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, husband of her stepmother who was also the old king’s sixth wife (this familial dalliance was taboo in both of England’s major 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. His pamphlet like the pageants he partly drafted was paid for by London’s commercial elite; the narrative 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?

He was Legal & General’s (L&G) chief press officer when he died in 1991, while telling a joke in the middle of a speech, aged 37.

At well over six-feet tall, thickset and broad-shouldered, Gordon was an imposing, yet gentle, character. His distinctive working class accent identified him as being from Glasgow’s Gorbals, a place Americans call the wrong side of the tracks. It, like the man himself, remained stubbornly unaffected throughout his career.

Gordon Macdonald, (1953 – 1991). Legal & General’s Chief Press Officer

Staying true to his roots, he befriended and supported homeless people and tramps he met on his travels. He had a habit of introducing them to his more well-heeled friends, not as objects of pity, but as valued members of his social circle. At the other end of the spectrum, he regularly danced the nights away with the Royals at Tramps in London’s Jermyn Street. Gordon also liked to party with Fleet Street’s hacks and to forge close links with newspaper owners, especially the Rothermere family. His other famous friends included performers such as Richard Harris, Spike Milligan, Mike Reid and Sir John Mills. Yet Gordon was not just a prominent socialite.

By his early thirties he had also become much more than a press officer. He was successful on the well-paid after-dinner and corporate speakers’ circuits. He was a mentor, serial risk taker and creative innovator of PR practice.

He mentored Mike Davies, now director of global communications at PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Tony McGarahan, PR’s very own Red-Adair-style extinguisher of corporate fires. And he mentored me, his deputy at the time of his death (see how Davies and McGarahan credit Macdonald’s important contribution to their success here and here).

Gordon understood that information and public relations were instruments of influence. He knew how to use his knowledge and talent to become a strategic power-broker within L&G. He was not given this elevated role officially. He just seized it. He defied rank and convention by always using the executive lift and toilets. When not holding court in Balls Brothers’ wine bar – known as his other office – Gordon ate in L&G’s executive dinning rooms. It was, he said, the gossip that he picked up in the lifts, toilets and bar that gave him the edge. The Board and senior management team came to trust his opinions. Increasingly, they sought his advice before making important decisions. In return, L&G gave him a licence to operate as he saw fit, warts and all.

After his death, I read the bulky file human resources kept on him. Gordon’s love of gin, wine, food and a good time – on the company credit card – was clearly legendary. Whenever anybody saw fit to complain about his expenses or demands, there was usually an additional note attached from the CEO or Chairman saying things such as settle all bills immediately, give Gordon what he wants. When somebody proposed taking disciplinary action against him for coming back from lunch late and drunk, there were more ‘witnesses’ prepared to say on the record that he was as sober as a judge (all charges were dropped). Gordon never got into serious trouble. Not even when L&G discovered he’d sponsored the kit of the Deal Rugby Club in the firm’s name without permission.

It amuses me to think how Gordon would have coped with today’s politically correct culture. It tickles me to imagine whether even Mike Davies would dare hire anybody like Gordon to represent PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2013. Sadly, I doubt it. That’s because in today’s tick-box world, something of the soul of our profession, and many others, has been lost.

The irony, of course, as recent corporate scandals suggest, is that we seem to be less morally- and ethically-driven today than in Gordon’s more tolerant and fun, not to mention more profitable, times. He certainly knew where to draw the line. For instance, I once sat with Gordon while he chewed to bits a more senior manager who tried to convince him to tell a lie in a press release to cover-up one of L&G’s mistakes. His invaluable reputation for trustworthiness among journalists and within L&G relied on such refreshingly robust candour.

There’s no doubt in my mind that, because of Gordon’s work, L&G punched above its weight in the media, particularly on front-pages of the tabloids. He even provoked The Sun to write an editorial praising L&G (his work with Spike Milligan had something to do with that). Indeed, L&G had a uniquely glamourous and populist, as in ‘the people’s trusted insurer’, image among traditional, some would say boring, insurance firms in the 1980s.

Gordon Heald, then managing director of Gallup, told me that it was Gordon Macdonald who taught Gallup the art of using opinion opinion surveys to promote corporate financial products in the UK. To cite just one example, Macdonald’s ‘price of a wife’ surveys – or, as The Daily Mirror put it, “how much does ‘er in doors cost if she drops dead and has to be replaced by a wage labourer ” – hogged the front pages of both tabloids and broadsheets. It was also Gordon Macdonald who introduced the umberella symbol that is still synomous with L&G’s image.

His early death was lamented in most of the nation’s major media, which was a remarkable feat for a PR man in his thirties. His midweek funeral attracted hundreds of mourners from all walks of life (including the Deal Rugby Club). The readings were given by the oscar-winning actor Sir John Mills, leading PR guru Roddy Dewe, co-founder of Dewe Rogerson, and by Lord Parry, a life peer of the realm.

So here, as inspiration to a new generation of PR professionals and for the benefit of us old ones, comes Lord Parry’s valedictory address, given at St Columba’s Church of Scotland, London, June 27, 1991.

Gordon Macdonald

There are those who know the answers to all the questions. They know about life. They know about death. They know which is the beginning and which the ending. I am not of their number.

My father was. He taught his own children in his home and other people’s children from his Welsh nonconformist chapel’s pulpit that life and death were equal and opposite parts of the same equation: that they were conjoined, added to, multiplied by love and that the whole process of which they were parts was divided, substracted from, diminsished by, the absence of love.

Whether or not we share my father’s religious confidence, it is life and death and love that have brought us together from all over Britain to this famous church, in this great city, at noon today.

It is the life and the death of and our love for Gordon Macdonald that multiply this congregation and unite us and we are all diminished by his passing from us.

But we would be unfaithful to the life that has brought us together if we allowed our grief at his death to dominate, to preoccupy us, either here or in the days ahead, because the whole purpose of our being here is to say “Thank You”, together, for all that this ordinary, most extraordianry, young man has given to us and – both in his daily work and in his, cruelly short, little lifetime of good works – to thousands of others, most of whom do not even know his name.

The first time that I heard the name Gordon Macdonald I was the Warden of the Pembrokeshire Teachers’ In-Service Education Centre at Haverfordwest. I was also – and one or two of you might find this harder to relate to – the Parliamentary Candidate of the Labour Party in Pembroke Constituency. My secretary, young enough herself to be interested, said: “There’s a young man to see you. He’s very big and he’s very good-looking. He says he’s from the Western Telegraph. He’s got a lovely Scottish accent. Can he come in?”

He did, of course, and that’s is why – 20 years later – I am in this pulpit today. Providence – and Herbert Thomas, the Editor of the Telegraph – had chosen Gordon Parry to be Gordon Macdonald’s first assignment as a journalist. Welsh though I was and am, I had been born on St. Andrew’s Day. He was brand new out of Glasgow. My daughter was his age.

We were friends in five minutes. Monday morning coffee time became our regular rendezvous.

In a sense, I lacked a son. Gordon was, temporarily, homesick. My wife and I became his “Welsh parents”. Mrs Macdonald and Glenys shared coddling. It’s not every press or PR man who has his annual Christmas cake baked and iced by Lady Parry of Neyland in the County of Dyfed; who has it delivered by the hand of a limping Life Peer of the Realm, and who then takes it with him on a a pre-Christams celebratory tour of the City and wakes the following morning to find it lying snugly alongside him in his cot. “The sweetest thing,” he claimed – probably with peotic licence and protecting his sources – “that I’ve ever had in my bed.”

Fleet Street, as it then was, beckoned young journalists. From the local weeklies of Pembrokeshire, John Edwards had made it to his own by-line on the feature pages of the national dailies. Hugh Whittow, John’s nephew, followed Uncle. Gordon found a happy, rewarding, half-way house for his personality and his growing skills as a communicator in the press office of Legal & General Assurance. Another Welsh father-figure, Emrys Wyn Owen, welcomed and guided him there. We Celts have learned to stick together when we go among the Anglo-Saxons.

In the same way most people collect trophies – souvenirs, stamps, autographs, money – Gordon collected people. Look around you. Look at me. Remember those whose bodies – for compelling reasons – could not be here but whose hearts and minds are. We are, all, the trophies of this young man’s lifetime. Apart from Gordon, we are so assorted a congregation as to have few things in common. Our common chord is that he found us interesting. He cherished good companions. While he was fascinated with and excited by the high and the mighty and all the arrogant energy of people of position, pomp and circumstance, ultimately, it was the person inside the ‘personality’ that he loved. Nor did it matter a scrap to him whether his friends actually held power, glory or wealth. Indeed, the murder of his rugby and music playing private soldier friends of the Royal Marines’ Band at Deal probably did as much as anything, literally, to break his caring heart.

Gordon knew, by instinct, and from his early beginnings in the less than salubrious quarter of Glasgow from which he came, that – as Montaigne said – “Every man is three things. He is what he thinks he is. He is what other men think that he is. He is what he really is.” Making the necessary asexual adjustments to that, in the post-chauvinist era, we know, don’t we, that, having explored what others thought of us, and teased out of us what we thought of ourselves, he stayed with us, whatever we really are.

And, at the same time, he was looking for himself. He was – with his journalistic skills, his zeal and energy for living, to help him – researching answers to those three questions that, in our quieter moments, perplex us all: “Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going to?”

