As long as the Murdochs have a certain sort of enemy, bright young things of the right are tempted to pile in blindly on their side. That’s fair enough for almost everyone except people in government, whose job – boringly – is to be scrupulous. They are, in the buzzword of the week, quasi-judicial. They need the unfashionable qualities of the bureaucrat: they write, and need to live by, the rule book. So the Hunt issue seems to be an example of a quite modern problem.

Let’s suppose that it turns out that Jeremy Hunt’s office were too closely allied with, and chatty with, the Murdochs. It would be a perfect case of a striking new failure of modern politicians, obvious under Blair’s sofa-government and hardly less so under Cameron. They don’t “get” government; they prefer Special Advisers to Whitehall; they prefer hands-on decision-making to the institutional democratic process.

One suspects that the Leveson inquiry will say little that is new about the ethics of the media and its relations with power. The good judge will probably propose some reforms. We may have a media whose corporations are more disciplined even as the blogosphere becomes more unruly. But we don’t need Leveson to tell us that politicians and police need to become more serious about their own dignity and role in life. It is, or should be, as plain as day that they need to be more grey and more accountable to democratic institutions and processes.

For anybody who wants to read more, here’s my review of the core PR issues:

So, we’re all agreed that bribing the police and hacking the phones of celebs, dead soldiers and murdered schoolgirls is immoral, and some of those seem to have been the unique preserve of the Murdoch empire. (We’ll see.) We can probably agree that if the Murdoch empire obstructed police in their enquiries, that may turn out to be the longest, deepest issue of all. But there is no consensus on what we should learn from this sorry saga. In fact, I fear the wrong lessons are being drawn.

The most potent myth of all is that by hounding and denouncing Rupert Murdoch we are somehow helping clean up British politics, its police and its journalism. I’m predisposed to say that instead of doing any such thing we are in danger of indulging in humbug. We risk laying ourselves open to swallowing a load of dodgy claims from Murdoch’s rivals and from politicians seeking the moral high-ground.

We live in age of digital fragmentation when the media is global in reach, not just local. There are myriad opinion-forming sources today. The world’s media is just a click or two away from anybody with online access. We live in an era in which media barons have less power than they’ve ever had.

One cannot compare the power that Lord Northcliffe (a former owner of The Times) had over British public opinion in the early 20th century with that held by Rupert Murdoch in the early 21st century. For example, Winston Churchill criticised Northcliffe’s role in the First World War, saying he: “wielded power without official responsibility, enjoyed secret knowledge without the general view, and disturbed the fortunes of national leaders without being willing to bear their burdens.”

Certainly, in Northcliffe’s day – the high tide of print media – his influence was not challenged by competitors such as multiple radio and TV channels, and the near infinite content of the internet. Though, of course, Northcliffe did have competitors in the print realm, such as the press baron Lord Beaverbrook, who became Britain’s Minister of Information in 1918.

So, once upon a time there was perhaps truth in the notion that media barons of the likes of Randolph Hearst (Citizen Kane) and Lord Northcliffe were overly-influential. But one can hardly claim credibly that such a state of affairs applies today.

The idea that Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers were responsible for Margaret Thatcher’s victories and for Neil Kinnock’s Labour Party’s humiliation in the 1980s beggars belief. It is also hard to believe that Murdoch was responsible for Tony Blair’s victories or for Gordon Brown’s defeat.

The evidence suggests that Murdoch’s newspapers swung this and that way with the tide, pulled not by the moon but by the bright glow of the side most likely to win. For sure, there was no Murdoch-led swing to Cameron at the 2010 General Election so much as crumbling support for Gordon Brown’s New Labour. This allowed an almost-electorally-stagnant Tory party to form a coalition government with the Lib Dems, whose seats in parliament declined despite gaining positive media endorsement from virtually every publishing house in the UK.

The question then is why did Britain’s political elite, not to mention its police, get so entangled with Murdoch’s empire and so desperate to court its favours? I see two main reasons:

1. For the political elite Murdoch’s camp was the only major media house not permanently tied to any particularly party of the so-called left and right divide. In contrast, the likes of The Daily Mail, The Guardian, and even the BBC, were much more fixed in their ideological and political outlook and loyalties.

2. Britain’s Establishment, including the elite in politics and the police, genuinely over-estimated Murdoch’s and the media’s influence. They lived in fear of it. In response, they sought to mingle with it, schmooze it, neutralize it, and to co-opt it and thereby gain access to its popular appeal. Collectively the Establishment displayed a lack of nerve, not to mention a lack of nous about the relationship between public opinion and the media (we can put some of the blame on poor PR advice from PR pros).

This is not to say that the media is without influence or unimportant. It is to say that politicians and the police have exaggerated the media’s powers and underestimated their own. If the public has not become subservient to sections of the media, some of the elite certainly have.

The elite delusion that garnering headlines is a short-cut to winning popularity with the public provides the only logical explanation as to why David Cameron took the known risk of hiring Andy Coulson as his media guru. In my view, Cameron’s number-one concern was containing and managing the media, in particular Murdoch’s media. It is an approach to engaging the public that unravels again and again

Unfortunately, the current crisis has not seen politicians regain their sense of self-worth. Neither has it taught the police to hold their nerve in the face of a media onslaught.

The political class now seems set on intruding into the media’s realm. The House of Commons Select Committee has totally over-reacted. It has, as my friend Richard D North points out here, gone way beyond its remit. It has in the process brought down elite police officers of the class of Yates and Stephenson without good cause. It is in danger of victimising the entire Murdoch empire in a vain attempt to court popularity with Murdoch’s formidable rivals in the media world, not to mention the Twitterati.

So what lessons do I think we learn from this hacking scandal? What PR advice do I have to offer to (a) Murdoch (b) MPs and (c) the police? Well here goes:

What we should learn?

First, media competition is alive and well, if not always well behaved. The crimes at the News of The World were exposed by its rivals. The upshot was that rather than revealing how powerful Rupert Murdoch is, it revealed how fragile his influence was.

However, the elite are now in danger of exchanging their faith in Murdoch’s illusory grip on public opinion with a misplaced faith in the liberal media’s and the Twitterati’s grip. In other words, politicians and police are now seemingly bent on trying to please yet another set of media influencers led by The Guardian.

In today’s increasingly disterintermediated world institutions can communicate directly with the public. As for the established media, firms and institutions of all sorts would do well to keep their media relations much less intimate and much more formal. The truth is that the media gets close to its marks in order to rip them apart whenever it desires. That’s a lesson that we need to take to heart.

What should Murdoch do?

He should do what he’s doing: grovel. He must be open and honest and clean up his house and rid himself of the rottenness, but also the poor governance, in his empire. (See the difficulties facing FIFA.) That is going to hurt. It might even bring down his own son. It is most likely going to send some of his employees to prison. But if he gets it right, News International could restore its reputation and perhaps make it more robust than ever.

What should politicians do?

Politicians should also own up to the truth. They share much of the guilt with News International. From Prime Minister David Cameron downwards, the relationship between politicians and the media – that’s with the entire media – has been grubby. They should apologise for that. They should seek forgiveness. At the same time they must set out in a new direction based on a new strategy that they communicate clearly.

To begin with they should stop the witch hunt against Rupert Murdoch, which is a trap that merely favours one set of media players at the expense of another. Instead, they need to get a sense of perspective over this whole messy affair. They must demonstrate their independence from the media by setting their own agenda. Disintermediated communication is what they need. Back to the soapbox, lads. That’s an approach which is far more likely to demonstrate integrity and to win the public’s respect than any amount of media schmoozing could ever achieve.

What should the police do?

First, they should reject the notion (put about by critics and even some friends) about how it is working class coppers who cannot fathom the complexities and subtler roles of today’s world. Let’s not forget that it was Oxbridge and classy coppers such as Sir Ian Blair (see here), Sir Paul Stephenson, John Yates and Brian Paddick who all messed up their affairs most embarrassingly precisely because they became obsessed with becoming part of the new political and media Establishment in order to manage public perception.

In contrast, I advise: the police should recognise that the media are animals; newsrooms are sausage factories; and that nevertheless, sometimes, they have their uses. But coppers have to accept that theirs is an unpopular role and that poor public perception comes with their beat. Just like judges, they need to keep their distance if they are to maintain their integrity in the face of the public. Sorry to say, but coppers just have to come to terms with the fact that theirs is a lonely role. They cannot expect much thanks from anyone, least of all politicians, for doing a great job.

In short, coppers should become more obsessed with being professional and much less concerned with being popular, which is an obsession that paradoxically has done more harm than good to their image.

It was the likes of the Labour politician Keith Vaz who hounded Yates and Stephenson so much that they felt obliged to resign. That had all the hallmarks of a hunt for scapegoats. Both coppers had distinguished records. They were “guilty” of little more than poor judgement and poor PR instincts. They forged some embarrassing personal links and made the odd omission etc.. A slap on the wrist at some point in the future might have been much more in the public interest than chopping off their heads. I believe that Stephenson and Yates should have resisted the pressure to resign. That leads me to my major observations on the whole affair.

The Big Picture

The time has come for institutions of all sorts to hold their nerve in the face of Grub Street’s rants and raving. Society does not require more controls over the media. Rather the elite requires more self-control and stronger nerves.

It is time for PRs to recommend forging a new relationship between their clients, the media and the public. It is time that PRs helped leaders lead. It is time to take back control of the reputations of public institutions from the media.

No related pages.

Utopian PRs have been dreaming about “one world, people and planet” in which all the barriers between various publics come tumbling down. They envisage a connected world in which the lines of demarcation between internal, boundary and external stakeholders dissolve as they connect transparently and interactively in a value chain that links interdependent companies to their consumers and markets.

But such views ignore some major issues.

One is that in an open digitally-connected world, there’s more need than ever to conspire – organise, ghettoise, corral – to keep things confidential and hidden behind closed walls.

Indeed, we will see the kind of problem which Freedom of Information rules can produce: a clever, covert, closed decision making in which everything which really matters is centripetally driven to a cabal. (Remember the government of Tony Blair?)

Arguably, the more open things become and the more control bosses relinquish to networks, the more restrictions they will have to impose on those who operate in them. This might, paradoxically, lead to even tighter control on commercially sensitive information than exists today. It might lead corporates to adopt a civil service mantra of only releasing information on a need to know basis.

Another issue that the utopian PR camp ignores is competition. Companies forging various so-called value networks are as likely as not to form lots of them. They are as likely as not to value some more than others and to find themselves involved in contradictory and conflicting chains.

This will lead to lots of tension and uncertainty within corporates and institutions, such as government service providers, as they are forced to choose between their various product ranges, service offerings and partnership relationships, according to either their broader interests or their ability to sustain them. The resolution of such problems, or issues, will remain driven from the centre, from the top, by corporate or institutional bosses concerned with strategy.

Moreover, because of competition, PRs at either end of a chain, not to mention the middle, might find themselves pulling in different directions and unable to always align their interests, messages and narratives. There is no reason to believe that just because we introduce new tools into the workplace that real-world tensions, politics and commercial interests, will evaporate. We should, I warn, avoid the technological determinism trap.

My point is that we should not think that corporations are about to relinquish control to horizontal or flat digital networks. We should not kid ourselves that top-down management and communication are about to die out. Neither should we imagine, as the PR utopians do, that existing internal silos, lines of responsibility and accountability, will be or should be altered very much by commercial Web 2.0 and 3.0 applications.

