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

Professor Norman Levitt

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

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

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

Professor Alan Sokal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recommended further reading:

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

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

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

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

Paul Seaman’s Psychobabble will not make PR credible

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

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

No related pages.

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

Its sections run as follows:

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

1. Introduction: Homer gives birth to humanism 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. From myth to the classic: the Greek transition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. The Iliad and Odessey gave man his voice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Muses in Raphael's Parnassus (1511)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Homer led to theatre and theatre to art

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. Homer’s disciples gave birth to PR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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.

Marshall McLuhan as portrayed by Playboy Magazine

There’s a lot to be admired about the “prophet of the electronic age” who said “if it works it’s obsolete.” Marshall McLuhan coined the term the “Global Village.” He also produced classic phrases such as “the media is the message,” “the media is the massage”, and the “Age of Anxiety.” And he’s credited with conjuring “turn on, tune in, drop out,” over lunch with the 1960s advocate of LSD trips, Timothy Leary.

McLuhan was the archetypal-media studies guru. Not only was he an icon of the 1960s counterculture, he also went on to become the “patron saint” of the newly launched Wired Magazine in 1996. They identified with McLuhan’s vision of decentralized, personal, and liberating electronic technological development that transcends time and space. They warmed to his vision of how electronic media would wipe away contemporary society’s traditional values, attitudes and institutions.

There is after all, as Andrew Keen has pointed out, much in common between the wired generation’s utopianism and the communal ideals of the hippies. As McLuhan told Playboy Magazine in 1968:

“The computer thus holds out the promise of a technologically engendered state of universal understanding and unity, a state of absorption in the logos that could knit mankind into one family and create a perpetuity of collective harmony and peace.”

That language, in the form of “one world, people and planet,” is endorsed by much (too much because it’s complete nonsense) of the mainstream corporate and PR world today: see here and here.

McLuhan: still Wired

Still, for some good reasons, McLuhan remains an inspirational thinker to a new generation of youth. He appeals to those who want to break free from looking at the present in the rear-view mirror. He appeals to those who wish to create something completely different to what’s gone before and to those, including corporations and politicians, who wish to appear “in touch” and “cool.” In McLuhan’s words:

“These kids are fed up with jobs and goals [traditional ones, anyway], and are determined to forget their own roles and involvement in society. They want nothing to do with our fragmented and specialist consumer society. Living in the transitional identity vacuum between two great antithetical cultures, they are desperately trying to discover themselves and fashion a mode of existence attuned to their new values; thus the stress on developing an “alternate life style.”

In Wired‘s launch issue interview with a virtual McLuhan, whose consciousness they said had been preserved in a programmed bot, he says that the real message of media today is ubiquity. It is not something that we do. Rather it is something we are part of from the outside that excites all our senses. It is, he said through Wired‘s medium, as if we have amputated not our ears or our eyes, but ourselves, and then established a total prosthesis – an automaton – in our place. He (ok, his cyber-ghost) adds:

“Postindustrial man has a network identity, or a net-ID. The role is now a temporary shift of state produced by a combination of environmental factors, like in a neural network. This possibility has always been latent in the concept of role, but in the machine age this was perceived as a danger, while today it is simply a game – we no longer see shifting roles as dangerous and taboo and therefore theatrically compelling. Rather, we follow these shifts as if we were doing a puzzle or kibitzing a chess game. Yes, the medium is the message, but this does not mean and never meant that the content of the medium is a conscious reflection on itself. The medium is the message because it creates the audience most suited to it. Electronic media create an audience whose shifting moods are as impersonal as the weather.”

So, regardless that McLuhan’s name is no longer household fare (unlike, say, Warhol’s), his influence remains as significant among cyber-nerds as it was among beatniks. In fact his thinking is arguably more significant today, given the amount of hype that surrounds the cyberspace, Web 2.0 world.

So what was he really about?

He sought to explain the world through the prism of communication and its tools. He ruminated on the drivers of human progress from its primitive tribal, oral preliterate cultural forms through to the invention of phonetic language, the Gutenberg printing press and the modern electronic age. His work explored the relationship between technology, forms of thought and different types of human organisation.

He probed the relationship between the physical senses and tried to assess how their interaction in different ratios modified how we perceived ourselves and our world.

McLuhan’s insights were in many ways visionary and intuitive rather than theoretical. Sometimes they were comical. For instance, he tried to explain to readers of Playboy Magazine how it was not naked women or those in high-definition mini-skirts that turn us men on most, but women with glasses and open-mesh silk stockings. He rightly, in my view, suggested that us men tend to turn low definition images of women into our ideal form. In contrast high definition images (use your imagination) do not engage us to the same extent. He also once remarked:

“I have no theories about anything. I make observations by the way of discovering contours, lines of force. I satirize at all times, and my hyperboles are as nothing compared to the events to which they refer.”

But we shouldn’t let his tomfoolery fool us. He was a Canadian professor of literature and philosophy with a doctorate from Cambridge University in grammar, logic and rhetoric (otherwise known since antiquity as the Trivium).

John and Yoko Lennon supposedly discussing Marshall McLuhan

He maintained that whereas the invention of the phonetic alphabet opened up closed societies, which had depended on the product of speech and ear, and then detribalised them, the modern electronic age would end our focus on the visual image (more later).

Viewing all forms of technology as media, or what amounts to extensions of ourselves, he was fascinated by the social consequences of innovations. He described, for instance, perhaps presumptuously, how the jet-plane’s speed rendered old national groupings of social organisation unworkable; perhaps the way Twitter supposedly does to national laws and institutions.

Picking up on a theme beloved by social media enthusiasts today who claim all PR is online (whether it is internet based or not), McLuhan stated:

“Once a new technology comes into the social milieu it cannot cease to permeate that milieu until every institution is saturated” [Understanding Media, page 161]

He added, with some feel for its liberating potential, that typography:

“…created a medium in which it was possible to speak out loud to the world itself, just as it was possible to circumnavigate the world of books previously locked up in a pluralistic world of monastic cells.” [ibid pages 161/162]

So his focus was holistic, in the sense that he was interested in how typography, for instance, came to influence every phase of the arts and sciences.

McLuhan studied the dynamics of human communication at the level of experience. He looked at the relationship between how our senses perceive the world and how technological progress changes our mental processes and how we think. He tried to trace how different social organisations, beliefs and politics arose as a result of the mediating influence of new channels of communication.

His intention, though on this he falls short, was to explain how human consciousness developed.

McLuhan argued that the technology of a period creates the human environment. In that sense technology is not a neutral force, but a transformative one. In his view, media and the other tools humans invent are active forces that shape the human galaxy in unexpected ways.

Of course, he was right to point out that new technologies create new possibilities and new realities. The railways, for instance, brought the townspeople to the countryside and country folk to the towns. Railways opened the American West more than horse and cart ever did. Besides taking the travail out of travel, they narrowed the distance and time between places. They altered how we lived our lives in myriad ways, from commuting to holidays to the movement of freight. Later they served as highways for the high-speed telegraph.

McLuhan is perhaps best known today for saying that the medium is the message:

“This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.”

He saw media as being like a Russian Doll: the content of a medium is always another medium:

“The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph. If it is to be asked, ‘What is the content of speech,’ it is necessary to say, ‘It is an actual process of thought which is itself nonverbal.’”  [Understanding Media pages 23/24]

McLuhan over-eggs his media

The problem that McLuhan never really engaged was to try to explain the content of thought. According to him, the formative power of the media are the media themselves. But it is tautological to believe that thought’s content equals the media’s content and vice versa. Explaining things that way begs the question where ideas really spring from in the first place, and leaves the influence of the rest of society out of the picture. Surely, though the two clearly shape each other.

Indeed and here is my big contention, and where it differs from the techno-Utopian view: thought shapes media more than media shapes thought. (Later, I will argue this a lot. But for now I will say that on the big stuff, we are not unlike, say, the Greeks in our thinking.)

That’s not how McLuhan saw it. He believed that we cannot remain immune from the influence of what we observe in the media. He said, and it is a compelling viewpoint, that humans make their tools and are then remade by them.

McLuhan as conflicted dystopian

The key intellectual issues in McLuhan-studies probably come down (as so often) to the irreconcilables in his thought. He was conflicted as to whether increased media was building a great society or destroying it.

McLuhan was supposedly interested (and here’s a useful explanation of what follows) in the ideas of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French priest and paleontologist who believed that God had created an evolutionary process, which had produced the “noosphere“. This was a sort of globalised consciousness (but also a spirituality) which God was pulling toward himself as a sort of final purpose of Creation. Give or take your appetite for this sort of thing, you can probably see how it fits the increasingly mediated world that McLuhan was pondering and is an idea of shattering (and maybe dangerous) optimism.

But McLuhan also seemed to accept a set of old-fashioned anxieties about the power of media. What’s not widely known is that, as a religious man, McLuhan was influenced by Pope Pius XII’s views. The Pope believed that the future of modern society and the stability of its inner life depended upon maintaining “an equilibrium between the strength of the techniques of communication and the capacity of the individual’s own reaction.” This prompted McLuhan to comment:

“Failure in this respect has for centuries been typical and total for mankind. Subliminal and docile acceptance of media impact has made them prisons without walls for their human users.” [Page 34, Understanding Media].

Indeed, that fits with what we have identified as one of McLuhan’s great faults: he over-estimated the media’s power and influence. That’s not to say they wield an insignificant influence in society, not at all. It is to say that I cannot agree with his media-centric view of the world, particularly when he starts trying to explain the success of the Nazi’s in Germany thus:

“That Hitler came into political existence at all is directly owing to the radio and to the public address systems. This is not to say that these media relayed his thoughts effectively to the German people. His thoughts were of very little consequence. Radio provided the first massive experience of electronic implosion, that reversal of the entire direction and meaning of literate Western civilisation.” [ibid page 262]

He said that radio encouraged “webs of deep tribal involvement” and that the message of radio was “one of violent, unified implosion and resonance.” He was saying: never mind the content, take a look instead at how something (radio, TV or the internet) engages our subliminal emotions because it represents a primitive extension of our nervous system that can strike long-hidden chords. In his words, in the non-visual world of subatomic physics, radio encouraged a newly found human involvement that bred anxiety and insecurity and unpredictability. Radio (for that read any new media) lowers our horizons and dulls our brains. If it were not so, we would never allow the media to influence us, said McLuhan. Therein lies a common theme that still dominates debate today about the destructive power of new technology.

Of course, he said that radio’s malevolent influence in Germany and places such as Russia did not stretch to the United states of America:

“Radio, the medium that resuscitated the tribal and kinship webs of the European mind in the 1920s and 1930s did not work in England or America. There, the erosion of tribal bonds by the means of literacy and its industrial extensions had gone so far that radio did not achieve any notable tribal reactions.” [ibid page 274]

But in the US and UK he turned his (over-serious) ire on TV instead. McLuhan worried that it wouldn’t help Johnny learn to read. He lamented that it gave Johnny a whole new set of perceptions instead, which he described as the “psychic and social disturbance created by the TV image.” He also accused TV of introducing a kind of rigor mortis into politics.

He remarked:

It is the extraordinary degree of audience participation in the TV medium that explains its failure to tackle hot issues. Howard K. Smith observed: ‘The networks are delighted if you go into a controversy in a country 14, 000 miles away. They don’t want real controversy, real dissent at home.”’ [ibid pages 269/270]

He also worried, unnecessarily as it happens, about the impact of TV on the future of comics, national magazines, and the movies.

McLuhan really did believe in the power of the media to control society. He cited Fidel Castro as an example of the new “tribal chieftain who rules his country by a mass-participational TV dialog and feedback.” He said that Castro controlled his country on camera (not by force or fear or restricting free speech, mind you) by giving Cuban people the impression of being directly and intimately involved in the process of collective decision making. Arguably, Col Muammar Gaddafi, Kim Jong-il and Saddam Hussein tried the same trick and found it wanting.