Not too long ago, Gordon extended that research into fieldwork when he went back to Scotland. He’d already seen more of the world than he’d ever expected. A guest at the great tables at home and abroad; a talker; a listener; a surrogate son; a broad shoulder to lean on; a borrowed uncle and tutor-guide to the young on the grand tour of adolescence; a lecturer; an after-dinner speaker and master of the one-liner school of wit – Gordon Macdonald, the maturing man, was infinitely more worldly-wise than when he’d left Scotland for Wales

In Glasgow, he walked the streets of his childhood.

They’d changed as much as he had. In PR terms, and as he had, they’d “gone up market”. He was disappointed. Parking his car, he had tried to find the exact spot where the Macdonalds had once lived. In the City of European Culture, one lady took more than a passing interest in his movements.

“Wha’ ar’y'u doin?” she asked. “Wha’ar’yu wantin?” ”Im looking,” he answered, “for the place where I used to live.” ”Ach, y’u'll no’ find it,” she pronounced. “Everything’s changed aroun’ here.”

“No! Not everything, ma’am,” Gordon quipped, as he got into his car. “They’ve still got the nosey neighbours,” and he drove away fast.

It was in a quieter part of Scotland that he came closest to his birthright. On an off-shore island, he met a Macdonald of Macdonald. The old man became another trophy. In capturing him, Gordon recaptured something of himself.

He was, after all, a son of the essential Scotland. I almost said of the essence of Scotland. Gordon took an atavistic pleasure in the beautiful glens of his homeland. He loved Glenfiddich and Glenmorangie especially. A part of his savouring of the whole of the spirit of life, his taste for ‘Usquebaugh’ and his pursuit of those famous Old Grouse of the heather became legendary.

It was a source of delight for him that, of the four Patron Saints of Britain who, in mosaic, grace the arches of the Central Lobby of the Palace of Westminster, it is Saint Andrew who stands over the way to the Bar: not to the Bar of the House, nor to the Bar of Britain’s highest Court of Appeal, but to the Bar where the water and spirit of life flow, not free, but cheap enough, even for a Scotsman.

This son of Scotland, son of Mr and Mrs Macdonald, brother to Marie and Donald, and doting uncle to Ryan, was a borrowed son to me. He called my wife his ‘Welsh Mam’. He treated our daughter, Catherine, as another sister. In this congregation, Gordon has, posthumously, gathered his unique, extended family of the relationships of his lifetime and we are relative to one another because we related to him and he to us.

He brought many of us toghether. Emrys Wyn Owen – although his wife, Ruth, and I grew up simultaneously in Neyland; Roddy Dewe; Joe Palmer: Ted Tilley; Jimmy ‘The Muncher’ Waldron [he died in 2000 penniless leaving a bespoke wardrobe, a full ashtray and a bundle of memories]; the Murphys – John and Mike ; Susan Shaar; John McCarthy; Paul Seaman: the lovely, lively ageless Sir John and Lady Mills; the Harmsworth family of Rothermeres; the young Mottisons. We met when Gordon showed us off to one another.

Some of us went, together, to a Mansion House dinner of the Patten Makers’ Guild, Gordon’s Livery Company. We went – the men that is – in obligatory ‘white tie and tails’. The ladies wore emphatic designer dresses, they were bejewelled, their hair extravagantly coiffured. En route, they took a drink with me in the Peers’ Guest Room of the House of Lords. Their Lordships were impressed – some startled, even – by the splendour of their entry.

Lord Gladwyn – formerly the scholar-diplomat Sir Gladwyn Jebb – was actually impressed enough to raise one eyebrow. “What’s this, Parry?” he muttered to me at the bar. “Is it your Constituency Labour Party annual outing?” Gordon loved that.

He loved so much of life: its ironies, its inconsistencies, its casual calamities, the perpetual challenges of it all, the tears and, especially, the laughter through the tears. He triumphed in the triumphs of his friends just as he shared his own joys, his latest stories, his newest experiences of life, with them.

If you’ve ever read Matthew Arnold’s epic, narrative poem Sohrab and Rustum, you will understand why I re-read it in preparation for this moment. You’ll recall that Rustum was a mighty warrior. You’ll know that he dearly wanted a son and that his wife hid the birth of the boy, Sohrab, from him, telling him that she’d had a baby girl, for fear that the son would follow in his father’s dangerous footsteps. You’ll understand the poignancy and the relevance, the dramatic irony, of Sohrab and Rustum’s finally meeting in combat to the death and learning their relationship too late to avoid the son – with so much living still in him – dying, while the father – tiring of it all – survived. His grief led Rustum to wish to die with his dying son. But Sohrab commanded his father to take a much more difficult path: to accept the sterner discipline of life and even greater responsibilities of love by re-entering the equation rather than exiting from it. Sohrab could have been speaking for Gordon and to us this afternoon. He said:

Do thou the deeds I die too young to do
And reap a second glory in thine age.

There was, too, that ‘druid of the broken body’ and scribe of our Celtic twilight, Dylan Thomas. He was in his thirties when his death tumbled him. Who knows what poems unwritten, went with him? For years he had stretched his talent to his ‘craft’, his ‘sullen art’ writing of life and death and love.

Rabelaisian, taking all living at the full, he’s been mistaken for a pagan poet but he was not. There was in him – as there was in Gordon Macdonald – a love, almost a lust for life, as if he knew that there wasn’t much of it left to savour.

When His friends asked the 32-year-old and about to die Jesus of Nazareth what was the most important discipline of the law, He answered:

This is my commandment, that you love one another

Gordon Macdonald lived and died by that and Dylan Thomas left, for our comfort, the assuring, reassuring lines:

Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion. 

Lord Parry’s eulogy ends.

An appeal from Zurich

We ought to honour Gordon Macdonald’s memory in the 21st Century. He, at least, deserves to have named after him a prestigious annual award for creative and innovative inhouse PR practice by young practitioners. So, if there’s anybody out there with the power and the will to make this happen: please, immortalise Gordon’s legacy.

I sparked controversy by criticising Public Relations Ethics: Contrasting Models from the Rhetorics of Plato, Aristotle, and Isocrates, by Charles W. Marsh Jr, University of Kansas professor of journalism. The response took me by surprise. This piece, then, is a follow-on contribution. It covers what I would have liked to have said had I had more time and been better prepared.

Marsh asks us to believe in the superiority of Isocrates’ ethical and moral approach to communication compared to his contemporaries. He contrasts what he calls the adversarial/advocacy rhetoric of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle to the supposedly more symmetrical and consensual communication techniques developed by Isocrates:

Because Isocratean rhetoricians seek unification and consensus—and because they cannot be certain of a divinely ordained best course of action—they consider the interests and arguments of others in a debate [unlike Aristotle or Plato]. …. the Isocratean rhetorician seeks to attain goals by building relationships in which both parties win. [All quotes from Marsh are from his paper Public Relations Ethics: Contrasting Models from the Rhetorics of Plato, Aristotle, and Isocrates.]

My purpose here is not to provide a comparative analysis of rhetorical rivals. It is to interrogate Marsh’s claims. To set the scene, here are some more quotes that highlight how he wishes to frame Isocrates’ significance and relevance to the modern world:

Isocrates created a moral, symmetrical rhetoric that proved to be more effective, immediately and historically, than its asymmetrical rivals in classical Greece.

He adds:

It [public relations] can, instead [of its Socratic habits], function admirably (in the several senses of that verb phrase) by following the foundation of Isocratean rhetoric: “to form a genuine ‘we’ out of diversity”.

He concludes:

Recent studies, in fact, support what Isocrates demonstrated and, 2 millennia later, the IABC Research Foundation posited that two-way symmetrical public relations, with its idealistic social role, is the most effective model of public relations.

Bold claims indeed. But do they stand up to scrutiny? I think not. There are a number of good reasons to temper our enthusiasm and moderate our praise for Isocrates.

First off, we know more about Isocrates’ criticisms of his rivals for business in the 4th century BC than we know about his actual theories and thinking on rhetoric. As George Law Cawkwell, an Oxford classicist who specialises on the 4th century BC, explains:

Unfortunately, his [Isocrates'] discussion in the speeches “Against the Sophists” and in “On the Exchange” tells one more of what he objected to in other systems than of what he actually had in his own, but it can be safely asserted that, whereas the training of the Platonic Academy was essentially philosophical, that of Isocrates was almost entirely given over to rhetoric, the art of persuasion. [See his briefing at the Latin Library on Isocrates (436-338 BC)]

Nevertheless, we know an awful lot about Isocrates’ politics and his contemporary reputation. We also know much about his work as an adviser and teacher. As Cawkwell goes on to opine and justify:

There is indeed a strong suspicion that Isocrates would lend his talents to any cause whatsoever, merely for the pleasure of presenting it well. The so-called Cyprian orations—”To Nicocles” (c. 372), the “Nicoles” (c. 368), and the “Evagoras” (c. 365)—are concerned with the laudations of monarchs, while the “Archidamus” (366) puts into the mouth of the heir to one of the Spartan kings a speech full of praise for Sparta and Spartanism. One is correspondingly less impressed when in the “Panegyric” and “Panathenaic” orations he professed admiration for Athens. Such exaltation of style and indifference to matter is contemptible, and, insofar as his purpose in his system of education appears to have been to train others to a similar facility, he can hardly escape the censure he accorded to other rhetorical schools. [Ibid]

In contrast to the progressive picture Marsh paints, Isocrates was no friend of radical democracy, or of the consensus, reconciliation and unmediated co-existence it depended on:

Isocrates did have beliefs, however, some of which are revealed in “On the Areopagus,” composed at the end of the Social War, when Athens’ fortunes were at their lowest for 50 years. In this work he commends the ancient constitution of Athens, under which the aristocratic council of the Areopagus exercised a general supervision over the conduct of citizens. Isocrates’ proposals for returning to the system in operation before the days of democracy were not practical but display profoundly conservative inclinations. [Ibid]

Cawkwell also describes how Isocrates sought to unite the warring Greeks by force, seemingly without regard for the merits and morality of whomever might end up in charge:

…in the letter “To Philip”, Isocrates appealed to the King of Macedonia to reconcile the Greeks and lead them against Persia. Since Philip was on the point of intervening in Greece to settle the Second Sacred War (355-346), many have believed that Isocrates was prepared to submit his country to an outside master.