Here’s what Norman Lewis, Managing Partner at Open Knowledge UK, had to say on this when he commented on my piece There’s no social media revolution:

… it’s definitely the case that social media like any other technology does not alter the realities of the business world. (I very much like your points about the chaos that would ensue in a company if everyone could relate to sales, customers etc). This is based upon the naive hippie prejudice that enterprises can become democracies run in the interests of employees empowered to act like free agents.

Another of the problems that’s being overlooked by utopian PRs is how social media usage in the personal sphere is maturing. They seem to have missed the point that the major stumbling block for social media of all kinds is privacy, trust and control over personal data. It would seem that social media users are emerging from the immature days of the early adoption period and starting to ask tough questions.

In the commercial sphere the risks and drawbacks have been fairly clear from the very beginning.

There is no doubt that knowledge-sharing, collaboration and instant feedback and decision-making all have great appeal. There is also no doubting that patents, IP, confidential information and in-house knowledge lie at the heart of commercial value. It is also obvious, or should be, that for legitimate reasons such as their survival, corporates are going to be reluctant to dilute and devalue their brand value and identity in an undifferentiated network. So the open Web 2.0 information flows between various players presents itself both as an opportunity and as a risk.

Yet there’s even more reason for PRs not to get over-excited about Web 2.0′s ability to transform the workplace as utopian PRs do when they talk about paradigm shifts. Some believe that Michael Porter’s value chain model has already been replaced – or almost so – “by fuzzy (and not linear) and immaterial (rather than material) networks that normally disintegrate the distinction between internal and external publics.” But the truth is that Web 2.0′s commercial applicability is in its infancy and has yet to make a great impact.

The point the utopians miss is how much experimentation will be required to ascertain where and how to make Web 2.0 and social media applications work best in the corporate and public sector domain given the virtual impossibility of measuring their benefits accurately.

Don’t get me wrong, however. I favour innovation and risk. I decry our current risk-adverse culture. I look forward to seeing more Web 2.0 and 3.0 applications introduced by business and institutions to deliver products and services. I don’t doubt for a moment that they can boost productivity and add great value.

I also accept fully that Web 2.0 and 3.0 provide a new sense of power and control to consumers and poses new challenges to corporates. So of course corporates need to manage this threat and turn it into an opportunity. But that aspect of the story was not what this post was about.

Note: This first appeared here in May 2010.

Related post

Related posts:

1. PR should help leaders lead, not listen

Writing this piece has forced me to reread Norman Levitt (1943 – 2009), professor of Maths at Rutgers. He was among the first warriors to take up cudgels in the Science Wars against left-wing postmodernists in the Academy. He maintained that their social constructivism, epistemic relativism and cognitive pluralism is in reality reductio ad absurdum.

Professor Norman Levitt

Levitt was clearly polemical in style. But he confronted some equally robust opponents. After Levitt died, Professor Steve Fuller, an American sociologist now based at Warwick University, opined that Levitt had been a pioneer of “cyber-fascism”. Fuller accused Levitt of having lived in a parallel universe, in which he positioned postmodernists as playing the role of Jews in need of extermination. Sticking the knife deeper in the man’s corpse he said that Levitt’s major contribution to the debate was a steady stream of invective. He added that Levitt’s robust defence of science was merely the noise made by a loser who felt disenfranchised from the mainstream. So this debate was not nice or polite or for softies.

Of course, what should be remembered is that Fuller blamed Levitt for being behind the Sokal Affair. This, for those new to this stuff, refers to Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University, who wrote Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity for an academic journal devoted to postmodern cultural studies. It was full of intentional howlers, such as claiming that quantum gravity was a social linguistic construction.

The resulting furore was a major embarrassment to the journal Social Text, which published Sokal’s baloney in its special edition devoted to what it dubbed the Science Wars. Professor Fuller was especially outraged because he had one of his own papers in the same edition of the journal. The Sokal Hoax seemed to underscore Levitt’s argument that for narrow-minded reasons, ignorant left-wing academics wrote and published nonsense about science.

Professor Alan Sokal

In reality this was much more than a squabble between left- and right-wing thinkers. Levitt was actually on the left of the political spectrum and he had no time for right-wing conservatives who wanted to teach intelligent design and creationism in schools. Sokal also shared Levitt’s distaste for Derridean deconstructionism, which he still decries as fashionable poststructuralist drivel. Yet what really united the likes of Levitt and Sokal was not their politics, but their shared understanding of the essence of science. In contrast to the postmodernists they stated that there was no such as “left-wing science”, no more than there was such a thing as “right-wing science” or “feminist Algebra” (no, I didn’t make that last one up and neither did Levitt).

Their concern was that postmodernist academics promoted a disdain for scientific principles, which struck at the heart of what science was about. They argued that this had negative consequences for society at large because it spread distrust about science, scientists and the benefits of the Enlightenment. They accused left-wing academics of promoting, what Levitt called, muddle-headedness:

Thus we encounter books that pontificate about the intellectual crisis of contemporary physics, whose authors have never troubled themselves with a simple problem in statics; essays that make knowing reference to chaos theory, from writers who could not recognise, much less solve, a first-order linear differential equation; tirades about the semiotic tyranny of DNA and molecular biology, from scholars who have never been inside a real laboratory, or asked how the drug they take lowers blood pressure. (Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels With Science, by Norman Levitt and Paul Gross)

Levitt robustly defended the integrity of scientific works which had been misunderstood and misrepresented by postmodernists. One example of this was Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which was denounced by Professor Fuller as a Cold War narrative. In his book on Thomas Kuhn, Fuller even goes as far as to say that Kuhn’s work helped dupe scientists into supporting Western militarism in the fight against Soviet and Chinese communism. In short, Fuller’s representation of science leans toward explaining it as little more than a conspiracy organised by the Establishment.

For sure, when Levitt criticised postmodernism he fully understood that how scientific knowledge was used was indeed a social and political issue. What concerned him, however, was the suggestion that scientific methodologies and theorizing itself was a social (subjective) construction that produced little more than metaphors. Levitt said repeatedly, mathematical equations are anything but metaphors. He rightly pointed out that mathematics and science have a substance and complexity, which metaphors can’t really capture.

So, that’s enough background. Now let’s take a step closer to understanding what might be attracting PRs to take a serious look at chaos theory. One of the great attractions of chaos theory to social theorists, and in PR to critics of Jim Grunig’s work, is its emphasis on the importance of nonlinear mathematical and scientific enquiry in its search for patterns and associations in seemingly complex and chaotic systems. But what I’m not putting under the microscope today is chaos theory in its scientific incarnation. I’m questioning how chaos theory has been exploited for other purposes by people with no understanding of, or respect for, scientific methods.

Chaos theory appealed to social scientists of a particular type because it appeared to provide scientifically-sourced ammunition in support of cultural relativism. As one reviewer of Levitt’s work puts it:

To cultural theorists, the word ‘linear’ represents relentless sequentiality, single mindedness and the triumph of the instrumental — all components of the supposed Western ethos of conquest, domination and objectification. ‘Nonlinear’, on the other hand, for them suggests many-sidedness, multi-culturalism, polymorphism and the effacement of traditional disciplines — a world where multiplicity reigns in culture, sexuality and ethnicity and where old barriers may be freely crossed.

In books such as Katherine Hayles’ Chaos Bound it was argued that Newtonian thinking had been overthrown, when in fact it had been subsumed, which, as Levitt said repeatedly, is something completely different. Hayles – in common with many other postmodernists – popularised the fallacy that Newtonian physics was mechanical and linear in its fundamentals. In fact, as Levitt pointed out, Newton’s laws of celestial mechanics and his equations of planetary motion are nonlinear to their core.

Levitt’s critique of Hayles’ book cites her poor grasp of basic scientific principles. On virtually every subject she discussed from Newtonian science, quantum mechanics, logical positivism, to the special theory of relativity, right through to her understanding of mathematics, Levitt found fundamental errors.

Just how ridiculous this postmodernist muddling of maths, science and culture can get is illustrated by Sandra Harding’s The Science Question in Feminism, which condemned Newton’s Principia Mathematica for being a “rape manual”.

So the red lights started flashing when I started reading Priscilla Murphy’s influential paper Chaos Theory as a Model for Managing Issues and Crises. My pen-friend Heather Yaxley had already informed me that Murphy’s critique of Jim Grunig’s two-way symmetric model had been partly responsible for persuading him to rejig it as a mixed-motive model that took more account of asymmetric reality. To my despair I quickly discovered that Murphy’s understanding of chaos theory was firmly rooted in Hayles’ Chaos Bound. For instance, Murphy makes the following observation:

“In fact, chaos theory generally represents a postmodern departure  from the social science worldview that unfolded from theories about  the physical universe articulated by Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, and Newton. According to this tradition, the universe actions is like a vast machine governed by unchanging laws that can be deciphered  through scientific  analysis. This view leaves little to chance,  for reality is basically static [sic, she's referring to Statics here which she thinks means fixed or static, so she completely misconstrues Newton] and tautological. Time is ‘reversible,’ meaning that one could go forwards or backwards at any point  and the same essential laws would be in operation. In contrast, chaos  theory urges us ‘to reinterpret the universe as being constituted by  forces of disorder, diversity, instability and non-linearity.’” [Chaos Theory as a Model for Managing Issues and Crises, page 96, by Priscilla Murphy]

Her mistake, besides not understanding science, was to ever have supposed that our understanding of the human world could be built around what Newton and Einstein and others discovered about the material world. And just to illustrate how gross errors of reasoning and understanding get repeated, here’s Murphy repeating Hayles’ fallacy uncritically:

The ‘reality’ that describes a given phenomenon is determined, not by its  universal qualities, but by the observer who chooses the scale. Such concepts have created a convergence between chaos theory and the postmodern realization that what has always been thought of as the essential, unvarying  components of human experience are not  natural facts of life but social constructions. [Murphy cites Hayles here for her viewpoint's "credibility": see page 99]

The problem here is that science itself is being accused of being little more than a subjective, social construction. The charge is that science has little to no claim to objectivity. Accepting such premises would make dismissing Global Warming easy and dismissing Creationism and defending Darwin difficult.

One of my points today is merely that when PRs try to wrap their crisis management expertise and their cultural insights in the language of chaos theory and complexity theory (which also interests Priscilla Murphy) they are undermining our trade’s reputation.

Of course, there is much more to say on this subject. That brings me closer to what’s going to become my core proposition; one which I shall highlight by interrogating the thoughts of some leading PR academics. For example, in the near future I intend to review Jim Macnamara’s The 21st Century Media (R)evolution in which, Richard Bailey reports, he writes:

Emergent media owe as much to chaos theory as to evolutionary systems theory.

For reasons that I hope are becoming clear in this piece, Macnamara is wrong on both points. Amusingly, in the same post on his blog Bailey quotes from Martin Thomas’ new book Loose: The Future of Business is Letting Go, in which he analyses the chaos and ambiguity of modern life. Thomas is quoted saying, perceptively in my view, that:

We are witnessing the unravelling of the most fundamental building blocks of the commercial world and a collapse of faith in tight, empirical rational models and ways of thinking.

