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

Related posts:

1. How PR sells firms and trust short

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

No related pages.

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.

No related pages.

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. He 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

No related pages.

Later Professor Toni Muzi Falconi and Professor Emila Costa joined us on a closing panel. Professor Falconi was usefully critical of us both. Professor Costa added another dimension altogether by outlining psychiatry’s latest insights into how to motivate and manage people.

I set about questioning some of the assumptions that underpin corporate social responsibility. My intention was to point out that more than ten years of serious investment in CSR had not restored corporate reputations and in fact had arguably harmed them instead.

My key point was that CSR makes claims that generate their own moral and reputational hazards.

Rather than take pride in the moral and social purpose of a firm’s business (let’s say oil or consumer goods) CSR often creates the impression that the core business has questionable merits. In contrast, the CSR programme supposedly makes up for that by giving the firm a human face. This in turn suggests that ordinary business is neither intrinsically human nor socially beneficial.

For example, BP once claimed to have gone “beyond petroleum” and to be on course to save the planet from the supposedly harmful business it was in.

I argued that all firms have an obligation (professional, moral and practical) to be honest. This, I said, is the ancient business of valuing probity: frankness, honesty, integrity, uprightness and sincerity.

Most of the reputational and ethical failure in the business world among bankers and other executives at Enron and so on has been in this area rather than in CSR. I said, BP’s beyond petroleum claim clearly failed the honesty test. Moreover as The Times’ editorial argued, massive executive pay raises in the UK are hard to justify through the prism of probity.

I agreed that I was advocating quite a narrow and inward-looking approach that prized self-examination and de minimus standards. But the key to managing reputations relies on setting realistic expectations about how much a firm can do and the least it must do.

I pointed out how CSR’s grand claims to planetary virtuousness had a demoralising impact on the very workers it was meant to inspire. I said in uncertain and tough times it was simply not convincing to say employees have two jobs: their own and another designed to save the planet (see Rosabeth Kanter’s SuperCorp 2009). I said such idealistic notions created a credibility gap between hype and lived experience that encouraged corrosive cynicism.

As an alternative, I argued that when it came to forging the future, PRs had a responsibility to help clients make a compelling case for economic growth. Though to clear the way we must first grasp that much of what passes for discussion around CSR today points in the other direction.

I said – and received a bit of flack for doing so – that CSR’s influence on discussion tended to undermine society’s efforts to improve our prosperity and affluence. I added that too much stress had been put on trying to connect with anti-corporate and anti-capitalist sentiments.

I criticised the mantra that less is better and that consumerism and greed were intrinsically bad. I criticised those who promote happiness over development. I made the case for supporting new technologies, innovation and massively increased energy generation. I pushed back on those in the audience who argued that profit-led growth was problematic and not morally defensible.

In contrast to Western pessimists, I pointed out that China and other economically dynamic regions of the world had no worries about the merits of profit and progress. The key challenge for the West, I said, was to workout how to compete with the countries we call BRICs.

Controversially I maintained that many popular CSR policies that called for costly regulatory restrictions on our economies, such as cap and trade carbon taxes, might have to be ditched.

While I accepted that CSR is sometimes good for the bottom line, I maintained that that is not an argument in its favour. Or rather, it is an argument about the expediency of CSR, whilst CSR’s real claim is to reach beyond expediency onto some higher plane.

Perhaps I should have said more clearly that I approve of the efforts that many PRs are making to drop the “S” in CSR (see here) because it removes some of the moral hazards associated with greenwash and talking nonsense.

I implied – but perhaps also not as clearly as I would have liked – that I respect PRs who prefer to talk about “sustainability” as an alternative to CSR because it captures ideas about future-proofing the firm. That’s got plenty of problems of its own, but at least it doesn’t claim huge moral virtue. Indeed, sustainability allows firms to put sustainable profitability at the head of all the competing sustainabilitities that different stakeholders advocate.

To avoid being misunderstood, again and again I made clear that I was not advocating for one moment that firms should be allowed to wantonly damage the environment, behave badly toward their neighbours or toward anybody else.

Nevertheless, some of the audience appeared to believe that I was some kind of fascist. One person accused me of supporting the use of child labour in China. People kept implying that those of us resistant to CSR’s charms were less moral and less attractive than those who backed it. But I replied, many businesses, for many reasons, are resistant to lumbering themselves with a wide social or moral remit. Many such businesses do great good and provide life-enhancing social benefits that they are proud to deliver. Such firms and institutions operate with authenticity and conviction.

I insisted on the merit of reminding everybody about the foremost layer of responsibility that firms have to society: probity.

No related pages.

Historians have always revelled in Elizabeth as perhaps the first monarch who set out to be loved by her people and who saw how such affection was politic. The nearer we come to our own time, the more admiring analysis we find of the skills she brought to this game. We find ourselves recognising them as tricks and techniques we have made into an important trade. And we also find that Elizabeth, as a Renaissance figure, was – in her very modernity – reaching back to classical skills from the inauguration of her reign to its end.

In 1558, as Queen Mary I lay dying in her bed, Philip II of Spain, Mary’s husband, sent his ambassador to consult with Elizabeth. Count de Feria reminded the queen-in-waiting that she would owe her throne to the king of Spain. His case was strong. Since Philip’s marriage to Mary in 1554 he had protected Elizabeth from the Queen’s wrath. It was Philip who finally persuaded his wife to recognise Elizabeth as her rightful successor.

Elizabeth replied that neither the king of Spain nor the nobility of England had paved the way for her reign. That honour, she said, went to her popularity among the English people. Feria wrote to his master, “She is much attached to the people… and is very confident that they are all on her side; which is indeed true”. [Queen Elizabeth, J E Neale, page 54, The Reprint Society, 1942]

The rebuke Elizabeth gave Feria took guts. As Elizabeth waited for Mary I to die, her future was far from assured. She faced a sea of existentially threatening reputational issues that threatened to delegitimise her reign.

Elizabeth I was the daughter of Henry VIII’s second wife Anne Boleyn who was executed for treason, adultery and incest. Officially her mother was decreed never to have married Henry VIII; though that made an absurdity of the adultery allegation. In the reign of Edward VI, Henry VIII’s son and successor, Elizabeth was accused of having sexual relations with Thomas Seymour, her stepmother’s husband and the old king’s sixth wife (such a dalliance was taboo in both religions). Seymour was executed in 1549 for treasonable activities that seemingly had Elizabeth’s assent and perhaps even her active participation. After Edward VI died young in 1553, Mary I reintroduced Catholicism to England and, on good evidence, suspected Elizabeth of being complicit in a Protestant rebellion bent on deposing her. In response Mary I had Elizabeth sent to the Tower of London. She was made to enter via Traitors’ Gate, which traditionally meant that an execution was imminent. Even though Mary I, daughter of Henry VIII’s first wife Catherine of Aragon, was persuaded to release Elizabeth, she still regarded her half-sister as a bastard child of an infamous woman. As Elizabeth waited to become Queen, neither the Catholic nor Protestant church recognized the legitimacy of her birth. Mary Queen of Scots’ claim to the throne was also arguably more credible than Elizabeth’s (see part 1).

Meanwhile, England was a relatively poor and weak European power. Its economy was struggling; its army and navy were in a pitiful state and no match for the might of Spain or France.