This is unjust, for Isocrates, a political innocent, had only the vaguest idea of what the consequences of such a policy might be. He had in fact made earlier similar appeals to Agesilaus, king of Sparta, to Dionysius I, tyrant of Syracuse, and to Alexander, tyrant of Pherae in Thessaly, none of whom could conceivably have become political master of Greece. The truth is that Isocrates was seeking merely a military leader. [Ibid]

This credible account makes it very difficult for me to accept Marsh’s admiration for Isocrates. It encourages me to think of Iscocrates as an unworldly political thinker. He also comes across as a flexible and rhetorical (PR) gun for hire to the highest bidder. That’s not anything I object to in principle.

The evidence just does not seem to support the claim that Isocrates put the practice of rhetoric (read PR) on to the moral and ethical high ground. Therefore, when an influential and credible professor of journalism stridently promotes Isocrates’ legacy as a role model for developing excellence and best PR practice in the 21st century, I think we need to debate an alternative viewpoint.

Marsh published his paper in 2001, so he had no chance to ponder a more recent source that casts fresh doubt on Isocrates’ moral and ethical credentials (at least in terms we moderns can appreciate).

In 2006, Joseph Stewart Garnjobst published The epistles of Isocrates: A historical and grammatical commentary, which critiques nine surviving letters by Isocrates.

What’s really fascinating about Garnjobst’s thesis is its account of how Isocrates used opportunistic psychological tricks to get inside the minds of prospective clients. He reveals, studiously, how Isocrates positioned himself symmetrically with the existing prejudices and practices of potential customers. He examines how Isocrates greased the egos of monarchs, tyrants and others to win business. He does so verb by verb, line by line to demonstrate how Isocrates spun his texts and messages. In the process, Garnjobst provides insight into Isocrates’ hubris. The sage appeals to potential patrons as one great man talking to others, and he never forgets to name drop, sometimes dishonestly, or to boast of the extent of his self-claimed influence.

Here is one example from nine, Isocrates’ letter seeking paid-work from a newly installed dynast, Timotheus son of Clearchus, in the city-state Heracleia (c 346 BC). Garnjobst examines the underlying meaning of the words used in the context of the challenges faced by both men:

While pleasure is a personal indulgence, virtue and reputation are to Isocrates public matters, since their attainment must take place in the eyes of the people. Thus the pursuit of virtue would fall into the realm of important things and therefore topics suitable for his [Isocrates'] speeches, which he charterizes as sumbouleutic, whereas he leaves personal matters to writers of epideictic and dicanic speeches [he means anybody in the Aristotlian camp or any other competitors among the sophists]. His pursuit of virtue marks Timotheus out as a person with similar thoughts and interests as Isocrates, and a person suitable to receive advice and education. It is this reason, Isocrates suggests, and not merely familial exenia [Greek term for already existing guest friendship] that motivates him to write to the young dynast.

That Timotheus has distanced his regime from his father will, Isocrates suggests (though it will also sound like a warning), make him a favorite of orators and encomiasts looking to the new dynast for patronage for their facile speeches praising his kindness and wisdom. While this was almost certainly true, what it also suggests is that Thimoeus will be lacking in true advisors [author's italics], those such as Ioscrates who will give him honest advice about the most important matters governing dynastic rule.

Isocrates is appealing for patronage. In return, Isocrates says he can help Timotheus develop the reputation he requires to assert effective control over the polis. We can easily imagine how Timotheus’ authority and legitimacy were cast into doubt by the brutal record of his father’s rule. It is said that, among other outrages, Clearchus delighted in giving people drinks laced with wolf’s-bane, which resulted in their prolonged and painful deaths. In turn, Isocrates is obliged to squirm. He had once been Timotheus’ father’s adviser and educator. In the letter, Isocrates explains how he disowned him once he saw his true character (perhaps that former relationship was what made Isocrates an influential guest-friend of Timotheus).

So, as I assessed Isocrates for this piece, I came to appreciate the principled integrity and famed obstinacy of Socrates. He, unlike Isocrates whose fees were higher than any of his competitors, refused to accept any money for educating people. Socrates thought that the taking of fees encouraged the educator to pander to students’ prejudices, rather than do what they’re meant to do, which is challenge them. It strikes me that Garnjobst’s book highlights an example of the moral dilemma that justified Socrates’ stance in Classical Greece.

Now let’s interrogate some more arguments that Marsh presents in support of his claims.

He accuses Aristotle of being amoral for saying rhetoric is the art of discovering the successful means of persuasion in any given situation. He says that’s not an acceptable ethical position. He proposes instead that rhetoric itself has to be an ethical discipline. Indeed, the whole point of his paper is to argue that Isocrates showed the world how to make it so. But this risks misunderstanding both Aristotle and rhetoric. If I read it correctly, Aristotle says it is the user who needs to be ethical. Rhetoric (read PR), on the other hand, is merely a tool, which can be used for good or for bad purposes. I suggest that Aristotle was concerned primarily with human agency (For me, it was this very concern that underpinned Classical Greece’s uniqueness, making it so significant in terms of human progress).

What we also need to bear in mind is that Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and, arguably, Protagoras, invented modern ethics, as well as the modern notions of virtue, rational discourse/conversation and philosophical inquiry.

I believe that Marsh similarly underestimates Aristotle’s depth when he dismisses his understanding of ethos. What he fails to mention is that ethics derives from the word ethos; literally meaning character. Therefore I suggest Marsh is wrong to say that “with Isocrates rhetoric is gradually transformed into ethics”, not least because ethos (ethics) is just one important part of rhetoric. And, surely, Aristotle was right to say that character can be faked and audiences misled by clever masters of rhetoric.

I contend, Aristotle’s contribution to the field of ethics, rhetoric and democracy (whose defining principle he said was freedom), to mention just a few of his claims to fame, deserves more respect and care than Marsh shows.

Furthermore, Marsh would have us accept that Isocrates validates, convincingly, Professor Jim Grunig’s preferred two-way symmetrical model of public relations. Again, I think there are good reasons to dispute this.

To substantiate his point, Marsh’s paper discusses Plato’s use of the theme of love to describe three different approaches to conducting philosophical discourse: the evil lover; non-lover; and noble lover.

According to Marsh’s account, the evil lover reduces his lover to an object fit for the chase. This involves conquest by seduction, or by any means possible, including lies and deception. For the evil lover, the ends justify the means. This is a model that in PR terms, says Marsh, fits Jim Grunig’s two-way asymmetrical model, a form of rhetoric (read PR) that advocates selective truth telling on behalf of clients.

The non-lover lacks passion and lacks a personal motivation, when it comes to developing a relationship with his “loved” one. Therefore, such people are largely indifferent as to whether their courting is successful. Marsh says, this model discussed by Plato corresponds to Grunig’s public information model of public relations, in which organisations deliver objective information to publics that request it. Marsh suggests, not unreasonably, that the premises of the ‘non-lover’ approach, when applied to PR, are flawed because it presupposes that, “the organization makes no other attempt at relationship building.”

The noble lover is Plato’s preferred framework for practicing ethical rhetoric, or more precisely philosophical discourse. Here the lover begins with a firm viewpoint (says Marsh), is sincerely interested in the outcome, and desires to impart his knowledge with a view to improving or ennobling his beloved in some form. In the words of Plato, noble lovers “exhibit no jealousy or meanness toward the loved one, but endeavour by every means in their power to lead him to the likeness of the god whom they honour.”

He critiques and dismisses the usefulness of Plato’s preference for the noble lover “model” for “PR purposes.” Marsh justifies his conclusions by arguing (mistakenly, in my view) that Plato envisages imposing viewpoints on others, rather than discussing them so as to fathom what is mere opinion and what qualifies as being more reliable than that. He then claims that Isocrates put forward a new definition of Plato’s noble-lover model, which prized relationship-building and obtaining unification and consensus in contrast to the latter’s supposedly uncompromising rhetoric.

However, Marsh advances scant evidence to back his claim that Isocrates offers us (never mind the ancients) something of unique value when it comes to insight and defining excellence in PR (or rhetorical) practice. He merely quotes Isocrates saying that good judgement (balancing the interests and arguments of others in debate) rather than science, or a search for illusory absolute truths, should guide people toward the best course of action. But that is the kind of wise viewpoint that Aristotle could also be cited expressing.

What I think Marsh has overlooked is that when Plato was discusing his “lover” tropes, he was talking about motivations as part of a wider body of thought. He was concerned with abstract matters, which I don’t pretend to fully comprehend. These include a critique of relativism, an examination of the relationship between nomos and phusis, and the difference between appearances and reality. Plato was also probing the boundaries between ethics, epistemology and metaphysics. He was attempting to define justice in a consistent manner and to spot universally applicable morals (something Kant was to do much later). It’s worth adding, I think, that all of theses debates, which were begun by Socrates, then developed by Plato and Aristotle, remain ongoing. I note also that while Isocrates was an incredibly astute and insightful thinker, he contributed little of substance – that we know of – to such debates.

