He's been living in the Athenian democracy where every single Athenian citizen had to be able to defend and prosecute himself, his own voice in court. You could hire a speechwriter, but you had to deliver it.
And he came up with this one magic triangle which everything always comes down to. You've got to have a good speech. You were talking Phil was talking about Philip was talking about the logos. You've got to have a kind of um authentic and trustworthy Personality, get over your ethos, your character, but crucially, and I think the most important is pathos, which is gauging the emotional state of your audience.
If you don't gauge the emotional state of your audience, no amount of good speech, content, no amount of authentic character will come over. If you misjudge that, it will fail.
What pathos is? Yes. I didn't know that.
Yeah, yeah.
You learn a lot on these programmes.
And that is
Free thinking is such good value. That is literally what it is originally. Yeah. The the emotional state.
And and I have seen so many speeches in every conceivable environment fail through not my little recent thing was um at a a appalling situation in Charles de Gaulle airport when because of bad weather uh getting through security. Fifty of us had missed a a Ryan airplane and we were told we would have to go back through security which would take three hours and buy a new ticket.
And I just saw that the actual uh ticket ladies were as distressed as everyone else and I managed to gauge a tone and I said to everybody, Look, we're all suffering, we're all in this together, it's just as hard on the airline employees, let us all sit down. ac roeddwn i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd.
And she got home.
We have to gauge the emotional state of everybody and then bring in an inclusive, hegemonic we.
fluency in the modern world. Do you go with that analysis?
Well, I was down the road this morning, as it happens, at a conference of three hundred teachers and two government ministers who would disagree, um, because they love this word oresy. They think it's uh answering a new problem. It's actually quite an old word, it's from the nineteen sixties. And it's waxed and waned i in and out of
Fashion. I agree with Ediv though. It uh it sounds like something that happens in a dentist's chair. Um and like most new ideas, it names something that's very old. So I think we can look back through history and see Um rhetorical traditions, elocutionary traditions, ideas about conversation and discourse that are really underpinning
all of the powerful ideas that all of those teachers down the road were talking about. But there's something really powerful about about the idea, and we'll come back to that.
¶ Women's Work Songs: Archives of Change
We will indeed. Uh Rita Sabramanian, you've been conducting interviews with women in India who use songs to share their experience and document environmental uh change around them. You've written a postcard for us about that work, so let's have a listen to that.
Variva Paus Nadila Alapur Gauran Madzi Ata Rahili Lamdur Midsummer rains have come, the rivers swell in flood, my daughter remains far away, beyond the rising flood. नहीला आलापुर वाहुन गेला काश्या कुष्या, एका दगड़ावर दून दूती फूई भाश्या. The river is flooded, all the twigs and debris are washed away. My aunt and niece keep washing clothes on the same rock anyway. Across rural Maharashtra in western India, women once sank such couplets, known as a novi, while turning heavy stone mills.
Grains became flower beneath their palms, time became rhythm, voices rose together in the slow companionship of work. Across the world, women have long sung their labour into sound. In South Asian courtyards at dawn, song travelled from house to house as grain was ground and water drawn. In West African fields, women sank to keep pace with pounding stones and bending back. In Caribbean cane landscapes shaped by storm and plantation histories, work songs carried endurance edged with wit.
Along cold North Sea coasts, fish workers sang while gutting catch and bending tone nets, salt stiffening their sleeves. Separated by oceans and languages, they were linked by repetition, by the gestures that kept households alive. Their songs eased fatigue, they created fleeting sisterhoods, they turned necessity into something shared. And they noticed. Women sang of clouds that gathered and passed without rain, of the earth cracked like an old mother's heel, of rivers that had gone to sleep.
Seasons became mirrors of the self, and of the worlds women were expected to inhabit. Without rain, the soil does not get moisture. Without a husband, the woman does not get happiness. Environmental change surfaced in these songs as pressure in politics, in longer walks for water, in rising grain prices, in the fragile negotiations that held households together. These songs also carried movement. Young men leaving with the dry season wind, flooded rivers separating families.
In Colombia's San Basilio de Palenque, women sang as they coaxed peanuts from rain softened soil, gathering food, language and memory in the same gesture. In the American South, enslaved women's call and response songs turned fields and wash tubs into spaces of shared endurance. Keep your eye on the sun, don't let her catch your work undone. Taken together, women's labour songs form a hidden archive, knowledge carried in voice rather than text, passed from hand to hand and breath to breath.
The work that shaped them was rarely recognized as work at all. Often performed by women marked by caste, class, and colonial hierarchies. Grinding, gathering, hauling, tending, essential labours that seldom entered official records. Now, the worlds that sustain such singing are changing. Motor driven mills replace grinding stones.
Collective rhythms grow quieter, songs once born from necessity drift into ritual life, sung at weddings or childbirth gatherings, fragments of memory echoing older days when women worked side by side. These voices remind us that environmental change has long been lived before it was measured, felt in aching wrists, uncertain seasons, restless tight.