Princess Elizabeth circa. 1546

So, when Elizabeth became Queen of England at the age of 25, her authority and legitimacy were questionable. Her realm was in danger of being overwhelmed by foreign foes.

Elizabeth I and her Privy Council advisers, not least the great Sir William Cecil and formidable Lord Walsingham, were well prepared to meet the challenges they inherited. They had all spent years reading Renaissance literature that revealed the anatomy of the rhetorical arts and the secrets of persuasion. In particular, they had been taught to wrap compelling narratives in the convenience of symbolic metaphors-in-motion, otherwise known as allegories, which appealed to diverse audiences for conflicting reasons. They now had the opportunity to use that knowledge to add world-changing spark, spice and substance to religious and political expression.

Their Elizabethan Renaissance was the age of emblems, symbols and celebrity. The fashion in England was to weave iconographical and allegorical representations of perceived truths and morals into the fabric of sermons, paintings, proclamations, pamphlets, poetry, pageants and other spectacles.

As Roy Strong explains in The Spirit of Britain, some of the images were kept obscure on purpose. The fashion was to produce coats of arms with pompous Latin mottos, fancy wax seals and abstract patterns in paintings and on clothes that carried hidden meanings, which looked and sounded medieval but were in fact of modern origin. Only the most educated members of elite society understood their messages. This obliqueness was a form of self-expression. It was the pursuit of the wealthy, which had a nostalgic and romantic attachment to the old feudal etiquette and styles. For instance, men loved to dress up as knights even though that position in society had been abolished.

In whatever form ideas were spread, the aim was to paint images in people’s imaginations. However, what concerns us more here is communication that reached out to the wider public.

Over the course of Elizabeth I’s reign she developed a compelling narrative theme that was updated regularly. Carefully managed public events were written up in pamphlets which were distributed nationwide. The narrative was then spread to a much larger audience by word of mouth. Above all, the retelling was staged managed literally at the theatre, which, with audiences often as large as 3000, was the major mass medium of the era:

Rather than use the Church as a communications channel to effect public persuasion, a path that might possibly have brought about open rebellion, Elizabeth turned to the Stage. Although this was by no means an open policy, that she did so has been attested to repeatedly by diplomats, intelligence agents, and educated contemporary observers. [Gary B. Goldstein's Did Queen Elizabeth use the theater for social and political propaganda?, 2004]

Traders in business and aristocrats on estates and people on the street then discussed what they had heard and seen. It was also mulled over by members of all classes sharing a drink in England’s taverns.

Elizabeth I and the Three Goddesses, 1569

The objective of Elizabethan image-makers was to compose allegories that got people talking about what was being communicated. Hence allegories designed for mass consumption required people to be able to interpret accurately what was being represented:

…the mentality which now turns to the comparative triviality of the crossword puzzle, then pondered on the sophisticated riddles of the emblems and impress.  [Shakespeare in His Own Age, Allardyce Nicoll, page 181, Cambridge University Press, 1976]

Deciphering and pondering these abstractions on a mass scale required a more literate and politically engaged public. This was something Elizabethan England positively encouraged. However, this social advancement had unintended consequences. As Roy Strong hints at here:

In this manner the visual arts were verbalised, turned into a form of book, a ‘text’ which called for reading by the onlooker. There are no better examples of this than the quite extraordinary portraits of the queen herself, which increasingly, as the reign progressed, took on the form of collections of abstract pattern and symbols disposed in an unnaturalistic manner for the viewer to unravel, and by doing so enter into an inner vision of the idea of monarchy. [The Spirit of Britain, Roy Strong, page 177, Pimlico, 2000]

Ironically, then, allegories designed to be easily understood by a broad audience risked being maliciously and humorously misrepresented. For example, J E Neale tells us in his biography of Queen Elizabeth how “drunken Burley of Totnes” regaled his neighbours with stories about how Lord Robert “did swive” the virgin Queen [page 80]. Shakespeare had the queen of the fairies, which was an allusion to Elizabeth, sleep with an ass in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In 1601, on the eve of his armed rebellion, the Earl of Essex sponsored a public performance of Richard II in the forlorn hope that its storyline would incite London’s masses to join him. Essex and his followers were seduced by the play’s account of Henry Bolingbroke (Essex saw himself) overthrowing Richard II (he saw Elizabeth I) who had abdicated too many of his powers to court advisors (he saw Cecil and Raleigh).

Elizabeth’s successor James I, the first of the Stuarts, continued to communicate through allegories and to encourage the arts. But there was a feeling that the education of the masses had gone too far under the old regime. The Lord Chancellor Francis Bacon told James that he should reduce the number of schools teaching grammar because there was no point producing more scholars than the state could employ. He added that by educating farmers and artisans the realm had become full with “indigent, idle and wanton people, which are but materia rerum novarum [substance of new things]”.

Sadly, toward the end of James I’s mostly peaceful, tolerant and prosperous reign he articulated the old maxim of the divine right of kings. His successor Charles I lost his head defending that right and became an iconic victim of a 16th-17th-century power struggle that encompassed most of Europe .

Sections of Europe’s public, particularly the merchant classes, developed an increasingly distinct identity that was expressed assertively in political and religious matters. New printing presses and better communication links also ensured that new and dissident ideas spread over great distances at great speed. The ruling elites soon discovered, too late in Charles I’s case, that they could not, as they had in times past, easily ignore or silence their opponents.

The Reformation was a public inquisition on the meaning and value of familiar symbols, beliefs and practices that challenged the old elite’s privileges and prejudices. The new ways that dissidents advocated were for many ideas worth dying for, let alone arguing for. At the heart of it was a fundamental dispute about the relationship between religion and politics; it was a test of power between competing factions within society.

People on one side questioned the validity of the old order. They saw God’s word in a new light. On the other, the forces of the counter-Reformation for the salvation of souls defended the old ways. Somewhere in the middle were the humanists who became the catalyst for the creation of a new secular world order. The three tendencies intertwined, but they were really at constant loggerheads in terms of argument, doctrine and the future of society.

Throughout Europe these differences were debated in print and in the pulpits. However the divisions expressed ran much deeper than just a Catholic versus Protestant schism. They also pitted Catholic against Catholic and different Protestant tendencies against each other and monarchists against republicans and vice versa.

For instance, Cervantes pokes fun at the Spanish Inquisition, the church and monks in Don Quixote (1605 – 1615), revealing how the old order in Spain was being undermined from within. The Dutch Catholic humanist Desiderius Erasmus was one of many who delivered a radical, and at times hilarious, critique of his own church’s ecclesiastical abuses: “Luther was guilty of two great crimes – he struck the Pope in his crown, and the monks in their belly”.

Whichever side people took, the ancient world’s rediscovered wisdom and the contemporary humanists who promulgated it influenced how they expressed their own ideas.