Contrariswise: Grunig’s models, which describe one-way communication, public information conduit, aysmmetrical and symmetrical communication, have nothing whatever to do with philosophical issues or with ideas. They are merely process-driven tactical and/or strategic options that institutions can adopt for communication purposes in pursuit of their objectives (see New Moral Agenda for PR for my appraisal of Grunig’s models).

Here’s another example, highlighting how and why I tend to disagree with the popular modern portrayal of Plato in PR circles:

Two problems with Platonic rhetoric, however, have impeded its progress over time: the near impossibility of ascertaining absolute truth and the rhetoric’s aggressive intolerance of opposing viewpoints.

Regardless of whether one agrees with Plato’s philosophical conclusions or not (and to be clear, I reject them), both of Marsh’s objections are vulnerable to informed challenge.

Plato was not intolerant of opposing views. Moreover, in the the spirit of Socrates, Plato would be more likely to ask people what they think and then to get them to interrogate their own arguments, than to say what he thinks. To understand Plato better, the work of the now departed Alvin W Gouldner, Max Weber Professor of Sociology at Washington University (from 1967), is worth citing:

The dialectic [Plato's method of inquiry] is a struggle of minds. It is a contestful way of achieving “truth”. It is congenial to those who think of it – as the Greeks do of aletheia [disclosure] - as that which is non-concealed or forgotten, or as something without deceit. The would-be knower, therefore, does not simply arrive at or find truth, but engages in a struggle to vanquish and to remove the concealment and distortion by which it is assumed truth has been disguised by other persons or forces.  [Enter Plato, Classical Greece and the Origins of Social Theory, page 261, by Alvin W Gouldner, Basic Books Inc. New York, 1965]

Unless I’m mistaken, neither did Plato believe that he had discovered absolute truth, though he was firmly committed to looking for it. He advocated that the way to find it was to engage in dialogue; through a contest of minds. And, significantly, he was not an opponent of two-way communication or of rational discourse: he was their proponent. For him, the commitment to the search for truth was the key to ascertaining whether people entering into debate were behaving in an ethical fashion or not. As Gouldner explains:

The search for truth requires that individuals commit to it, and this above all is the sentiment needed for successful dialectic. Men must want to know the truth more than they must wish to win or to be judged victorious in the conversational contest. [ibid page 262]

In essence, Plato believed in the existence of absolute truth in a similar manner to how religious people believe in an all-knowing God. Plato was unsure that humans would ever come to know the truth. He was absolutely certain that he didn’t possess a monopoly on it. Just like Socrates, Isocrates and Aristotle, Plato campaigned against the eristic rhetoric of the sophists. Though, personally, I think it is neither fair nor useful to talk about the sophists (it became, I suspect, a term of abuse for rivals you don’t like) as if they were a coherent group. They were no such thing. So, perhaps overstating his point, Plato accused all, or at least most, sophists of being lovers of fame who were addicted to winning arguments for winning’s sake.

Hence, I could conclude, ironically, that Plato’s thinking validates Grunig’s account of what constitutes excellence in PR practice in the 21st century. I prefer to suggest, however, that we must do better than make superficial ahistorical comparisons between the past and the present. We would  profit more by examining the development of communication theory and practice from a sociological and historical perspective (I note in passing that Grunig’s models were devised for use in our mediated world, whereas Classical Greece was mostly an unmediated environment based on peer to peer communication. I find that a significant difference).

Let’s examine Marsh’s assessment of Isocrates some more.

He maintains that unlike Plato, Isocrates did not believe that there was a “divinely ordained best course of action”. That’s not exactly accurate. In Isocrates’ second speech concerning Nicocles, written for the king to communicate what he expects from his subjects, we get an insight into how Isocrates thought that democratic consensus had led the Greeks away from the natural (best) order of things:

He criticized democracies and oligarchies whose rivalries injure the commonwealth. These governments honor those skilled in swaying the crowd, but the monarch claimed he honors those skilled in practice. In war situations monarchy was considered more efficient. Isocrates noted that the gods live under a monarchy. [see here]

I also find it hard to accept the proposition that Isocrates seriously advocated open and free two-way communication, or that he was ever committed to consensus building in a meaningful manner. In his first letter to Nicoles himself, Isocrates advises the king to:

Allow freedom of speech to men of sound wisdom, that you may have friends who will help you to examine any questions on which you may be in doubt. Distinguish those who artfully flatter from those who loyally serve, that the wicked may not get the better of the good. [see here]

I take that to mean that the king must choose whom he trusts. The views of the others, we can suppose, are to be silenced or ignored. In contrast, elsewhere in the poleis of Classical Greece freedom of speech was for everybody. All citizens were considered equal (of course, women, slaves and foreigners were not citizens). Everybody was active in politics and no separate state or state institutions existed within the polis. This equality of voice and decision-making often led to the aristocracy, much to Plato’s anger, being marginalised in the public arena as the poor and middle united against them. Meanwhile, when we talk today about consensus, reconciliation, two-way dialogue and the symmetry of rights (justice: dikaiosune), we normally mean democracy and freedom, not kings – the asymmetrical rule of one over the many – restricting free speech.

So, I maintain that Isocrates was a reactionary by comparison to the spirit that defined the freedom-loving radical democracies in Classical Greece. I also find it hard to think of him as being a suitable role model for us either. However, we know, Plato was democracy’s most potent opponent, not Isocrates, who strikes me as having been on the side of whomever paid him (I don’t think my earlier defence here of Plato collapses because of this challenging fact. That explains why Plato remains so significant and hard to comprehend in the 21st century, I suspect).

As this piece ends, it’s useful to briefly review Isocrates’ impact on Roman rhetoric. Marsh claims:

Cicero and Quintilian could not afford ineffective rhetoric. Their clear preference for the symmetrical rhetoric of Isocrates is its most compelling endorsement.

That view does not correspond with my reading. I suggest, Cicero did not favour Isocrates over Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, or over any other rhetorician. Though I do accept that Cicero did say in his treatise Brutus that the high point of Greek oratory was Isocrates. But we should not read too much into this. Cicero was referring to his admiration for Isocrates’ eloquence and his ability to master sound and rhythm, a crowd-pleasing rhetorical skill that Cicero sought, with much success, to emulate. Yet when it came to taking sides, or to preferring one rhetorical methodology over another, Cicero was too much of a politician to fall into such traps.

In De Oratore, Cicero’s masterpiece on rhetoric, he argues against the one-sidedness of the neo-Atticists who favoured abandoning persuasion for arbitrary critical perfection. Cicero countered that the best orators had to be expedient. In De Oratore, he says over and over that rules and theories are inadequate guides to rhetorical practice. Cicero maintained that personal experience matters much more than theories and models. He believed that orators (read PR pros, politicians, priests in the modern context) needed to be masters of all rhetorical methodologies and styles, and to know when to employ each.

The classicist George Kennedy nails Cicero’s wiliness. In Kennedy’s many books on rhetoric, he explains how Cicero possessed the nouse to maximise existing materials and opportunities. He says that Cicero had the imagination to invent totally new concepts and to break with the past. In other words, Cicero plundered the Greek’s contribution to rhetoric in a very instrumental manner.

Though I feel obliged to say that I share Marsh’s admiration for Cicero’s contribution to the development of philosophy, political and ethical values, the concept of public service (duty), and much more.

Having not examined Quitantilian’s work, I have nothing to say about his views on Isocrates. However, I do wish to draw people’s attention to what Cato said about Isocrates’ legacy. He complained that students from the school of Isocrates wasted so much time on education that they had to use their knowledge to plead before Minos in the underworld.

So, where does all this leave us?

Marsh invites us to believe that Isocrates laid the “effective foundation for [modern] public relations” and that ”history shows that Isocrates’s symmetrical rhetoric clearly was more effective than its adversarial/advocacy rivals.” He also wants us to accept that Isocrates demonstrated that ”effective, achievable ethics foundation for public relations need not function at the relatively low level of the advocacy/adversarial society model.”

I beg to differ.

And, second, why did anyone anywhere near the top of a journalistic organisation nurture the idea that Newsnight’s investigation could disappear merely because it wasn’t broadcast? I think the answers to both questions are typically BBC, and especially as it now is. And so we get to a third question: didn’t the BBC see that the Chinese walls of rectitude might become the silos of self-destructive departmentalism?

Jimmy Savile’s image

The BBC seems to me to be run by over-educated aparatchics of the liberal elite who have tripped up over their clip-boards. They’d got their precious process and accountability and integrity so battened down, they couldn’t spot an enormous shit-storm as it headed toward them. One might say that they had so organised themselves as never to have another Andrew Gilligan or a Russell Brand that they could not see an enormous Jimmy Savile.

Of course, I don’t know for sure. I’m not there and I don’t see the BBC close-up at any level above receptionists, more or less larky researchers and interns, gofer junior producers, and the occasional glimpse at more or less leathery or wary presenters. Sometimes by chance or in the distance I see senior producers and executives and they have never, so far, failed to unimpress. I see how an Evan Davis (“Built In Britain”) or a Stephanie Flanders (“Masters of Money”) can break out and set a real style and say something quite or very real: a strong personality can poke through the miasma. And the miasma is not frightful or wicked, it’s just a bit ho-hum and a turn-off. I can see how a generational change will work well, and that may be all that’s needed: time. But I do still think the whole institution needs to be dumped.