Bailey also mentions how Grunig and Hunt’s Managing Public Relations drew on systems theory. Bailey adds that systems theory once seemed as solid as Newtonian physics - until some new theories came along (Relativity, String Theory) to change the way we think about the world. But Newtonian physics, remains as solid and as relevant and as scientifically robust as in Newton’s day: see here for a layperson’s explanation of my point. Moreover, the eclectic “systems theory” Grunig drew on had nothing whatever to do with Newton’s theories on kinematics and systems, but is an unscientific, wobbly, flexible and elastic construction (see here) drawn from the world of social sciences, which absurdly tries to wrap itself in the language of the physical sciences in an opportunistic and often hilarious mix and match approach.

Well, if PRs take Fuller, Hayles, Murphy and Macnamara seriously – and I’m not claiming Richard Bailey does just because he quotes some authors – one wonders what it will do for evidence-based PR. Perhaps it means R.I.P. Burson Marsteller?

Indeed, I shall be arguing in my book On Message: Propaganda, persuasion and the PR game that both the linear and nonlinear bods in PR circles fail to bring science to their cause. I shall explore why Grunig’s theory of Excellence has as little right to claim scientific credibility as does the display of ignorance that emanates from his opponents in the asymmetrical, relativististic postmodernist camp.

So, let’s remain grounded. The good news is that chaos and complexity theories, postmodernism and Jim Grunig’s symmetrical model of Excellence, have very little to do with proper PR. Thankfully, most PR professionals in the real world don’t consider such theories as being relevant. Discussions about what it all amounts to for PR professionals remain marginalized among PR academics and a few practitioners they educated or have influenced. However, if we left it at that that would require conceding the high ground to the spreaders of hogwash.

So in conclusion, I maintain that we need to interrogate the usage and possible misuse and abuse of real science by PR academics; not least because they mostly do so in the name of PR and often in association with some of our leading practitioners. It is necessary, therefore, to raise the profile of this debate about science within the PR community and in wider circles still. I hope you agree.

Recommended further reading:

Here are some links to what my fellow PR bloggers have had to say about chaos theory recently here here and here

David Ruelle’s Chance and Chaos, New Science Library, 1991

Harmke Kammingen, What is This Thing called Chaos? New Left Review, 1990  (Kammingen writes “…claim that chaos theory is the new paradigm for science should, at least at this stage, be viewed with considerable caution.”)

Heather Yaxley’s I’m a PR person, let me read your mind

Paul Seaman’s Psychobabble will not make PR credible

Paul Seaman’s What could “neuro-PR” do for our trade?

Note: since this was first published in June 2011 it has been updated to take account of the useful criticism Heather Yaxley made of my conclusion (see remarks in comments). It also corrects my understanding of Martin Thomas’ quote, which again is a criticism captured in the comments below. I have also incorporated a few other changes. Not least one from Professor James Woudhuysen who set me straight about one of my loose remarks on Newton. Of course, any remaining errors or points of contention remain entirely my responsibility.

No related pages.

My profession seems to be obsessing on stakeholder relationship management. I see why. When the angry mob is howling at the gates (actually mostly not so much a mob as a media, protester and Twitter scrum), it seems sensible to pretend that crowds have wisdom. Like politicians, media and most bosses in the West, public relations professionals are terrified of seeming elitist. They believe that leadership is no longer possible, or is toxic.

I have often banged-on about how PRs fear that corporations are seen as evil, so now mistakenly believe they must wear a bleeding heart on their sleeve. That’s not my point today. I want to stress here that it is a profound problem that PRs and many organisations – from firms to political parties – dread leadership and responsibility.

There’s a shortage of adulthood

What I’m on about today is related to a wider social problem. I think it’s time the grown-ups behaved like adults.

We live in a society in which people strut about in a macho culture of bullying, slap-head, hyper-fit, scowling aggression, but at the slightest set-back everyone’s weeping and in therapy.

Big cars, sharp suits and watches the size of dinner plates don’t confer anything worthwhile on a person. Aren’t you struck by how fragile the self-esteem of so many modern pseudo-adults seems to be?

We have watched stars, CEOs and politicians behave like greedy, petulant, hysterical teenagers rather than heroes. But what is striking about many of them is that they have so little fortitude. Most CEOs disappeared from view when the credit crunch struck. We have heard how former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s inner circle phoned bullying help-lines to complain about him. Their self-confidence was revealed as being wafer thin.

At the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos we are repeatedly reminded that profit, shareholder value and shareholders are no longer priorities because all stakeholders are supposedly equal. Such talk comes from Western leaders. The bosses from the East generally hold their nerve and sometimes express disbelief. The split between the two world views has become so stark that Richard Edelman reported enthusiastically from the 2012 WEF gig how Ian Cheshire of Kingfisher, Europe’s leading home improvement retailer, opined that: “we have to get consumers in developing countries past wanting the “American Dream of more.”’

We need corporations rooted in a solid culture

It’s this bifurcation I’m after. I want to try to make it understood that ordinary decency, a workable sense of fairness, a sellable ideal of enlightened self-interest - proper trust between firms and employees and customers and wider society – has to flow from a far deeper sense of corporate culture than can ever be achieved by becoming a weather vane.

Today I want to try to get a proper handle on this particular concern: that our clients cannot afford to aim to become whatever the media or ether-mob, the gobby bloggers, the placard-wavers fancy. They can’t pick up a self-definition by triangulating the top three or four messages they get from a consultant. Even if they did, they’d have to live it and that involves sticking with it and that involves ignoring the next fashion which hurtles into view out of the mists.

I am tolerably sure that floating along on public opinion is never good. It sometimes leads to rushing weirs and crashing Niagras, but more often to long dreary shoals where no-one’s boat floats.

The public says  - or rather the media and campaigners say so supposedly on its behalf –  it wants to humble corporations and corporate bosses, just like it says it wants to humble political parties and politicians. So it has created the risk that firms, parties and institutions become rudderless (sorry, I couldn’t resist another water analogy).

In fact though, if there’s one thing the public fears and distrusts more than strong, mean, unaccountable and self-serving public bodies and leaders, it’s bodies which are too weak to do their job.

Before we can have listening and flexible firms, we need to have firms which are quite strong and quite clear about what they actually want to be.

So the perpetual self-abnegation involved in stakeholder relationship management is a folly. It is a chronic abdication of corporate responsibility. It constitutes a surrender of leadership to instrumentalist short-termism, which causes a loss of vision and direction, encourages low-ambitions and, ironically, undermines public confidence in modern corporations and institutions.

It is a myth that the best reputations must be sustained by stakeholder management crowd sourcing. Good reputations are not based on living within limits set by consumer or voter research and stakeholder engagement, but on breaking down barriers and achieving something significant.

Reputations, trust and success

The best reputations arise from doing things and from keeping promises and delivering results and sometimes from managing failures well. Reputations that endure do so because they inspire.

Great companies and governments transform the world by creating demand and conditions that didn’t exist before. They often do so at great risk in the face of fierce opposition.

There’s more for PR to do than to get their clients to reflect what audiences say they expect or claim that they will accept. There’s more for PR to do than to try to forge consensuses before advising firms to make decisions. Good PR acknowledges that what’s wanted in society is not fixed. Great PR helps society transform the prevailing perceptions of sustainability on business, cultural and environmental matters.

Successful countries from the democratic UK, America and India to today’s undemocratic China (I’ll defend democratic accountability another day) were not built on the back of listening and forging an instrumentalist-driven consensus. They were built on the back of courageous leadership and innovation that won the trust and confidence of their people. This gave the masses things of value  to believe in, such as the American Dream.

Now let’s review a few more conundrums and case studies that highlight how current wisdom is flawed, before I propose my manifesto’s alternative approach.

According to Edelman’s trust survey, trust in business and government today is strongest where stakeholder relationship management matters least and weakest where it seemingly matters most. By a significant margin, China leads the world in both categories and its media are supposedly the most trusted on earth, too. India, Brazil and Indonesia score highly. While Russia records trust levels for both business and government that hover around the same level year-on-year as France’s and Germany’s.

Meanwhile, the PC, the internet and Google’s search engine are all examples of top-down disruptive innovations, not ones driven by bottom-up demand-led engagement-based consultation. They did not arise from listening to the market or to stakeholder groups.

Google

Google’s search engine was an innovative marriage between algorithms and computing power that created its own demand.

The motto of Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin was “question everything”. As this review of recent books on Google explains, they were like postindustrial Henry Fords, using digital technology to eliminate all inefficiencies in traditional economies.

Ironically, Google’s Eric Schmidt advocates in a Washington Post piece, Erasing our Innovation Deficit, bottom up crowd-sourced innovation. In it he underestimates the risk-taking top down investment and leadership which helped Google succeed, the internet take-off and the US put a man on the moon: see here. However, that weakness should not detract too much from the mostly timely, insightful points Schmidt makes.

Unloved Microsoft and lovable Apple

Microsoft at its peak never won our empathy; it didn’t need to differentiate itself through branding while it was transforming successfully how we all worked and played on our PCs. Microsoft hardly consulted anybody as it developed what some viewed as monopolistic tendencies. Bill Gates wielded Microsoft’s power like a blunt instrument against all comers, including customers and partners. But if Microsoft was always unlovable, Apple is its polar opposite. Its fans adore it (almost uncritically until recently), believing it to represent an anti-corporate, culturally-fresh, arty sort of an entity. That’s mostly nonsense, but in any case Apple achieved this myth-making with top-down communication and command and control management. Apple’s path was classic old-style branding designed to attack and differentiate itself from a dominant incumbent.

Rock ‘n’ Roll

The electric guitar transformed music. It created new possibilities by creating new sounds. It helped spawn Rock ‘n’ Roll, including Punk, that outraged public opinion. But its hall of fame contains some of the greatest reputations of the last century. But as Simon Cowell shows, even this grass-roots business is managed from the top, even if it draws inspiration and talent from the bottom. It created its own space and its own demand.

Ryanair: nobody’s friend

Last, Michael O’Leary’s Ryan Air’s low-cost digitally-networked business model revolutionised the airline industry. It was an achievement of an aggressive innovative genius, not of stakeholder collaboration, which he despises.

These examples provide evidence of Joseph Schumpeter’s law of creative destruction that drives the capitalist market. They support my argument that PRs who think our trade is all about aligning values, listening, engagement and relationships need a reality check; though I’m very pro using those techniques in the right context and more importantly for the right reasons.

Key manifesto messages

In contrast, I say PRs should be more prepared to defend, advocate and promote risk taking. They should be less concerned about what’s acceptable and what’s popular. They should be more willing to celebrate elitism and success. They should be less concerned with the crowd as it is currently constituted or inclined to emote and opine.

PRs should be more willing to celebrate the arrogance of the change-makers who bring innovation to society. We should be less concerned with bad headlines and with tyranny of media produced crises. Instead we should focus our campaigns on achieving positive outcomes and on getting things done. We should be the torch bearers honing the narratives and messages of the people and forces which challenge or ignore society’s constraints. In that game PR plays a transformative role: we could start by making economic growth our focus.

The blog which got me going

Here’s the article that inspired this manifesto: To listen, to engage: empty buzzwords? Let’s discuss. It sums up the risk adverse stakeholder relationship management approach of mainstream academic PR. According to this school of thought progress depends on winning the public’s trust by establishing empathy. For them it is all about connecting with stakeholders by gathering sense:

“The consequences of the interpretation-of the comprehension-of the gathered sense need to be explicitly related to the listener’s decision making process and are inherently fuzzy, non linear and situational. The competencies are creativity, feasibility, and time framing with their respective tools.”