To its credit, since the early-15th-Century the Catholic hierarchy in Rome had been funding humanist writers to develop Ciceronianism, the literary movement of the Renaissance. It first encouraged the translation of Greek and Rome classics and the construction of a library in Rome devoted to humanist thought. It then hired humanists to overhaul the church’s Latin communications and to give its sermons more verve. Amazingly, in 1458 it elected the humanist Pius II Pope. He had a reputation as a Casanova (he had two illegitimate children), diplomat and belletrist. He courageously wrote about his life in the style of Cicero in his tell-all Commentaries, the only autobiography ever written by a wearer of the Papal tiara. Among many salacious revelations, the book describes how he was invited to an orgy in Britain, and how his election as Pope was rigged by a group of cardinals conspiring in the urinals. Subsequent popes may not have been inclined toward humanism in quite the same manner as Pius II, but they continued to make full use of its insights and practitioners. For instance, in the 1520s the Church used Cicero-style polemics to combat Martin Luther’s doctrines; one of which, A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, was written by the English Catholic humanist Thomas More.

So by the time Elizabeth became Queen in 1558, the Catholic Church had already spent more than 100 years acquiring a modern voice. It was capable of using rhetoric and humanist writers to produce eloquent arguments in robust pamphlets, proclamations, speeches, broadsides, treatises and invectives designed to rouse people’s spirits and influence their opinions.

Indeed, as early as 1568 the Catholic Church was training secular youth in the Netherlands to oppose English Protestantism. In 1580 a year-old school in Rome sent the first Jesuit missionaries to England to reclaim the land for Catholicism.

Almost twenty years after Elizabeth’s death in 1603, Pope Gregory XV consolidated these efforts in his Congregation of Propaganda Fide.

Elizabethan England was, however, more than a match for the Pope’s PR machine. The Queen herself was a great communicator. While her closest advisers Sir William Cecil and Lord Walsingham were the world’s first modern spindoctors and arguably the best to have ever practiced the art. She also had the support of William Shakespeare. He is thought to have worked for a company of actors and playwrights known as Queen’s Men and later The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, which produced patriotic propaganda for the masses. In her 1947 book, Shakespeare’s Histories: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy, the American intellectual Lily Campbell states that:

Each of the Shakespeare histories serves a special purpose in elucidating a political problem of Elizabeth’s day and in bringing to bear upon this problem the accepted political philosophy of the Tudors. [Quoted in Gary B. Goldstein's Did Queen Elizabeth use the theater for social and political propaganda?, 2004]

Moreover, there was Edmund Spenser, who wrote the allegorical poem Faerie Queene in Elizabeth’s honour. It proved to be a potent piece of nationalistic propaganda:

Mirrour of grace and Maiestie diuine,
Great Lady of the greatest Isle, whose light
Like Phoebus lampe throughout the world doth shine,
Shed thy faire beames into my feeble eyne,
And raise my thoughts too humble and too vile,
To thinke of that true glorious type of thine (full text here)

Elizabeth I: The Pelican Portrait - an allegory of her selfless love

Elizabeth and her inner-circle were visionaries. Their advantage over both their contemporaries and near successors was their understanding that feudal society’s mores and morals and all forms of immutable religious faith no longer provided sufficient glue to maintain stability. Tyranny was also of limited appeal to them, though not without its uses, given the rise of powerful new social forces capable of asserting their will. Instead, they accepted that the monarchy’s long-term survival meant letting go of some aspects of their control over society. They saw the need to relax somewhat their hold on people’s religious beliefs and practices. They conceded, perhaps reluctantly, that they no longer had a proper monopoly over debate and the dissemination of ideas within their realm. Though censorship remained a frontline weapon wielded with zeal.

Rising to the challenge of recasting her reputation, Elizabeth’s communication strategy was brilliantly formulated to redefine her ambiguities as strengths. Her intention was to make cognitive dissonance work for her.

Elizabeth I took the facts of her position and decisions and made sure that their merit was made glamorous and comprehensible. She made sure that her behaviour was seen (accurately, actually) to be the epitome of statecraft for her people. Everything was tweaked and honed to unite a wide range of audiences who might otherwise threaten her rule.

The first narrative salvo was fired during Elizabeth’s pre-coronation pageants before she’d had a chance to achieve anything. It was a bold and inspired example of Renaissance creativity in practice. Her confidence in her narrative reflected the ancient world’s humanist mantra that people could establish themselves in the esteem of an audience through eloquent words and telling images.

Elizabeth I’s pre-coronation pageants were a mixture of pomp, ceremony and unceremoniousness. It was very much a charm offensive that showcased her trademark touchy feely PR style. But there was more.

As Elizabeth was wheeled through London’s streets she insisted on stopping to talk to passersby. She also replied to the scriptwriters’ themes and interacted with the performances of the actors at the various pageants. As Professor Dale Hoak maintains, this effectively turned the procession into a conversation between the queen and her people:

…something Richard Mulcaster, the ‘reporter’ [he wrote the defining account of the event within a week of it] who helped script the pageants realized was unprecedented. [The Coronations of Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I, The Transformation of the Tudor Monarchy, Dale Hoak, which can found in Westminster Abbey Reformed: 1540 - 1640, by C S Knighton and Richard Mortimer, page 135, Ashgate, 2003]

Elizabeth encouraged what Mulcaster described as “baser personages” to converse with her in private. They would handover flowers or express their goodwill, while she “staid her chariot, and heard theyr requestes”. According to J E Neale’s biography of Queen Elizabeth I this seemingly unbecoming behaviour from a monarch shocked the envoy from the Italian city of Mantua, who recorded that, “she exceeded the bounds of gravity and decorum” [Queen Elizabeth, J E Neale, page 63, The Reprint Society, 1942].

Ditchley Portrait highlighting her divine powers

Hoak says that Elizabeth I was the first English monarch to exploit the psychological possibilities of a coronation’s spectacle. Her proactive approach demonstrated that she valued her subjects’ opinions and their support. Her behaviour at the pageants communicated that she was their servant as well as their Queen. The seeming unity on the streets of aristocratic courtiers, London magistrates, merchants and artisans signified that the bonds linking the monarch to her people were reciprocal. It conveyed the impression that the bond she had with her people transcended social and official status and that she considered other classes to be level with the nobles in importance. Back then no other kingdom in Europe would have positioned their monarch’s relationship to their people at their coronation in such a populist manner.

Much of Hoak’s information comes from Richard Mulcaster’s account of the pageants in The Passage Of Our Most Drad Soveraigne Lady Quene Elyzabeth Through The Citie Of London To Westminster The Daye Before Her Coronacion. Mulcaster’s pamphlet, like the pageants he partly drafted, was paid for by London’s commercial elite; but the narratives and allegories of the pre-coronation pageants were most likely the co-creation of wealthy aldermen, Elizabeth and her advisers.

Mulcaster’s text provides some insights into the anxieties surrounding Elizabeth’s coronation. Describing the scene of London’s aldermen handing her one thousand marks in gold, Mulcaster records the exchange of words between Randolph Cholmley, London’s Recorder, and Elizabeth. Cholmley reportedly tells her to “mynd” [the purpose] of the gift. When Elizabeth accepts the money, from the people upon whose tax contribution her state depended, she replies, “no wille in me can lacke.” She adds, “neither doe I trust shall ther lacke any power”. And to drive home her message, she says, “for the safetie and quietness of you all, I will not spare, if nede be to spend my blood”. As Susan Frye assesses:

For just a moment, Elizabeth’s response breaks out of the mould of gracious obedience to make sure of the bargain: I will perform my part, but you must support my sovereignty. [Elizabeth I The Competition for Representation, page 42, Oxford University Press, 1993]

Frye is being astute. Elizabeth I was not yet secure. At the same moment as she celebrated her accession she was negotiating, if only symbolically, with her people about the terms of her rule. The pageants were helping the Queen to gauge public opinion as much as to influence it.