Long before climate science named the crisis, women across different worlds were already marking transformation as it unfolded around them. They were singing their work, they were singing their weather, they were singing the storm.
¶ Documenting Oral Traditions: Grindmill Songs
Risika, fascinating and how did you first come across these songs and chants and explore why they were used in the way they are, were and are?
Yeah, I think uh it actually began when I you know, I grew up in Maharashtra in the same state that these songs were once produced. And as part of my doctoral research I was looking at data around drought and, you know, looking at experiences of marriage in this region.
And one thing that I was quite shocked to see was that there were no voices of women in like official records, whether it was government records, um newspaper archives or, you know, data around drought itself. And that's when I stumbled upon this archive called the Grindmill Songs Project. which is also now managed by the People's Archive of Rural India.
And there are hundred thousand such couplets which have been recorded. And what's interesting is that these songs, unlike what we've been discussing so far, were not songs meant for performance. They were songs meant for conversation, you know, which were conversed by women while at work.
you know, in a way to get through the drudgery of labour or just to, you know, build some form of kinship and sisterhood. So they became really interesting reflections because they represented, you know, metaphors that came from everyday maternal you know material realities. And in a way became very rich resources around how people really experienced drought, experienced scarcity and you know, built some collective voice around it.
And tell us a bit more about the messages the songs deliver. You've made that uh link there between the big picture of of climate change and suggested that the sort of the songs get there to communicate it uh ahead of there being a formal language to do so. You had a wonderful uh metaphor that I just uh picked up there about the earth cracking like the heel of an old mother. You can see that, you know, you can see that dried out.
skin and then imagine what that looks like when when th there is drought and when the the earth is arid. So w what are they sort of trying to say quite a lot of the time in the in the songs?
So I mean it it actually is quite interesting because these were couplets, you know, so they were talking about it was more like a conversation uh, you know, set to the beat off the grinding stone itself. And uh what's interesting is that these messages actually travelled with marriage. So with women getting married, they would move t villages
move away and, you know, carry some of these songs as traditions. And some of the messages I mean, I worked on sugarcane migration in this region and the metaphor of sugar kept appearing in different ways, you know. So for example, sugar sacks of sugar A sack of sugar would probably mean, you know, like a woman for instance who's being, you know, given in marriage where her father was described as a merchant, or crushed sugarcane would refer refer to gender based violence, for instance.
Or uh you know so basically sugar as a metaphor was very interesting because it sort of brought together some of these experiences around drought, labour and scarcity.
And what's happened to these songs now? You you referenced that they were dying out. Are there parts of it that still remain or get adapted as a a live tradition or that people actively want to hang on to because it has some emotional connection for them?
Yeah, I think here technology has played a big role Anne because you know, on the one hand the tradition the way it was has been dying because you know people are no longer collectively grinding grain to flour for instance.
There are Motri systems at work. But having said that, there is a digital archive that was created by these two ethnomusicologists back in the eighties and nineties who documented these songs, you know, with recordings. So today we have an archive of hundred thousand such songs.
And we have it's classified in a very compelling manner with details around caste, around names, around villages, and that's where you can really use this as a rich rich uh resource or a source of uh for academic uh research.
¶ Orality in Ancient Greek, Buddhist Worlds
Let's bring an Edith Hall in turn to the ancient world where oral culture also thrived. Can you tell us uh something perhaps about the poetry of Homer, another A way that we can look at at the way that language is used, chanted, spoken, or even sung?
Yes, absolutely. It's not just Homer that's there's two names it's attached to, Homer and Hesiod. But these guys are these are just names attached to uh uh f least five hundred year oral tradition before the phonetic alphabet was introduced. We c we we know that.
So for at least five hundred years you had numerous professional bards, often they were the people with bad eyesight or the blind people in the village who were chosen as children, um, who learnt off by heart tens, twenties, hundreds of thousands of Xameter versus this very
special meter. It's a bit like I could hear the rhymes coming through from your thing. So it's easy to remember. And the entire wisdom of the ancient Greeks is packed into this. And it's just called the epos. It's where the we we get the word epic from. Epos. You have your ordinary life and then you go into your
hive mind cultural encyclopedia which will tell you everything you need to know about how to do an animal sacrifice, how to farm, when to farm, when to cook. There were women's epics that we sadly haven't got there, they're reflected in Odyssey Eleven. And th this was um
it me it carried Greek civilization. The only reason it had to get written down was with colonization. The phonetic alphabet some people think was actually introduced to allow a Greek emigrating from the Peloponnese to the north shore of the Black Sea to take The world of the epos with them.
Stephen, let me bring you in because you've written about the ancient world and also that sort of connection between Buddhist tradition a and the the Greek tradition. Tell us there where the the spoken word fit. It's alongside the literary tradition because there's perhaps just a bit of a bias towards thinking if it's not written down it's not it's it's not as important or it's not the real thing.