I have for several years believed that we ought to “Scrap the BBC!” (the title of my book along those lines). Oddly, it’s no fun watching the BBC’s upper reaches reveal themselves as clots. I do sourly note that they’ve never done me any favours. More loftily I do think they have not been good for the BBC or broadcasting. But more to the point of my book: I wonder if the problem of the rule by clip-board is an inevitable function of what I dislike about the BBC as an institution. You see, I am not very interested in how the BBC happens to be run at the moment; but in whether an over-regulated, poll tax-funded behemoth could ever be run well.

That the present clip-boards are in charge fits well with the BBC’s structure and role, but is such ghastliness in one form or another inevitable until we stop cosseting and corseting such a beast?

The answer to that question is probably, yes. In other words, whether one sacked or kept Entwhistle, Rippon and Patten (and whether one lauded Thompson or not) the BBC would remain an over-mighty, smug, pseudo-dissident redundancy from another age. Indeed, I am inclined to leave the BBC’s top brass exactly where they are. They are adept at learning mantras and new tricks: they’ll learn fairly decent responses  to their present predicament. And leaving them in place would have the merit of denying scalps to the media and our silly Select Committees (heaven forfend I should ever see them so).

By the way, it is fairly easy to see how Jimmy Savile got away with his behaviour. Crucially, as many people have noted, he hid in plain sight. But it is important that NHS people assumed Savile must be alright if the BBC thought he was; and the BBC thought he must be alright if the NHS thought he was. Since I’d like to see the back of both monoliths, I might make a cheap point here. I won’t, because it is more important to note that it is terribly easy for different worlds to misunderstand each other and let good sense slip down the gaps between them. That kind of thing could happen, even if we grow out of state-sponsored corporatism, unless people keep asking themselves very awkward, worldly-wise questions (whilst not becoming cynical – and that’s not an easy trick: BBC Moral Maze).

I think there are very strong elements in the writing on this subject from Peter Oborne (good on BBC clip-boardery), Matthew d’Ancona (good on Savile’s playing institutions against each other), and Simon Jenkins (good on the absurdity of some modern inquiries in The Jimmy Savile witch-hunt sets us on a path to paranoia). I disagree with bits of their differing analyses, but take great comfort from our having such stuff.

It is not my intention here to take sides in this gruesome dispute, neither with the company versus its workers nor with the ANC, which some think wants to nationalise the mine for its own purposes (see: FT‘s Mining code troubles South Africa investors), versus Lonmin. I want to talk instead about Lonmin’s corporate website, which reads as if it were promoting a mine somewhere in Western Europe rather than in troubled South Africa. And I want to issue a warning against the dangers of moral grandstanding that is all too common in South Africa.

It shouldn’t require much explanation. The realities in South Africa are the realities of post-apartheid successes and failures. It is increasingly a reality dominated by frustrated discussion and protest that rants against the slow pace of change.

South Africa might be a regional power, but on a world-scale the country remains economically and socially backward. There is unquestionably mass and escalating anger directed at the corruption and abuses of power by the country’s elite; including the behaviour of the likes of the miner’s union leader Cyril Ramaphosa, an ANC NEC member and director of Lonmin.

Meanwhile, South Africa is keen to position itself as setting the global standard in terms of promoting the merits of “triple bottom line” obligations and reporting. For example, the country’s King III  report, which governs corporate governance and compliance practices on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, is rated by many as being world leading (see here and here).

So the South African government wants to be known as the master of a slick, progressive, pro-people and environmentally friendly operation. And to this end, it has signed-up to a large dose of politically correct and misleading codswallop. This puts Lonmin in a difficult position. In other words, Lonmin has to be seen to back the government’s apparent objectives by creating some hype around the firm’s supposed progress in meeting them, well ahead – I imagine – of its own belief that it has succeeded.

In its attempt to keep in the good books of the ANC, Lonmin’s website deploys almost every known PR CSR and sustainability mantra. It is loaded with talk of stakeholder engagement and partnering, KPIs, balanced scorecard metrics, system and management measurement procedures for monitoring progress. It reels the rhetoric off in a language that’s at the leading-edge of reporting tick-box criteria and promoting modern notions of what PRs advocate as being the very best ideal practice.

Lonmin’s 81-page 2011 Sustainability Report tells how the company’s sustainability efforts are rated 3^rd by Sustainability Services for GRI (Global Reporting Initiative) performance and excellent by Ernst & Young (see here). Lonmin’s website is filled full with smiling pictures of workers, glowing reports of the firm’s progress achieving worker empowerment; clumsy language I find perplexing because of its ambiguous meaning. However, with respect to Lonmin, that language emanates from the ANC’s laws.

The company pushes everything too far. Lonmin’s website flaunts the firm’s promise to aim for zero environmental impact, which, never mind any laws saying otherwise, is an impossibility in the mining business. It even talks about making a sustainable peace with its workforce as if that incantation added something to its credibility in the negotiating process.

In short, the website is self-indulgent, self-congratualtory and addicted to PC terminology. It is keen to tell its readers of its numerous – perhaps, sometimes, real – achievements. But the balance between achievement and ongoing problems is all wrong. Here’s an example from a section discussing the firm’s progress empowering historically disadvantaged Africans, entitled our performance highlights, which trivalizes the challenges Lonmin faces:

We have met and exceeded our target of 40% of designated groups represented in management with 43.3% of designated groups in management.

In collaboration with the International Finance Corporation we have published a guide to integrating women into the workforce. This guide is aimed at the mining industry at large and has informed our approach to women in mining.

The number of women in the workforce has increased by 52% since the start of the Lonmin-International Finance Corporation Women in Mining programme in 2007.

Challenges

Our principal risk is the possible withdrawal of our Mining Licences resulting from failure to deliver commitments made in our SLP regarding training and empowerment of our employees and communities.

We had three reported incidents of sexual harassment and four incidents of discrimination.

The inter-union dispute between the new Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) and the established National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), and the strike itself, clearly reveal a more chaotic backdrop than a few cases of harassment and discrimination. Though elsewhere the company’s website does highlight other serious ongoing issues (particularly here), such as the failure to meet its housing, health and safety targets and its struggle to meet myriad requirements set by the South African state.

But Lonmin’s nuances (whether purposely or not) are lost in the website’s front-end self-satisfied hype. That’s a real PR problem because the impression it leaves is one of lack of probity.

Hence, I want to talk about the difficult challenge of setting realistic expectations in difficult circumstances. I want to issue a note of caution to Lonmin and to similar firms in similar challenging locations.

My advice? Keep it real. Keep the tone moderate. Don’t over-blow successes because it generates moral hazard in the form of high expectations you are unlikely to be able to satisfy. So (if it can be avoided; and if not get the message out why) don’t rush to adopt or get over-excited by codes of practice such as King III . Put another way, be very wary of codes of practice designed to serve propaganda purposes; one’s merely designed to make it appear on paper that your country’s or firm’s standards are (or realistically aspire to be) higher than those in Europe and the US.

Talk instead about issues in a way that people on the ground anywhere can genuinely relate to as work in progress (as Lonmin at least does here in its fact sheet responding to latest developments). That way any real achievements made will stand out as being credible.

Vision 2050 identifies 350 milestones, of which 40 are described as “must haves”, that will allow the world to produce enough food, clean water, sanitation, shelter, mobility, education and health to provide for 9 billion humans (two more billion than today).

The report (by 29 leading global companies from 14 industries in dialogue with 200 companies and stakeholders) says that to create this sustainable world we must first negotiate some tough hurdles:

“These include incorporating the costs of externalities, starting with carbon, ecosystem services and water, into the structure of the marketplace; doubling agricultural output without increasing the amount of land or water used; halting deforestation and increasing yields from planted forests: halving carbon emissions worldwide (based on 2005 levels) by 2050 through a shift to low-carbon energy systems and improved demand-side energy efficiency, and providing universal access to low-carbon mobility.”

Vision 2050 calls on governments and business to write new rules for markets that reframe environmental challenges as economic challenges, driving innovation and competition toward sustainability and away from resource- and energy-intensive production. It adds its collective multi-corporate voice to the campaign that wants market prices rationalized to take account of externalities such as climate and biodiversity impacts.

In other words, WBCSD’s Vision 2050 promotes the viewpoint that over the next forty years, corporate environmental efficiency must become a competitive advantage across all industries and regions of the world.

How to interrogate this stuff from an independent PR perspective? Sceptically, I suggest.

Externalities, state subsidies and political horizons

Big business likes this stuff because it sounds and even is, sometimes, virtuous. It has the merit of turning all kinds of uncertainties into market opportunities.

I warm to Vision 2050′s commitment to raising productivity (worker output per hour) by improving land usage and making better use of genetically modified organisms. I can also see the logic of big business wanting to be seen to capitalize on political realities by trying to persuade governments to turn costly externalities into profit-centres. However there have always been substantive reasons to object to WBCSD’s demand for regulation to sort out the issues it addresses.

It is worth noting, Vision 2050 advocates that externalities and social desirables become goods and services which have a state-subsidy or state guaranteed price.