McLuhan’s misplaced angst about the power and potential threats and corruption of society by new media has a long pedigree. It even turned Plato against written texts, which were a new fangled inovation in his time. He said they robbed us of our ability to use our memories and risked making us lazy. It also informed Cervantes’ hilarious character Don Quixote who set out on his mad adventure having been first hypnotized into helplessness by trashy novels of galantary and wandering Knights.

McLuhan’s pessimistic outlook that suggests we live in a “post-literate” society is mirrored today by people who argue that the internet is destroying our culture. Supposedly all today’s youth can do is scroll, skim and scan. Meanwhile the internet is undermining existing media, and reducing everybody’s capacity to concentrate and read books (see a useful critique of Nicholas Carr’s new book The Shallows, which is very much in the McLuhan clan of thought). And, yet, McLuhan’s writing also fuels bloated thinking of those who claim that the Arab Spring was sparked by the internet rather than home-grown discontent.

McLuhan on public vs private sphere

There is a rather lovely thought at the heart of McLuhan’s thought. This is that communication created individualism. Or, put another way: the mass media allowed both the public and – more surprisingly – the private sphere to flourish. It’s an over-egged thought, though.

He explains well how the media’s influence developed. He describes how script and papyrus were the mediators of the ancient world. But they lacked the reach to enable mass communication, and in so far as they were consumed by the mass, that was done in public when texts were read aloud. However, that changed with the advent of the mechanical revolution that began with the mechanization of phonetic script in the form of the Gutenberg press. It was this invention that was more important during the Renaissance than any rediscovery of the ancient text of rhetoric and the wisdom of the Greeks, he said.

The man at work

What’s really interesting about McLuhan is his examination of how the public sphere became separated from the private one. I think it is true, as McLuhan says, that the modern private sphere – as distinct from its public counterpart – came into existence in the 13th century. He believed it came about with, and only because of, the introduction of mass media and the ability of people – for the first time – to read and think in silence in private.

I don’t dispute McLuhan’s view that in the age before the private sphere came into being, opinions and roles in society were mostly fixed by the fortunes of birth and the rigidities of the ancient or feudal hierarchies. That was a time when people knew their place. Until books and manuscripts were reproduced in large quantities on mechanical assembly lines, the means of communication did not have the power of extension to create a mass public. In McLuhan’s words:

“Printing from movable types created a quite unexpected new environment – it created the PUBLIC.” (ibid, introduction)

But was it technology that sparked the paradigm shift? Or was it one factor among many, such as history, war, serendipity and culture? In his book Mind, Self and Society George Herbert Mead said that language was the content of our minds, and added that that “is only a development and product of social interaction.” His was a more rounded sociological approach that highlights, I suggest, how narrow McLuhan’s methods of thought were.

Besides, plenty of classical scholars argue convincingly that the Greeks invented the private sphere (the mind) and did it, in public, in theatres. They did it by starting to have characters addressing, as persons, individuals in their audience, as persons. The idea of private, separate interiorities, each of which has ideas, was (rather oddly) explored in public.

Of course, the planned effort to influence the public sphere by influencing the opinions of people in their private refuges cuts to the heart of what PR is about. Individuals and organisations have conflicting opinions, interests and experiences. In the public sphere such differences have to be reconciled in a battle of opinion for influence and power. Otherwise decisions-making cannot take place in a consensual manner.

I say, in contrast to McLuhan’s account, the rise to prominence of PR in the world can be accounted for by the clamour of an emergent public’s struggle for a voice in society’s affairs. In my view, the study, practice and arguably the perfection of rhetoric as a tool of persuasion, is firmly rooted in ancient Greece’s democratic forums. That was, after all, the period when opinions, reputations and winning debates determined outcomes for the first time in history. But as we know, ancient Greece’s democracies were a peculiar and temporary phenomenon. (I shall explore at another time how the public’s voice came to matter historically).

But there is something else missing in McLuhan’s narrative that should not go unremarked. There’s no mention of Max Weber’s protestant ethic and little said about Adam Smith’s or Karl Marx’s explanation for the formation of capitalism and the market economy. And when it comes to explaining the relationship between the modern public and private spheres, I suggest that Jürgen Habermas is much more useful than McLuhan.

So, McLuhan ignores the emergence of new social categories of civil society that separated the public from the private spheres. He gives scant attention to the emergence of the modern state, commerce, wage labour, and the formation of the nuclear family. Instead, McLuhan’s reviews the different mediums of exchange and communication, such as money, typography, film, radio  and ads etc. and focuses his attention on how the phonetic alphabet magically created our state of mind, the modern state and world.

While I reject some of his reasoning, there’s no doubt that when books, pamphlets and newspapers became mass commodities which could be owned, reading in private became a mass pastime. This in turn changed how humans experienced the world of ideas. It also changed how they interacted with each other. It did, as McLuhan claims, encourage, if you like, the internalisation of the thought processes that a private and individualized outlook requires to take root in the human psyche. It created a new sphere of human existence from which major social changes in the fabric of society flowed.

Does digital kill the individual?

It is perhaps ironic that McLuhan, a devout Catholic, who was worshiped by the individualists attending the Summer of Love festivals, where God was proclaimed dead, should be the bearer of the news of the imminent demise of individualism. The modern dilemma that troubled McLuhan most was that while the printing press had made individualism possible, the electronic age rendered it dead. He described the present period as one of transition toward retribalization.

Society, he said, was moving from individualism to “corporate interdependence.” But he warned that instantaneous mass communication and mass consumerism were creating a new crisis in human history. The changes were moving faster than people’s ability to cope. With such observations (or probes as he called them) he caught in the embryo the emerging angst of what became the anti-globalisation lobby.

He described advertising as  a “self-liquidating form of mass entertainment,” and said that it created the impression that a woman could “iron shirts without hating her husband.” He observed that far more time and thought went into creating them than was expended on writing features and editorials. He wrote:

“They (advertisements) are subliminal pills for the subconscious in order to exercise an hypnotic spell, especially on sociologists. [Understanding Media 202/203]

This is all pretty much what we see in Moan (sorry, Noam) Chomsky and Naomi Klein.

Indeed, he also seems to have seen the pitfalls of identity politics, with its Tyranny of Small Differences and the endless modern litany of “memory, identity and loss”:

“As man is tribally metamorphosed by the electric media, we all become Chicken Littles, scurrying around frantically in search of our former identities, and in the process unleash tremendous violence.”

Massaging the message

He also perhaps overstated the changes, while capturing something worth noting, when he said provokingly:

“Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and physically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent.” [Marshall McLuhan, "The Gutenberg Galaxy, page 5]

He saw the media as an extensions of our senses. And, just as many social media buffs describe the internet and cloud computing as a near-sentient network, McLuhan said that electronic media was a sort of planetary-wide nervous system that produced a group or global consciousness. Of course, in reality, computers even at their most advanced and most highly networked are not anything like a human brain or conscious of anything whatsoever.

Nevertheless, from many angles, he correctly foresaw how the demarcation line between our private and public lives would increasingly become blurred. He said that a century of electronic media had reduced time and space in a planetary embrace that had caused the implosion of human society. He said of the electronic age:

“All our alienation and atomization are reflected in the crumbling of such time-honored social values as the right of privacy and the sanctity of the individual; as they yield to the intensities of the new technology’s electric circus, it seems to the average citizen that the sky is falling in.”

He also sensed in 1964, in a visionary flow of thought that makes him sound like a 21st-century Google executive director, that:

“Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extension of man – the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media” [Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, page 19]

McLuhan thought that the new electronic interdependence would recreate the world in the image of a global village. He obviously said that before China blew such notions (including his argument about the phonetics being at the heart of progress) out of the water by doing its own thing to boost globalisation in its own unique undemocratic manner.

There is also much New Age angst buried in McLuhan’s thinking;

“This book (The Gutenberg Galaxy) will try to explain why print culture confers on man a language of thought which leaves him quite unready to face the language of his own-electo-magnetic technology.

“..certainly the electromagnetic discoveries have recreated the simultaneous “field” in all human affairs so that the human family now exists under conditions of a “global village.” We live in a single constricted space resonant of tribal drums.” [Gutenberg Galaxy, pages 30/31]

The problem here is that McLuhan pits man’s creation against man: as in the machine strikes back. Moreover, the logical implication of his notion of the “global village”, a useful expression if ever there was one, is that national divisions in a globalised world would dissolve (it was very much in tune with John Lennon’s Imagine, except that McLuhan believed in Heaven above and Hell below us). But, paradoxically, our increasingly globalised economy has more nations today than ever; certainly there’s many more than when McLuhan was writing in the 1960s.

I’m not suggesting for one moment that Marshall McLuhan books should not be read. On the contrary, they remain classics worthy of exploration for the many insights they contain. But that’s no reason to buy into his main technological determinist message.

No related pages.

Just leaving Kiev on the long road to Slavutych was an eye opener to a world I had only ever read about in spy novels. Every twenty or so miles there were police roadblocks to negotiate: documents, please, and can you answer some questions? My interpreter called it a giant job creation scheme. There were hardly any cars on the road. I soon understood that freedom to travel did not yet exist in Ukraine.

As night fell, few lights shone from roadside cottages we passed. Old ladies, carrying massive piles of sticks or buckets of water from the well, seemed surprised by the sight of our fast-moving car. They sometimes froze in the middle of the road forcing us to make sudden manoeuvres to avoid killing them. The few cars going the other way appeared to be heading directly at our Volga, which was an old communist party boss’s car well past its peak.

We arrived in Slavutych and went immediately to a restaurant. It was a public facility with high ceiling and loads of ostentatious marble, or marble-substitute, in reddish-brown and gaudy pink, and seats for two hundred people. I named it the Taj Mahal because the tacky-style reminded me of an over-the-top second-rate Indian restaurant I once visited in Birmingham, England.

The six of us were the only diners that night. I would eat there every night for many months to come virtually alone or with a few power station bosses or with very welcome parties of visiting foreign journalists. The menu took twenty minutes to read, but a waitress soon told us that they had nothing available from the menu that night. She brought what they had in the kitchen – it turned out to be caviar and bread.  Most nights we had a choice of only one or two dishes or starving.

When I got up next morning and toured Slavutych, I discovered a large, half-built town with deserted streets, next to no shops, except for roadside kiosks selling Polish biscuits and Ukrainian vodka. There was only one private bar in town; the police used to throw out the gangsters (none of whom worked at the plant) when I visited, then huddle in the kitchen until I left to ensure I was protected. One night a fight erupted at the next table, blood spilled and the police rushed out and made matters worse – but I was kept safe.

Just getting to the office was a nightmare. The creation of Belarus placed an international border between the power plant and Slavutych. So everyday we had to cross into Belarus and back again into Ukraine, and navigate two tightly controlled exclusion zones, there and back. Some days, I was seriously delayed at the Belarus border on the way to work and at the Ukrainian border on the way home. Sometimes all the border guards in both countries appeared to be asleep as we motored past.

At that time, Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (ChNPP) was not able to sell electricity for money. It bartered it instead for goods from other enterprises that were equally devoid of cash. The power plant also paid its own workers with plastic tokens which had a notional dollar value that no bank would honour and which were not valid outside of the shops it owned and ran. The shops lacked food, anyway. People were growing their own vegetables, or doing odd jobs for farmers in return for meat.

It took all my powers of persuasion to get the Chernobyl management to open up the “Sarcophagus” to the prying eyes of western journalists. Why, asked the then station manager Parashin [now an even more senior figure], should we show the world our shame, our embarrassment when they can tour two working reactors onsite? I told him that the construction of the protective shelter over reactor 4 was a triumph – and I knew he thought so too. His fear was really that opening the doors would just produce negative coverage. It was also a big decision because it takes a long time to prepare people to safely penetrate the Sarcophagus. Tours inside disrupt the daily work that goes on there. To his credit he signed the order to allow entry.

On days off, I toured hospitals and schools neighbouring the exclusion zone, finding malnourished and sick people everywhere. The hospitals lacked medicine, the schools lacked new books and other essential material – nobody had been paid their wages for months.  There was no interest in politics; the atmosphere was fatalistic and quietly depressing.