Well I think that's very much the case, and I think because we come from such a literary culture and we take it for granted that the written word is somehow carrying the authority of the tradition, we tend to sort of disparage. orality, uh that people who don't write stuff down are maybe not taking their tradition as seriously as we do. I think there's a bias that comes in there.
But in the Buddhist tradition from the outset the Buddha never wrote anything. There wasn't really much writing going on in India at that time, about five hundred B C. uh and the tradition uh was continued uh for four hundred years where um the Buddhist uh texts and teachings which amount to, you know, several, you know, hundreds of pages uh were r repeated and recited by people who were again, as Edith Wall said, singled out for this ability, probably as kids or for some other reason.
And this uh tradition uh was uh systematically memorised. They had skills in India, not just the Buddhists obviously, but the Vedas also were memorised for hundreds of years before they were first written down. In the Buddhist tradition you have up here about four hundred years where different groups of monks and nuns and
uh would uh r memorize different parts of the canon uh and the whole monastery would then have the whole body of material at their fingertips. And then about the first century uh B C uh this material was eventually writ written down in Sri Lanka Um but and so but orality, the power of the written word, uh the spoken word.
uh continues to be uh the life breath of living Buddhist traditions today. That a text is not something written on a piece of paper. A text consists of a body of articulate sounds. It's it's it's the sound, it's the voicing of these texts that is the real thing. Uh the written version is just a kind of reminder or a kind of a a gloss that might help remember what you've internalized.
¶ Orality vs. Literacy: Modern Revival
So we've got another word on the go now, orality and what do we think Tom speech does, whether or not it gets a nice big word around it that writing can't?
Yeah, I mean orality is a much older word than some of these buzzwords that we've been discussing today and Edith's been tracing it w right back to the to the classical world and I think the kind of vitality, the kind of presence that we associate with orality is is one of the central reasons why it's such an important part of education and educational reform today. And much literature from the past has been as much about the expression of the voice as as the expression of the text.
And usually the way that's understood in history is that There's a transition from orality to literacy. I think one of the most fascinating things about what's going on now, any of us who got got here on the tube today, if we were looking round looking for in vain for anyone under thirty who was reading a book. Everyone is consuming voices. They're listening to short form video, they're listening to audiobooks, they're listening to podcasts. They're living in a world of orality that's come back.
And I think lots of the claims that are being made about the post literate world, avid listeners to Radio Four will but will have heard lots of stuff about reading recently. Um, it's all about the return that we might be making to the power of the spoken word and how education systems might need to change to reflect that.
You touch on something very interesting there. I think is i is a bit of a third rail at the moment. I was at a big book prize this week and people talked about podcasts and audiobooks. It's also got an inverted commas as if this was the this is the sort of barbarian at the door in terms of that the publishing uh industry but also, you know, was it in some way inferior to be of course as a podcaster I I struck back, but uh James Marriott has a very interesting
uh show at the moment or series on radio four about are we losing or are we sacrificing something if we lose the literary tradition, which I I think is is really interesting. But there's also that question as you say you can't resist
trends in which people are going back to perhaps to an older tradition of spoken word and listening. So Philip Philip sorry, I was going to push that to you and say y you live heard so much of the spoken word in the room from politicians trying to get their point across. What does it mean that is different from them crafting something really well written and then briefing it out to newspaper journalists as as as you've been for many years?
Well, of course, the act of speech writing combines the two disciplines because we're writing for speech. But the thing that speech can do, which the writing can't, is, of course, it's a performance. It's also a moment. That takes us right back to where Edith was with the setting and the connection between the speaker and the audience, which you are there
four. Where of course if you write something and it's it's read invisibly and silently, that's a very different transaction with an audience. But it's crucial to think of the setting and the audience which is there before you. And that's part of the act. And I mean I've I've lost count of how many Labour MPs have come to me and said, Could you make me a bit like Barack Obama? And I have to say to them
Names, names.
Th I can't give you names, but you but they're they'd they'd be known to you. And I have to say to them, let me tell you the ways in which you're not like Barack Obama. The first of which is you're not Barack Obama. But the most important is, of course, that you're not President of the United States, and you're also not a black man who's president of the United States, with all of the history that stands behind him, which is to say his ethos.
his character as a speaker and his relationship, his pathos, his relationship with the audience. You don't have any of that. So if you're on just after lunch at the Investors Chronicle Housing Summit, Don't come on like Barack Obama because you're getting all of those things wrong. And all of that is what the speech does, which the written word doesn't do.
¶ Diverse Oral Narratives: Fables to Philosophy
You've got another.
Oh well Aesop's Fables is um after the Bible and the Odyssey the third most translated and published book in the world. uh quantitatively true. Um Aesot's fables originated entirely in oral culture, but they're prose. They are quite formulaic prose. You know, there's certain kinds of sentence structures. uh that go on and there's a little bit of personnel, you've got your different animals and your different workers and so on.