The problem is that state planning risks making the world dependent on the short-term political thinking today’s politicians favour, which is the very opposite of what Vision 2050 seeks to achieve. Certainly, WBCSD hopes that governments will map the paths to achieve pre-advertised and pre-announced priced services (the ex-externalities), which is something that may or, as countless useless UN summits suggest, may not happen. For a moment, let’s assume WBCSD campaign had been more successful.

It knows that when the state is required to map out the big things it wants to happen, big firms will be able to gear up to deliver it quicker and better than small firms. It rightly assumes that government would find itself talking with the big firms which deliver big stuff.

For instance, BP may have cocked-up in the Gulf of Mexico, but a small firm couldn’t have even begun to get the deal. If you electrify cars, the trains, build new track, put in huge windfarms or solar arrays, deliver new low-pollution chemical plants etc, etc, almost all the sustainability deliverables, which are capital intensive, get delivered quicker by giant firms. So the big problem-makers become the big problem-solvers. Yummy. Trebles all round. And a PR victory to boot, you would think. Perhaps, but it is a short term, costly and counterproductive one.

Given that governments are unlikely to produce the market-fixing consensus WBCSD proposes: big business will have to lead from the front in a more forceful manner than Vision 2050 imagines. It is in that spirit that I find myself a critic of Vision 2050. 

Questioning Vision 2050′s energy policy assumptions

What Vision 2050 gets wrong about energy efficiency is this: if we make energy cheaper to use through engineering efficiencies, demand for it will inevitably rise; regardless of how energy efficient individual machines or industrial processes become. That trend has been apparent – like a law of progress – since the dawn of the industrial revolution (think of batteries, cars, washing machines and dishwashers etc). Hence, the tendency is for improvements in productivity to push society in the opposite direction to the path mapped by Vision 2050 (See ‘The Efficiency Dilemma: If our machines use less energy, will we just use them more?’ by David Owen in The New Yorker).

Vision 2050 assumes that in the future the world will have to (and shall in practice, which is not the same) cutback on carbon dioxide emissions to combat global warming. But surely it makes sense to achieve this through innovations that improve how we use fossil fuels?

What if we could either suck the carbon from the atmosphere or clean it up effectively as we go using carbon capture and storage technologies? Even commercially viable clean coal looks possible in the near future. As the IEA makes plain, clean gas and cleaner oil is within our grasp. With the former solution we could turn-reverse global warming and keep using fossil fuels. With the latter we could make use of all the fossil fuel resources we desire for as long as they are available without making AGW any worse than it already is. After all, according to the IEA, the world has hundreds of years’ worth of supply of coal, gas and oil in conventional and unconventional payloads.

Certainly, China provides a contemporary case study that challenges many of Vision 2050′s assumptions.

China’s development contradicts Vision 2050

The Chinese lead the world in installed wind power and in most other renewable energy technologies. Yet it is using them to centralize (not decentralize) its power generation and distribution systems. China’s ambition is first to energize its prosperous coastal regions using energy generated in its northern territories thousands of miles away. Then it envisages using this expertise and experience to connect its coal-fired power stations in northern China, vast windfarms in Inner Mongolia and gigantic hydroelectric plant in and near Tibet, directly to Europe via an integrated high voltage grid. To its credit, the intercontinental electricity grid is precisely the type of project Vision 2050 advocates.

Of course, subsidies might help encourage the decentralized solutions WBCSD prefers as much as the centralized and energy intensive ones China is implementing. Then again, they might not, because special pleading might not be attractive to Western taxpayers in support of either outcome (the Chinese people don’t have choice). The main issue is not for or against subsidies; it is that decentralized solutions lack the punch to deliver the goods in vast quantities over vast distances.

It is the scale and focus of China’s vision that dwarfs WBCSD’s. It wants to use hydro, wind, solar, nuclear and every fossil fuel resource in ever greater quantities. It is not prepared to develop one at the expense of the other. It wants to lead the world in all of them. It aims to supply its land and Europe’s (and perhaps most of Asia too) with a plentiful supply of cheap electricity.

Theirs is completely the opposite approach to Vision 2050′s decentralized zeal for “lower demand-side energy efficiency”, which implies lowering overall demand. Explained bluntly, the Chinese prize energy efficiency but only in the sense that it helps them produce more of everything, including energy. Industrialists in Europe used to think similarly. They too were obsessed with increasing productivity until campaigners and inept politicians began promoting falling GDP (in other words austerity and recession) as something to celebrate. Unfortunately, many firms in self-abnegation mode, fearing campaigners, indulged this “happiness” agenda, just as Vision 2050 does.

The Chinese mantra might be summed up as “think global, act global” by taking the lead on many fronts. It is investing in real solutions (including low carbon ones on an unmatched scale) while resisting being hamstrung by regulation at a national and global level. In the short to medium term its carbon emissions might well rise, but they intend to reinvest their profits back into finding cleaner solutions.

Another good example of this difference of opinion and direction is China and Russia’s determination to think big about the transformative potential of pipelines.

Grids, pipelines, gas and water

There’s a rush on today to construct gas pipelines on a global scale, by connecting China to central Asia and both to Europe. Russia’s Gazprom’s has multiple projects in motion, including Nordstream and Southstream, connecting its gas fields to Europe, and maybe in the next couple of years to the UK. Then there is the existing Maghreb–Europe Gas Pipeline from Algeria, which connects Africa to Europe, and a number of other projects designed to challenge Russia’s grip on gas supply. But pipelines have more applications than gas.

Vision 2050 cites how a shortage of water in various parts of the world is a major problem today and (perhaps) set to get worse:

Presuming that freshwater for hygienic and sanitation purposes is prioritized, the implications of an overall supply gap are that regions will have to compromise on how active they can be and the type of water they use in other water-intensive areas such as agriculture, industry and primary resource extraction. [Vision 2050: The new agenda for business, page 40]

There is, though, nothing inevitable about such an outcome. In a world two thirds covered by astronomical oceans it is surely not right to allow economic and social development to be limited by a shortage of an abundant resource. Mass-scale desalination, a technology Vision 2050 admires, has the potential to evaporate worries about water shortages and redefine how we calibrate the sustainability of its usage. It is quite possible to build a global water-pipe grid just as we are doing for gas (a project states might legislate for but might not pay for; while the market might be able to sustain the entire costs because it is profitable to do so).

Of course, desalination is an energy intensive process. It requires lots of cheap energy to be economically viable (the poor will want cheap water and lots of it). Even when the process becomes more energy efficient, as it will, building lots of desalination plant would still require vastly more cheap electricity than we generate today. Then again, if we want to drive around in electric cars we run into the same problem that requires the same solution.

Yet in China, in contrast to the West where every technology, including wind, tidal, hydro and especially nuclear, has its vocal antis, there is a determination not to be constrained by “natural” or self-imposed limits. There is a will to find solutions. That is how it used to be with us in Europe and the US until relatively recently.

Big business would say that, wouldn’t they?

WBCSD’s Vision 2050 is in the business of envisioning a future that is difficult to predict. There can be little doubt, however, that WBCSD has identified all sorts of problems which are up ahead. Vision 2050 correctly says (yes, I said correctly) that government has a role in fixing them, helped by big business and vice versa.There’s no denying that China’s progress is mostly state-driven, or that, shamefully, Western governments have been almost inert in comparison.

My concern is only that we should be careful when big business signs up for a green sustainability agenda, but only because it is neat and now it suits them. Regardless of such instrumentalist intentions, they may still be right. But I suspect they’d be quick to argue, whatever the reality was, for legislation, controls etc, which makes their life more mappable. That doesn’t make them wrong, but it takes away some of their virtue, which they so boldly lay claim to. In any case, they may – as I fear – wrap us in all sorts of expensive taxpayer action which turns out misguided and which leads to its own backlash that undermines their credibility and reputations.

Risk-takers and innovators versus WBCSD’s 2050 Vision

My point is that innovation creates new industries, new possibilities and paradigms. Small and medium-sized companies have to be given the space to challenge and slay big firms. They have to have the room to become the new solution providers and new corporate giants.

There is also a glaring contradiction at the heart of big business’s support for innovation. While they laud innovation in glossy documents they are mostly cutting back on their R&D; and calling instead for more taxation and regulation of externalities (US tech R&D spending as a percentage of GDP is below where it was for much of the 1960s, according to Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker’s analysis of USA Inc.).

If big business is really serious about driving forward innovation, they could demonstrate it by increasing their R&D budgets by, to make a tough demand, a factor of ten.

We can argue about how much to spend, but the case for investing more in innovation, taking more risks and encouraging more risk-takers to emerge should be taken as read. Many of these risk takers are as likely as not to be competitors of today’s major firms (and in China’s case countries). They will make best use of scientific and technological breakthroughs to challenge the existing order.

The inspiration for innovation rarely emerges from the partnership relationships (cosy clubs) WBCSD favours. They arise much more often from the work of the Academy, disruptive entrepreneurs or from within focused industrial-sized in-house R&D departments of major firms (IP/ patents and knowledge are their lifeblood), as, in varying degrees, the railways, automobile, IT, internet and bio-pharmaceutical industries did.

What grates on me, though, is the self-interested emphasis Vision 2050 places on the regulation of externalities. This is really about big business searching for a regulatory safe haven. It is an attempt, consciously or not, to shirk their responsibility to lead through innovation.

However well intentioned Vision 2050 is, it does not provide a sustainable plan for the next 40 years given the nature of the unknown unknowns – such as politics, serendipity and competition – that are as likely as not to tear the plan’s assumptions to shreds.