In the villages I found evacuees decanted to places they didn’t really like (there is no place like home) among people who could barely support their own struggling communities. Chernobyl victims appeared to receive additional support denied to “real” locals.  That was resented, until villagers realised they too could claim victim status certificates from their doctors because they considered it unjust to say no.

At that time, life spans were getting shorter and health levels were declining all over the former Soviet Union. Evacuees, and people living on contaminated land, were convinced radiation was the root of all their troubles. Others only pretended that was the case to gain access to scarce health services and other benefits, including weekly invalidity cash and free holidays for their kids. I even met power station workers whose kids, born elsewhere, cynically took advantage of holidays to Ireland – and who could blame them?

It was sad. There was nothing I could do to help – except in working to get decent information out. I found Chernobyl to be an amazing place. Five thousand people turned up every day to run two working reactors and to keep the rest of the site maintained and safe. The worst of the accident was not visible. The staff had smart, well pressed, uniforms. The corridors and offices were full of pot plants. There was a busy and professional buzz about the place.

I soon discovered that communism and centralism were not dead; certainly not at Chernobyl where a gigantic bust of Lenin overlooked the main entrance. The station manager ran the plant and the town of Slavutych with its 30,000 or so residents, including shops, hospitals and schools. All major decisions crossed his desk and awaited his signature. Sometimes it seemed to take forever to get an answer.

I was one of the first westerners to enjoy life in the exclusion zone.  I saw how its wildlife flourished in a verdant setting without parallel elsewhere in Europe. In the zone, wild animals roamed unmolested through ancient forests and luscious marshes, along untouched riverbanks and across riotous unfenced meadows. It rather defied expectations and gob-smacked me; what nine years of human absence had produced in a so-called dead zone.

Today, I have selfishly mixed feelings about the world’s discovery of Europe’s best-protected nature reserve.  My joyrides in a speedboat on the broad empty river observing the fish, birds, grazing animals and natural shoreline brushed by rushes, trees and beaches, may not be so special an experience in future. Others will also now be joining me by the roadside overlooking waterlogged fields at sunset in the forsaken land.

Ends.

No related pages.

A health warning. This is a 20 minute read. It’s a feet-up, cup-of-coffee or glass-of-wine read.

Its section go:

Trust: where’s the decline, really?
Inside the minds of kowtow thinkers
PR: The trade that hates itself
Different types of ARM PR
Three cases: BP, BA, France Telecom
The perils of modern individualism
Firms and institutions do not have to hate themselves
References

Trust: where’s the decline, really?
We are said to be in the middle of a crisis of trust. Since the public relations industry is supposed to be all about building the stuff – and since it has been well paid for at least 50 years to be ubiquitous and effective in doing so – one might expect us professional schmoozers to feel a bit guilty. Well, we don’t (or at least not much). We are more inclined to think that our clients rather deserve to be pilloried by the media and the public. Indeed, we are doing quite nicely out of advising businesses and other bodies on how to fix or manage the malaise.

As a matter of fact, I am a shade sceptical that businesses really are in the doghouse at all. When the ‘problem’ of the reputation of business first surfaced, I started looking at research on the subject. I was struck by the incoherence and inconsistency of what researchers claimed to have found. At the University of East Anglia, for instance, the Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment led the way in agonising over the public perception of risk. In one paper, it found that only a very small percentage of the residents of Norwich were prepared to trust information from government or firms [1]. A few more (but still only a very few) trusted information from the media. More people trusted doctors or scientists. By far the greatest number of people placed their trust in environmental campaigners, friends and family.

Given my way of looking at the world, this was bizarre, to say the very least. It did not seem to accord with the realities of where one looked for accurate information. When I turned the page, though, this selfsame report seemed to find something a bit more cheerful – and somewhat at odds with what I had just read. It appears that a Mori poll had found that, while less than half of the population was inclined to trust scientists to speak honestly, those scientists who worked in industry were rather more trusted than were those who worked for government. Those scientists who work for campaigners were distrusted quite strongly.

In short, industry need not think that its voice is uniquely tainted. Indeed, for all I know, its reputation might improve quite a bit if it spoke as many truths as possible and let time prove them accurate. It might even help if these truths were harsh.

Let us (just for the sake of it) assume that some public opinion research is accurate – or at any rate influential. Research by the Edelman PR agency indicates that firms in China, Indonesia and Brazil are more trusted than those in the UK, Germany, France or the USA [2]. Why might that be? One reason for the anomaly may be that the public in the BRIC countries – the new ‘Tiger economies’ of Brazil, Russia, India and China – is naïve about firms. Maybe, though, it is not so much about naivety as about a genuine – and even quite well-informed – hopefulness about progress.

Perhaps industry in the emerging economies is confident of its merit. Perhaps we should mourn the decadent, self-doubting introspection of modern western mores.

I am in PR and it behoves me to look at the part played by my own trade in shaping or influencing the western public’s attitude to its firms. PR professionals (let’s just call them ‘PRs’) are increasingly reluctant to defend the reputation of western firms. They would rather just go along with the prejudices that their researchers think they have uncovered than take on the tougher job of challenging them. They tell CEOs that their firms are hated or not trusted because capitalism is hated and not trusted. A vicious cycle ensues.

Many of us PRs are, of course, arts-type people with arts-type prejudices. We are (or would like to be) part of the metropolitan liberal world rather than the gritty commercial and entrepreneurial world. Like admen, we think of ourselves as ‘creatives’ rather than go-getters; as do-gooders rather than mere achievers. We often display a distinct dissidence, just like the journalists we spend so much time trying to influence. (Yes, I know PR is more than just media relations, but most PRs remain obsessed with social and mainstream media regardless.) If we were to be split into camps, these would be ‘liberal pragmatists’ and ‘pragmatists’: people with the wrong agenda or people with no agenda save for convenience. Either way, PRs have largely decided that what the media wants it ought to get.

Meanwhile, we PRs should not beat ourselves up too much either. Journalists say they don’t trust us. The public says it doesn’t trust the media. It’s all nonsense. Journalists get most of their information from PRs. The public gets most of its opinions from the media – mainstream or social. As a PR, I am able to spoon-feed journalists my information because what I say is accurate and well evidenced. They do not expect time to disprove what I tell them. That is the point about being professional: we have far more to gain from being accurate than we have from lying.

Going back to Edelman’s survey, its results show that PRs are less trusted as spokespeople than are lawyers. Who cares? I do not really believe that the public has any idea what PRs do, so it pays ignorant punters to play safe and to say they don’t trust spinmasters [3].

The problem with PRs today is not lack of credibility or influence. Rather it is how we exploit our powers of persuasion and how we perceive the world. PRs have convinced firms to launch pre-emptive communication campaigns aimed at stakeholders that (a) admit to the mistakes Darwinian capitalism is supposed to make; (b) apologises for the past practices; and (c) promises and demonstrates a willingness to reform. The objective, so it is argued, is to restore trust and to secure or maintain the licence of business to operate in a hostile world. Meanwhile, corporates and other institutions have accepted that self-abnegation is a sound strategy, because they accept that PRs know their trade. But do they? Have PRs become too willing to act as the prosecuting counsel and the advocates of cringe?

Something is wrong when, to take one example, the public’s trust in banks in India and China outweighs by far its confidence in London, New York or Zurich institutions [4]. Or rather, for all their recent failings, western banks are – at least in principle and largely in practice – a part of the wealth-creating open societies that host them. It may be that Asian banks, say, are less prone to hazardous innovation than are their western counterparts. But we ought to wonder whether they are more transparent, competent or trustworthy.

Therein lies another dimension that should make us a little more sanguine about the seemingly low levels of trust in western institutions: healthy scepticism is not the same thing as lack of trust, but it is a part of what keeps the West dynamic. That is certainly true of our scientific culture, and it has become almost too true of our democratic political culture. The corporate world is really quite prone to smugness and complacency. For that reason alone, it could probably do with a good dose of external challenge to keep it on its toes.

Still, I say PRs have sold business and society short. Of course, sometimes the public and the media call on an institution to apologise, reform and move on (ARM) for good reason. This is obviously the case when a firm or an institution knows it is guilty as charged. One example of this was in Canada in 2008, when listeria contamination of some Maple Leaf Foods products killed 22 people and harmed many more. When the origin of the contamination in its plant was identified beyond doubt, the firm accepted responsibility and unhesitatingly sought to make amends. But in most crises, actually locating blame is not such an easy task, and the issues involved are by no means one-sided or obvious.

In incidents such as Shell’s failure to dispose properly of its Brent Spar oil platform, France Telecom’s supposed responsibility for mass suicide, the Catholic Church’s child abuse scandal, or even Toyota’s recall of millions of its cars, the truths involved were conflicted, uncomfortable and awkward for all the parties involved. But in every one of those cases, most PRs urged the bodies concerned to surrender their integrity to the crowd and beg forgiveness, regardless of the facts.

Inside the minds of kowtow thinkers

One of the leading advocates of the kowtow PR culture in the UK is Sandra Macleod, group CEO of Echo Research. Her firm’s research on behalf of leading companies is often used by PRs to persuade CEOs and institutions to reform the way in which they behave, rather than to sell their core values more effectively. Here Macleod outlines her thinking:

“In our early days of innocence, many mistakes or misjudgements were made. We are paying the cost for it now – with pollution, climate change, distrust and mistrust. The ‘corporate speak’ train has reached its terminus. But awareness is the first step to the path of greater enlightenment and fundamental change and improvement.

“Harvard Business School Professor of Business Administration Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s new book SuperCorp argues that capitalism is at a crossroads. The old ways of doing business no longer work.” [5]

Macleod explains and endorses Kanter’s opinion that customers trust companies that do more than just provide goods and services. She also agrees with Kanter that workers are inspired by commercial opportunities, in which people go to work every day with the idea that they have two jobs: one to ‘do my job’ and the other to ‘change the world’. The ‘AAha factor’, says Macleod, is ‘we can do well by doing good’. She says that, by forming partnerships across sectors, firms bring together capabilities that promote the greater good, creating value for society beyond today’s markets and products. This is crucial. This style of PR argues that firms can only thrive by deeply, really internalising criticism from the world of activists and campaigners, including those who are profoundly anti-capitalist. In Kanter’s words:

“That has the potential to solve enormous social and environmental problems and, as a by-product, restore confidence in business. I hope that is the 21st-century model for the future of capitalism.”

In the same piece, Macleod quotes an article in the McKinsey Quarterly in support of her position:

“While unfortunately, short-term thinking is now endemic to business strategy… the financial crisis has increased the public’s expectations of business’s role in society. Most companies have maintained or increased their efforts to address socio-political issues, and many have already derived better-than-expected benefits from doing so.”

This view requires interrogation. The McKinsey line is interesting because it seems to imply that business is (a) short-termist in its approach and (b) long term in its societal aspirations. Is that not inviting us to say that the thing many people would like is for business to be business-like for the longer term? And if it achieved that, it wouldn’t have to get all self-conscious about saving the world? The major lesson of the recession, after all, was how bad things get when business fails at its day job, as the banks did.

As an advocate of ARM PR, Sandra Macleod captures well the new anti-competitive capitalism that her research says the public wants. She envisions a world in which:

“Governments [take] a stand and businesses [are] no longer seen as [the] unacceptable face of capitalism as balance sheets count [the] costs of social and environmental impact through policies, levies and taxation.

“A new science of qualities of life will emerge whereby growth and evolution are not seen as a competitive struggle but as a cooperative dance.

“Growth will be redefined beyond politics to a land of opportunities focusing on a better civil society and well being – in a world, as Senator Kennedy argued that ‘makes life so precious and makes us proud to be citizens of our countries and planets.’”

Macleod’s naivety (though I have no quibble with the value Senator Kennedy put on life) would once have been laughed at. The major point she misses is that it was market forces that built the great societies we live in. She too readily dismisses our heritage and denigrates the reputations that grew out of it. Moreover, her view does not reflect the tough realities that workers, firms and countries face as they battle to improve productivity and compete with each other in the real world (though the taxes are real enough). But Macleod’s line is the vision that many PRs recommend we sell to the public.