This piece of gobbledygook is typical of current PR thinking. It springs from a misplaced faith in Grunig’s two-way symmetrical model of PR and an addiction to jargon and spin. Amusingly the author is so sure of his ground that he asks What comes after Grunig? and replies, “the answer to that looming question is that after Grunig…comes Grunig.”

The danger here is that Grunig’s supporters have ended up trying religiously to make reality fit the theory. That’s the trap, if I’m any judge of PR-related text, that the Stockholm Accords, arising from the Global Alliance’s World Public Relations Forum debate, fell into.

In summary, my point is that PR is a multi-faceted, flexible profession. Sometimes it is top-down and one-sided. Sometime it is a two-way interactive real-time force. In whichever way it does its job, however, PR is an objectives-driven art rather than a science that’s reducible to orthodox formulas. My take home message is that PR makes its most useful contribution to society when it advocates transformative risk-taking on which great reputations are built.

This is an updated piece that was first published in February 2010

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PRs representing bankers need not concede much ground to the moralists. Instead they should recommend their clients come out fighting. The advice from financial PRs should be: stand your ground; defend yourselves; get the rest of the business community behind you.

If banking clients have doubts about the merits of this approach, PRs should remind them that so far they have been very bad at making a serious case for themselves, which has made it hard for PRs to do so on their behalf. Moreover, bankers need not worry about going out on a limb. There are positive signs that the British business establishment is more than prepared to back British bankers and to condemn the anti-business rhetoric being spouted by the media, protesters and politicians.

This week a leading group of business folk, including Sir Michael Rake, chairman of BT and Easyjet, Sir Andrew Witty, chief executive of Glaxo Smith Kline, and Paul Walsh, chief executive of Diageo, will tell Prime Minister David Cameron to stop bullying CEOs. According to The Sunday Times, one of them will state that if Cameron’s government keeps bashing business:

Eventually companies will leave, and those that stay will not be able to recruit top talent.

That’s the bottom line. The British Establishment’s liberal courtiers are in danger of making the country Mickey Mouse about all this: scapegoating Fred Goodwin, whinging about rather ordinary pay and bonuses for HSBC, Barclays and other bankers.

Hence bankers should tell politicians and the media that the British people and City of London need thriving financial institutions more than they need them. That’s an arrogant message, perhaps. But it has the compelling merit of being an honest one.

PRs have to say forcibly that we need Hester to stay at RBS, and we need HSBC and Barclays to look like credible global businesses capable of attracting the very best to work for them: end of. The rest is noise.

It is unlikely that the public and media can be persuaded to agree with such messaging right now. Yet I doubt that the masses will be pleased over the long term if the liberal commentariats make the moral hazards of doing business in Britain too much for the banking sector to bear. So David Cameron (who can be convinced and needs convincing now) needs to be told that he won’t gain anything by banker-bashing. That pious positioning should be left to Ed Miliband, who is blindly stuffing his portfolio with this unelectable puff.

As several people have remarked, the public will be slightly more in favour of bankers etc. when in a few years’ time, Britain is the world centre of world class bankers. But if we lose this fight to the other side because Britain does not embrace banks and business, Switzerland, where I live, is one of many countries that hopes to profit from the UK’s demise.

Swiss bankers have never been popular in Switzerland. Instead, the Swiss grasp the truth about who needs whom more and why. They have long-acknowledged, however reluctantly at times, what drives business success. They value the benefits that accrue to the wider population as a consequence of allowing their financial institutions to function properly in a global market place.

So as I close this piece, here’s my insight gained from observing Swiss bankers. Bankers need to be trusted more than they need to be popular. To win trust they need to speak straight about the realities of their business. That won’t make them popular. BUT: there’s never been an era in history when bankers and money lenders have been popular. So get used to it; get over it.

Canny PRs have long seen this stuff clearly. To those that don’t yet get it, I say be careful which side you support because the stakes are very high indeed.

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In has come a bold recognition that business must be seen, as Edelman’s press release puts it, “as a force for good and [more significantly] an engine for profit”. But – yes there’s always one very BIG one of those – there’s a major contradiction at the heart of the lessons Edelman draws from its own results:

Consistent financial returns, innovative products and a highly regarded senior leadership are primary factors on which current trust levels lie. However, listening to customer feedback and putting customers ahead of profits are more vital to building future trust. [taken from press release: here]

It is as if Edelman is saying profit, innovation, new products and good leadership will win you trust today but not tomorrow. This message is suspect for a number of reasons. For example, trust is strong in business in every part of the world in which there is sustained economic growth. We should note, indeed, that current evidence from China suggests that future trust levels will fluctuate in proportion to the rate of, and the degree to which people are optimistic about, continued growth and social development.

Now let’s look at the cognitive dissonance among the public that Edelman’s survey uncovers. Edelman reports that while business is on average much more trusted than governments across the globe, 49% of respondents want governments to impose more regulations and supervision on business practices. On this point Richard Edelman usefully takes the lead:

The interventions people are asking government to take are changes business can step up and implement on its own [taken from press release]

That’s seemingly a robust pro-business message. Except it isn’t enough. Honesty is called for. In the future the West is going to continue to compete with emerging markets in the BRICS and elsewhere in Asia, Africa and Latin America. As a consequence, many of the calls that the public are now making to restrain and control business are going to have to be resisted; of course that’s not the same thing as ditching corporate responsibility. Winning that argument by challenging the public’s current perceptions will take a protracted and frank debate.

Otherwise it is more likely that business will say one thing and then be forced to do another under the pressures of the real world. Already, business has had to cut back on its biggest social responsibility to its employees and society at large: pension provision. In the future things are likely to only get tougher still on many many fronts – so let’s be straight or we seriously will lose people’s trust.

The key to building and maintaining trust and confidence is not difficult to fathom. Today, wherever there is uncertainty and angst about economic growth in the future, there has been a massive fall in trust and confidence in the present, which looks set to continue if things don’t improve.

Hence the best PR from now on must be focused on making growth happen by removing the barriers to innovation, experimentation and profit making; be they limits imposed by governments or self-abnegation and concessions to protest movements. That calls for a battle for hearts and minds in the realm of public opinion. It will involve making consumerism and corporations chic once again and advocating rapid technological progress and economic development.

The upbeat culture we require to win back trust and overcome cynicism is totally at odds with today’s downbeat anti-growth, anti-technology and anti-corporate, pessimistic climate, particularly in the West with its Occupy Wall St protests. However, as yet, the PR world, including the Edelman PR Agency, does not agree with my viewpoint. So I predict we will continue to remain part of the problem for some more time to come.

See also: Edelman’s wonky 2011 Trust Survey

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Before I counterattack with some beef, we need to review the four definitions currently on offer. The definitions all presuppose (or purposely pretend) that PR is mostly concerned with managing relationships between an organisation’s stakeholders and publics. That was a misconception addressed in my recent post PR is more about messages than relationships. Anyway, here comes PRSA’s three proposed definitions in their full glory:

No. 1 

Public relations is the management function of researching, engaging, communicating, and collaborating with stakeholders in an ethical manner to build mutually beneficial relationships and achieve results. (Read the annotated version here.)

PS’s comment: this is a loose, slippery definition. How do you define, or who gets to define, what constitutes “collaborating ethically”? The words “mutually beneficial” are waffle because only one side pays our fee and we can’t represent both sides’ interests equally. There’s something anodyne about “mutually beneficial” because the perception of “mutual benefit” sustains relationships of all sorts. Moreover, every management function involves “engaging, communicating and collaborating with stakeholders” or it is not a management function. The words “achieve results” provoke the question: results for whom?

No. 2 

Public relations is a strategic communication process that develops and maintains mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their key publics.

PS’s comment: the logic of this definition is that if you are doing tactical and reactive PR you are not doing PR at all. Moreover, tough luck if you are not on the “key publics” list. Yeah, right. (Read the annotated version here.)

No. 3 

Public relations is the engagement between organizations and individuals to achieve mutual understanding and realize strategic goals. (Read the annotated version here.)

PS’s comment: What if your goals and those of your client are not strategic? How do you define strategic? As for individuals, they rarely relate to institutions strategically. Greenpeace might understand the nuclear industry and vice versa: so what?

Problems with PRSA’s method

What’s amusing about the three PRSA definitions is that they were the result of the collaborative work of hundreds of professionals who submitted their own definitions of public relations during a two-week crowd-sourcing phase. As the PRSA explains:

Working from a qualitative and quantitative analysis of this input, PRSA’s Definition of Public Relations Task Force proposed six possible definitions, which were circulated to our global partners. Based on their collective feedback, the three candidate definitions… emerged.

Attempting to define PR through crowd-sourced inputs is a recipe for producing confusion and compromise rather than clarity. The likelihood is that the blind will continue to lead the blind in the wrong direction. Indeed, the old saying about a camel being a horse designed by a committee springs to mind. Be that as it may, the process of deriving the proposed definitions is not my main concern: I’m more interested in the what than in the how.

What PRSA fails to grasp is that PR is a trade, not a profession. PR is not comparable to law, medicine, accounting or even to architecture. They have a specific body of knowledge to master in order to qualify and then professional bodies and codes to regulate practice backed by a legal framework.

Assessing CPRS’s definition of PR

Before I spell out the real role PR plays in the real world, let’s examine in some detail why the fourth definition from the CPRS is far from honest. CPRS’s definition, which they’ve adopted and others believe has universal validity, claims:

Public relations is the strategic management of relationships between an organization and its diverse publics, through the use of communication, to achieve understanding, realize organizational goals, and serve the public interest. (Flynn, Gregory & Valin, 2008)

This definition throws up a host of issues. First there is the question of whether our first duty as PR advisers is to our clients or to the public. Do we swear allegiance to both on equal terms even though it is our clients, rather than the public, which pay for our services? Would it be ethical to treat both responsibilities equally?

Proposition A (“realise organizational goals”) is scuppered by Proposition B (“and serve the public interest”), unless we are to have a rather strained oxymoron.

PRs are paid to promote the interests of their employers. They promote A within the bounds of decency and the law. They do this – if they do it properly – professionally in the best sense of the word. That is in the public interest (B) in the sense that having one-sided advocacy is a part of free society since freedom is not merely the right to speak but the understanding that truth and good sense emerge from competing arguments.

In other words, the defence advocate is serving the pubic interest almost whatever the merit of his or her client. Almost all the time, the PR’s job is to persuade the public that A equals B. But unless these two propositions are simply supposed to be coterminous (which is a stretch) there is often an important tension between propositions A and B. In reality, PRs have to favour A under the cover of espousing B.

The honest PR would admit that PRs dress up A as B. They would insist that his or her professionalism dictates that they should warn the public about the threat of “deception” (or at the very least, one-sidedness) which lies therein. This is why it is so unprofessional and sad and demeaning that PRs should (often do) pretend that A and B are always, or even should or must be, a good match.

It has always been a comfort to me and to colleagues that doing A is clearly defensible (within limits) and doable whilst achieving B is as hard to achieve as it is to define.

Public interest is hard to define

It is the impossibility of defining pubic interest (B) which has reinforced our civilisation’s conviction that lots of A (“realise organizational goals”), done competitively but within limits, is really the best way of achieving B. I say this in the spirit of how markets, democracies and debates are organised in the free world and how they actually behave in practice.