Note: this essay first appeared here as a sketch in much shorter blog post more than two years ago. 

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 as are Professors Fuller and Sokal. For example, Levitt and Sokal, unlike Fuller, had no time for American conservatives who wanted to teach intelligent design and creationism in schools. Sokal and Levitt shared a distaste for the left-wing Derridean deconstructionism, which they decried as fashionable poststructuralist drivel, which Fuller admires. So what really united the likes of Levitt and Sokal and split them apart from Fuller was their 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.

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

No. 1 

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

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

No. 2 

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

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

No. 3 

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

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

Problems with PRSA’s method

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

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

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

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

Assessing CPRS’s definition of PR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Public interest is hard to define

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My view of what PR is about?

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

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

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

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

Recommended additional reading:

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

PR Conversations: A defining moment for public relations

Stuart Bruce: Public relations defined for the 21st century

Please Revise…: “Defining” Public Relations 

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

Lindsey Hilsum

Campbell issued this warning at the University of Westminster, following a short ceremony in which the Charles Wheeler Award for Outstanding Contribution to Broadcast Journalism – in memory of the distinguished BBC correspondent who died in 2008 – was presented by his widow, Lady Dip Wheeler, to Channel 4 News reporter Lindsey Hilsum. In her acceptance speech, Hilsum remembered a time when Wheeler had praised her reporting and she ‘walked on air’ for days afterwards. Following in Wheeler’s footsteps, Hilsum’s reputation rests on coverage of world historic events.

The event was attended by the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who arrived late.

The Charles Wheeler Award not only recalls its eponymous hero, it also calls up journalism’s preferred image of itself – humane and high-minded, accurate and analytical. Wheeler himself really did embody these qualities: he took accountability to the public so seriously that even in retirement this world-renowned reporter had himself openly listed in the London phonebook as ‘Wheeler, Charles: Journalist’.

Meanwhile, on the streets outside the award ceremony, the day’s headlines added strength to Campbell’s dire warning.

Charles Wheeler

The biggest-selling morning papers had led with further personal details about ‘sex cheat’ Ryan Giggs. The Manchester United footballer was said to have undergone follicular replacement therapy following stress-related hair loss.

Later in the day, the London Evening Standard plumped for the personal presence of Mayor Boris Johnson at a police drugs raid in Tottenham – this made the front page. When a suspected drug dealer awoke to find the Mayor of London in his flat, along with police officers, he is reported to have said: ‘What the f*** are you doing here?’

‘I don’t think this chap was pleased to see me’, the Mayor later said. But Johnson must have been pleased that his celebrity status was affirmed by media coverage associating him with decisive police action.

We once thought Ryan Giggs led a passive sex life; but it is none of our business either way

The hairs on Giggsy’s head were headline news. Imagine the front page splash (and the follow-up pages inside) if CSI-style reporters had bagged the pubes from his mistresses’ beds! But the forensic fetish for personality goes way beyond philandering footballers and their ‘wagms’ (‘m’ added for mistresses). It extends to public officials such as Johnson, now known much less for their politics and far more for their personal presentation (in BoJo’s case, the mop of tousled, blond hair which says ‘public school but people-friendly’).

The way his hair is distressed is BoJo’s mode of address: I’m half-way between Hugh Grant and Ron Weasley, and it just so happens I head-up the government of London. Celebrity is the medium, there’s not much message besides, and many journalists seem happy to carry it – the lighter the better.

BoJo is an “hairlarious” politician

In the same vein, subsequent press coverage of the Charles Wheeler Award ceremony featured the banter between the two biggest celebrities in the room. From the stage, Campbell joshed Johnson for arriving late and for going out early on the drugs raid.  Though dedicated to the public role of journalism, even this event was partly colonised by the media-bred, scandal-fed, all-embracing, self-referencing cult of personality.

So Campbell’s warning could not have been more timely; and when I heard him issue it, I really thought I had found a kindred spirit. Charismatic, too, even if his claret and blue is a wrong ‘un (Burnley instead of West Ham).

Recognising that journalism’s recent regression is relative rather than absolute, Campbell used the same phrase which I had made use of in an academic conference the day before: British journalists are defaulting to ‘a new centre of gravity’ (my conference paper proves prior usage). He called upon journalists to re-discover what they are for – as I and my colleagues have done in Proof: reading journalism and society www.proof-reading.org , and again in the recently published book Journalism Studies: a critical introduction. He even agreed with my proposition (I know this because I asked him) that journalists should stand up and say: Giggsy, celebrity, even (for the time being) the ‘question of privacy’ – it’s all sheer follicles! These are non-events, they should be non-stories, and we just have to drop ‘em and go after the ones that matter.

So Mr Campbell and I agreed on four of journalism’s famous Ws: who should do what, where and when. But we parted company on the fifth. Why the compulsive downshifting to molecular celebrity? Campbell came back on this question with the 2Ts answer: time and technology. As he sees it, new media technology drives journalists to churn stuff out all the time, so they have no time to do anything else. But this is like saying that politicians are overtaken by events: it’s true and it’s a truism, with no explanatory power.

Yes, journalists under time pressure will stay within existing tramlines, but that does nothing to explain why tracking celebrity has become the line to follow. Furthermore, it’s by no means certain that online journalists are generating content more rapidly than, say, Harold Evans sitting under the clock at the subs’ desk of the Manchester Evening News, writing and re-writing reports of the 1952 Harrow train crash for successive print editions.

Even if there really is more new stuff today (rather than different ways of cutting up the same old), why should journalism’s expansion have to end in journalism-lite? We might have expected more to mean heavier.

Alastair Campbell had Tony Blair’s ear

Though criticising journalism for its default mechanism, Campbell himself was defaulting to technological determinism, which alongside environmental determinism and the new neurological determinism, now constitutes the centre of gravitas on why people do/should not do the things they do. This is a silly place for intelligent people to find themselves in, though not because it contains elements of determinism. Anyone who thinks we simply make our own history must have lost sight of the circumstances we didn’t choose – to coin a phrase. The problem is one of misattribution: the wrong sources (digital media, brain chemistry, the Earth) are being identified as determining factors; and dodgy determinisms such as these can only have a damaging effect on the subjective, collective determination to raise our game.

It’s socially determined, stupid!

Instead of technology, neurology and nature, the following, brief episodes – flashes from the history of news – are intended to show that journalism has been socially determined; and so too is our capacity to change its centre of gravity. Revealing the real elements of compulsion can only make the case for concerted change more compelling.

‘News’ – to be distinguished from something which has happened, that happens to be new – has various preconditions, one of which is the position from which to report it. This position was fully established 300 years ago in the merchant city of London, where it was personified in the Spectator magazine, co-edited by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele.

Lloyd’s Coffee-House

In an enormous variety of essays on all aspects of city life, Addison was consistently striving to establish standards of behaviour. The deliberately self-regarding style of his essays reflected new manners and morals, and the Spectator helped to compose well-mannered deliberation into a whole way of life for the emerging bourgeois class. If such refinement seems far removed from the rough and tumble of eighteenth century markets, with fortunes lost and found as tides turned and ships went down to the bottom, it turns out that Addison identified the London Exchange (one of the city’s leading markets) as the most uplifting place in the world. For Addison, valuating commodities and evaluating human behaviour were one and the same habit of mind.

In their mind’s eye, members of his mercantile milieu habitually met at an agreed point of comparison, from which to carry out a continuously comparative study of the world’s worth. Their valuations applied to people as much as things; and their meeting place was also the starting point for a new approach to common values – moral as well as commercial.

To arrive at their shared position, London’s traders were obliged to divest themselves of some personal interests, while investing something of themselves in the creation of common interests, or the public interest. Commonality such as this can only be an abstraction from strictly personal existence; yet it also materialised in London’s eighteenth century coffee houses and in the publications that these traders went there to read. Thus the first, fully fledged reporter, standing aside from particular interests and standing in for the common interest, was called into existence by the unstinting gaze of the merchant. Eighteenth century London had to have its own embodiment of this combination. In the form of the Spectator, founded in 1711, the merchant city acquired the press it deserved.

Professional journalism’s obsession with murder

With hindsight, it appears that the Spectator was a reporter in slow motion: he had the time to compose essays at a time when, relatively speaking, every day was a slow news day. In the 1900s, two centuries later, journalism was already 200 times faster. Not because the associated technology was so very different (nota bene, Alastair Campbell); instead, the whole world was turning like never before.

Meanwhile, the press had become a murder factory: not often a killing machine (though wartime propaganda often amounted to indictment, excitement and incitement); more that the newly established, professional news industry ran on a murderous diet.

‘Get me a murder a day’ was the watchword of popular newspaper editors from the end of the nineteenth century to the turn of the twenty-first. This staple was said to keep the accountants away. Tabloids especially, though they contained a variety of entertaining and informative content, defaulted to the murder story. When facts were sacred, morbid details were the holy of the holy. Even when a reporter’s copy did not begin with someone enjoying the peace of the grave (in news, what happened last comes first), his approach often verged on the murderous. ‘Newsmen’ – in those days it was customary to style themselves as such – were used to looking down on events, and the people in them, from the same vantage point as Lee Harvey Oswald overlooking the presidential motorcade in Dallas.

Nothing but wannabe celebs, confessions, sex, drugs, murder and fire on the front-page

If professional news reporting contained more than a whiff of gunsmoke, it was not because objectifying human subjects is always an act of epistemological violence, only matched by the pathological arrogance of abstracting from their personal particulars. These are the complaints levelled against professional journalism by critical theorists and, latterly, self-doubting journalists; but this does to journalism just what journalism stands accused of, namely, character assassination.