Another leader of the kowtow PR culture is Richard Edelman. He has a prominent platform at the World Economic Forum’s Davos summit, where he has reported how:

“…the consensus of CEOs was in favor of evolving the model away from Milton Friedman (the social responsibility of business is to make profit) toward a more nuanced approach of business’ positive contribution to society. Michael Porter, professor at Harvard Business School, said, ‘The greatest competitive advantage for business will be social. We used to believe there was a trade-off between profit and social issues. Now we know differently. We thought work place safety and environmental stewardship were expensive, but the highest return on investment comes from zero accidents and reengineering the supply chain to make you more efficient. Companies which understand complex social issues will turn them into competitive advantages.’” [6]

So, CEOs are being advised to present a utopian vision to their publics, in which all stakeholders are treated as equals, and in which firms exist to form partnerships with NGOs that are designed to promote ‘societal good’. They are even expected to pretend that business can or must engineer zero accidents and zero risk, which is downright misleading.

I want to be careful here, but not mealy-mouthed. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) and high levels of safety are – up to a point – Very Good Things. However, though some of today’s CSR is invaluable and well executed, I do (rather unfashionably) believe that much of it is useless or silly. Be that as it may, the main point I want to get across here is that corporates should not always and everywhere wave the white flag in the face of criticism. A permanent affectation of guilt is as psychologically dangerous for a firm as it is for an individual.

The trade that hates itself

The strange thing is that PRs have little confidence in the social contribution they and their clients make to society. For instance, when Richard Edelman describes how his company makes a social contribution to society, he reveals a distaste for the ‘unreal-world’ practices that lie at the heart of his core business: defending and promoting other people’s reputations and businesses. Instead, he urges his staff to ‘live in color’:

“What I mean by this phrase is that we have a responsibility to live in the real world [partly by doing pro bono work]… We must recognize that there is a responsibility to have continuing education in our field that is dependent on getting out of the office, beyond the small world of billable hours, into a big world of imagination and social contribution.” [7]

His message appears to be that billable work does not make a significant social contribution to society, and that its content is detached from the world of imagination. He seems to be saying that we PRs reconnect with the world by doing stuff outside the office, rather than by creating the world we live in at work. In my experience, however, pro bono often risks becoming merely a stressful, self-interested extension of work and brand building (that is not virtuous at all). There is no dispute about the benefit of staff leading an active and constructive social life beyond paid work. But Mr Edelman ignores the obvious point that his staff need to remain billable, so as to live full and productive lives with their families in their communities. What I oppose is the dispiriting and demoralising consequences of Mr Edelman’s ‘live in color’ mantra, which denigrates his core business’s value and PR’s contribution to society.

Different types of ARM PR

Sometimes the focus of ARM PR is limited and sometimes it is wholesale. When it is limited, it involves reforming business practices, adopting CSR and sustainability programmes and resolving to do better in the future (some of this is certainly progressive). But when it’s wholesale it involves redefining a business, often for very dubious reasons. I have identified three broad camps into which firms and other institutions fall when it comes to ARM PR:

1. Those who adopt ARM as a PR strategy while not believing it. I think British Airways and BP fit this bill.

2. Those where the most senior people genuinely believe that the business has failed morally to some degree. Body Shop, Ben and Jerry’s (especially in its pre-Unilever incarnation), Timberland and maybe even HSBC belong here. The effect is that they seem anti-capitalist and appear to want to create a thoroughly post-Darwinian corporation.

3. Those that have suffered a cock-up and believe energetic apology is the most
effective strategy, whether or not they believe they are actually guilty. Here I would cite Toyota, certain banks and France Telecom. In the non-corporate sphere, one might add many UK social services departments.

So firms go along with this ARM PR agenda with varying degrees of honesty and enthusiasm. Some businesses have turned their anti-establishment agenda into a major part of their claim to integrity. Body Shop’s message, for instance, was validated by the genuine (and rather absurd) anti-corporate enthusiasm of its mouthy CEO and chairman. Similarly, it may be that HSBC’s adoption of CSR is genuine, given that its boss, Stephen Green, seems a genuine (and perhaps religiously motivated) enthusiast. But then again, banking and banks are about profit and loss, and there is no escaping the fact. The problem with all three approaches is that they all involve a display (to varying degrees) of self-hate, self-pity and cynicism about the nature of business per se.

Three case studies: BP, BA and France Telecom

BP’s ‘beyond petroleum’ was self-deception

Peter Sandman, the former PR consultant to BP, has given an insider’s insight into the rebranding of British Petroleum. He described how the company first became simply BP, then went on to adopt the lower-case bp on its logo, and finally redefined the meaning of BP as ‘beyond petroleum’. He cited this as an example of a company adopting the ‘reformed sinner’ persona. Addressing a group of PR and mine managers in Australia in 1998, he said that this:

“…works quite well if you can sell it… [Big oil companies] have done a very good job of saying to themselves, ‘Everyone thinks we are bad guys… We can’t just start out announcing we are good guys, so what we have to announce is we have finally realised we were bad guys and we are going to be better’… It makes it much easier for critics and the public to buy into the image of the industry as good guys after you have spent a while in purgatory.” [8]

John Kenney, one of the two Ogilvy & Mather executives responsible for BP’s ‘beyond petroleum’ tagline, outlined their methods in the New York Times [9]. He described how they talked to people on the street and heard a lot of gripes about oil companies. From what he says, he does not discount this sort of view or filter it or ponder its validity. He does not seem to care whether the views he hears are well informed, prejudiced or intelligent. But he decides to try to fix the perception problem – as indeed was his job. So Kenney and his boss develop a line which says, in effect: Look, BP are doing all sorts of things to address the ‘oil problem’.

The compelling attraction of Ogilvy & Mather’s ‘beyond petroleum’ tagline was that it matched what their research revealed: that the public claims to hate the oil business. Rebranding BP appeared a sensible way of outflanking public opinion by showing that the business was equally uncomfortable about the nature of its core business. That might have been a credible position had BP been serious about getting out of oil. But it wasn’t.

There was, of course, a rather major problem with the notion of BP going ‘beyond petroleum’. The realities of global warming (whether scientific or political) made oil more attractive than coal, just as it made gas more attractive than either of them. Demand for oil soared during the boom times. New drilling techniques were developed and new oil fields discovered. It soon became clear – and all along should have been – that BP was not going to be ‘fossil fuel free’ so much as ‘fossil fuel plus’. Hence Kenney writes in the New York Times:

“I guess, looking at it now, ‘beyond petroleum’ is just advertising. It’s become mere marketing – perhaps it always was – instead of a genuine attempt to engage the public in the debate or a corporate rallying cry to change the paradigm.”

BP was forced to rethink its ‘beyond petroleum’ stance after a couple of crises revealed that it was neglecting its day job. In 2005 there was the explosion that killed 15 people and injured more than 100 others at a BP plant in Texas. Then the following year there was a pipeline corrosion and oil leak crisis in Alaska. Both incidents highlighted that BP should have been more interested in petroleum and safety than in the company’s super-planetary virtuousness. The setbacks resulted in a change of leadership and a shift of emphasis back to oil. These events led some BP staff to re-label BP as meaning Big Problems [10].

As I write, in the Gulf of Mexico BP has just managed to staunch the flow of the biggest oil spill in US history. In terms of reputation, this is perhaps the biggest issue ever faced by any company. Since the Deepwater Horizon oil platform blew up and sank in April, oil has been gushing almost as furiously as Barack Obama’s anti-BP rhetoric. He has, of course, re-rebranded the company ‘British Petroleum’: this is a man who understands that the Americans are torn between respect for and dislike of the British. The handy trope of British arrogance is always available to American propagandists.

This all serves to remind us that the original rebranding of British Petroleum as BP/bp (not to mention ‘beyond petroleum’) was about as forlorn as the relabelling of Windscale as Sellafield after the nuclear plant’s chimneystack fire of 1957.

But it is moot whether – just because it became fairly adept at love-bombing the green vote – BP became any less competent in engineering terms. Though I suspect strongly that, if BP did lose engineering focus, this was because its drive for profit and deals was disguised behind a veil that misrepresented reality to both the company’s employees and the public. Arguably, ‘beyond petroleum’ became a risky distraction and a demoralising influence on the company’s reputation, safety culture, sense of self-worth and identity. In fact (and the appointment of Tony Hayward as CEO shows this, as does his subsequent replacement by Robert Dudley), BP was busy reminding itself of the merits of being technically competent and focused on the core business even as God, in his inimitable way, bowled it an untimely beam ball.

The reality BP had accepted was that its oil business had grown in size and risk, while its safety record in the US had gone downhill:

Two refineries owned by oil giant BP account for 97 percent of all flagrant violations found in the refining industry by government safety inspectors over the past three years… Most of BP’s citations were classified as ‘egregious, willful’ by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. [11]

According to the ABC news website:

“[Occupational Safety and Health Administration] statistics show BP ran up 760 ‘egregious, willful’ safety violations, while Sunoco and Conoco-Phillips each had eight, Citgo had two and Exxon had one comparable citation.” [12]

We do not know what BP’s American future will be. I for one certainly hope it will thrive there precisely because it does the right thing on every front in the Gulf, beginning with proving engineering diligence and continuing with being clear about its responsibilities (including their limits). I also hope that Barack Obama pays the full price for his finger-wagging and scapegoating, and not least for his pettish dislike of the British.

Presumably, Barack Obama is throwing as much mud as he can at BP because he recently lent his support to offshore exploration. He can thus in some sense be assumed to have approved of the regulatory regime that signed-off on BP’s operations in the Gulf.

Of course, the challenge for BP will be to switch from presenting itself as a self-hating sort of organisation that is keen to disguise its real, so-called ‘grubby’ purposes as it seeks to appeal to green opinion. I have mostly argued that firms should not cringe. At this moment, of course, BP must be penitent. But I shall risk saying that it must not stop being thoroughly adult. Insofar as it has done wrong, it must quite soon admit its part of the blame. It can then build on what seems to be its current quite sensible strategy – which is to say that it will stand by those it has damaged. Let us hope that BP can now play a noble role in a general corporate desire to move beyond infantilism.

The truth is that BP was always very, very petroleum. ‘Better (or even Best) Petroleum’ would have been – will be – a better tagline than ‘beyond petroleum’. But here’s another important truth. BP’s long-term trustworthiness and profitability may well survive this disaster, just as the Gulf of Mexico might recover more quickly than many observers expect. What is more, the disaster is likely to make it clear how the two properties of trust and profit are inextricably bound together.

BA: briefly ashamed of its flag’s roots

British Airways is another company that felt compelled to appear embarrassed by its roots. In 1996, it famously took the Union flag off its tailfins, logo and stationery.

The BBC reported at the time how BA’s aim was to create a cosmopolitan-feeling airline, not one trading on past glories of the Empire. It quotes Bob Ayling, the then head of BA, saying: ‘Perhaps we need to lose some of our old-fashioned Britishness and take on board some of the new British traits[13].’ The new ones were cited by Ayling as being linked to Britain’s ‘new’ friendly, diverse and open-to-all cultural image, rather than its old, rather remote and aloof one.

The Union flag was replaced on the carrier’s fleet by the many colours of the world. Symbols of the Ndebele tribe of Zimbabwe, animals and trees appeared on its Boeings. The airline’s Citiexpress Embraer sported Paithani – a variety of sari – on its tailfin. The company said its new ethnic makeover – costing £60 million – connected with the modern world, and not least with the 60 per cent of its passengers who were not British. In the process, BA rebranded and reformed itself.