But um these can be traced right back to Sumer. These are not Greek invention. There are Egyptian fables. There are the Sumerian fables of Akika. And the short, pithy, moral tale with a lesson, which technical Greek term is neuthetic, except it's got a little bundle of advice in it. is um absolutely as old as the metrical epos that I was talking about, and the very uh fact that it is now
so pervasive all over the world, like everybody in any language can get hold. I mean, even indigenous languages that publish practically nothing else can get hold of a children's copy of Aesop's fables. I find completely fascinating.
Mm. Ritchka, do you recognise any parallels there in what you've been working on?
I think um just to talk about just the idea around the audience for instance or you know, even in terms of like pushing it forward, what is very interesting is that these songs that I've been working on were not songs meant for you know, a sp it is meant for singing to each other in a way.
So it was like a gender safe space, uh like a safe space where women, you know, spoke to each other, which is where they were very vulnerable, they were talking about experiences which they potentially couldn't sing outside. Um so I think and what's very you know, one thing that I was reading about is rituals were very pa important. You know, the songs were also a ritualistic act.
Wherein the grindstone grinding stone was also treated as God, for instance, or like a friend. So the kind of conversations that they were having, the songs that they were singing, in a way brought in that kind of, you know, the metaphors they used, also sort of a very deeply personal but also deeply political.
Uh in Edith, I'm obviously trying to pat myself a kind of uh one hour degree course here, but if we look a uh the other greats that people will will be familiar with Aristotle, Plato. Do they broadly have the same view that you've laid out about the merits of the spoken
versus written language. Or are they kind of all a little bit you know, a bit like people having arguments here about whether you should be really more into popcasts or it only counts if it's written down? Are there differences in the in the ancient world? Or is this an entire degree course that I could.
Rydyn ni'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd The art of persuasion was deeply, deeply, deeply dangerous, and it should not be available to be taught. because it meant that people with bad moral ideas could persuade people. And it's because he says this so often, so loudly throughout all of his treatises, basically slagging off the sophist.
Because he's not a democrat, you know. It's the Democrats who think that everybody ought to be able to uh speak up for themselves. Plato doesn't want Hoi Poloi speaking up for themselves. His student, Aristotle, wrote the rhetoric to put two fingers up to his tutor.
¶ Deconstructing Donald Trump's Rhetoric
Which is always tempting. Philipage, see we're we're nodding then. I I've got just a bit of a provocative one to throw in. Is that why people who don't like Donald Trump don't like listening to Donald Trump speaking?
Oh well, Donald Trump, I knew we'd have to get to him.
I mean he's uh some form of the oral tradition. He's a very powerful community.
He is a very powerful communicator and it's very interesting to to inquire into why actually, because he um if we take the Aristotelian Trinity, which I agree is absolutely the gold standard when we're analyzing anything like this. And it's worth noting that
There's probably there aren't many disciplines where the the standard analytical framework has survived for that long. I mean we're not reading Aristotle's science anymore, but we absolutely are still beholden to his analysis of of rhetorical discourse. And Trump Retrup Trump's rational apprehension is virtually non existent.
And I say that not to s I'm not simply saying Donald Trump is irrational as an insult. I'm saying he isn't trying to do rational arguments. That's not the method of communication he's employing. He's very good on the other two counts. Because he's very Donald Trump like all the time.
So does he pass your test that you set him out about do you know what you're saying and how you want to say it? Which I think you said.
Think he passes the latter test. uh very handsomely, whether the format I think he's so good at the characterization and at making emotional connections that it overrides the fact that if you were to pass his prose it wouldn't make the slightest sense at all.
Thank you for your attention in this matter, as he always ends. His his truth is social. It's like it's like putting a big felt tip, you know, read this, listen to this. Um
¶ The Embodied and Living Spoken Word
Stephen, we we you you mentioned something earlier which is j just stuck in in my mind, which is what's a sort of the sense w within the Buddhist tradition that the written form is a less perfect form of the true nature of the message, and that is the sound.
and the communication, so I wanted to dive into that with you just in a little bit more depth. Does that make then a very big difference about I think you you used the phrase a heartbeat of the ideas uh communicated. I does that then ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud.
Well I think in in some ways today it's become rather formalistic and and when, for example, if you study a particular treatise with a Tibetan Lama, then um if you miss one or two of the lessons you have to go back to the Lama and you have to get him to uh to recite the text that you miss. In other words, if you don't uh hear the whole thing spoken by another human being, you somehow have not received it in some crucial way.
And uh this I think places the emphasis not just on the importance of the spoken word, but also how the spoken word somehow embodies a living human person's actual experience of something rather than just an idea written down on a piece of paper. Um so in practice I think this has become a formality. You just quickly recite the text, but I think it's hearkening back.
uh to a sense that only when you speak and particularly when you're speaking about things that matter to you existentially, like religion or philosophy or something, then the meaning of that speech uh is very much to do with how you uh uh uh a a as a a creature, as a human being, have internalized and made that idea your own in some way.
And and other sorry, are there other cultures that you've you've taken an interest in that rely on speaking rather than writing that we might be less familiar with?