None of this is to deny that a PR may want to enrich an employer’s view of what A is, and do it by framing a view of B which could be promoted. A good example of this is corporate responsibility (CR) and a commitment to sustainability.

Hence, the honest PR needs to make a distinction between espousing B as an instrumental matter for pursuing A, and as a goal in its own right. He or she also must distinguish between pretending to know what B really is, and adopting a popular view of B, or a view of B which was plausible but also suited A.

Obviously the more B is bent out of shape so as to fit A the less the PR can claim a real moral power for his use of B, or for his employer as it claims to adopt B. Therein lies the accusation of greenwash and much more, as the rift between reality and practice produces a credibility gap.

It is my view that authenticity, truthfulness and being aligned with reality will nearly always and in the long run trump fluff, flannel and puff (spin) when it comes to winning long-term public trust; even if the case put is uncomfortable and unpopular. That’s to say: the long-term “organizational goals” will usually be best met with honest PR. With any luck, being honest will usually strike the public as having been in the public interest too.

The idea that PRs serves the public interest has rhetorical appeal precisely because it is a loose proposition. We all have our own wildly differing definitions of what it is; even if sometimes it is also clear to all (most) of us what it is not. In contrast, being honest – and prizing honesty – is a principle that has stood up pretty well over time.

That is why it may be best to leave the public interest out of it. The International Public Relations Association (IPRA) Gold Paper No: 6 seems on safer ground when it notes that:

‘[According to the Dutch PR association] Public relations is the systematic promotion of mutual understanding between an organisation and its public‘. Or, as the British express it: ‘Public relations is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its public’.

I have a fairly decent quibble with the British definition. To “maintain goodwill” might involve a good deal of deception or systematic lack of frankness. “Mutual understanding” has its attractions because to understand something includes the idea that what one is learning is not untrue. (The English language does not allow that one can “know” or “understand” an untruth.)

My view of what PR is about?

If forced to pick one word that captured the essence of public relations I would opt for “advocacy”: the act of pleading or arguing for something in the court of public opinion to influence an outcome on behalf of clients, preferably by using two-way communication techniques. That is to stress that I am not all that interested in PR which persuades people to think a certain thing unless the PR has invited and accepted and met informed challenge by the target audience. However, I’m not convinced that we could ever arrive at a “catch all” definition of our multi-faceted trade.

At the end of the day, PRs have to acknowledge that they are not in business to push their own varied agendas on to their clients. Rather they represent – advocate – their employers’ interests. PRs are more like barristers than priests. True, they can – like doctors or management consultants – help fix their employers’ problems. True, they can – like diplomats – bring the wider world to their employers and sensitise their employers to the wider world’s needs. Be they however sophisticated, flacks are hacks – they are for hire. That does not mean they leave decency or professionalism behind when they go to work.

Indeed, the definitions I recommend for them may be more rigorous and personally costly than swimming with the tide of fashionable nostrums, which is my beloved trade’s commonest activity right now.

(Apologies to regular readers of 21st Century PR Issues who might just recognise some of the text above, which originated here)

Recommended additional reading:

Heather Yaxley: Why I don’t care about defining public relations

PR Conversations: A defining moment for public relations

Stuart Bruce: Public relations defined for the 21st century

Please Revise…: “Defining” Public Relations 

21st-Century PR Issues: How PR sells firms and trust short

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All businesses are about relationship-building. Butchers, say, depend on it. As in: “I’ve some nice sirloin today. A bone for the dog?” One pitch of modern PR is to say that we manage the relationships other people can’t reach – or don’t spot. And indeed we are right to stress that nowadays, reputational risk is everywhere: your suppliers can let you down as easily as your managers. So, yes, PR is about a clients’ 360-degree reputational risk. We have to look at our clients’ relationship risk and its way upstream, way downstream – and all around. To some extent, we can fix those relationships, or find people who can.

But I think we’re starting to go too far, as though PRs were uniquely suited to giving a sort of therapy, or a laying-on of hands. We are at risk of not spotting that messages and influencing behaviour remain our core business.

Here’s an example from a popular blog and thought leader of the muddle PRs are currently in:

“Communicating (communications departments typically engage in: talking) is not a particularly useful skill. Relating is. Maybe it’s time to reclaim the words “public relations” and, more importantly, the philosophical principles that underpin those words. (Paul Holmes’s blog here)

Of course, I accept that our trade is public relations. But I insist that the essence of that remains preparing and communicating messages. We improve people’s relationships by ensuring they understand the value of developing their messages carefully, getting them out, and living up to them.

That means we are like diplomats, journalists and yes (blimey) philosophers. And we do indeed go further: we remind our clients, over and over, that good messages produce their own weakness and risk; we remind them that they have to walk the talk. A stated aspiration is a hostage to fortune, a challenge to our critics (stakeholders, indeed!).

You can have all the relationships you like with the media, with one’s neighbours, with one’s customers, with the NGOs, and when you don’t deliver the reality you’ve told them to expect, they’ll still all pile in on you with gay abandon and crocodile tears.

So of course, we PRs build relationships. But relationships are no sort of insurance or guarantee. They may not even be the best sort of investment. What you need is good behaviour, solidly communicated.

I’m trying to get it across that winning friends is not the necessary or sufficient condition of influencing people. The relationship of trust (which PRs may well want between themselves and their clients and the rest of the world, that great Other) is not the same as or even like the relationship of, say, friendship or affection. Reputations are about more than relationships.

Perhaps I can put it this way: I often trust people or institutions I don’t know and don’t like. I don’t have a relationship with judges, the police, firefighters, the surgeons in my local hospital, the drivers of Shell’s road tankers. I don’t want one either. I just want to be able to trust them.

By the way, new media don’t change any of this much. The people who twitter and blog may believe they are a new social entity, and PRs may believe that this new sociology requires a new sort of relationship-building. Like Harold Burson here, I doubt it.

Much was made of the new relationship Obama had forged with the American people in the new ether. Yeah, well, maybe. Right now, he seems to have gone on to hack off the floating, middling, uncommitted American centre ground. Will he get the enthused kids back? Has he got an ongoing, er, relationship with them? We’ll see. It looks to me that in important measure, what he surfed was a wave of enthusiasm, and it may have broken on the shore in a trillion sparkling droplets. His vast virtual Rollodex may develop into a relationship, but we can’t know yet because a relationship is a thing which gets a history or it isn’t anything.

Moreover, we’ve always known that the best PR is heard and not seen. That means that PR has mostly an indirect relationship to its target audiences – through the media, through third-party opinion formers and other influencers (advocates) whether that’s online or off, through the media or by other means.

PR’s hand is even more remote when, as Edward Bernays showed us with his “Torches for Freedom”, it manufactures consent by engineering events that help create a new social consensus or climate of opinion.

So I come back to the importance of asking the question, relationships with whom? Of course, most institutions and firms want good relationships with clients, opinion-formers, hacks, enemies, politicians stakeholders, neighbours and everybody else.

But, actually, most of those audiences don’t have time to have a relationship with you. What most audiences require is the right message, at the right moment via the right channel. Most of the people who determine what reputation you acquire (reputations are conferred by others) will respond positively (or dangerously). They won’t do so because they’ve been nurtured directly by PRs.

For advocacy to work, of course, people need to be persuaded to think a certain thing. Hence, it makes sense for PRs to engineer a genuine invitation to accept and meet informed challenge by the target audience – but very often still without engaging directly as the PR team – for anything controversial or requiring consent or acceptance by various stakeholders (new runways, licences to operate etc.).

Of course there are exceptions. Those are strategic and tactical considerations (Ryanair doesn’t talk to PlaneStupid, but many firms talk to Greenpeace, but some won’t talk to either and some talk to both).

There’s no love in war, competition, public opinion and the media, so why bother to be loved or liked? Being understood and trusted should be enough. That means putting integrity, truthfulness, evidence and authenticity at the heart of communication.

Note: this was first posted in 2009.

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I’ve had, and hope I’ve shared, an absorbing PR year. It’s been threaded-through with a stab at a long-range, long-form piece of work – a book in the making – about the whence and whither and whyfore of PR. I hope that 2012 lets me explore these themes usefully, and share them amusingly.

It’s been huge fun because I’ve been teaching myself some history (Greece and Rome, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution), the better to understand the evolution from rhetoric to spin.

If all goes well, the book will be a guide to where PR came from and where it may – and where it should – go. The crux is of course, whether we’re a bunch of chancers or a cadre of professionals. And more: if we’re bits of both, how to signal the mode we’re in as we go along.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the ride so far, and that you’ll stick with it for another year. Let’s engage soon and help make the future something we can all be proud to share. Meanwhile, I wish you all well.

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Health warning: get a cup of coffee or a glass of wine before you engage because this is not a typical blog post.

Its sections run as follows:

1. Introduction: Homer gives birth to humanism
2. From myth to the classic: the Greek transition
3. The Iliad and Odyssey gave man his voice
4. Women’s viewpoint was first heard in Sappho’s poetry
5. Homer led to theatre and theatre to art
6. How Homer’s disciples gave birth to PR
7.  Why Plato blamed Homer, Sappho, sophists, theatre and art for spin

1. Introduction: Homer gives birth to humanism 

Rhetoric came to life the moment mankind came together to cooperate. It was and is speech designed to influence others. Yet our story of the message only really begins with a discussion of Homer’s influence in archaic and Classical Greece. That is not because earlier civilisations failed to produce rhetoric that’s worthy of discussion. It is partly because the Greeks produced work which is so recognisable to us, and because they talk about their rhetorical developments so self-consciously. And one of the important developments is the idea that, with the Greeks, we see rhetoric becoming not merely the business of persuading people, but of having radically new ideas worth persuading them about.

According to historians such as C J Emlyn Jones and E H Gombrich, before Homer storytelling and art were not arenas in which ideas were explored so much as straitjackets that transmitted incontrovertible messages. Besides highlighting hunting grounds, battles, kings, queens and campaigns, their function was confined to conveying sacred themes about perceived truths concerning ancient or newly created myths, rituals, deities and magic.

However Homer’s period marked a new beginning for mankind. The key difference being that from around 800BC onward man began to acquire more freedom to manufacture and communicate messages that were open to interpretation and contestation. It was the moment when humanism was born:

Homer’s concern for human spiritual and social development in association with, but also sharply independent of, the gods – what may be termed humanism – separates Greek culture right from the beginning from the essentially god-centred and theologically motivated literature which was composed during the previous millennium in technically advanced but politically conservative cultures of the Near East, chiefly Mesopotamian, Hittite and Egyptian. [The Ionians and Hellenism: a study of the cultural achievement of early Greek inhabitants of Asia Minor, C J Emlyn Jones, page 61, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1988]

From then on the cultural and political agenda became more unpredictable and more dynamic than before as humanity sets out to query the will of the gods and question the nature of fate. This was an intellectual innovation that signified that man’s perception of his position in the world had shifted. As Jones points out:

…it was in Ionia, in the poetry of Homer and the cosmology of the Milesians, that for the first time in history, man took the centre of the stage as a thinking and feeling individual – an assumption upon which Western culture has subsequently rested. [The Ionians and Hellenism: a study of the cultural achievement of early Greek inhabitants of Asia Minor, C J Emlyn Jones, page 6, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1988]

We cannot be certain why it happened. Perhaps it was luck. More likely it had something to do with the fact that the Greek-speaking world allowed citizens more scope than previous civilisations to ponder, debate and decide upon social matters. But the genesis and the content and purpose of Homer’s ur-verse are the subject of controversy and mystery.