Our concern here is her PR messaging, rather than the events themselves. So let’s review in some more detail the narrative that emerged from her five pre-coronation pageants and from her first post-coronation speech.

Elizabeth I was painted in the mind’s eye as a “queen with the heart of a king”. She was presented as being very much her father’s daughter. This was an image that served her well thirty years later when she rallied her troops to resist the Spanish Armada:

I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field. [1588: Speech to the Troops at Tilbury]

Indeed, Elizabeth’s rhetoric in 1588 was consistent with how she presented herself in 1558. J E Neale writes in his biography of Queen Elizabeth how Spain’s ambassador Count Feria noted at the beginning of her reign that she longed “to do some act that would make her fame spread abroad in her lifetime, and, after occasion memorial for ever” [page 67]. Her messaging always reflected this aspiration.

Elizabeth I: The sieve is a symbol of chastity and purity

At the pre-coronation pageants Elizabeth made a virtue of being the product of Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, the woman blamed for the social turmoil after the break with Rome. She glossed over how her father had denied the legitimacy of her own birth in his will and Second Act of Succession. She instead blamed the problems of her society under the Tudors, not on the Tudors, but on the consequences of the War of Roses, which ended in 1485. The positive messages here were that she was a Tudor and a bringer of unity and concord, the unifier of the two warring houses of Lancaster and York. She was committed to maintaining the peace and that above all was what people wanted to hear.

The pageants’ allegories drew extensively on familiar themes from the Old Testament. Elizabeth explained her escape from the Tower of London, where they kept lions, as if she had had the same God-given help as Daniel when he miraculously escaped Nebuchadnezzar’s lions. The message was communicated by her in a prayer (women didn’t normally lead prayers in public so this was significant). She implied that God had saved her from the Tower so she could become Queen.

Elizabeth also portrayed herself as the new Deborah; a Hebrew goddess, female judge and military leader who rid the land of Canannite idolatry (a clear allusion to Catholicism) and restored good governance to Israel (a dig at Mary I). The allegory made great play of how she would consult the estates of England for the good of her citizens, the same way that the Old Testament in chapters 4 and 5 of Book of Judges said Deborah had.

For the consumption of the educated classes Elizabeth’s character was endowed with mythological qualities associated with the three Roman vestal virgins: Minerva, Vesta and Diana. She was compared most favourably to the goddess Diana, acclaimed for her light, inaccessibility, virginity, sovereignty, supremacy and impassibility.

At the pageant at Temple Bar she was proclaimed as the modern embodiment of two mythological giants, Gogmagot the Albion and Corineus the Britain. This allusion to English folkloric tales linked her spirit and lineage with the mystical founding fathers of England. It also had the benefit of invoking the images of well-known Old Testament characters of almost the same names – see here & here. Such allusions were designed to touch and provoke potent nationalistic and Biblical sentiments that reached out to everybody.

At the pageant Truth, the Daughter of Time, Elizabeth was heard to say “and Time hath brought me hither.” The pageant was:

…set in the form of two hills. One was green and beautiful, and on the summit was a handsome youth, gay in dress and spirits, standing under a green laurel tree: this represented a flourishing commonwealth [Respublica bene instituta]. The other all withered and dead, and a youth in rude apparel sat mournfully under an arid tree: this was the decayed commonwealth [Ruinosa Respublica]. Between was a cave from which Time emerged, leading her daughter Truth who carried and English Bible in hand. [Queen Elizabeth by J E Neale, pages 61/62, The Reprint Society, 1942]

The message had a double edge. The City was expressing what it wanted from her, which was Protestantism. She responded by implying with her actions and words that she was on their side. Elizabeth seemingly confirmed her role as the personification of the Truth by kissing the English Bible and then theatrically holding it aloft before hugging it to her bosom. Afterward she thanked the City for giving her the book. She said with God’s help she would oversee the renewed glory of the commonwealth after Mary’s rule had allowed it to wane. She was going to stamp out vices, which the audience took to be Catholicism, and uphold virtues, which they took to be Protestantism. The crowd cheered; though at the time it was unclear just what plans Elizabeth had in mind for the future of her realm.

The second salvo was fired several weeks after her coronation. Elizabeth I’s maiden speech to Parliament and her Privy council, read for her by Sir John Mason, declared that from now on she stood free from any reputation that had dogged her in times past or present (one assumes she meant before the pre-coronation pageants). Then, addressing the male audience on the sensitive topic of her gender and her marriage intentions, she said:

…albeit it might please almighty God to continue me still in this mind to live out of the state of marriage, yet it is not to be feared but He will so work in my heart and in your wisdom as good provision by his help may be made in convenient time, whereby the realm shall not remain destitute of an heir. That may be a fit governor, and peradventure more beneficial to the realm than such offspring as may come of me. For although I be never so careful of your well doings and mind ever so to be, yet may my issue grow out of kind and become perhaps ungracious. And in the end this shall be for me sufficient, that a marble stone shall declare that a Queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin.

Elizabeth Coronation portrait

It was a bold position to take. She had declared openly that she was minded not to marry; previously that option had been regarded as unthinkable. But marriage was not out of the question either. Creating this elbowroom was important. It was used as tool of her diplomacy. Beginning with proffering a maybe to marry Philip II, she went on to feign her intention to marry numerous suitors from states whose neutrality she required for a while.

The allegory of the Virgin Queen and Mother of England contained the overarching narrative of Elizabeth’s reign. God had preserved her so she could be wedded to her people. This way she took the judgement of her reputation out of the hands of man and placed it in the higher authority of God. This positioned her almost on the same level as the most elevated female from the New Testament: the Virgin Mary. Of course Catholics worshiped the Virgin Mary’s icon, but that was a practice now frowned upon in Protestant England. Instead, Elizabeth was portrayed as the sacred one, the deliverer of England’s people to a better world. This nationalist sentiment resonated with both England’s Protestants and Catholics.

The appropriation of this familiar theme for a new purpose and person was a stroke of brilliance.

It took the heat out of the thorny problem of finding an heir to throne that had bedevilled the reigns of Henry VIII and Mary I. It allowed her to escape the constraints of traditional female virtue that positioned good women as passive creatures. As Susan Frye says in Elizabeth I, The Competition for Representation, the image of the Virgin Queen portrayed her instead as being free from the confines of marriage and male dominance; she had no husband, father, brother or other male relatives to obey. This was, therefore, a power play.

This clever use of the art of rhetoric persuaded the public, and not least elite society, to alter their perception of what to expect from Elizabeth as a woman and monarch. It provided Elizabeth with the necessary consent to play the man’s role in society as England’s legitimate Queen. Yet Elizabeth’s greatest PR masterstroke was not this, but it was the way in which she was able to unite and motivate her people.

One of the major issues she confronted was filling the vacuum at the heart of English communal life in the wake of the demise of overt Catholicism. Austere Puritans and pious parsons positively discouraged much of the seasonal fun and frolics the old religion had once encouraged in village life. In response, Elizabeth once again revealed her conservative instincts by getting her branding gurus to redefine past practices to serve contemporary purposes.