Um well in Zen Buddhism, for example, you have this I they make a distinction between what they call live words and dead words. Uh in other words or the the oral is still very crucial, but there's a recognition that um you can repeat uh standardized beliefs and phrases as
long as you like, but they may not come alive for your listener. They're somehow flat, they're somehow dead. It's a bit like when you go to a lot of conferences, you hear people reading their texts, and almost inevitably I'd fall asleep.
It's the death of the soul, isn't it?
So when they break from their prepared text and start speaking as they would speak to a friend, it suddenly becomes alive. And I think that quality too, there's a living vital quality. to the spoken word that is often lost in the written text.
¶ Crafting Memorable Language and Slogans
Do we know, just uh looking around the the table here and picking on you Tom, is there something about speaking or song that makes information easier to remember the rhythm as well as the the the flow of the word?
Yeah, absolutely. But I wanna bring it back to this idea about articulacy, which is what Stephen use this idea earlier, bringing ideas together and to turn it round to really the shadow of what we're all talking about. We're talking about eloquence, we're talking about uh expression, whatever we want to call it, but I think you can understand an idea best by thinking about its alternative.
What's inarticulacy? I the inability to bring things together. Who is inarticulate? Is Donald Trump inarticulate, even though he's weaving these things together? Um Biden d famously described um uh Barack Obama in in two thousand and seven when running against him as uh articulate because he was
inheriting this tradition we have for demonizing the inarticulate. And I think that's a really interesting way of thinking about what speech does, bringing things together and how we can demonize those who don't possess
Uh f do you think you've come across particular catchphrases It could be from politics or what we now call politics adjacent to it. And as soon as I use that phrase I just think like what has happened to my use of the English language. But you know, there's now we've got so much of this politics, policy, social, uh environmental that all comes together. Are there
words or phrases in a nutshell that you think in in in these areas that you think, yeah, that really has pulled something together for me. Could be a campaign, could be something that a party or an individual
Yes, there there are. I mean they are absolutely dominated by those which in Stephen's term are dead. So I absolutely recognise what he was saying. That distinction between the live and the dead, I think it lives on into our time and it it's very, very important in our politics. But there are examples of good practice still. I I'm not entirely pessimistic. A really very obvious notable one recently was uh Mark Carney's speech.
uh Davos when he he did w what what as a speech writer you're always trying to do and he found a very vivid uh description of his whole speech in one image, which was the image he borrowed from Vaclav Havel of the of the sign in the window. And if you're displaying the sign in the window, y that's a a fake a pretense that your that business is u is carrying on as usual. And it's time to take the sign out of the window, he said. And I the very fact that I can still remember it and we can
That's a very good example that you can do.
We can all see it, can't we? We can all you're all imagining a shop and w and a sign now. And that pictorial language is it then w it works as a parable for the whole speech.
Who else has got a catchphrase or a slogan that they've just stuck in their mouth? Oh he's just got a hand up at the front of the clock.
I'd just like to i illustrate one of the very most fundamental ancient ploys which everybody here will be very familiar with, which is an aphora where you kick off every sentence with the same thing is the I have a dream trope. Um you know, I have a dream, I have a dream. But Greta Thunberg's How Dare You speak Where she kept saying, How dare you blah blah blah leave the planet like this for for my generation? How dare you stand there before me with your smug data set?
That was perfect anaphora, but for me that pathos was very interesting. She was playing an extremely dangerous game, being quite aggressive. Was extremely dangerous and she got it just right. She just got them embarrassed enough.
I I'm slightly chewing my pen here thinking like there's a difference between getting something right in the moment. Does that stand the test of time? I mean it's not to go down a
Well in textbooks, yeah.
Uh might by doing textbooks, but I was also thinking about how a a very good, technically sort of good phrase and the Remain campaign was better together, but it didn't mean you won and it didn't mean mean that the the sort of Greta model carried all before it and actually lost some people along the way. So
Just one thing on that.
Bringing me to get in, but go a go ahead.
Which is that that climate change you would think would be the a subject that would be in all the anthologies of great speeches and it isn't. No one's ever done a great climate Change speech. I won't take up the whole of the programme explaining why, but in a nutshell I think it's because no one has executive authority over it. Yeah. That's why I think it's hard to to make a great speech on that subject.
If anyone thinks they have heard one, they can let us know via any form of social media readily consumed by me and our guests.
And I think I do have an example because I was actually gonna think of a s I was thinking of a slogan which was Jug uh it was basically Jal Jungle Zameen, which is in Hindi and it was coined over a century ago. And literally translates to a water, forest and land. And this was this actually came from like indigenous struggles back in like eastern and central India.
And believe it or not, over the last hundred odd years, this particular phrasing and slogan has been used by feminist activists, it has been used for grassroots activism, it's used for anti mining struggles, for instance. Something that's so powerful, so material and so lived. Uh so I think there are strong examples from history.
I think you you had just one thought you wanted to chip in there f which is that it has to feel like you have to be able to visualize it.