In his book Performing Homer, Gregory Nagy, Francis Jones Professor of Classical Literature at Harvard University, suggests that because Homer’s narratives were committed to memory and transmitted through an oral culture they were most likely reconfigured by performers over the course several hundreds years. In short, to keep performances relevant, Nagy says Homer’s content was continually adapted to accommodate the shifting needs of what he calls the polis of the audience. Certainly, there is no written copy of Homer’s work earlier than 600 BC (Jones page 88).

Be that as it may, nobody really knows whether the name Homer refers to a person or to an innovative period in storytelling and human development. We don’t even know if Homer’s supposed home in Ionia was an economically advanced or backward region of Greece. There’s so much uncertainty on so much detail that we should keep an open mind about the historical accounts we read. Nevertheless, here is a brief sketch of what scholars surmise to be true about the period, some bits of which are more rooted in verifiable fact than others.

2. From myth to the classic: the Greek transition

The period of Homer was one in which war and invasions and colonial expansion had undermined the coherence of the old world’s beliefs. This nascent civilisation was spread over a large area on the southern Balkan peninsula, the Aegean islands, coastal Asia Minor, and elsewhere around the Mediterranean and Black Sea coast. It was when and where the Phoenician alphabet was developed (though there’s no evidence that Homer had access to such knowledge). It was the period that introduced coinage and in which the population became more urbanised. There was also more freedom given to women than was granted during the Golden Age of Greek classical democracy three hundred or so years later.

Society was organised into a loose network of independent communities, which over the course of the next few centuries were to become city-states. They spanned two great cultural traditions: the more austere tradition of Greece, and Eastern flamboyance. Living in them were several tribes who had only recently intermingled, such as Mycenaeans composed of Achaeans, Argives and Danaans, and their northern opponents known as Dorians. There were numerous local customs, rituals and traditions within communities as well as between them. In essence, theirs was a cultural potpourri that shared a common language but no creed rooted in religion, principles and values. No region, community or tribe was capable of imposing its authority and outlook on the others. Even within communities there was such a precarious balance of power that only a measure of toleration made it possible to hold them together.

Kings ruled in most regions, but they were far from secure in their position. They relied for their legitimacy on the support of an aristocracy composed of a socially elite strata of wealthy, land-owning, educated families (but this was not a titled elite as existed in the Middle Ages in Europe). As the aristocracy grew in wealth and political influence they increasingly sought to break free from their kings and by around 750BC they finally ousted them.

Given the challenges that this disparate civilisation faced, the educated elite may have consciously devised a strategy to unite their vast realms or they may have stumbled upon one by accident. As we shall explore here, it is not difficult to imagine how they might have seized upon the potential of Homer’s persuasive messages to bring a semblance of coherence to their society.

While our knowledge of Homer’s time might be wanting, we know much about how subsequent generations from Classical Greece to the present have interpreted Homer’s legacy. It amounts to the founding myth of the civilisation which underpins our own. So, let’s examine Homer in that regard.

The newly installed aristocratic rule of Homer’s world faced serious challenges. During the 250 years it took the city-states to become democracies, yeoman farmers and other members of the rising middle classes, including merchants and manufacturers, regularly colluded with the military to replace oligarchical aristocratic rule with that of tyrants. But their downfall was paved partly by progressive policies that some tyrants pursued and partly by technical and social innovation:

The development of a disciplined heavy infantry (hoplites) gradually eroded the dominance of the cavalry and the aristocrats, whose power had come from their ability to afford horses. This forced leaders of a city state to field a well-trained phalanx of hoplites who had enough in common to be willing to stand together and fight, each protecting with his shield the sword arm of the man to the left. Leaders and their troops had to work together in the interests of the community as a whole, and there was no place for the individualism of an Achilles. [Early Greek political thought from Homer to the sophists, Michael Gagarin, Paul Woodruff, page xi, University Cambridge Press, 1995]

One of the best-known and most progressive of the tyrants was the poet and reformer Solon who ruled Athens with popular acclaim (638 – 558 BC). The legal rights that “law-givers” such as Solon granted came to be recognised as statutory rights worth preserving. This encouraged a sense of entitlement that eventually encouraged the masses to rebel against the arbitrariness of tyrants such as Hippias of Athens who in mid-reign switched from being a progressive reformer to a regressive dictator.

Hippias was finally ousted in 508BC by a popular uprising backed by Spartan soldiers. Afterward the polis invited the exiled leader Klisthenis back to take control. He transformed Athens by opening the government of the city to all its citizens so that they could create a representative democracy. This new society consisted of legislative bodies, including ten municipalities run by delegates chosen by lot, rather than by kinship or birthright. But the major decisions in this new creation were taken at the Ecclesia, the assembly and government of Athens. There every citizen was given the right to vote, for example, on the price of food, when to go to war, or whether to ostracize troublemakers who threatened to reintroduce tyranny.

Later in BC462, Ephialtes, mentor of Pericles, leader of Athens’ Golden Age of 462 to 429 BC, destroyed the last bastion of aristocratic privilege when he abolished the Court of Areopagus (appeal court) and transferred its duties to the People’s Court.

So as tyrannical, oligarchical and plutocratic rule gave way to democracy, ordinary citizens (exclusively male and never slaves or foreigners) from mostly non-aristocratic backgrounds became the major social and political power. They created a society in which there was a presumed equality of free men based on shared values and assumptions. Hence, it was during this period that the notion of equality under law was first acknowledged and enforced.

According to myth court-based forensic rhetoric originated a little earlier in 476BC in Syracuse, Scilly, when the tyrant Hieron I, the instigator of the secret police in Greece, died. In the turmoil that followed a small group of families formed a restrictive democracy. Their first challenge was to settle their disputes in judicial hearings about how to redistribute the land the king had supposedly taken by force. The story goes that because claimants pleaded on their own behalf in the newly created People’s Assembly, they sought the services of speechwriters (logographos in Greek) to enhance their chances of success. The legend says that to meet this need two professionals arose called Corax and Tsias.  It is claimed it was they who wrote the first textbooks on rhetoric. But none of their written work survives. Some scholars dispute that either character existed. Others say they were one person not two:

Hard facts about Corax and Tisias are almost entirely (some would say entirely) lacking.[1] The former is mentioned by Aristotle, the latter by Plato, and the fact is that a similar argument from likelihood (eikos) is attributed to Corax in Aristotle’s Rhetoric and to Tisias in [Plato’s] Phaedrus does not inspire confidence. [Background and Origins: Oratory and Rhetoric before the Sophists, Michael Gagarin, page 30, A Companion to Greek Rhetoric, Wiley-Blackwell, 2006]

It is said that as full democracy matured in Athens the masters of rhetoric from Syracuse moved to the mainland. That’s the history mixed with myth, now let’s take closer look at how Homer’s epics influenced developments.

3. The Iliad and Odessey gave man his voice

Today, Homer is remembered most for composing two great poetic epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, which eulogise the exploits of orator warriors such as Achilles, Hector and Odysseus who fought in the Trojan War. The Iliad relates the story of the Achilles and to a lesser extent his opponent Hector. The Odyssey tells the tale of Odysseus’ journey home from the war. Together they provide an idealised vision of noble heroes, aristocratic virtues, such as honour and courage, and a concept of excellence which Homer’s contemporaries imagined embodied their civilisation’s long-lost Golden Era (circa: 1100/1200BC) when the Trojan Wars supposedly took place.

Caroline Alexander’s recent book, The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War[2], highlights that the Iliad was the world’s first critique of war. She explains how it provides an account of the conflict that favours neither side. But perhaps more importantly it portrays its main characters as aspiring to master their fate in preference to remaining passive victims of the gods’ designs. Indeed, the characters in the Ilaid display a lust for life and a contempt for Hades, king of the underworld, god of death, that is quite inspiring.

The Iliad opens with Achilles, the mortal son of the goddess Thetis, ranting about how the nine-year-long war has cost countless lives. He asks king Agamemnon what drove the enemy to fight so hard. He reminds the king that no Trojan had done him or his men any real harm and adds that no prize in war is worth dying for. Angered by a dispute with the king over the spoils of war, Achilles says he’d rather go home than remain dishonoured in Troy. A little later the lowly bow-legged and lame soldier Thersites addresses the troops seemingly on Achilles’ behalf; though the narrator says Achilles hates him. Thersites denounces Agamemnon for being a coward. He declares boldly that a man committed to rape and rapine and living a life of luxury while his men live a destitute existence is not fit to lead the army. He urges his fellow soldiers to abandon their leaders and return home to their loved ones (Homer’s text has Thersites laughed at and beaten, Shakespeare made him the hero of Troilus & Cressida).

As the tale unfolds Achilles becomes increasingly consumed by the grievances he has with both sides of the battle. At the end, Achilles proves to be inflexible. He comes to terms with the tragic realisation that he will die as consequence of the pointless war against Troy; though he’s comforted by the conviction that his heroism will be remembered for eternity.

The Odyssey is more complex and less fatalistic than the Iliad. It tells how the multi-faceted Odysseus, king of Ithaca, uses deception, courage and intelligence to overcome every trial and tribulation on his ten-year-long journey home from the Trojan War to reclaim his kingdom and wife. So in love is Odysseus with his mortal wife Penelope that he remains faithful to her despite the sea goddess Calypso offering him immortality if only he would stay with her forever.

Among many other adventures he wrestles god-sent storms meant to kill him. He navigates his ship between two perilous rocks, where on one side sits Scylla, a six-headed monster, and on the other Charybdis, a sea-monster whose every gulp of water sets off deadly whirlpools. He blinds the one-eyed giant Cyclops, son of the gods Poseidon and Thoosa. His ship is sunk and his men killed when Zeus attacks them with thunderbolts. Yet somehow using lots of guile he makes it back to his homeland on the island of Ithaca. There with the help of his son Telemachus, he kills the greedy suitors of his faithful wife. Finally Odysseus is reunited with his family with whom we suppose he lives happily ever after.

Of course, Homer’s epics were not the world’s first. The stories of the Old Testament and The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the world’s oldest known epic poems, predate Homer by perhaps thousands of years. Moreover as with Homer’s works their continued relevance owes much to their equally universal and enduring human themes.

The Epic of Gilgamesh tells the story of king Gilgamesh of Uruk, who is part mortal, and a greater part god. It recounts his quest to discover the secrets of eternal life so that he can become immortal. Along the way he realises that no man can possibly live forever. When he finally arrives back home he concludes that while the gods cannot be trusted, they have granted man something worth treasuring, which is the immortality of man’s achievements. The ageless message of the tale being that man must make the most of his time while he has it (and perhaps also that there is no place like home).