In 1586 William Warner published his popular poem Albion’s England, which set out a romantic vision of English traditions. It even eulogised the legend of Robin Hood and his merry band of outlaws living in Sherwood Forest:

As Paske [Easter] began our Morrisse, and ere Penticost our May, Tho Robin Hood, Liell John, Frier Tuck, and Marian deftly play, And Lord and ladie gang till Kirke with Lads and Lasses gay. [Quoted in Shakespeare's Festive World: Elizabethan Seasonal Entertainment, François Laroque, page 336, Cambridge University Press, 1991]

Warner implied with wit that Catholic and older pagan irreverent festivities were part of a patriotic culture that celebrated England’s glorious past, which supposedly began with Noah’s flood. Albion’s England met with some ecclesiastical resistance. However because the poem was passed by the censors it gave courage and support to those wanting to restore May Day, Whitsun and summer fun to the parishes and greens of England’s towns and villages.

As I outlined in part 1, Elizabeth I had a great understanding of contemporary realities. There was substance, policies, inspired leadership and a great grasp of ambiguity behind everything Elizabeth did. Above all, we should note that Elizabeth I was her own agency for change (she was not at the mercy of fate). She redefined Renaissance England according to her will and what was possible.

While Elizabeth clearly admired Cicero for his eloquence and insight into how to communicate effectively, she was just as influenced by his views on the principles governing the relationship between rulers and the ruled. Throughout her reign she showed a commitment to the Ciceronian maxim: Salus Populi Est Suprema Lex; the welfare of the people is the ultimate law. She even, for example, created the basis for the world’s first welfare state by introducing the Poor Law, which took a compassionate view of the state’s responsibility to alleviate poverty, in 1601.

English Renaissance communication techniques might appear primitive to us, perhaps. But let’s not forget what Daniel Boorstin says in The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. He maintains that today’s PR, marketing and advertising executives are “simply the acolytes of the image”. He suggests that modern image-makers obscure the origin of content so that form takes on new meaning, in much the same way that Elizabeth I did. (I shall review the views of Boorstin in the second half of On Message: Propaganda, persuasion and the PR game).

Overall, Elizabeth’s positioning, messaging and policies were ahead of their time. From her cautious beginning she wrapped romance, war, progress and a new national identity in an evolving and compelling meta-narrative. Roy Strong summarizes the uniqueness of her PR achievement well:

Never before had so many lay people been drawn into the creation of a new national identity, one in which the arts were seen to play a crucial role. Even then nothing could have quite prepared anyone for the explosive energy of creation which followed the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. [The Spirit of Britain, by Roy Strong, page 174]

By the time of Elizabeth’s death in 1603, she had inspired and united a kingdom previously murderously divided by two major religions of almost equal weight.

Out of the Elizabethan era came English nationalism, a new mercantile spirit, English colonialism and a cultural revolution. But from a PR perspective there was something even more significant and lasting to celebrate.

Elizabeth I’s near-separation of politics from religion defined a new space outside of public life, which was its modern counterpart: the private sphere.

What more should it take to become a PR icon than that?

Related posts:

1. Queen Elizabeth I: PR Icon (part 1)

In a letter to the FT last week, she criticises PRs who worked for Col Gaddafi and any who wouldn’t mind working for Iran. Setting out her own ideas, Fiske gets into a muddle and contradicts herself without shame or perhaps without realising it:

We [Public Relations Society of America] believe every person or organisation has the right to have its voice heard in the global marketplace of ideas. But for PR firms to represent dictatorships that do not afford that same freedom to their own people is disingenuous towards the liberties of a democracy and to democratic societies’ reputations as marketplaces for dissenting ideas.

Well, she can’t have it both ways. Either everybody has a right to a PR advocate, or they don’t. Her position, if we take what she says seriously, is that only people who run their countries according to the same democratic principles as the United States deserve PR counsel from the Western world. Moreover, Fiske writes in her letter:

Ethical public relations places an emphasis on counselling reputable organisations and individuals in developing and maintaining beneficial relationships with concerned stakeholders.

Nice work if you can get it.

Leave aside for the moment that Fiske is positioning the PR industry as the arbiter – which we are not qualified to be – of which person and organisation or country is “reputable” or what stakeholders are “concerned”.

Surely, the point of some very important PR is that it helps people who are considered (or may self-evidently be) unreputable. If they were of good reputation, they’d have scant need of our work. Oil companies need a lot of PR when their pipes and ships leak. Tobacco companies presumably need good PR all the time. (See Thank You For Smoking.) Ditto, professional downsizers. (See Up in the Air.) You get the picture.

The point isn’t that so-called sinners should be denied PR. Surely it is: what class of rogue is so utterly roguish that PRs shouldn’t take their money? Of course, we all have our limits, but they’ll likely be different.

A moment’s thought suggests that famous, outed, seemingly obvious rogues have a strong claim to PR’s efforts. They are the targets of huge, prejudiced, tediously liberal, right-on attacks, which are often unjustified. Why shouldn’t they have a defence? Besides, such media “victims” come with a huge risk for PRs, and that makes defending them an act of some courage, and therefore of some merit on those grounds alone.

I can easily imagine why for selfish reasons most PR agencies might reject Col Gaddafi’s reputed two million pounds sterling to launch a belated lobbying campaign against NATO. They would be right, I suspect, to assume the contract would do their reputations more harm than it would do his any good. Though if anybody does take the job, they should not be condemned by fellow PRs living in glass houses. (See PR Week).

There are far murkier waters than these, though. What about the covert-rogue? That’s the one who has a good and undeserved reputation and employs PRs to keep it that way. Is that acceptable work for a PR? The answer depends in part on how nasty the rascal is and how much the PR knows. (See “Deadly Spin” is mere spin.)

It is no good for PRs to argue that they don’t have to be any more picky than a defence lawyer. While courts of law might be symmetrical, the court of public opinion seldom is. In reality, the balance of opinion and media coverage is often tipped unfairly against clients. Hence we rightly assume the prosecution is competent and well-resourced: its best shot is likely to be pretty good and merits as good a response as is available. (See A new moral agenda for PR.)

It seems pretty obvious that Ms Fiske’s position is obviously way too saintly. She suggests that even if the US government was working in the past to repair relations with Libya and Syria, American public relations firms should have cold-shouldered them. Her qualification for our endorsement appears to be “people like us”. But that would exclude Saudi Arabia, China and Russia and many other countries in which PR is booming.

Of course, one could argue that in China PR firms mostly represent Chinese companies, rather than the state. Except that would be dishonest. In China the state owns most major companies and still commands the economy. It also gets its claws, admittedly indirectly, into the Western firms which operate there. (See Google comes of age in China.)

Ms Fiske works for the Public Relations Society of America. I imagine that it would like PR to be a respectable profession. Presumably its members believe that obeying a rather strict code is good in itself or good for business or both. I am interested in the merits of that sort of scheme. (See: When “friends” fallout over “dirty tricks”.) But I also admire the PR firms that say they don’t want to be part of the public relations industry’s hypocrisy.

No related pages.

Elizabeth I was a wonderful ruler, of course. She is worth a close look as a communicator because she became a world leader not least by canny manipulation of the media available to her. Using persuasion in preference to coercion, she took a weak position and made herself strong; she made sure people understood that she served a wide interest, not herself; she deployed glamour and argument to keep her people in line. She also had a perfect command of ambiguity. What modern PR and leader wouldn’t like that record?