To BA’s surprise, it discovered that its core values – all of which were hard-core, old-time, unabashed British – were prized by its non-British customers almost as much as by its British ones. Following a public rebellion led by consumers and a PR meltdown led by the media and politicians, the Union flag reappeared, with a BA spokeperson proclaiming:

“Rod [Eddington, Ayling’s successor as CEO] feels that Britishness is at the core of this airline’s appeal. We are a global carrier, but we are British and proud of it – and it is not just Britons who like our Britishness. Rod wants BA to be associated with Britain in the same way that BMW is associated with Germany, symbolising quality in a way that is understood worldwide.” [14]

France Telecom disingenuously admits guilt

Ever since it was semi-privatised in 1996, France Telecom, Europe’s biggest internet provider and third largest mobile operator (trading as Orange), has faced mounting competition and has been busily restructuring its business. Responding to union and political pressure, the company has been reluctant to make too many staff redundant. It has attempted instead to hang on to most of them, and in so doing created its own nightmare. Though it fired 60,000 employees, it redeployed many more thousands of otherwise redundant staff to newly created posts. It retrained many of them as salesmen, known as mobilités professionnelles (meaning they often worked away from home).

In reality, France Telecom workers were being pushed into unfamiliar roles, in jobs that were ill-defined. Staff sensed that many of them were in unsuitable positions, doing non-jobs that had no future or any real reason to exist. Meanwhile, management applied pressure to make the new structure work effectively. Given that most of the workers had no real role to play or any real prospects in their new jobs, they became understandably stressed and frustrated. They felt undervalued and under threat.

As discontent grew, so the focus of people’s anger concentrated on a spate of suicides and attempted suicides among France Telecom staff over an 18-month period in 2008–09. Some of these suicidal staff left notes blaming the company, and some of them attempted suicide at work. However, there was no real evidence that the company’s change-management strategy was to blame. As Oliver Barberot, France Telecom’s head of human relations, told the French satirical weekly newspaper Le Canard enchaîné:

“It’s [the number of suicides] not that dramatic, I have seen worse. The number of suicides is not even going up. In 2000 there were 28 and in 2002 there were 29 [compared to 24 suicides in the 18-month period that provoked the headlines].” [15]

However, despite the number of suicides being below the national average for the age profile of its staff, and despite the number going down rather than up, the company did not defend itself. It did not do so in the fond expectation that this would restore its reputation. Instead, it suspended its retraining programme of mobilités professionnelles. It employed more human relations staff and physicians who specialised in occupational medicine. It sent its heads of department on tour around France to investigate why their workers were so unhappy. First, Louis-Pierre Wenes, the architect of the modernisation drive stood down. Then the chief executive, Didier Lombard, was forced to resign, though he has remained the company’s chairman. In the process, France Telecom found itself paralysed for more than a year. It has yet to recover.

In effect, France Telecom ‘apologised’ and promised to ‘reform’ and to ‘move on’ in response to ‘outraged’ public (read media) opinion. By doing so, the company made it harder not only for itself to function as a business, but also for other firms to manage similar structural and emotional issues. So here is why I think it is immoral to resort to ARM PR in cases where the employer knows it is not the guilty party:

(1) ARM invites firms falsely to portray themselves as villains (think BP with ‘beyond petroleum’ and Shell with its Brent Spar oil platform).

(2) ARM invites firms falsely to assert that they can manage their affairs in ways that do not cause pain (France Telecom).

(3) ARM invites firms to dissemble (after all, it is untruthful to say you accept blame when actually you don’t and there is no evidence that you should). For instance, if France’s culture makes middle-aged men prone to suicide, does it help society to head off blaming France Telecom and then for France Telecom to blame itself?

(4) ARM creates moral hazard: campaigners know they can make false accusations and make their targets pay – think Pfizer with its Trovan crisis in Nigeria, where it stands accused of killing 11 children in a clinical trial [16]

(5) CSR – one could add sustainability and corporate responsibility generally – is an empty shell, inviting contempt, unless it speaks to business realities (think about the moral crusade against banks and what it will actually take – and what we shall have to accept – to get them working properly again; and think public sector cuts and the truth of the pain they will cause).

The perils of modern individualism
I make the point on my blog 21st Century PR Issues [17] that there is a problem with modern individualism: it makes people nurture their vulnerability and makes them see themselves as victims of capitalism, whereas in fact they are more likely victims of emotionalism, nonsense and downright deception. In short, France Telecom said it cared for the inner self of its employees when it didn’t; or, if it did care, it said so when there was only so much it could do to help (which was not much).

Of course, ARM PR works in the short term; but over a longer period it is corrosive. It buys firms breathing space in a crisis. It also breeds an underlying unease among the public(s) about motives, and gnaws at the self-confidence of the very firms that practise it. For instance, it is interesting to note that the suicides and stress at France Telecom were all among those workers who kept their jobs: presumably those who lost theirs suffered less angst because they knew where they stood.

The turmoil at France Telecom is a classic example of self-hate and self-flagellation gripping western business. France Telecom was by no means an uncaring monster; its problems stemmed from its attempt to please too many of its stakeholders – particularly the unions. Of course, leaving aside France Telecom, France itself is a country where things tend to be controlled by the state. Many of the company’s problems were created by political considerations. However, the logic this case highlights will be recognised by lots of employers (not least British Airways, which nearly fell into the same trap with its over-indulged trolley dollies).

Firms and institutions do not have to hate themselves
Peter Cappelli, professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, carried out a study based on interviews with the heads and human resource departments of 98 of India’s 150 biggest companies on the key differences between Indian and western bosses. According to the CNN website, he found that:

“…every leader interviewed gave a specific social purpose as being the goal of their business. Those purposes ranged from improving healthcare in India, to getting cell phones to people who don’t have access to communication tools, and proving to the international community that Indian companies can lead in IT.” [18]

Thus Indian bosses are committed to motivating their staff around whatever it is that the core purpose of the business happens to be:

“In terms of lessons for managers elsewhere, one of the most important things is that Indian leaders lead with a sense of social purpose.”

So one has to promote one’s firm as having a social purpose. Of course that makes sense. But for some reason, in the West we seem to have reached a point where sticking to the knitting – doing the things the firm is overtly dedicated to – will not suffice. Indeed, this has come to seem deeply suspect. Only the ‘add-on’ of CSR is sellable.

But the core purpose of a pharmaceutical or a phone company is the same in New York or Newcastle as it is in New Delhi. The difference is that in India it is pushed to the fore as the reason for the firm’s existence.

These things are necessarily nuanced. Indian bosses reported that they had less pressure to meet quarterly targets than their western counterparts, and therefore they could set more long-term goals. That indeed is a luxury worth having.

Certainly the West has a problem with planning for the long term, and we must fix that. But it is worth noting that the Indian economy is massively profitable on the back of low labour costs and a focus on core purpose, and that its focus on financial performance is relentless.

The self-confidence of Indian and Chinese business contrasts sharply with the ‘miserablism’ of the West. This leads me to my conclusion.

Right now, it is not so much that PRs are lying about the real world (though sometimes they do), as that they are recommending – whether from conviction, cynicism or pragmatism – that firms and other institutions should wear the badges of self-hate, self-pity and low self-esteem on their sleeves. The problem is that such sentiments are now deeply embedded and internalised at all levels of society. Hence, there is an urgent need for a more robust, self-confident style of PR to emerge. Not least because the world is changing.

There is a new balance of power emerging in the world as the BRIC countries rise to prominence without the restraining hand of the West’s insecure emotional baggage. Survival in this new environment calls for robust, often brutal and agile strategies and tactics, delivered at speed by leaders who are accountable for their decisions. In support of this challenge, PRs should be discussing how we position and sell this new world to the masses – among whom many will be losers and many more winners. Rather than knocking them, we should be shoring up the backbone and confidence of western firms and institutions.

References:
1. Tim O’Riordan, Claire Marris and Ian Langford (1997) ‘Images of science underlying public perceptions of risk’, in Science, Policy and Risk. London: Royal Society.

2. Edelman Trust (2010) ‘Building a mosaic of trust’ (Executive Summary), available at: www.edelman.com/trust/2010/

3. Charles H. Green (2007) ‘Trust and the PR profession’, available at: http://trustedadvisor.com/trustmatters/137/Trust-and-the-PR-Profession

4. Edelman Trust (2010) ‘Building a mosaic of trust’ (Executive Summary), p. 4, available at: www.edelman.com/trust/2010/

5. Sandra Macleod (n.d.) ‘CR and sustainability, commit or crunch?’, available at: www.ipra.org/detail.asp?articleid=1446

6. Richard Edelman (2010) ‘A sober and reflective Davos’, Richard Edelman website, 3 February, available at: www.edelman.com/speak_up/blog/archives/2010/02/

7. Richard Edelman (2004) ‘Living in color’, Richard Edelman website, 21 December, available at: www.edelman.com/speak_up/blog/archives/2004/12/living_in_color.html

8. Bob Burton (1999) ‘Packaging the beast: A public relations lesson in type casting’, Center for Media and Democracy website, available at: www.prwatch.org/prwissues/1999Q1/beast.html

9. John Kenney (2006) ‘Beyond propaganda’, New York Times, 14 August, available at: www.nytimes.com/2006/08/14/opinion/14kenney.html?_r=1

10. Michael Harrison and Andrew Buncombe (2006) ‘BP: Big problems for oil giant’, Independent, 30 August, available at: www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/bp-big-problems-for-oil-giant-413933.html

11. Jim Morris and M. B. Pell (2010) ‘Renegade refiner: OSHA says BP has “systemic safety problem”’, Center for Public Integrity website, 16 May, available at: www.publicintegrity.org/articles/entry/2085/

12. Pierre Thomas, Lisa Jones, Jack Cloherty and Jason Ryan (2010) ‘BP’s dismal safety record’, ABC World News website, 27 May, available at: http://abcnews.go.com/WN/bps-dismal-safety-record/story?id=10763042

13. ‘R.I.P. British Airways’ funky tailfins’, BBC News website, 11 May 2001, available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/1325127.stm

14. Paul Marston (2001) ‘BA restores Union flag design to all tailfins’, Daily Telegraph, 11 May, available at : www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1329843/BA-restores-Union-flag-design-to-all-tailfins.html

15. Stefan Simons (2009) ‘French government steps in to stop staff deaths’, Spiegel Online International website, 17 September, available at: www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,649715,00.html

16. See ‘Trovan fact sheet’, available at: http://media.pfizer.com/files/news/trovan_fact_sheet_final.pdf

17. http://paulseaman.eu/

18. Mark Tutton (2010) ‘What bosses can learn from India’s business leaders’, CNN International website, 5 March, available at: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/BUSINESS/03/05/india.leadership.lessons

No related pages.

I found that nearly a year ago the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) handed administrative control of the site to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Despite the UNDP claiming that the site’s material is “under review” it has yet to make any real changes.

The site’s claim to be impartial remains useless. Its own UN sponsors say the Chernobyl myth is the biggest hazard resulting from the disaster – yet Chernobyl.info does much to reinforce it. Indeed, the entire site produces the opposite effect to the myth-busting its own UN sponsors say is now crucial.

It matters because Chernobyl.info ranks high in Google searches and because it appears to be an authoritative source backed by credible institutions.

The myths and the facts
In the immediate aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster there was understandable uncertainty and controversy regarding the accident’s impact on the health of people living in the neighbourhood. But within months, let alone years, of the Chernobyl accident it was possible to produce sensible accounts of the real hazard it posed. (Here’s one area where the fairly optimistic experts admit they got it wrong at first: predictions of thyroid cancer, which implies they take the evidence where it leads.) Twenty five years on, there is no excuse for not helping people to understand the carefully-researched facts as we now have them.

It is a scandal that the whole world, let alone the five million people living in contaminated areas in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia are still receiving alarmist messages about the threat that haunts them.

Take Ukraine. Chernobyl.info cites official sources as saying that 84 per cent of the three million Ukrainians exposed to radiation from Chernobyl are registered as sick. It is often said that these include one million children. This is bound to generate huge anxiety amongst children and their parents.

Indeed, in the Gomel region of Belarus people were told that there was an increase in leukaemia cases of about 50 per cent in both children and adults compared to the period before the disaster. Additionally, they were repeatedly informed that, as Chernobyl.info says, clusters of breast cancer had been increasing for ten years in the region, and that there was “a recognised and internationally collaborated” causal link to the accident.