It helps. Yeah, it really helps but if you can if you can provide me with a metaphor, make me think of a bridge, you know, t to use a very well worn one. I'm immediately located there. And I literally have moved you in your brain from one side to the other when I have done that. And this is something that's very important about speech of course which is we only say it once. If when you're reading a text you can circle back.
Now it's not great writing if you're forced to read it twice, but you can. Whereas you hear it once, it has to be memorable, it has to stay with you. And you c you get many speakers lose their audiences. And the more pictorial you can be, the more chance you've got of keeping your audience.
Which is is very rarely said, but the voice is actually something created by the body. It is somatic. Right. Reading a book. You're doing something through visual perception for the little squiggles, but there is a physical link between a speaker and a listener. You are breathing into the other person's ears. And the ancients understood that extremely well, that this becomes a whole body link which you can never get with a book.
I was just remembering the Ronald Reagan uh tear down this wall speech to to Gorbachev. And at the time that was thought, well, you know, it's the wall, it's just there. What a silly speech you know, many people thought I was a sort of silly aura a kind of just Reagan Reagan Gunner Reagan called a thing. Of course, in retrospect, tear down this wall, as in the one I'm here in Berlin standing in front of, looked very predictive. So sometimes you don't exactly see the significance
Absolutely a remarkable speech and and a great story attaches to that speech because Colin Powell, who was the national security advisor at the time, and George Schultz, who's Defence Secretary, both advised Reagan against doing that. They said don't on any account. Rydyn ni'n ei wneud, ac mae'n ei wneud, ac mae'n ei wneud, ac mae'n ei wneud, ac mae'n ei wneud.
Reagan, on the way to the Brandenburg Gate where he delivered the speech, said to Peter Robinson, his speechwriter, I'm going to say it, you know, and it wasn't in the script anyway.
He had an actor's actors instinct. I'm sure that's because he had engaged Emotional manipulation.
And also the greatest um dis disconnection between the speaker on the one hand and the writer on the other, usually Peggy Noonan, the the world's greatest speech writer, she wrote all the words, Reagan didn't write a thing, but my could deliver a line.
You're listening to Free Thinking, delivered by me and Mikhail Voy, and by my guests, Ritiko Sebramanian, Stephen Bachelor, Edith Hall, Tom Wright and Philip Collins. We are discussing Oral Traditions and Orasy. Tom referred to James Marriott's series How Reading Made Us, which is on radio for at the moment and you might like to check that out.
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Their company's success. Build a nation. But who are the family? Tech giants.
the major corporate empire that we now know today.
Samsung.
Inheritance. Samsung from the BBC World Service explores the real-life dramas of the Lee family. Inheritance Samsung. Listen on BBC.com, the BBC app, or wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
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¶ Oracy in Classrooms: Political & Educational
So let's take this into contemporary classrooms and the political arena now and how some of these oral traditions are playing out. Now, Tom, you're going to have to take us back to basics on oracy and why policymakers and teachers got so keen on promoting this in schools.
Yeah, so we're all using the word literacy and we're all comfortable with that. We understand that it's two things at once, it's reading and writing. In the nineteen sixties, educationalists in the UK started getting excited about
The idea that you needed another word for describing um oral communication. So I said that down the road and I was dealing with lots of uh teachers and government ministers today that are thinking about Orasy education in school. It looks like it's gonna affect the lives of millions
of school kids. So I think we need to think very seriously and critically. Is it new? Does it make sense? Does it have powerful ideas underneath it? And you know what, I I think it does. And I think it has something that does update the analytical framework um that we inherit from the classical tradition because it has three ideas.
at the heart of it. It's doing three things. It's teaching people how to talk. Yeah. Okay. That's what Philip's been talking about. It's teaching people through talk, which is what Stephen's been talking about. I think um people talking leads to learning that Classrooms shouldn't be quiet. They should be full of people exchanging ideas. But d crucially and I think this is what we're all doing here.
uh today it's teaching people about talk, thinking about the ideas of talk, the ideas of accents, about prejudices that surround them, about sociolinguistics, about the kind of assumptions that we have.
Aristotle didn't have this, Edith, I'm afraid to say. But he was getting there, but we but we have we have ways of thinking about this and I think instead of orisy, let's just say thinking about voice. Let's just have this idea of placing it at the forefront of of education in ways that it hasn't been for many in the state sector, whereas it has been for the independent
There was a small cry of pain for me.
I'll just say you can only say that because you've only read the rhetoric, not the ethics and the politics. If you'd read them you'd see the whole system of how how it is totally ingrained institutionally. and in society. And Aristotle does talk a lot about being how important it is to listen. And I was surprised you didn't say that, that it also trains people to listen.