Her father Henry VIII knew a thing or two about image making, but Elizabeth I was the first European monarch really to rely on rhetoric rather than brute force. From the outset she acknowledged that public opinion mattered most of all to the success of her reign. She also understood what few other leaders did. That was how to exploit Greek and Roman classical thinking and practice to shape the contemporary world. She was the monarch the humanist northern Renaissance created and had been waiting for.

Elizabeth I’s classical education provided her with an intellectual’s familiarity with philosophy, a ruler’s insight into political intrigue, and a poet’s way with words. She had the confidence to negotiate with world leaders and their ambassadors in person in English, French, Latin, Spanish and Italian. There was something more: to put it bluntly, her advisers, and foreign ambassadors, found it hard to bullshit this master of bullshitting.

She grasped that while messages mattered more than muscle, they had to be transmitted by innovative means if they were to connect with her subjects.

Elizabeth I knew how to use compelling public spectacles in London and in the provinces for PR purposes. She introduced the English to celebrity culture. She cultivated glamour at her court. It was her means of controlling squabbling courtiers who jostled to become and stay one of her favourites. The relatively new-fangled printing presses reproduced her speeches and proclamations for distribution by preachers and mayors, which went on sale in pamphlet form within weeks of major events.

Under Elizabeth I there was an expansion of literacy. Famously, her reign produced the genius of William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and Edmund Spenser, who wrote The Faerie Queene in her honour. The period’s explosion of professional playwrights, actors and theatre companies is described by Roy Strong in his delightful The Spirit of Britain, A Narrative History of The Arts, thus:

The Elizabethan drama was an astonishing and unique phenomenon equal in every way, and indeed exceeding in artistic achievement, all other aspects of that great cultural renaissance which occurred during the last twenty years of the sixteenth century, and which was to stretch over into the first decade of the reign of James I who succeeded Elizabeth in 1603. That it happened at all was due to a quite exceptional set of circumstances, the foundation stone of which was the Renaissance recasting of the role of man as a being who had the ability to choose and fashion his own destiny. [The Spirit of Britain, A Narrative History of The Arts, Roy Strong, pages 203/204, Pimlico, 2000]

Roy Strong adds that Elizabeth I led a cultural revolution. She defined the majesty of her reign in drama and imagery which even today is instantly recognisable as Elizabethan. Her taste in painting favoured distinctive styles, particularly in portraits and miniatures by the likes of Nicholas Hilliard. When it came to fashion she loved to see flamboyant clothes at court, and she encouraged symmetrical but ornate architecture that transformed the look and feel of England.

Elizabeth’s cultural revolution encompassed political and spiritual matters. In a departure from past practice, she put ambiguity at the heart of her policymaking on the most contentious and divisive issue of the day: religion. In the process, she founded new traditions, new rituals and a new identity for England.

But at the start of her reign Elizabeth I’s grip on power was far from assured. She could not even count unconditionally on Protestants. The example of Mary I’s reign seemed to prove Henry VIII’s warning that a queen would either have to marry at home or abroad. If she married abroad she opened the realm to foreign control, and if she married at home the result would most likely be civil war between rival factions.

Mary I did indeed subject England to foreign influence through her unpopular marriage to Philip II of Spain. She also created social instability at home by burning at the stake 300 Protestants and by restoring Catholicism. Not least she alienated London’s wealthy aldermen, Guilds and merchant adventurers who were largely Protestant (Catholics lived mostly in the north of England).

Moreover both of England’s major religions shared a fear of the “monstrous regiment of women” (regiment here means regime). This phrase was conjured in a tract published anonymously in Geneva by John Knox, the Scottish leader of the Reformation and a former religious adviser to Edward VI. It was released just a few months before the death of Mary I. In it he ranted:

To promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion, or empire above any realm, nation, or city, is repugnant to nature; contumely [an insult] to God, a thing most contrary to his revealed will and approved ordinance; and finally, it is the subversion of good order, of all equity and justice. [The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, by John Knox, 1558]

After Mary I died the Catholics had the same woman trouble. Their champion to displace Elizabeth I was Mary Queen of Scots. She was also perceived as being an impatient, innately weak and foolish woman who in common with her entire sex was capable, in John Knox’s words, of acting as ”neither speaker nor advocate for others”.

Today’s female PRs can thank Elizabeth I for driving a coach and horses through that misogynistic myth.

Elizabeth I not only worried about the powerful pro-Catholic lobby at home. She also knew that if she provoked the Pope he would back Mary Queen of Scots, Catholic great granddaughter of Henry VII, who arguably had a stronger claim to the throne of England than she did:

If the succession to the throne had gone by mere heredity, then strictly speaking Mary was the nearest heir, for not only was Elizabeth illegitimate by Catholic Canon Law, but, until Parliament could meet, she was also illegitimate by English law. The danger was no airy, merely speculative one. Mary’s father-in-law, the King of France, might quite well induce the Pope to declare against Elizabeth in favour of Mary, or even depose her and commit the fulfilment of his sentence to French arms. Provided, however, that Elizabeth made no open move against Catholicism, then she could count on Philip II [king of Spain] exerting his powerful influence in her favour at Rome. Good Catholic though he was, the last thing that Philip could tolerate was a French conquest of England. [Queen Elizabeth, J E Neale, pages 56/57, The Reprint Society London, 1942]

The PR challenge for Elizabeth I, then, was to convince the world – Protestant and Catholic – that they should accept her as a legitimate ruler. J. E. Neale in his authoritative biography Queen Elizabeth describes how she negotiated her first major challenge:

In the first public document of the reign ‘and &c’, was put at the end of the Queen’s titles, where in her father’s and brother’s reigns the title of Supreme Head of the Church had been. It was both a bold and a cautious step; bold because implicitly it maintained the theory of the English Reformation that the supremacy of the Papacy was usurpation of the Crown’s ancient authority, and that no parliamentary statute was needed to confer headship of the Church on the monarch; cautious because after all, no more appeared than the words ‘et cetera’, which left the Catholic world guessing and hoping about the future – hopes which Elizabeth in her talks with Feria [Count de Feria envoy of King Philip II of Spain] did her brilliant but shameless best to sustain. [Queen Elizabeth, J E Neale, page 56, The Reprint Society London, 1942].

By appointing herself Governor of the Church of England as opposed to Supreme Head, Elizabeth I avoided being condemned by Pope Paul IV as a heretic for breaking Mary I’s reunification of England with Rome. Instead, she allowed the Pope to hope that in the future the position of Supreme Head could be his once again. Yet Elizabeth I was being disingenuous. Her opaque policies, as we shall explore below, were designed to lower tensions between the two great religions and to prevent wars with foreign powers she was unlikely to win.

In 1559 she introduced another radical change with the Act of Uniformity, which defined the Church of England until the late 20th century. The Act reversed many of the Lutheran-influenced reforms of Edward VI. It brought back to churches the use of ornaments and vestments. It kept the ring on the finger in the marriage service and the sign of the cross at baptisms. It also blurred the difference between the Catholic and Protestant Communion services by merging their prayer books. Though Catholic parliamentarians opposed the Act, the reforms were popular with the faithful of both religions.

