Whither the Lost Art of Oratory?
At the start of August, The Art of Manliness, complained about the decline of speech-making in the present-day. To rectify it, the site presented a listing of the top thirty-five speeches in history from ancient times to the modern era. Three speeches given by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s—at the fortieth anniversary of D-Day; the Challenger address; and at the Brandenburg Gate—all of the speeches come from 1963. On paper, the era of statesmen as great orators is long over.
In the September 10 issue of The New Republic, John McWhorter uses the occasion of the Democratic National Convention to investigate the nature of modern speech-making. Effective oratory nowadays, he reiterates the findings of linguists, is “rendered not in long, tidy sentences but in packets of about seven words at a time.” As a result, contemporary speeches don’t “look like much on paper, but [can be] irresistible in performance.”
McWhorter invokes Aristotle’s distinction “between logos, founded in argumentation, and pathos, founded in emotion,” as the two styles of public speaking. Speeches of an earlier generation focused on the content to make precise arguments. They translated well to being reprinted in newspapers across the country in an era of nascent mass communications. Speech-makers today rely on tugging at heartstrings with less emphasis on speech content.
Moreover, technology has played a-less-than-obvious role in determining the style of speech. In an era before microphones, speakers had to rely on broad gestures and precise language to get their message across to a huge crowd. Express “natural” emotion to large crowds required something akin to over-the-top play-acting. Nowadays, “speakers can use their natural voices.” Close-ups on television screens communicate their feelings and expressions without artifice. As McWhorter says, nowadays, “the old-style grandiloquence would seem affected and insincere.”
Yet something is lost, McWhorter concludes: “Speeches rooted more in slogan and song than explanation cannot help but seem lightweight compared to the kinds of speeches audiences once considered ordinary.”