Or see, I thought part of the policy was that it was classroom listening training, so that you learn to be civil i in interaction. Uh what I'd actually like to say though is that I've been teaching with a colleague at both time of mine, Professor Arlene Holmes Henderson, we've been teaching oracy as she calls it, rhetoric as I call it, in HMP. yw'r brifysau, yw'r brifysau, yw'r brifysau, ac yw'r brifysau'r brifysau'r brifysau, ac yw'r brifysau'r brifysau'r brifysau'r brifysau'r brifysau.
sit and listen and interchange. And you know what the most powerful statement is that I tell them that if they had in their trials, they would have had to defend themselves. They would have had to speak in their own defence. And they all say, No, but I would have done if I'd had this class first. They say, Why didn't we have this at school?
And Aristotle's third sentence in the rhetoric is I do not understand why in Greek society we teach all young people to defend themselves with weapons, but not with their tongue. That is the most moving sentence in ancient literature for me. That's what you're doing.
So Tom just take us a little deeper into some of the the thoughts behind this because It does for some people, i it can be you it's something they have a strong view about and there are pros and and cons in this argument. I mean tell me if I'm roughly right here that for liberals it's often seen as a part of the sort of social mobility, quest yna, yna, yna, yna, yna, yna, yna, yna, yna, yna, yna, yna, yna, yna, yna, yna, yna, yna, yna, yna, yna, yna, yna, yna, yna, yna.
sort of economic determinism or Marxist traditions who say, Yeah, well you're you're sort of fadlin' about here. Well really all it is, you know, here is material inequality in the society that is holding people back. And then you have It's a lot of conservatives who like the idea because they think it might be sort of requ restoring ways of speaking or speaking well in inverted commerce. Do you think it is politically inflected, this whole idea of or
Well I think you captured it just really well. It it's a Rorschach plot. People can see in it, they can hear in it if you want, whatever they want. So p if you say, Hey, we're going to teach listening, we're going to teach speaking people get very excited.
And they see in it what what they want. And I think that's why it's such a powerful and and why it's such a controversial idea because speech is never neutral. To try and control the speech of others is is one of the most political acts you can you can make in a society.
But it underpins all of the education that already takes place, all of the assumptions that exist within um education and all of the ways in which we assess, we need to think carefully about how we can how we can introduce new methods to do that, especially in this world of
I'm gonna mention it, AI and in this post literary postliteracy um landscape that some are warning us we're entering into. I think some of these ideas, whether they come from Aristotle or whether they come from the teachers down the road, I think are gonna be really important in doing that.
And the danger is that it becomes coded in a very p very uh political way, that it can become a technocratic skill, another thing that we can get young people to fail at. And I think trying to avoid that is the is the paramount.
Scored thirty three on your Orasy test. What do you reckon, Philip Collins? Orasy promotes rhetorical literacy, helps people decode. I think there's sometimes a bit of a finger on this scale about it as if If people only understood this, they'd uh they'd see through bad political arguments, and then they wouldn't vote for the people I think are really bad. Or am I being a bit cynical?
No, there's definitely some of that. B however, I'm strongly in favour of of all of this because for the reasons that we've all been giving, which is that underneath all the skills we're talking about is the fact of learning. And of of subjecting your own thoughts to critical inquiry. And you improve your thoughts in in no way is there better than if you subject them to the scrutiny of an audience.
And so the things that you learn during the process of going through these things are so vital. So I mean the one of the last generations to have a proper rhetorical education included one William Shakespeare in a grammar school in Stratford.
There's a great essay by Quentin Skinner where he takes you through the education that Shakespeare and his contemporaries would have had and he he traces that into the plays and says, This is why he knows so much about forensic rhetoric in court, for example, because he's been taught it at school. So one of Tom's people who's talking about at the conference is going to be the next Shakespeare because we're going to teach them these things which we've stopped doing.
No no s no pressure there then to harm it. Do you like that idea?
So I just gonna y just gonna come in there. I think this takes us we learning it in school, that's that's fantastic. I want to bring it right back to where we started, Angela Reina's speech. One of the things that's most important to understand about Orasy and why people are afraid of it is that it can be top down, it can be imposed in school and by governments. It's just powerful people telling the rest of us how to speak.
But grassroots Orissey, let's think about institutions, let's think about ri what Ritika was saying, let's think about the trade union movement. Let's think about the Chartists and suffragists and the way in which These um adult learning institutions have incubated forms of rhetoric that are still powerful, as we've seen from Rayner's speech this week to this day.
I I would I would trace that all back to to to Methodism. I would trace it all back.
Yeah.
Preacher training.
¶ Listening, Conversation, and Public Language
Um Stephen, you're listening to this from from from France and I'm wondering whether you like um w with your your uh expertise hat on, whether you like this idea of modern oracy being something that can be taught. But I'm also just curious if you know, if you're spending time in in France, how does that that sense of putting or see into a c curriculum land than in the French speaking world and a r around you.