Residents in affected territories were told that “internationally recognised epidemiological studies” showed major negative health consequences of the accident. They cited, for instance, the findings of bodies such as the Clinical Institute of Radiation Medicine and Endocrinology Research, in Minsk, Belarus, that discovered a 40% increase in cancer between 1990 and 2000 attributable to Chernobyl. Reports often hinted of much worse to come in later years.

The sources for such claims were seemingly respectable, and secured a mention in a European Union executive summary to an international conference in Kiev in 2001 (that’s not to be confused with an official endorsement, but understood as a report on another report’s findings).

Campaigners, aid groups, even bodies associated with UN agencies, all seemed to support, and perhaps initially believed, the claims.

It is true that Ukraine and Belarus registered many hundreds of thousands of unharmed people as victims of Chernobyl after 1986. This certainly seemed to reinforce the fears. However, in the early days, there was disaster relief money to be had. People classified as sick as a consequence of Chernobyl secured additional funding, winter fuel allowances, access to scarce health care, housing and other resources. Such benefits were invaluable after the Soviet Union collapsed. It was understandable opportunism. It wasn’t then in any local person’s interest to ask too many questions. Moreover, doctors felt obliged to help their impoverished patients by ticking the “right” boxes.

Since 2001 onwards, most of the local benefits have been withdrawn. That is partly because the apparent health issues were not real. It is also partly because the overheads became an unsustainable burdenon the national budgets of Ukraine and Belarus. The people were stuck with a flawed understanding of what was happening to them, but without the compensation.

No wonder that scientists found that the single worst consequence of the accident was a “paralyzing fatalism” among residents of affected areas caused by persistent myths and misperceptions about the threat of radiation.

As Louisa Vinton, Chernobyl focal point at the UNDP, said in 2005:

“Two decades after the Chernobyl accident, residents in the affected areas still lack the information they need to lead the healthy and productive lives that are possible. We are advising our partner governments that they must reach people with accurate information, not only about how to live safely in regions of low-level contamination, but also about leading healthy lifestyles and creating new livelihoods.”

The nonsense endures. Anyone visiting Chernobyl.info today will be told what Kofi Annan, former Secretary-General of the United Nations, said in 2004:

“At least three million children in Belarus, Ukraine and the Russian Federation require physical treatment (due to the Chernobyl accident). Not until 2016, at the earliest, will we know the full number of those likely to develop serious medical conditions.”

This quoted opinion remains in play on the website – without any explanation – despite official members of Kofi Annan’s specialist agencies having reached diametrically opposed conclusions.

The role of charities
It is perfectly understandable that charities sprang up and attracted international aid and assistance to help alleviate the consequences of the accident. Their original sympathy for the children, women and communities whose land was blighted by contamination cannot be doubted.

But, sometimes, good intentions can do more harm than good. This can particularly be the case when their sell-by date has passed.

Once in motion, however, it is difficult to halt an industry. This is particularly the case when the defining reason for its existence is good works and, perhaps, a narcissistic statement about the values of the people who conduct such work.

Caring about Chernobyl’s victims has become, for some, the personification of who they are and what they stand for. In these circumstances, it seems, people will cling to their world-view regardless of the evidence. More on that later; first let’s review the latest facts.

A better class of work
For more than two years (2003 – 2005), eight specialized agencies of the UN family studied all the evidence relating to the health affects of the disaster in the designated affected areas of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. This was an unprecedented study by hundreds of scientific experts in the fields of oncology, radiation and environmental protection.

The bodies doing the research were among the most respected in the world. They included the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), World Health Organization (WHO), United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN-OCHA), United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), and the World Bank. The governments of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine also participated and endorsed the report.

The Chernobyl Forum
The scientists, after reviewing all the existing evidence from all credible sources, came to what was for some a startling set of conclusions in their landmark Chernobyl Forum Report 2005. Though most of the report’s conclusions were already apparent to experts – working together as part of the IAEA’s International Chernobyl Project –  as early as 1991 and more so by 2001. The 2005 report found:

* Fewer than 50 deaths directly attributed to radiation from the disaster, almost all being highly exposed rescue workers, many who died within months of the accident but others who died as late as 2004.
* No profound negative health impacts to the rest of the population in surrounding areas.
* No widespread radiation contamination that would continue to pose a substantial threat to human health, with the exception of a few restricted areas.
* About 4,000 cases of thyroid cancer, mainly in children and adolescents at the time of the accident, of which at least nine children died; however the survival rate among such cancer victims, judging from experience in Belarus, has been almost 99%.
* No evidence or likelihood of decreased fertility among the affected population has been found, nor has there been any evidence of increases in congenital malformations that can be attributed to radiation exposure.
* Other than thyroid cancer there were no other increases in cancer rates attributable to the accident in the directly affected regions.

In conclusion, the three-volume, 600-page Chernobyl Forum report said that up to 4,000 people may eventually die (note: Chernobyl.info reports this as “will die”) as a long-term consequence of the 1986 accident from radiation induced diseases. However, the authors were at pains to state this is an upper limit. They said we will never know for sure if the death toll gets any where near that mark because statistically it is insignificant when set against the normal background levels of cancer. The report stated:

“Apart from the dramatic increase in thyroid cancer incidence among those exposed at a young age, there is no clearly demonstrated increase in the incidence of solid cancers  or leukaemia due to radiation in the most affected populations. There was, however,  an increase in psychological problems among the affected population, compounded economic depression that followed the break up of the Soviet Union.“

The report’s Chairman, Dr. Burton Bennett, added:

“… we have not found profound negative health impacts to the rest of the population in surrounding areas [Ukraine, Belarus and Russia], nor have we found widespread contamination that would continue to pose a substantial threat to human health, within a few exceptional, restricted areas.”

It is also worth noting that the restricted zones are increasingly being de-restricted by the Ukrainian and Belarusian authorities. Farming has officially resumed in areas it was once thought would be abandoned for centuries. Chernobyl itself is becoming a bit of a theme park and tourist destination. Moreover, the Chernobyl Forum reported:

“… because the doses were so low, there was no evidence of any effect on the number of stillbirths, adverse pregnancy outcomes, delivery complications or overall health of children. A modest but steady increase in reported congenital malformations in both contaminated and uncontaminated areas of Belarus appears related to better reporting, not radiation.”

There are huge disagreements
The discrepancy between the myths and what the Chernobyl Forum described could hardly be greater.

The Chernobyl Forum says, for instance, that most of the land in the affected regions is returnable to normal use and the biggest single health impact is psychological. Much of the material on Chernobyl.info implies or says that these areas remain hazardous and people are suffering severe medical effects.

So this can’t be brushed aside – the “refuseniks” need challenging. There is a case (the Chernobyl Forum’s) that the biggest problem is anxiety brought on misinformation. There is another case (equally aired on Chernobyl.info) that there is a cover-up of the human health effects of Chernobyl and that to deny these real effects is misinformation.

Though, admittedly, for all sort of contradictory reasons, it initially suited many stakeholders – governments, journalists, and campaigners – to inflate the consequences of Chernobyl, as Richard D North’s useful briefing highlights.

The problem is one of evidence-handling
It hasn’t required creative thinking to keep the Chernobyl horror story alive. All it has required is that people throw away ordinary rules of editing and publishing.

Chernobyl.info treats all claims about the affects of the Chernobyl accident as having equal weight. Moreover it uses old and discredited claims about the accident to dispute the findings of new scientific investigation. It does so even when, as in the case of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and UN bodies, the makers of the original claims have moved on.

Hence Chernobyl.info says:

“Some facts about Chernobyl are uncertain or disputed. In such cases we follow our principles by presenting the different interpretations, and citing the sources. Chernobyl.info thus lives up to its stated goal of providing independent and impartial information.

“It is vital that aid and cooperation projects for Chernobyl should not depend on whether everyone is in agreement on a particular fact.”

But impartiality isn’t quite enough….
The difficulty here is that a normally-busy, normally-informed person taking an interest in Chernobyl and going to this site has no way of establishing where the truth – or where the merits of argument and evidence –  lies between the opposing claims.

An information project needs to offer some way for its users to navigate between alternative viewpoints. It is not good enough to lay out the competing claims, and their sources, and think people can devote the kind of time involved to checking it all out from first principles.

But Chernobyl.info studiously avoids being useful. Note the site’s citations of two main kinds of scepticism about the Chernobyl Forum’s conclusions:

“The report, which acknowledges only hard-and-fast scientific findings, has been severely criticised by independent Chernobyl experts, environmental organisations and Chernobyl relief organisations, who claim that it plays down the impact of the disaster and goes in the face of earlier studies. Some of its statements, moreover, are provably false.”

Its examples of these supposed falsities were examined in the Chernobyl Forum’s report and found wanting.

In passing, one wonders what other than “hard and fast scientific findings” are of real interest, and who Chernobyl.info – or its editors at SDC and now UNDP – consider to be “independent Chernobyl experts”. I assume they mean: partisan anti-nuclear, environmental and Chernobyl relief organisations.

Does Chernobyl.info mean that such people were independent of international bodies such as the eight UN organisations, the World Bank and leading scientific experts from Ukraine, Belarus and Russia? Does “severely criticised” mean the same as “seriously criticised”, or merely mean “strongly”, or “ardently” criticised?

The scandal of Swiss government and UN involvement
It was at least very odd that the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), an arm of the Swiss Foreign Ministry, appeared to still dispute the evidence compiled by the international community as late as 2010. This sort of material might not matter if Chernobyl.info was an independent site run by activists; but it isn’t.

The difficulty seems likely to be that Chernobyl.info’s editors believe that their duty is to the passion, commitment and anxiety of people who are affected or worried by Chernobyl.

The problem seems to be a sort of multiculturalism. Chernobyl.info’s view seems to be that the UN and all its experts, including UNDP’s own scientific advisers, have an opinion based on rigorous investigation, but it is no more valuable than those of people who dispute it. Indeed, it seems fair to give special weight to “local” or “regional” “communities” and non-governmental organisations who may be under-resourced.

It is worth noting that the UN bodies themselves seem schizophrenic. On the one hand they seem to want to be honest to the facts in the Chernobyl Forum report. On the other, they want to appear friendly toward the anti-nuclear campaigners and local groups who dispute it – even when their own governments don’t.

This anomaly is probably explained by the fact that UN bodies, such as UNDP, have traditionally welcomed any well-funded projects which can be thought to help people living in what are undisputedly deprived regions.

All that would be acceptable were it not for the fact that it is the myth itself which is doing so much more harm than the radiation.

In short, Chernobyl.info seems to have been hijacked by people who have a particular emotional response to the Chernobyl accident. They appear determined not to let go of their existing work no matter what evidence is produced to undermine their pre-judged conclusions.

If UNDP does in future follow the site’s mission statement, it is unlikely that Chernobyl.info will stay as it is. The site’s stated aims are perfectly legitimate:

“…[to] provide a sound basis for the evaluation of measures aimed at dealing with the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster.

“The most important target audience worldwide comprises decision-makers, at all levels, who are concerned with the consequences of Chernobyl. The provision of information for decision-makers should help to promote the funding of targeted and useful measures.”

But Chernobyl.info does the opposite. Instead it impartially provides material whether it deserves the word “information” or not.

No related pages.

This essay interrogates the response of leading academics, especially Jim Grunig, as they aimed to build an idea of PR fit for the post-modern, reflexive, inter-active, wisdom-of-crowds, stakeholder society environment they studied.

As the post Second World War euphoria fizzled out into new-age angst, the late 60s and 70s saw optimism turned into scepticism about progress. During that period protest movements arose that questioned the “military-industrial” complex of white-coated experts motivated by profit. Capitalism, it was claimed, was destroying the planet. People became increasingly sceptical about the value and consequences of economic growth. Books such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and groups such as Greenpeace fuelled a green backlash that we are still experiencing.

Events such as the core meltdowns of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl spooked the world. They became indelible symbols of man’s folly and served as proof points among anti-corporate anti-technology campaigners. Thirty years or so later, the nuclear industry has barely recovered. Moreover within the nascent environmental movement were the seeds of the new radical politics of the 1990s. With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 anti-capitalist sentiment took on different dimensions. Communism, socialism and the peace movement rapidly lost credibility. New forces emerged, consisting of politicised greens aligned with anti-globalisation protesters.