Western journalism was professionalised towards the end of the nineteenth century. It had to be. By that time there was so much more to human life that only a trained observer could hope to encompass it, itemise it and formulate news items before something else came along. At an unprecedented rate, human beings were making more things, making more of themselves, and, in the same process, producing new ways of objectifying themselves, including professionally produced, commercially viable journalism.

Insights into the age of stereotyping

Though journalism was trying to capture the liveliness of human beings, character assassination did indeed occur whenever journalists wrote off being human by reducing it to a formula. Thronged with stock figures and predictable personae, many ‘news’ stories amounted to typing, not writing, i.e. stereotyping rather than character development.

However, the hack’s propensity for the hackneyed results not from objectification but from human subjects being alienated from this process. Our alienation from making the world of objects – making the world our object, is how we came to lose a crucial part of human life – a loss of life which has to be acknowledged in contemporary culture. Popular journalism registered this loss by finding itself in the murder story; hence the editor’s craving for murder, and the reporter targeting his subjects as if about to commit one. This suggests that professional journalism’s quest for murder, was as much the sign of its own times as Addison’s earlier search for morality.

In the meantime, the Spectator’s mercantile habits – evaluation, evaluation, evaluation – had been extended from already finished objects on sale in London’s markets, to include the human activity of making new objects for sale. This is a shorthand description of the transition from merchant capital to industrial capitalism, which took place in Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The development of industrial capitalism not only entailed the production of millions more things and millions more people to produce (and consume) them, it also introduced a new level of commonality between all things and all people. From now on, anything anyone did, automatically existed in comparison with everything everyone else had ever done. Each human action occurred twice over: in its particulars, and in relation to human activity in general.

No mere repetition, this was an historic achievement. By virtue of their comparability, human activities were liberated from their local settings in time and space. Unleashed in this way, our productive activity served to mobilise even more activity. In the further development of both personality and commonality, there was more to being human; and a wider spectrum of humanity for reporters to report on. Furthermore, there was greater demand for a multi-faceted continuum – art, politics, media – that could hold it all together.

Yet togetherness was promised rather than fulfilled. The same process which brought people together to make the world, and prompted them to consume journalism’s re-making of the world, also contains that violent moment when productive activity in both its aspects (the general and the particular) is forcibly transferred over to the thing which prompted it – capital, and taken over by the people who own capital – the capitalist class. In this moment, when what we do together is commonly privatised, those who have been active are suddenly alienated from their own actions, estranged from the things they have made but no longer own. As millions of people are separated from the actions they have performed together, so we lose the life we have lived together. Aside from productive activity, there is still another life to be lived, but this is typically biased towards personality rather than commonality. Fully associative life is repeatedly destroyed – so many times over that we hardly recognise its destruction.

What’s really changed in the last thirty years?

This carnage, which is as widespread as capitalist production, was indirectly reflected in journalism’s passion for murder. We were misdirected, however, by the indirect nature of this reflection. Though professional journalism has continually spanned the continuum between personality and commonality, when describing the world exclusively in terms of personal experience, it presents both commonality and its violent destruction as a straightforward function of personality. Such misattribution amounts to another obituary for the independent life of our shared humanity.

In the twentieth century, morbid tendencies within popular journalism were offset by mass participation in democratic politics, with its (limited) tendency to move along the continuum in the other direction, from personality towards commonality. However, after the demise of mass political participation in the 1980s and early 1990s, the path was clear for further separation of the productive life of humanity from the rest of our lives. In this instance, separation has occurred literally – along geographical lines.

After two decades of further estrangement, the Western way of life now largely depends on the actualisation of labour in far-flung places, increasingly in the East. Even if we are not directly involved in financial speculation, the personal existence of ‘Wessies’ is increasingly derivative: we derive our existence from the creation of value elsewhere.

Meanwhile, in their restricted leisure time millions of ‘Essies’ prefer to speculate (non-financially) on the lives of those with more time to cultivate their personality – us ‘Wessies’. We duly oblige, securitising our debt to the East by performing a continuous spectacle, trading representations of ourselves – merchandising the self – on the various media platforms which now comprise ‘contemporary Western culture’.

How too much attention turned to sex-cheating celebs

Pamela Anderson announces she’s going on Big Brother

In these circumstances, do not ask why the bell tolled for Big Brother. The show ended and the house was shut down in 2010 (it’s due to be revived on Channel 5 from August 2011), but, from the p-o-v of the industrialising world, you and I have taken up permanent residence in UK Reality TV. We’re all (minor) celebrities now.

Yet life in the spectacle is an impoverished form of existence. As we are further removed from the commonality occurring in production, we tend to fall back even further on our personal life, which tends to become yet more superficial just as we pack ourselves into it, frantically networking in the forlorn attempt to derive more significance from it. Worse still, we cannot but feel that being so dependent on interpersonal existence amounts to betrayal of that other life which we might have had in common.

The fact is we are cheating on an important part of our humanity – our commonality, the other-half-life which ought to partner our personal existence. It’s been so long, we might not know what it is exactly, but we know we are betraying it; and from where we are, we feel compelled to do so.

Hence the newly compelling attraction of storylines based on intimate, personal betrayal. This type of saga has supplanted the murder story because it represents, indirectly, the most important, recent development in world history – the betrayal brought on by the further separation of personality from commonality. In journalism, this estrangement has been translated and contained within narrowly personal terms, i.e. transposed into suitable terms for a local audience whose centre of gravity has moved along the human continuum towards the strictly personal. Thus for Western news editors, today’s must-have is a personification of intimacy, self-presentation and alienation: enter the celebrity sex-cheat!

Bill Hagerty, editor, BJR, left. Lady Dip Wheeler, far right. Lindsey Hilsum centre.

But we need not be utterly compelled by the dish of the day. That humanity’s two halves have drifted further apart, may mean it’s harder to realise their connection. However, if more journalists can be persuaded to perform like Charles Wheeler, buoyed by a proper account of why they have been asking so much less of themselves recently, that in itself will add to the measure of humanity.

Dr Andrew Calcutt teaches journalism at the University East London. He is editor of Proof: reading journalism and society www.proof-reading.org; and co-author, with Dr Phil Hammond, of Journalism Studies: a critical introduction (Routledge).

This playground spat was sparked by some leaked emails to the blogosphere. It seems Facebook wanted to traduce Google’s new Social Circle offering for violating users’ privacy rights without being identified as the shit-stirrer. The cause of the media “outrage” was an upfront admission from BM in an email trail that:

“I’m afraid I can’t disclose my client yet.”

One supposes the reason for non-disclosure was that Facebook’s reputation on privacy matters is arguably worse than Google’s. BM added, however, that the full facts of the case they were advocating were already in the public domain. In other words, they were inviting somebody to follow up some pointers.

So, never mind that BM has apologized for their role in this; I’ll criticize that in a moment. I’m going to argue that their two PRs behaved pretty well (see here for leading PR Steve Earl’s similar opinion).

In this instance, BM were dealing with somebody who knew the agency were being paid by a third party for PR work. The PR agency also believed that their potential advocate supported the views they sought to spread. They outlined some lines of argument which were already in the public domain and not unreasonable. The blogger they approached was advised to check BM’s facts for accuracy and for the degree to which he agreed with them. What does it matter who was paying BM? Would it have mattered if it was the Devil? I think not.

Sure, BM broke their own ethical code of practice. They did not walk the moral talk they spout. But the worst thing about this whole episode was playing the blame game. Questioning a client’s integrity is not a good image for our trade. The denial from Facebook also did the firm no favours. Facebook is now, anyway, once more the main target of the media’s angst about the “betrayal” of user privacy rights.

The best response from both parties to the exposure of their relationship would have been simply to admit to it. Silence might have also sufficed. Unfortunately, my beloved “so what?” would have been problematic given how BM was flouting its own code of conduct.

But let’s not let the media off the hook. Their outrage is bluster. The media rarely tells their readers which story was sparked or parked by a PR working on behalf of a particular client. Readers are mostly left in the dark about the who, the what and how of the birth of a story. If it were not so, the names of PR agencies, political insiders and their staff would be all over nearly every story published.

Quite rightly, the best media – just like the best PRs – look to the accuracy, veracity and fairness of what they say, write and advocate to establish their credibility.

The fact is a writer might have all sorts of interests and prejudices – including commercial – when he states this or that opinion. He might have shares, or old grudges, or – yes – a payment directly from a party to write a particular piece. Does it matter? The answer has to be, up to a point and depending on the circumstances. For instance, a paid employee writing about their firm cannot pretend to be an independent bystander. An analyst or financial journalist recommending a share as a buy, and who has a personal financial motive for doing so, must declare it openly etc..

Nevertheless, as a reader, I am most interested in a writer’s opinion. If I find it interesting (well-argued, peculiar, entertaining, whatever), then I’m likely to be influenced by it. If I see a writer’s byline, I will be drawn to it if he was interesting in the past. Their new bit of writing will either continue to amuse, or fail to, on its merits. I can usually judge those myself. But sometimes I depend on the authority of the writer’s editors for my sense of the writer’s merits. That’s where the reputation of the likes of The Economist or WSJ etc. matters most.

So let’s keep this real. BM did not really sin. Our industry should come clean about how it and the media really functions and about on what premises trust and integrity really rest.