Uh well I'm not really sure. We don't have children and uh I'm really out of touch with what's going on in French schools. Um I suspect it's very similar to the UK. I think we inhabit a very similar culture. Uh but one of the things that I like to pick up on is the it's already been mentioned, this idea that it's not just about speaking, it's also about learning to listen. And listening is a kind of contemplative.
uh quality as well. We uh often we find when we're we're hearing some um something, we're not really listening to what the person's saying, we're already preparing how we're going to respond. in reaction, uh we're cluttering up our own mind with our opinions and our views and and and our likes and our dislikes and we're actually closing off, really being able to hear what the other person is trying to say and perhaps
Some of the strategies that we might not approve of in their rhetoric. So I think to train in in public speaking, to in oracy as it may be called, uh there also needs to be a counterbalance uh of training people how to listen and what they do when they listen. Uh to become more conscious of how they're listening.
Intentional listening, as the coaches they call it. Which basically yeah just don't interrupt them so much. Tom, you uh
I was thinking about France. So I lived there recently, I was a visiting professor and they've recently introduced into their uh baccalaureate in the in the Lice. A grande oral. You know, uh at the end of your um education you have to give this speech to your teachers. Now I think that's exactly the wrong way to go about this because I'm gonna offend
Philip here. Um he's written great books about speech making. Um I'm guilty of having written some too. And um The RC agenda is trying to get away from speech making, performance, towards conversation, towards listening, towards
the intimate exchange, that it's what we're doing here, it's what our people d people are doing in the workplace. It's not necessarily the conference hall. It's not even the assembly. It's not the Senate hall. It's something which needs to be far more intimate and needs to be taken away from the idea that it ultimately culminates in you as Barack Obama on the stage.
Uh Philip uh Tom is suggesting too many speeches, Government.
Yeah, no, I'm not offended by that because I mean of course my own bailiwick is the is the speech, but actually what we're talking about here I think is public language in a much more extended sense. And there's lots of places where public language is good or is bad. I mean on the on literally in the lift on the way uh down to to record this we were we were listening to the Arctic Monkeys and I pointed out that is an example of great public language.
Me we and Gordon Brown, he he loved them too. And I think there's really good public language everywhere. And that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to make sure that people speak well, not in a way which is sanctioned by anybody, uh, either in your our tone of voice in or in our diction. uh or in our or the r the rules of grammar if there were such a thing which there isn't. But public language broadly.
Retika and dealing with young people teaching and getting feedback from young people, do you think that there's a a a lively appetite for this as well as deciding it's a good thing for other people to do. Do you do you think that your students and those you you spend a lot of time with would welcome them?
I think so. And I think for the first time, for instance, we did introduce you know, we've also been revisiting assignments, for instance, you know, where you spoke about even AI earlier. I think revisiting how you even think of assignments in terms of we've now introduced a podcast. as as a way of, you know, thinking of development studies for instance and you know, thinking of topics in terms of how you would engage with as as like a podcast speaker.
But one thing that really stuck with me in this whole, you know, exchange right now was also the question around translation. Because you know, when you're talking working with oral archives, for instance, one thing that comes to play is also translating it and, you know, now thinking of meaning making and thinking of context. thinking of just the visceral aspects of, you know, writing and speaking itself and that distinction I think is something which I'm also exploring.
¶ Habermas's Public Sphere and Limitations
Tom, mae gennym ni'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd a hundred by a couple of years. He was known for writing about communication and about the public sphere and the way that words and thoughts land in the public sphere and certainly one of the most
significant philosophers and in interpreters of what we now call the public square i i in in the the the the post war period in in Germany and beyond. Uh what did he say that you think is relevant for this conversation?
Well, like any good speech, he wanted you to see an image and the image he wanted you to see was the London coffee house. Uh not far from where we we are now in the in the seventeenth seventeenth and eighteenth century, there were thousands of coffee houses which grew up which he idealised as symbolic of the free flow of ideas in modernity. Uh for the first time in history people, in his view, were exchanging ideas free of government control or or free of state control. Now
That was partly through print and it was partly through uh newspapers a and pamphlets and that kind of thing, but uh ultimately it was a world of orality. It was a world of conversation and exchange. Now, on the one level that's really positive for us sitting around this table, we we can see that as uh
as an ideal that we might move towards but immediately you step back from that and you start thinking who's who's not in the coffee shop, who can get in the coffee shop and more importantly, what are the rules of those conversations within the coffee shop?
What are those wh how are the rules that structure the public sphere and the way we talk, the way we listen, the way we evaluate each other's arguments structured? And I think he can help us into these questions, but I d I'm not sure that he can necessarily give us all the feelings.
Well there we must leave our exploration of the power of speech with my pleasantly loquacious guests, and next week on Free Thinking, Matthew Sweet will be exploring another familiar rhetorical strategy. The humble brag and asking whether humility is a virtue or a vice will be back next Friday at nine.
Their company's success helped build a nation.
The company is such a big part of Korea's economy.
But who are the family? World's tech giants.
The major corporate empire that we now know today.
Samsung.
Inheritance Samsung from the BBC World Service explores the real-life dramas of the Lee family.
succession style drama underneath of all this.
Inheritance Samsung. Listen on BBC.com, the BBC app, or wherever you get your BBC podcasts.