To appease the Pope, she retained her half-sister’s Mary I’s Catholic ambassador at Rome as her agent. She feigned a maybe to an offer of marriage from Mary I’s former husband King Philip II of Spain. She also offered her hand in marriage to other Catholic princes. At home she punished Puritan radicals for acts of dissidence by imposing fines and other penalties on them. She made it known that Mass was still said in her private chapel; John Knox responded that one Mass was more fearful to him than 10 000 armed enemies. Meanwhile, proposals from Protestants to reform the clergy’s hierarchical titles such as Archbishop, which were clearly Catholic leftovers, were vetoed. In short, Elizabeth I kept her own religious views – which are best described as conservatively Protestant – hidden behind a veil of confusion.

Elizabeth I’s “misleading” signals (we’ll assume Philip II was willingly duped, because she rejected his marriage proposal on the grounds that she was a heretic) meant that she avoided being excommunicated until 1570. So for the first twelve years of her reign, with the Pope’s seeming blessing, she corresponded, negotiated and flirted with her Spanish and French equivalents on equal terms.

However as Elizabeth I’s reign progressed, the threat from a number of home-grown plots began to change her attitude toward Catholics. This was particularly so after 1570 when Pope Pius V issued his Papal Bull, Regnans in Excelsis (ruling from on high, meaning God), in support of a Catholic rebellion in the north of England. The Pope declared her a pretended queen and wicked heretic, who should be overthrown by English Catholics.

That year’s Ridolfi plot to assassinate Elizabeth I came as another major shock to her regime. Led by a renowned Florentine Catholic banker with links to Spain and Rome, it provided yet more evidence of support for a Catholic restoration. The plot’s English leader was the Duke of Norfolk, the realm’s most senior nobleman. He had just been partially forgiven for his involvement in the northern rebellion. Yet Elizabeth I was once more reluctant to take his life. This time, however, Parliament’s outrage proved too strong to resist. In 1572 he was executed for treason. Though Mary Queen of Scots was spared despite the authorities possessing proof that she played a leading role in the conspiracy. It worth noting that it was often Elizabeth I’s preference to spare the lives of rebels and to rely on public opinion for her reward and protection.

In 1580 Pope Gregory XIII deactivated the Papal Bull. He advised English Catholics to obey their queen until a suitable opportunity was found to overthrow her. His major motivation for the suspension was to allow Jesuit priests the right to wander England in pursuit of their missionary, propaganda and subversive agenda. Elizabeth I, with no illusions, allowed them in to England until she got wind of Spain’s military preparations in 1585.

Three years later Pope Sixtus V reactivated the Papal Bull, adding regicide to Elizabeth I’s list of sins after she executed Mary Queen of Scots for being an incorrigible plotter. However, Elizabeth had once more been a reluctant executioner:

“What”, she asked, “will my enemies not say, when it shall be spread, that for the safety of herself a maiden could be content to spill the blood, even of her own kinswoman?” [Queen Elizabeth, J E Neale, page 259, The Reprint Society London, 1942]

The chopping off of Mary Queen of Scot’s head in 1587 exposed finally the futility of Philip II of Spain’s self-delusions about Elizabeth’s faith. The next year he sent the Spanish Armada to dethrone her, which was the first of four ill-fated Armadas Spain rallied to restore Catholicism in England.

Regardless, most English Catholics opposed the plotters and stayed loyal to their queen because they had come to see themselves as being English first and Catholics second. That acceptance of Elizabeth I’s legitimacy was the consequence and triumph of her PR strategy. It was a classic case of opinion forming: she had developed a new identity for her people, and sold it to them. It was in important degree a secular identity to do with pride in a sovereign nation – and its sovereign – rather than in religion and its foreign (never mind heavenly) sources of authority.

Nevertheless as Elizabeth I became increasingly threatened by foreign Catholic powers, people were executed for upholding their religious beliefs. Yet under her regime Protestant bigots who persecuted Catholics in the name of the state could not also claim to be acting in the name of God, because the Queen was not the Supreme Head of the Church. Instead, they had to cite temporal law as their shield.

In his masterpiece History of Civilisation in England VI Henry Thomas Buckle notes the historical significance of this shift. He says Elizabeth I’s reign was the first modern government without the central participation of spiritual authority. He adds:

Although many persons were most unquestionably executed merely for their religion, no one ventured to state their religion as the cause of their execution. The most barbarous punishments were inflicted upon them; but they were told that they might escape punishment by renouncing certain principles which were said to be injurious to the safety of the state. It is true, that many of these principles were such as no Catholic could abandon without at the same time abandoning his religion, of which they formed an essential part. But the mere fact that the spirit of prosecution was driven by subterfuge, showed that a great progress had been made by the age. [History of Civilization in England VI, Henry Thomas Buckle, page 339, Longmans Green and Co, 1873]

As Buckle and Neale so deliciously depict in their books, Elizabeth I’s strategy did more than seduce popes, Catholic kings and ambassadors into entertaining her fictions. It also turned England’s religious leaders into hypocrites. They denied what they really believed, which was rooted in feudalism, and which actually mirrored Catholic doctrine: that heresy was treason; God’s law was supreme. They, who had once claimed to act in the name of God, whose authority was embodied in their monarch or Pope, now acted in the name of man, whose power was embodied in the Queen. It was socially progressive, but not entirely honest.

Buckle says that Elizabeth I’s rule set the tone for our current epoch, which according to him, is defined by scepticism and the spirit of secular inquiry. Roy Strong makes a similar point in The Spirit of Britain. He says that her reforms had as much to do with the cultural direction of England as they did with beliefs. I concur with them that Elizabeth I’s regime was undoubtedly socially progressive and humanist in essence.

How the new age measured reputation differently

To understand Elizabeth I’s reign we need to consider the period in which Elizabeth I ruled. We also need to be clear about the difference between the two Rs: the Renaissance and the Reformation.

The birthplace of the Renaissance was Italy. There, it was neither a political nor a religious outburst. It was instead inspired by the rediscovery of classical literature in monastery libraries. This set off a massive revival of arts and learning. It sparked an individualistic outlook that prized self-expression and having fun.

In contrast, the Reformation’s heartland was in the more austere North of Europe. It was a politicized reform movement that focused on the nature of the link between church and state, and which questioned matters of doctrine and ritual. It led to political turmoil and radical change. Not least it sparked Protestantism and the counter-Reformation, which led to many wars and the creation of new states.

The combined impact of the Renaissance and Reformation introduced new sets of socially-derived values against which the reputations of leaders of states and religions were measured. As result, the changes that were unleashed led to a division of Europe between largely Catholic states in the south and Protestant ones in the north; though the two Rs transformed the cultures, religions and states in both regions.

Elizabeth I ruled at a time when the link between church and state was becoming increasingly strained. Throughout Europe monarchs were resisting papal influence. Princes were overthrowing republics and vice versa. Aristocrats were corrupting both republics and monarchies, while pretenders to Europe’s thrones opposed one another in the name of competing religions.