It is not the exploration of the meaning of life and death that sets Homer’s work apart. Neither are Homer’s epics different because of their accounts of the dysfunctional behaviour of the gods or for their exploration of love, friendship, family and sex. What gives Homer’s narratives their humanist content that tales such as The Epic of Gilgamesh lacked is more profound than that. According to the art historian E H Gombrich, Homer’s major innovation in storytelling was not only to tell the “what” in his accounts of mythical events but also the “how”:

Obviously this is not a very strict distinction. There can be no recital of events that does not include description of one kind or another, and nobody would claim that The Gilgamesh Epic or the Old Testament is devoid of vivid accounts. But there is still a difference in the way Homer presents the incidents in front of Troy, the very thoughts of the heroes, or the reaction of Hector’s small son, who takes fright from the plumes of his father’s helmet. The poet is here an eyewitness. If he were asked how he could know so exactly how it actually happened, he would still invoke the authority of the Muse who told him all and enabled his inner eye to see across the chasm of time. [Art and Illusion, A study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, E H Gombrich, page 129, Princeton University Press, 2000]

So however ambiguous this break with the past was, Homer was the first writer to draw the audience’s attention to the author’s narrative as a work of fiction. He’s the first to highlight the human nature of an epic’s messages. He’s the first to portray the main characters as being in many respects superior to the gods. This makes his epics truly groundbreaking.

Homer’s epics were admired for their advocacy of heroism, honour, nobility, cooperation and community values that characterized the popular culture of the Greek-speaking world. In Homer’s wake, a new wave of artists and thinkers sought the same licence to express their voice.

Muses in Raphael's Parnassus (1511)

4. Women’s viewpoint was first heard in Sappho’s poetry

After Homer’s epic poetry dominated oral verse, lyric poetry (from where we get the word lyrics) emerged in the seventh century BC. This innovation in poetic expression introduced musical verse accompanied by a lyre, backed by a choral choir that also danced. It was an artistic movement whose senior figure was Sappho, antiquity’s leading female poet.

In her masterful Rhetoric Retold, Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance, Cheryl Glenn maintains that Sappho was regarded as being on the same level as Homer. She adds that Sappho is equal to any poet who has lived since then.

Sappho was an aesthetic poet with a light sensual touch who articulated Greek society’s interest in intimate and inward-looking thoughts of mortals. In contrast to Homer’s almost exclusive focus on male characters, she explored themes such as sex, love and beauty from the perspective of individual women. Cheryl Glenn sums it up thus, “the speaking subject of Sappho’s poems was a woman, a woman claiming the right to talk, the right to use her voice” (page 26).

Given that Sappho was neither banned nor condemned by the society of her day, it would seem that she was empowered by the polis of the Greek city-state of Lesbos to subvert stereotypes about the position of women in society.

For example, Sappho provides an alternative account to Homer’s Iliad about how Helen of Troy might have felt about her role in the Trojan War. Homer’s Helen cursed herself for abandoning her husband and coming to Troy; Sappho’s Helen is admired for desiring one thing, “the fairest,” and for choosing to realise her ambition by leaving her husband for Paris in Troy. Unlike in the Iliad, Sappho’s Helen is not a forlorn victim of a man’s world but an independent subject making moral and personal decisions about how she chooses to live her life.

Hence there were differences between the two poets that manifested themselves in a clash of ideas. On the one side, Homer promoted intelligence, courage, selfishness, self-control, moderation, lack of arrogance, hospitality and respect for gods, strangers, parents, justice and fairness. On the other, Sappho advocated surrendering one’s self to hedonistic ecstasy. She wrote sensually about love and beauty. She expressed her delight at seeing flowers being caressed by the slivery moonlight. She wrote about women who loved each other as much as they did men who looked like gods.

As the American scholar Ruth Scodel points out in Listening to Homer, Tradition, Narrative And Audience [page 175, University Michigan Press, 2002], contemporary classicists are less prepared today than they were during the 19^th century to see Homeric epics as historical sources. Instead they are more inclined to view them as ideological interventions (we shall explore in the section on the sophists how Greek ideology was weak and in need of mythological reinforcement) designed to influence contemporary opinions. In support of this viewpoint, Glenn quotes Germany’s leading classicist Werner Wilhelm Jaeger saying something similar about Sappho in his book Paideia [2nd edition, New York: Oxford, UP, 1943]:

[t]he very existence of Sappho’s circle assumes the educational conception of poetry which was accepted by the Greeks of her time; but the novelty and greatness of it is that through it women were admitted to a man’s world, and conquered that part of it to which they had a rightful claim. For it was a real conquest: it meant that women now took their part in serving the Muses and that this service blended with the process of forming character. (1: 133) [Rhetoric Retold, Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance, Cherly Glenn, page 25, Southern Illinois University Press, 1997]

While Jaeger’s point is clearly convincing, that should not lead us to suppose that Sappho was a campaigner for equality. Not only is there no sign of that in her poetry, back then the concept of equality applied only to men who were members of the polis. The closest any writer of the time came to advocating equality was in Plato’s Republic. There he remarks that the physical and mental differences between the sexes are minimal. He says that in his ideal society there would be “equality” of opportunity in terms of work and education for women and men. But he makes no concession to his opinion that the souls of women are the reincarnated souls of cowardly and unrighteous men. Moreover, the absence of any modern notion of equal rights in Classical Greece is plain to see in the contemporary acceptance of slavery as being rooted in human nature.

Plato’s views appear relatively progressive when compared to the position of women at the time. In the city-states, including Athens and Sparta, women and men lived apart. Women were excluded from the polis, the ekklesia (principal assembly of the democracy) the Pan-Hellenic games and the oracular shrines of the Classical Greek world. Most scholars acknowledge, however, that women such as Sappho who were daughters and wives of citizens received a good education, though separately to men. The consensus also suggests that women played a major role at funerals, religious rituals and in the arts in Athens, particularly in the chorus, and that in Sparta they were encouraged to participate in athletics. [3]

There’s little doubt that Sappho’s influence was substantial, but Homer’s prestige clearly reigned supreme throughout archaic and Classical Greece. For example, Jaeger’s assessment of Homer cites no less a figure than Plato to stress the important part his epics played in the transmission of tradition in the ancient world:

Plato tells us that in his time many believed that Homer was the educator of all Greece. Since then, Homer’s influence has spread far beyond the frontiers of Hellas [Greece]….all his [Plato’s] attacks did not shake the supremacy of Homer. The Greeks always felt that the poet was in the broadest and deepest sense the educator of his people. [Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, Volume 1, Werner Wilhelm Jaeger, page 34, Oxford University Press, 1939]

Of course, here Jaeger is also pointing out that Plato was a critic of Homer. Plato was not comfortable with the new freedom of expression artists were given. He believed they should have stuck to the prescribed paradigms set by the Egyptians and earlier civilisations. He thought that their artistic licence encouraged them to move away from the pursuit of truth-telling toward what we today call spinning, manipulation and outright deception. But before looking more closely at Plato’s arguments, we shall examine how Homer and Sappho influenced the wider world of messaging in the theatre and review the sophists.

5. Homer led to theatre and theatre to art

Theatrical performances in Classical Greece were major events attracting crowds well in excess of ten thousand at a time. They provided an experience, narrative and set of messages that all Greeks shared. In short, theatre was, as Homer had been and remained, a major force in the transmission and diffusion of common values, mores and beliefs throughout the Greek-speaking world. As John Richard Green writes in Theatre in ancient Greek society [Routledge, 1996] the popularity of Athenian drama and comedy outside Athens in the fourth century BC was probably the result of the universal, as opposed to parochial, appeal of their themes.

The theatrical era arguably began in Athens in BC534 when Thespis stepped in front of the chorus and created a role for himself to win the world’s first theatrical competition: ever since actors and actresses have been known as thespians. Later, writers produced innovative plays that gave roles to actors, supported by the chorus. In the sixth, fifth and fourth centuries they invented and developed the art of comedy, including its political form, satire, and they gave us the word tragedy, which means goats music in Greek. The era produced three great bards: Aeschylus (524 – 456BC); Sophocles (496 – 406BC) and Euripides (480 – 406BC). It was they who progressively transformed the world of theatre into its modern format.

Aeschylus is known as the father of tragedy and as the playwright who wrote parts for actors that went beyond liaising merely with the chorus. He put more characters into plays than his predecessors, which allowed him to explore how they interacted and conflicted with each other in his embellishments of themes derived from Homer’s epics. However, there were still only two actors on stage and the plots were kept comparatively simple. It was Sophocles who introduced the third actor that made possible the development of dramatic plot. His work increased the interaction between characters who identified themselves in numerous disguises with the aid of masks on stage. His plays included the ‘Freudian’ Oedipus Rex in which Oedipus unwittingly kills his father and unwittingly marries his mother with whom he conceives four children (when the truth is revealed he plucks out his own eyes). Euripides went further still than Sophocles in the development of both plot and characters. Euripides portrayed strong independent, intelligent women. He interrogated the gods and sometimes found their sense of justice wanting (this made him controversial). He explored the psychological motivations of the different characters. Significantly, in terms of style and content Euripides was naturalistic and humanist in a recognisably modern manner. For example, when Euripides wrote his own version of a well-told story about Orestes, a mythological character and subject-matter of several Greek plays, he gave it a contemporary tone that still resonates today:

…in earlier tellings of the story, Orestes killed his mother in pursuance of the unwritten laws of vendetta, but in Euripides’ play Orestes is castigated for not referring the matter to a democratic law court. A Modern society is superimposed on an ancient society based on codes of honour. In more subtle ways, all Greek tragedies observed the same principle, refracting the past through the present to make old stories generate an infinite number of new meanings. [Greek theatre performance: an introduction, David Wiles, page 11, Cambridge University Press, 2000]

It was the development of theatre after Homer and Sappho that perhaps did most to provide a licence for artists to put his or her directed message at the heart of their work. As playwrights produced more life-like drama they increasingly required the development of realistic scenery that could make the audience believe in the scenes they were witnessing. But this in turn required artists to experiment with the schemata of conceptual art because, as Gombrich explains, the more they began to embroider myths and to dwell on and illustrate the “how”of events, the more they were forced to accept that:

…in a narrative illustration, any distinction between the “what” and the “how” is impossible to maintain. The painting of the creation will not tell you, like the Holy Writ, only that “in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Whether he wants to or not, the pictorial artist has to include unintended information about the way God proceeded and, indeed, what God and the world “looked like” on the day of creation. [Art and Illusion, A study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, E H Gombrich, page 129, Princeton University Press, 2000]

This led the Greeks to do something no previous culture had seen the need to do: mimic reality (mimesis) by mastering perspective and modeling in light and shade to produce convincing illusions. The result was that Greek artists developed a fluid naturalistic style of painting, sculpture and other art forms that came to define their classical culture and later to inspire the Renaissance’s creative outburst. This was how the Greeks gave birth to the world of art as we know it today:

The creation of an imaginative realm led to acknowledgement of what we call “art” and the celebration of those rare spirits who could explore and extend that realm.

It may sound paradoxical to say the Greeks invented art, but from this point of view, it is a mere sober statement of fact. We rarely realize how much this concept owes to the heroic spirit of those discoverers who were active between 550 and 350 BC. [Art and Illusion, A study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, E H Gombrich, page 141, Princeton University Press, 2000

The driving-force of this revolution in art, however, was not a breakthrough in artistic technique, but a breakthrough in the world of ideas in epics, poetry, theatre and democracy expressed through rhetoric. Put another way, developments in artistic technique grew out of the world of ideas, not the other way round.