There was a feeling – one shared by protesters and serious thinkers – that major corporations had participated in undermining the sense of community which held society together. The growth of the shopping mall on the city outskirts, for instance, was seemingly responsible for turning town centers into decrepit zones inhabited by criminals. The likes the US’s WalMart and the UK’s Tesco became liberal bête noires. It was said that the corporate and major institutions in society were suffering from a core values crisis and, as a result, a trust deficit (see here how WalMart redefined the debate in the internet age by exposing Potemkin communities).

In the 1990s, from global warming to globalisation, the PR trade’s clients – particularly large multi-national companies – found themselves on the receiving end of a hostile crowd’s anger. The movement’s aims were popularised in books such as Naomi Klein’s NoLogo, a title that struck a blow at brand value, consumerism and globalisation.

The anti-globalisation protest peaked at the Battle of Seattle in 1999. In scenes reminiscent of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam protests of the 1960s, Seattle’s air was filled with tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets as militant demonstrators clashed with police. As delegates arrived at the conference their way was blocked by groups of demonstrators chained together at street crossings. One group even managed to disrupt the opening ceremony. Elsewhere mobs roamed the city smashing windows, singling out Starbucks’s for special attention. A civil emergency was declared. The National Guard took control and enforced a curfew. More than 600 people were arrested from the 40 000 or so protesters.

This was one of many such outbreaks of violence across the world. Similar riots took place outside major international conferences of bodies such as the World Economic Forum, the G8, EU and even the UN conferences on global warming. It was as if no international conference was safe from the mob.

There was a sense that corporations and governments were losing their grip on public opinion because their ethics and morals were not the same as the audience’s. This feeling became more extreme as the world’s economies boomed in the late 20th and for some of the first decade of the 21st century.

The anti-globalisation lobby became more subdued after 9/11 and more still after the global credit crunch turned into a global recession. Yet the interconnected economy, as the WEF savants of Davos now euphemistically dub globalisation, is now more rampant, arguably more in demand, than ever in the developing world.

Nevertheless, green, anti-corporate and anti-growth sentiments remain strong, particularly in the developed West.

In fact, while all these trends characterise something tangible, it would be wrong to accept such a one-sided picture of Western enthusiasm for anti-consumerism. The very fact that global economies boomed mostly from the 1980s onward shows another side to society’s drive that’s diametrically opposed to the campaigners’ viewpoint. The masses of the world embraced globalisation. They adopted new technologies such as mobile phones, IT, internet, CDs, DVDs, GMOs and bought more cheapened old ones such as air travel and cars etc..

It is debatable whether the protesters ever deserved the attention they received. It is also questionable whether they ever really represented the views and instincts of the avaricious consuming masses who expressed their will through their purchasing power. But of the influence of the protesters on academia, the media and on political debate there can be little doubt. This middle class green backlash had clout.

Dead-end search for models

Recognising the challenge in the 1980s and early 1990s were two PR academics, Jim Grunig, Professor Emeritus for the Department of Communication at University of Maryland, and Todd Hunt, Professor Emeritus at Rutgers University School of Communication. They came together with their peers in an attempt to find the key to reconnect corporate America with its public, and on a more ambitious scale the American nation with world opinion. At the same time they sought to address the low esteem PR was held in. They believed PR required a model that would define it as a proper profession and explain its role and behaviour to both the public and clients.

In their view, the absence of a progressive model was holding PR back; a model being a simplified representation of reality. They reasoned that one was required to transform PR into an acknowledged ethical, credible, trustworthy profession. They thought this was required to help head off activist protests and to put public relations professionals (let’s just call them ‘PRs’) at the head of the corporate pyramid with the C-suite.

The intention of Grunig and his supporters was to position public relations beyond advocacy. They felt that self-interest was not the exclusive motivation that PRs should focus on. They said it had to be combined with concern for others and for the impact an organisation’s behaviour had on the environment. In short, they wanted to produce a model of PR that could be used to balance corporate self-interest with the public interest, or with the interest of others.

In their 1984 classic Managing Public Relations, Grunig and Hunt put forward four models of public relations which encompassed its historical and current practice:

The first was a one-way communication model based on media relations, or press agentry, which seeks to get favourable coverage by either ethical or unethical means, depending on the practitioner’s standards.

The second was the public information model which is a one-way communication process where the PR acts as a conduit for distributing the client’s news.

The third was the asymmetrical model, which could be two-way or one-way, which uses persuasion and manipulation, backed by research, to bend the wills of an audience the client’s way in a process.

The fourth (the preferred model) was two-way symmetrical communication in which PRs resolve conflict by promoting mutual understanding and respect between the organisation and their public(s). The objective here, according to Grunig, was to use research and dialogue to bring about symbiotic changes of ideas, attitudes and behaviours of both audiences and organisations.

The two-way symmetrical model was, of course, an idealised model for PR practice that sought to separate it from its persuasive, propaganda and (supposedly) one-sided roots.

The preferred model was, I acknowledge, a very natural and legitimate attempt by PR practitioners to manage their own reputations. It was, though, not just mistaken, but a dangerous corrosive approach to engaging the public.

What’s interesting is how Grunig defined the public, which, he said, “can be identified and classified in the context to which they are aware of the problem and the extent to which they do something about the problem.” That effectively conflates the term public with activists, often militant anti-capitalist ones at that. Hence Grunig’s style of PR accepts the terms of discussion – the symbols and stereotypes – from the activists. It ends up perverting institutions by urging them to develop their narratives in a way that is out of sync with the public opinion of the silent majority.

The two-way symmetrical model of PR rests on a number of assumptions that require interrogation. It positions PRs as mediators between their clients and their publics. Rather grandly it supposes that PRs are the moral keepers of their organisations. With this model PR gives the target audience equal status to the paymaster. The objective is to ensure that no side dominates the communication process and all sides’ views are treated on level terms. To ensure fairness it assumes that both sides agree to abide by a set of rules which can be audited transparently to ensure compliance.

Its proponents claim that this approach is ethical because it empowers PRs to organise how the dialogue is conducted, or at least to negotiate the terms of engagement. Jim Grunig sums it up thus:

“To be successful, however, they [PRs] must be able to convince their client organizations and publics that a symmetrical approach will enhance their self-interests more than will an asymmetrical approach and, at the same time, that it will enhance their reputations as ethical, socially responsible organizations and publics.”

[Two-way Symmetrical Public Relations, Past. Present and Future, Jim Grunig, page 18 in Public Relations Handbook.]

For the model to work, rigorous research of their target audiences’ views is required. This information is then used by PRs. Ironically, knowledge is power and the more money one has the more research becomes possible. This fact clearly undermined Grunig’s proposition that PRs could mediate effectively between their clients and their publics in an objective and neutral manner. It scuppered the stated intent that neither side should control the perception of the other side’s ideas and viewpoints.

Hence Grunig has since been forced to revise his model representation of reality. To his credit, he accepted that his idealistic social perspective of PRs role in society took no account of the PR’s motives (PR is paid for by only one side of the relationship). In response, he put forward a compromise that acknowledged mixed motive communication.

Professor Grunig re-cast his theory by arguing that two-way symmetry is a process not an outcome. He said it was not so much about reaching a consensus with activists as about collaboration and conducting a dialogue. He defined the new take as a discourse designed to balance the private and public interest. Commenting on how the re-jigged models aligned, he wrote:

“Rather than placing the two-way asymmetrical model at one end of a continuum and the two-way symmetrical model at the other end….. A public relations strategy at either end would favor the interests of either the organization or the public to the exclusion of the other…..The middle of the continuum contains a symmetrical win-win zone where organizations and publics engage in mixed-motive communication.

“With this new model of combined two-way public relations, the difference between mixed motive and two-way symmetrical models disappears. In fact, describing the symmetrical model as a mixed motive games resolves the criticism that the symmetrical model forces the organization to sacrifice its interests to those of the public.” [Ibid, page 25]

Mixed motive communication then becomes a collaborative advocacy (the cooperative dance as Sandra Macleod likes to say) that defines what Grunig describes as a cooperative antagonism (which he accepts involves two-way asymmetrical communication as being inherent to the process).

Grunig’s philosophical pretensions

The idea Grunig posits as being practical and ethical is that all the players retain their uniqueness and self-interest in the process of negotiation. In support of this notion, Grunig calls for help from a leading Marxist semiotics and structuralist theoretician by the name of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin. He maintained that the essential quality of a dialogue is the simultaneous fusion or unity of multiple voices. However each voice retains its uniqueness and there’s an ongoing dynamic tension with and differentiation from the Other. It is from this understanding that Jim Grunig comes to redefine what public relations is about, thus:

“Simultaneous fusion with the Other while retaining the uniqueness of one’s self-interest seems to describe well the challenge of symmetrical public relations.” [Ibid, p28.]

This approach to PR supposedly draws on Kantian philosophy. This reminds us, in the tradition of humanism, that stakeholders (any humans, actually, rather than just those PRs define as being relevant to their purpose) are ends-in-themselves, rather than a means to an end. The views of the philosopher Jurgen Habermas are also cited in an attempt to give the model bottom. Habermas maintains that dialogue and not monologue is essential to mutual human understanding.

Grunig, in common with many PR thinkers, mistakenly believes that PR is about establishing mutual understanding between publics and their clients. Actually, PR is about advocacy on behalf of clients and achieving client objectives, something that achieving mutual understanding may or may not help. It isn’t necessarily necessary, for instance, that firms understand campaigners or campaigners understand firms. PR’s customers usually hope that – one way or another – their activities come to be accepted. They are dealing with real life challenges; not in a seminar. Nor is it all that obvious that a self-improving firm, anxious to be a good world citizen, should assume that it only has to get into an understanding with its critics to achieve its goal.

Anyway, Grunig has proposed that PRs, their clients and their opponents, retain a get out of jail card. He says that if after dialogue one side cannot accommodate the other it can disengage ethically from the symmetrical process. Of course, failure and the perception of the other side’s willingness to cooperate is a subjective matter. This joker in Grunig’s pack rather suggests that persuasion and getting one’s own way lie at the heart of his game-plan; at the end of the day by any means possible (within the law, of course). Indeed, Grunig tries to make a “virtue” of this motivation:

“…we have stated consistently that the symmetrical model serves the self-interest of the organization better than an asymmetrical model because ‘organizations get more of what they want when they give up some of what they want.’” [Ibid]

However where there’s a clash of seemingly irreconcilable forces over issues, such as pro- versus anti-abortionist, ditto nuclear power, ditto GMOs, and so on, Grunig’s symmetry runs aground. That’s because there really are fundamental differences in the opposing cases: these are existential and can’t be moderated away. Hence Grunig accepts that two-way PR becomes virtually impossible (except at the margins) when negotiating between two publics with diametrically opposed moral viewpoints. This is so with pro and anti-abortionists, for instance, or when anti-trust laws prevent collusion. So it is unfair to say that he is totally idealistic.

It is in the murky space where deals can be made that Grunig’s approach to PR becomes risky. Even when compromises can be reached, the obsession with engaging activists in a cooperative dance has very often eaten away at the values, self-confidence, self-belief, integrity and identity of organisations; as it did when BP said it had gone Beyond Petroleum (a change which was both skin-deep and corrosive).

Grunig, rightly in my view, says that persuasion is indeed what PRs do but that the persuasion of PRs cuts two ways:

“If persuasion occurs, the public should be just as likely to persuade the organization management to change attitudes or behavior as the organization is likely to change the public’s attitude of behavior.” [Ibid]

Sure, we can all agree that compromise is part of life. Compromise is necessary, and perfectly normal, regardless of the form or model of communication an organisation chooses to adopt. But allowing protesters or activist publics to set agendas risks persuading an organisation to give up something that is perfectly legitimate. Arguably this happened when Shell was persuaded to abandon dumping its Brent Spar oil platform deep at sea: the upshot was a less ecologically-sound solution. The regulator and the corporation had had the right idea in the first place and trust in both was eroded – not bolstered – by their giving in to emotionalism.