Increasingly, the so-called “divine rights of kings” was no longer accepted as providing sufficient grounds to confer legitimacy on a sovereign. Modern leaders were being asked to fulfill new expectations or face the consequences. In 1581, for instance, the Estates General in the Netherlands effectively fired Philip II of Spain, on the grounds that he was an unfaithful servant who had broken his contract:

 God did not create the people slaves to their prince, to obey his commands, whether right or wrong, but rather the prince for the sake of the subjects (without which he could be no prince), to govern them according to equity, to love and support them as a father his children or a shepherd his flock, and even at the hazard of life to defend and preserve them. And when he does not behave thus, but, on the contrary, oppresses them, seeking opportunities to infringe their ancient customs and privileges, exacting from them slavish compliance, then he is no longer a prince, but a tyrant, and the subjects are to consider him in no other view.  [The Dutch Declaration of Independence, 1581]

Elizabeth I was among the first to comprehend how to establish legitimacy with the support of a positive reputation in the post-feudal age. In the midst of social turmoil, she grasped that both monarchies and republics were being held to similar criteria to sustain their right to retain power. These were acceptance by their public, call it the power of public opinion; the delivery of stability, in the form of social cohesion; and maintenance of security in the face of external threats (most of her reign was spent at peace, which helped make England rich).

It was the success leaders had in managing such challenges which made or destroyed their reputation and cemented or axed their right to rule legitimately (arguably that’s where Mary I, Mary Queen of Scots and Charles I went tragically astray).

In contrast, under feudalism rulers had to proclaim (though, as the Reformation exposed, it was largely hypocritical) to be the epitome of virtue. Church leaders and princes relied for their good reputations, as defenders of the public good, on their adherence to eternal virtues of rank, birth, fealty, chivalry, courage, self-sacrifice, honour and loyalty, particularly to their religions. Failing that, as they often did, they relied on tyranny.

Under the feudal system there was no separation of spiritual authority from church and state; heresy was treason. Popes saw themselves as “Vice Regents of Christ upon Earth.” Though of course, the leaders of Protestant states, such as Henry VIII in England, claimed to be on a similar mission, except that theirs was confined to a particular state (that is, they took the Pope’s role).

Meanwhile, the commercial classes of merchants and manufacturers were increasing their social and political weight. This was a new age of joint stock companies, global trading, banking and lending. There were new commodities and gold flooding in from the New World, and there was more trade between Europe’s nations than ever. In the case of the Netherlands, their merchants’ wealth was such that they could afford their own navy and army to see off their king.

As things became more complex and conflicted, a professional layer of civil servants dedicated to public service arose out of the middle classes to administer their rapidly centralizing states. For example, when Henry VIII destroyed the Catholic church he took its wealth and power for himself and he relied on his civil servants to administer his realm. Elizabeth I continued that process – though she was far less autocratic – and went on to forge what became in embryo a modern parliamentary state administered by civil servants from the centre.

In this maelstrom of change wisdom plucked from rediscovered classical literature became tremendously influential. The ideas it ignited seemingly provided the solution to the turmoil. The most important of these were drawn from the legacy of Cicero’s Roman Republic. Two of his concepts were particularly appealing; not least, in practical rather than republican terms, to Elizabeth I.

They were Cicero’s notions of “concordia ordinum,” which relates to agreement between the classes, and “Virtus and Fortuna,” that refers to how people could overcome their God-given fate or fortune. This was revolutionary thinking in feudal times. These radical lines of thought were popularised in contemporary books, for example by Petrarch in The Remedies of Both Kinds of Fortune (1366) and later by Giannozzo Manetti in The Dignity and Excellence of Man (1532).

Petrarch in particular is famed for being the founder of modern humanism. He wrote about the beauty and gifts of the body, the joy of love, the glories of nature, colour, and the wonders of the sun. He celebrated the virtues of courage, prudence and intelligence. He urged people to focus on the public good and not to be afraid to take risks. In short, he inspired people to set out to create paradise while they were still alive.

These humanist principles resonated with the educated elite among the emerging social classes. The humanist outlook of these and other Renaissance writers helped define the identity and value systems of the new forces in society. It helped set a new concept of the public interest based on forging a consensus between social classes. It helped society determine what was wanted from their leaders in the nascent world.

By 1603, when Elizabeth I died, ritual had found a new expression in court spectacle and festivals of state which apotheosised the success of her rule and images and portraits. The cult of the Virgin Queen had successfully replaced that of the Queen of Heaven. [The Spirit of Britain, A Narrative History of The Arts, by Roy Strong, Pimlico, 2000, page 149]

She was an infuriating and often ambiguous Queen. Paradoxically, that was what made her a great one. She deserves to be revered as, among many other things, a PR icon.

No related pages.

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.

Only this weekend Britain’s Business Secretary Vince Cable called for an end to media moguls, as if the real problem was that Rupert Murdoch had too much power and influence over British society. However, that’s just not so.

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 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.

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 it, and damaging to the reputation of postmodernist theorists. 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 the claim made by Levitt that for narrow-minded ideological reasons, 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 might well have been on the right of the political spectrum, but Sokal was on the left. Moreover, Levitt had no time for right-wing conservatives who wanted to teach intelligent design or creationism in schools. What united the likes of Levitt and Sokal was their defence of science. They maintained that there was no such thing as “left-wing science”, as the postmodernists claimed, no more than there was such a thing as “right-wing science” or “feminist Algebra” (no I didn’t make that 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. Postmodernists were said to be promoting instead, 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)

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.

Levitt robustly defended the integrity of books such as Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which were denounced by Professor Fuller as Cold War narratives. 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 view of science leans toward viewing it as little more than a conspiracy organised by the Establishment.

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. What I’m questioning is how it has been exploited for other purposes by people with no understanding of, or respect for, scientific methods.

The appeal of Chaos Theory to social scientists of a particular type was its seemingly novel (in the world of scientific enquiry) reliance on nonlinear methodologies. As one reviewer of Levitt’s work put it, this appeared to provide ammunition in support of cultural relativism:

“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. Moreover, she – and many other postmodernists – wrongly state that Newtonian physics is mechanical and linear in its fundamentals. That, as Levitt explained, is nonsense. In fact, 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 ignorance 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 limited grasp 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.’”

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 citing Hayles as an authority:

“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.”

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 spouting hogwash.

Of course, there is much more to say on this subject. This post of mine is but a first instalment. But before I depart I’d like to put what’s going to become my core proposition. It is my intention, for instance, to review Jim Macnamara’s The 21st Century Media (R)evolution where, Richard Bailey reports, he writes: ”Emergent media owe as much to chaos theory as to evolutionary systems theory.” 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:

“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 remarks in passing that systems theory once seemed as solid as Newtonian physics – I think I’m right in supposing that here he’s referring to Newton’s dynamical systems theory, which is not the same systems theory Grunig drew on - until some new theories came along (Relativity, String Theory) to change the way we think about the world.

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 passing in my book on PR (this dispute hardly deserves much consideration in a serious publication) that both the linear and nonlinear bods in PR circles fail to bring science to their cause. I’ll be arguing that 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, nonlinear postmodernist camp.

So, let’s remain grounded. The good news is that Chaos Theory, postmodernism and Jim Grunig’s model of Excellence, have very little to do with PR in the real world. PRs in the field don’t get obsessed with asymmetry and with symmetry. It is mostly a marginalized discussion among academics, because it mostly revolves around irrelevant puff. I say, long may such debates remain in the stuffy cubby holes and seminars of the Academy.

Readers interested in this issue might want to check out what some of my fellow PR bloggers have had to say about Chaos Theory recently here here and here.

Recommended further reading:

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.”)

No related pages.