6. Homer’s disciples gave birth to PR

The sophists (from Greek for wisdom) emerged in the fifth century BC as an eclectic class of roving educators who passed on the techniques and power of persuasion to others. Their popularity reflected the demise in importance of birthrights, class and wealth as the main determinants of a person’s influence within the polis. Instead, in the new Greece influence and authority also depended upon how virtuous others perceived a person’s character to be and on how eloquently they performed in debates. The other great appeal of the sophists was that they had something interesting and original to contribute to public life at the level of ideas. So even though most of them were foreigners (not eligible for citizenship themselves) they flourished in Athens where they spent as much time managing their own image as they did those of others.

James Herrick remarks in A History and theory of rhetoric[4] that it was the sophists who demonstrated how there were at least two sides to every story and showed the world how to make democracy work by consciously putting contentious argument and competing opinions at its centre. Michael Gagarin and Paul Woodruff maintain[5] that it was the sophists who first gave Homer’s notion of the importance of procedural justice in communities theoretical support. Aristotle credits them with having invented the trade of speechmaking and passing on life-style “rules” known in Greek as arête that translates as something akin to excellence, which the Greeks saw as equating to virtue, as described in the Iliad and Odyssey. This claim of the sophists was controversial because previously virtue had been seen as an inherited quality that people couldn’t learn but only hone. Hence there was a widespread belief that the sophists were charlatans who preyed on the vulnerable by promising things they couldn’t deliver.

The sophists lived in an age in which oratory (public speaking) became the most valued social skill of all. So much so that the education system from the age of 14 focused almost exclusively on teaching the techniques and theories of oral expression. To meet society’s need for leaders who could persuade others, competing schools arose run by likes of Isocrates (the next chapter will examine these in detail). Their services, however, were often exceedingly expensive. This was, then, the age in which PR became a recognisable trade concerned with advocacy and managing reputations. But it was our trade at its most loftiest and most worldly. The rhetoric of the sophists brought politics, philosophy and PR to life simultaneously. For all practical intents and purposes they were inseparable in their hands. It took the theoretical work of Socrates, Isocrates, Plato and Aristotle to unbundled them by separating sophistry from philosophy, which is something we shall explore more in chapter 2.

Sophists – in the sense of those who practiced sophistry – thought that truth was inseparable from eloquence: arguably, they often mistook eloquence for the truth itself. They invented grammar and philology. They worshipped prose and the periodic structure (holding the main clause or its predicate until the end). They aligned words to express the “truth” rhythmically. They were the masters of the use of assonance, allegory, alliteration, simile and metaphor, and other pleasant sounds that enticed the ears to seduce the mind. In similar manner to the Renaissance thinkers of the 14^th to 17^th centuries Europe, they advocated living life to the full based on the quest for excellence in all human undertakings.

One of the leaders of the early school of sophists was Protagoras of Abdra (490 BC – 420) who started life as a porter, and who is remembered most for coining the humanist mantra, “man is the measure of all things”. He specialised in teaching “antilogik”, which involves arguing every side of an argument in debate in a balanced manner. However, his work Kataballontes (overthrowing arguments) describes strategies and techniques designed to make a desired outcome triumph using the art of persuasion. As a consequence, Protagoras was widely criticised for teaching people how to manipulate arguments so that the ones they favoured always trumped those that they opposed.

Another of the leading sophists was Gorgias. He believed that there were no universal values of right and wrong and that nothing existed (or at least that they could not be proved to exist objectively). He said if things did exist they could not be known. He added that if even if things could be known that knowledge could not be passed from one person to another. In his view truth was the product of debates in which diametrically opposed positions were reconciled in a particular circumstance. Truth in short, according to Gorgias, is something subjective that humans create linguistically through discourse (that sort of makes him the precursor and inspiration for post-modernism).

Gorgias thought that rhetoric was neutral and could be used for good or bad purposes on either side of any debate. He also believed in rhetoric’s supernatural powers, which could enchant audiences with hypnotic incantations and the magic of words. Gorgias maintained that rhetoric was capable of convincing virtually anyone of virtually anything. To prove this point, he showed his students how to defend Helen’s role in the Trojan War by claiming she was not responsible for abandoning king Menelaus and running off with Paris to Troy. Challenging Homer’s classic account in the Iliad, Gorgias gave four possible excuses for her actions: “it was the will of the gods; she was taken by force; she was seduced by words; or she was overcome by love.”

Such claims also resulted in him being denounced for his ability to make the weaker argument appear the stronger. He reinforced this view when he stated that all we know about reality “lies in the human psyche and its malleability and susceptibility to linguistic manipulation.” In other words, as modern PRs are prone to say (much too much for my liking), perception is reality.

However, the sophists’ proposition that there were many truths challenged the underpinnings of Greek democracy, which presupposed that some truths were immutable. In contrast, in so far as the sophists believed truth existed they mostly viewed it in terms of probabilities and likelihoods (Eikos in Greek) rather than absolutes. This difference of opinion was exasperated by the lack of clarity within the polis about exactly what truths were immutable. That is beyond the “obvious” concerning the position of women and slaves, and the hold of mythology over the collective imagination that manifested itself in the near-worship of Homeric heroes and the actual worship of the gods.

In practice the city-states of Classical Greece never had a strong ideology to guide their governments: there were an abundance of conflicting gods, no over-arching moral beliefs, no scared texts; besides Homer’s legacy, which acted as Classical Greece’s unifying cultural anchor. The majority opinion within the polis was determined by the majority vote in Athens of citizens and in Sparta by the votes of an elite strata guided by its complicated but quite robust constitutional rules which combined oligarchy with democracy (each of the many city-states was constituted differently). But the outcome of votes was often unpredictable. Athens in particular was prone to losing control of democracy to demagogues who appealed to the prejudices and emotions of the crowd.

The vagaries of Greek democracy, politics and beliefs left the sophists vulnerable to being accused of subversion for contradictory reasons: sometimes for their lack of reason and sometimes for their commitment to it. Socrates, for example, was a critic of the relativism of the sophists. He refused to accept money for his services. He condemned his rivals for their amoral views and for their lack of critical thinking in the pursuit of truth. But he was tried and condemned to death for subverting authority, corrupting the youth, and, among other things, for being an incorrigible sophist.

7. Why Plato blamed Homer, Sappho, sophists, theatre and art for spin

By now, we post moderns are feeling almost queasy with recognition. During the centuries of the Reformation, Renaissance and the The Englightenment, the world stayed fairly solid under our feet and in our heads. We could be fairly content with a rationalistic and materialist account of things. Gods and myths were available, but were increasingly kept for high days and holidays. Increasingly, however, the power of the imagination has been brought home to us until by now relativism, fuzzy logic, emotional intelligence, point of view, and a host of other agendas have led people to half suppose they live in a sort of dreamscape, or even a nightmare.

The School of Athens by Raphael (1509–1510), fresco at the Apostolic Palace, Vatican City.

This is why reading about Greek thinking is so exhilarating. The further we press on into a world of media and perception, the more we realise just how well-equipped we are by our Classical forebears. They seemed to have seen all the essentials of our dilemmas. And of course, we find Plato waiting for us, a bit stern sometimes, but cool, too, and seemingly determined that we hang on to the nuts and bolts of good sense.

Hundreds of years after Homer and possibly in the year of Gorgias’s death in 380BC, Plato objected to the change in the function of art, literature and rhetoric in the Republic. In the same year he also picked philosophical quarrel with poetry and art in Gorgias. Twenty years later in the Phaedrus, Plato went on to outline his parameters for practical philosophical rhetoric that’s also ethical (more on that book in chapter 2).

Voicing his objection in the Republic to the new freedom of expression society granted artists, Plato condemns them for introducing fakery and psychological tricks into their work. Above all, he blames Homer’s influence for corrupting the morals and character of the youth by popularising myths. He says in effect that Homer’s epics provided society with a poor role model by showing the gods in a humanist light that portrayed them as being unreliable, dishonest and quarrelsome; Plato believed in the goodness and sanctity of the gods. Plato also expresses his disapproval for the way in which people studied Homer’s works with a view to arranging their whole lives around them. He pointedly excludes Homer from his perfect and imaginary “noble state” (kallipolis) because it would be wrong to transmit the ethos of society through mythological poetry in a city-state governed by the exercise of reason.

Nevertheless, in the Republic Plato acknowledges Homer as Greece’s leading poet and in Anthologia Palantia, a work ascribed to Plato, he supposedly dubs Sappho the tenth muse, meaning that in his eyes she was virtually a god in her own right.

According to Plato, for all Homer’s talk of military commanders, medicine, navigation, agriculture, fishing and horsemanship, the author knew little about any of them. In a similar fashion the painter and sculptor knows little except about the appearance of the things that they represent. He argued that the more realistic their art appeared to be the more illusion their facsimile of a facsimile of a form needed to convey.

In his satirical work entitled Gorgias, Plato has his eponymous character Gorgias conduct a discussion with the imagined Socrates (we presume that Socrates was dead by then, but we can’t be certain) about rhetoric. There, Plato slams rhetoric as flattery, foul and ugly, all nous and deceit, based on a good knowledge of words. He says rhetoric is the counterpart to cookery and amounts to no more than kairos, which is about knowing what to say and when to say it.

In Gorgias Plato compares rhetoric to those things traditionally considered an art, such as medicine, politics, and warfare. He reasons that rhetoric, unlike true arts, is a methodology without a specific subject or any basic data to serve as the foundation for those who practice it. The subject of medicine is healing, he states, which is accomplished by knowledge of illnesses and medicines. In contrast, he says there is no need for a sophist (or PR) to know the truth of the actual matters being addressed. Hence he denounced sophists for advocating that one merely needs to have discovered some device of persuasion, which will make a person appear knowledgeable.

Plato was clearly annoyed by Gorgias’s views. He denounced Gorgias, saying that his rhetoric, “be it which it may, art or mere artless empirical knack – must not, if we can help it, strike root in our society.” He believed, in contrast, that there were absolute truths to be sought as well as universal principles of right and wrong.

So, Plato frowned upon Homer’s epics and the licences it gave to artists to mess with messages and to invent narratives. He disapproved of the other innovations in artistic technique it encouraged. He believed that poets, playwrights, actors and other artists couldn’t recreate reality but only things that resembled it. He argued that socially constructed messages cast a spell on people that made them lose sight of reality. Hence Plato denounced the new art forms for making most of us, as opposed to the philosophical elite, susceptible to being bewitched by impressions (that’s a very contemporary concern).

Plato was rebelling against mimicry, tricky and the illusion of matching things in ways that made them look real. He was rebelling against what he saw as the corruption of character and morals by sophists and art during what was perhaps the most creative moment in human history. It was a period in which he played a major role and left a lasting intellectual legacy. His reputation as a thinker has survived because he touched on some truths and had some insights that are still valid: the appearance of things is not the same as the real thing.

Greece’s Golden Age in the fourth and fifth centuries was one of free expression and the creation of democracy. It was at that time that rhetoric was taught and practiced as it never had been before. This was a time of philosophic and scientific enquiry. It was a time when ideas became subject to proper interrogation: it was the world’s first Enlightenment. It still marks the moment against which all subsequent epochs have measured themselves.

In the next chapter I shall examine the development of systematised theoretical rhetoric in the thinking of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Isocrates (including their disputes). I will also sketch the anatomy of rhetoric that still governs communication and in particular PR today; however hidden its hand might be.

[5] Early Greek political thought from Homer to the sophists, Michael Gagarin, Paul Woodruff, page x, University Cambridge Press, 1995

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