Contrary to what Grunig’s supporters say, the asymmetrical models of PR are not awful, if they are good descriptions of how different sorts of PR actually work. But they are a rather clumsy way of arriving at one idea (or ideal) of what PR excellence might be like: a symmetrical two-way process in which power is equal between the two parties, and so is the flow of argument and respect.

This begs many questions. It is indeed often wise for negotiators (which is what PRs are in the symmetrical two way process) to assume that the other party’s case is real and serious at least to the party which holds it. But that way lies relativism. It may be intellectually dishonest and dangerous in other ways too (for instance, assuming your opponent is rational and sincere may not be wise when she or he is idiotic, lying and or prone to terrorism). Such relativism, from left-wing critics of Grunig, led some PR academics to make excuses for terrorism, as if supposedly hegemonic asymmetrical PR were to blame:

“Yet we would also argue, in agreement with Deetz (1992) and Philo and Miller (2001), that Western corporate capitalism has succeeded in dominating the range of discourses, and indeed our material practices to such an extent that it is difficult for alternative discourses and practices to rise to any level of ascendancy without violence – as the 9/11 attack on the World trade Center demonstrated. Those attacks can be understood as an attempt to make America and Europe by attention to accumulated Muslim resentments against a history of western prejudice, exploitation, and anti-Muslim foreign policy in the Middle East”

[Source: "From propaganda to discourse", by Weaver, Motion and Roper in Critical perspectives in public relations; International Thomson Business Press, London, 2006]

The assumption here is that the “other side’s” claims are legitimate. It is also worth noting that no rational explanation has been given for 9/11 and that those that have been provided have been totally contradictory. Terrorism is nihilistic. It is not prone to rational explanation or interpretation. Blaming the West for 9/11 says more about the views of the PRs who make such comments than it does about the motivation of the terrorists.

Grunig is not the problem

I’m almost sorry to focus on Grunig. He is capable of nuance and anyway was not the instigator of the problem he is part of. Rather, he is the clearest in laying out his premises and arguments. His map of the PR dilemmas is the best we have. The kind of ideas which he outlines are indeed the kind which have become all too popular. The view that partisan PR – paid for by bosses of any sort – is unethical is widespread. Even critics of Grunig’s theories such as L’Etang share his distaste for positioning PRs as advocates:

“Only if practitioners engage with such [ethical and political] issues can they avoid the charges of superficiality and cynical exploitation of target audiences. The role of public relations itself is shown to be necessarily partisan and, furthermore, by operating on behalf of certain interests, intrinsically undemocratic…”

[L'Etang, J.  "Corporate responsibility and public relations ethics", in J. L'Etang and M. Pieczka, eds., Critical Perspectives in Public Relations; International Thomson Business Press, London, 1996, pages 82–105]

This quote and stance from L’Etang highlights the major problem within PR circles. It displays an intrinsic dislike of what PR is about: advocacy on behalf of clients. It also reveals a complete failure to grasp what democracy is about and where PR fits in. Democracy is all about the pursuit of self-interest on the part of certain interest groups. Democracy is merely the form and framework within which conflicts and different interests pursue their interests: it sets down the limits to how conflicts are fought and the means for resolving them legally and constitutionally, when persuasion does not settle the matter of its own accord etc..

None of the above should be taken as an inducement to firms to be anything other than morally alert. Contrariwise: my point is that firm should be more alert, not less. That’s why I put such a high value on truth-telling. The Financial Times‘s Martin Sandbu summed it up well in his recent piece (Aristotle – the banker’s best friend):

….moral philosophers have granted impunity to lazy thinking. And the result is a debate soaked in such inanities as “giving back to society” or putting “people before profit.” Fine phrases, but they mean little and in practice will achieve even less. Most attacks on business immorality conjure up villains in corporate boardrooms plotting their next evil deed. The real problem is harder. Most business people are like most people everywhere: wanting to do the right thing but confused about what the right thing is in a complex world.”

He goes on:

“… one may question whether corporate conduct must be justified by its social usefulness. Is business really responsible for the common good? Or is it enough to respect the rights of others while pursuing profits? To ask that question – surely a fundamental one – is to enter a big philosophical debate midstream, for which reading John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant is better preparation than any number of management books.”

Setting higher expectations

The real problem is, in my view, that PRs have struggled to talk sense about the world. They have endorsed many of Grunig’s premises, even when rejecting his theories. That’s because they share many of the protesters’ criticisms of modern society. Much of the Grunig and L’Etang take on the world has shifted subtly and resurfaced as stakeholder doctrine, CSR and sustainability mantras. One can read the narrative in Edelman’s Trust Barometer conclusions, and in initiatives such as the Stockholm Accords (see here here here here and here). It is an outlook which pretends that all stakeholders are equal. It is an arm of PR which claims organisations don’t serve their owners or founders or exist to fulfill their core purpose first and foremost.

My point is that PRs need to get beyond recommending to their clients that they outsource their reputations for NGO imprimatur. PRs should also stop advocating that firms and institutions redefine their social purpose to comply with NGO agendas (read soft-left, liberal and often anti-corporate activists). PRs should be helping firms and modern institutions establish their integrity and reputations based on their own merits. Instead of advising the likes of BP to rebrand themselves Beyond Petroleum, they should help them stand for something they really believe in, that reflects their core purpose, such as Better Petroleum.

I say PR’s paymasters should ask some tough questions. They should demand more from their highly-paid advocates. It is my argument that PRs have helped create the climate of cynicism and lack of confidence that so bedevils Western society. They have helped put it at a disadvantage to the BRICs by their failure to speak robustly and honestly to their publics. The PR industry’s leading academics have in a sense deprived the industry of what it really needs to be taken seriously as a profession: self-esteem and self-respect for its own contribution and that of its clients.

For instance, it has hardly been remarked upon by PRs that supposedly, according to Edelman’s Trust Barometer, China has the most trusted government on earth, its businesses are more trusted than the US’s and that Russian businesses are supposedly more trusted than France’s and Germany’s, or that the Russian government is as trusted as the UK’s (2010 findings) etc..

It is time Western PR got real. It is time it got beyond trying to construct trite idealised models. PRs should become less defensive and apologetic about managing the messy perceptions and realities that resound in our modern democracies. It is time that PR became part of the solution. It is time our trade grew up.

Note: this essay was inspired by a review of the best of 2010 PR books by Richard Bailey on his useful PR Studies blog.

Anybody wanting to know about my views on the issues above can read A Sorry State: Self-denigration in British Culture, edited by Peter Whittle, foreword by the historian Michael Burleigh, published by The New Culture Forum, November 2010. My essay there is entitled, “How public relations sells western firms short” (available from Amazon online).

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Story #1: “125,000 Death-toll”
The BBC, news agencies and other media reported in April and May 1995 that 125 000 people had already died as a direct consequence of the accident in Ukraine alone, according to the Ukrainian health ministry.  This was a lead item on BBC TV news and radio and the story was carried prominently in newspapers across the globe. It was a case of sloppy reporting with no verification of the facts.

The health ministry had actually said that 125,000 deaths in Ukraine represented the normal rate of loss one would expect in the nine years that had followed the accident among the millions of people defined as living in affected territories. Most of the deaths were from natural causes and among predominantly elderly people.

The World Health Organisation issued a special briefing report at that time to squash the reports. WHO clarified that the official toll from the accident remained 28 dead from acute radiation syndrome and 200 or so people (sick, not dead) with radiation burns from fighting the fires in April 1986; and 500 cases of thyroid cancer among potentially 3 million children living in the most affected regions.

The thyroid story was very important, because it seemed to play to the argument that Chernolbyl’s radiation had indeed been a huge horror story. Indeed, the figure for the thyroid cancer toll has now risen to 4,000, almost all of which were non-fatal.  It is true that incidence of thyroid cancers in children were higher than had been expected. One of the most interesting (and mostly rather reassuring) experts on Chernobyl’s cancer legacy, Keith Baverstock, has noted (1998) that Chernobyl had taught us that radioactive iodine was more carcinogenic than had been supposed. He added that the US and European atomic weapons programmes had put more of the stuff – and more danger – into the atmosphere than Chernobyl did. In 1995, he was perhaps the first Western expert to consider the thyroid issues.

One of their main points was that hysterical reports were causing real health problems among people living in affected territories by unnecessarily increasing anxiety and stress levels. (The IAEA produced also produced a useful little booklet.)

The then chairman of the BBC Marmaduke Hussey apologised to the British nuclear industry trade association for the publicising the story. He blamed the mistake on inaccurate wire reports from a journalist who misunderstood a quote from the Ukrainian Health Minister at a one-day seminar in Kiev. In fact, the Ukraine Health Minister issued statements to the media at that event in English and in Russian saying that deaths and cancers, such as leukaemia, resulting from the accident were not then detectable, beyond some already known thyroid cancers among children.

Hussey emphasised that: “it is not practicable to check every detail of dispatches sent by correspondents of reputable agencies”. (1, 2)

Story #2:  Remember Igor Pavlovets?
In May 1995, Igor, Child of Chernobyl, a highly promoted documentary made by Carlton for the Network First strand on the UK’s ITV reported the tale of Igor Pavlovets, born after the 1986 accident in Belarus with stumped legs and a missing arm. Publicity for the programme highlighted that over one million children were either deformed like Igor or harmed as a result of the accident. It quoted a survey of 500 children in Minsk which found only one healthy child – which may have been the case given the parlous state of the Belarus economy and health service in 1995. Actually, there was no evidence linking his problems to Chernobyl.

After the barrage of TV and newspaper coverage about Igor, the World Health Organisation pointed out that the average rate of deformities among children in Belarus was 2, 000 per year. WHO clarified that given the number of children born there each year, that was inline with rates found elsewhere in the world. (3, 4)

Story #3: The tale of the collapsing building

In March 1995, The Observer newspaper led with a story that was supposedly based on a leaked industry report that had been suppressed by the European Commission. The substance of the report, whose origins were never revealed, was that the supporting pillars of the then working Reactor 3 could collapse onto the Sarcophagus built over Reactor 4, because they shared common weakened foundations and supporting walls. The Observer quoted an unnamed expert saying “supporting pillars could burst at any time”, meaning that a working reactor would effectively crash into the remains of the 1986 accident. A new international-scale disaster threatened, The Observer said.

Following the March 26 report, many ambassadors from Kiev’s embassies made for the offices of Mikhail Umanets, the then Ukraine minister for nuclear facilities, demanding an urgent explanation. He told them that The Observer’s case that Reactor 3 shared common foundations or supporting walls with the stricken Reactor 4 was nonsense. Each reactor building was built at different times; each had its own foundations independent of the adjacent reactor. It was only a cosmetic façade that made the two buildings look from the outside like they were one building. In fact, there was still an operational railway line in the gap between the two reactors; and the service block situated between the two reactors was no more than the access route linking the two buildings together, above the railway line.

The Observer ran a follow up report. It claimed that as a result of its coverage the US Vice president Al Gore and Norway’s Prime Minister Gro Harlem Bruntland had placed the issue of western funding for Chernobyl high on the next G7 summit; held in Canada in June, 1995. Whether The Observer was a victim of industry or environmentalist lobbying remains a mystery. (5, 6)

References
1. Letter to Roger Hayes, the then director general of the British Nuclear Industry Forum, from Marmaduke Hussey, then chairman of the BBC, dated 20 June 1995
2. NucNet News No. 196/95, 10 May, 1995, reporting on a briefing document issued by the World Health Organisation’s Dr. Keith Baverstock.
3. The Times 1 June, 1995, by Nigel Hawkes, science editor,  Born under the cloud of Chernobyl
4. Sunday Times, 17 March 1996 by Steve Connor, Chernobyl: the fallout myth
5. The Observer 26 March, 1995, by Polly Ghazi (substantiated by the nuclear industry PR who accompanied her: me)
6. The Observer 30 April, 1995, by Polly Ghazi (substantiated by the nuclear industry PR who accompanied her: me)

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