Speech and Ritual

[jducoeur]

I was chatting over in msmemory's journal about the inauguration, and the point was raised that, whereas many adults in offices talked right over the speech, a lot of schoolkids were rapt. I have to say, I'm not at all surprised.

The thing is, what makes Obama's speeches so powerful is their use of well-controlled and carefully modulated emotion. Yes, the words speak to the head, but the real difference is that he speaks with emotional nuance that we're just not very used to from politicians any more. Moreover, the emotional tones ebb and flow fluidly through his better speeches: consider the way his inaugural address started pretty quiet, then moved through subtleties of warning, determination, and eventually raw patriotic sentiment. There's nothing new here, of course, but many modern politicians seem to have forgotten this particular art: even when they manage emotion, it tends to be rather monotonous.

Really, it's all about ritual. A good political speech shares a lot with good ritual, and *great* ritual requires emotion. When I teach ritual, this is always the capstone. First you make sure you have meaningful words, and you understand them thoroughly. Then you do the mechanical bit: memorizing the ritual to the point where it is flowing, confident and strong. If you get to this point, you can do good ritual. But *great* ritual demands that you go to the next step: to really *feel* what the words are saying, what they mean on an emotional level, and let that emotion flow through your voice, changing tone with every paragraph and phrase to stream those nuances through. The result is that people will feel the punch of what's you're saying right away, even if they have to re-read it ten times to really grasp all the words. And I suspect that it's why kids responded well to the speech: even if they didn't understand every bit of it, they likely felt it.

It's powerful -- and it's dangerous. Ritual can be used for both light and dark, and it's easy to miss which is which in the heat of the moment. With any luck, Obama will have some success against the cynicism that I think has badly corroded American life and thought over recent years. But I'm going to need to remember to step back from time to time, and coldly sanity-check the words under that emotion, because it's awfully easy to get carried away in it...

Comments

[driftingfocus.livejournal.com]

This was a great post.

[jducoeur]

Thanks! Ritual is (via Freemasonry) one of those topics I seriously geek about. Indeed, I've wound up very slightly famous because of it -- I wrote an essay on the subject, back in the early days of the Net, which has been reprinted several dozen times worldwide.

And politics is a family avocation, so the intersection of the two is an obvious interest of mine...

[serakit.livejournal.com]

I've never heard it explained quite like this. It puts a lot of things into place, both on why I utterly hate certain rituals and why everyone here thinks Obama is the salvation of the universe. Suddenly it all makes so much sense!

[jducoeur]

Interesting -- which rituals do you dislike?

[serakit.livejournal.com]

Mostly the Flag Ceremonies- and, thinking about it from this perspective, it seems like it's mostly because no one wants to be there and the aura of boredom is palpable, even when they get the actual ceremonial stuff right. (Flag-Burning Ceremonies tend to be a bit better because they hardly ever happen, so we're usually interested.)

[dryfoo.livejournal.com]

Oh, I do hate badly-done ritual. Yes, of course people are bored by it -- because the person doing it is either totally inept, and struggling through wordage they seemed to have been forced to learn phonetically, or because they have learned the words, but they're banging through them simply to be finished with them. I recently heard someone compare that latter to the someone engaging in the process of... ahhh.. digestive elimination (although they made the point with a less delicate expression).

I'm happy to see Justin's comments here. Happily enough, I was working with one of our new FC's today, and had the occasion to show him the pointer to that "Learning Ritual" article from the front page of my website. I'm sure he'll be sharing it with our two other FCs when they next get together to work.

Wouldn't it be something if Obama's speeches began to get schoolkids interested in both aspects of that art, writing and oratory? Two of my favorite fictional characters in the last few years were exemplars of those: Toby Ziegler and Pres. Jed Bartlet of The West Wing. Nice to see the skill making a comeback in the real world, too.

[serakit.livejournal.com]

What's an FC?

[jducoeur]

Fellow Craft. dryfoo is one of the people who got me started in Masonry, and he's talking about that.

Masonry has three "degrees" -- theoretically ranks, but most people actually get to the third degree very quickly, so they're effectively three levels of initiatory ritual that you go through. The degrees mimic the operative Mason's guilds that the organization grew out of, so they are known as Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft, and Master Mason. The phrases are used so commonly that they're often abbreviated EA, FC and MM.