The (old) Alpha Mind

I’m planning a memorial for Tom Fox for this coming Sunday. I hope Friends and others from all over the bay area can attend.

I believe we can’t properly memorialize Tom without mourning all the war dead, and particularly the tremendous sufferings and losses of the Iraqi people. The memorial will honor them all.

Where: Berkeley Friends Church, 1600 Sacramento St., Berkeley 94702
When: Sunday, March 19, 5:00 PM

A thought after Quaker Heritage Day:

I posit two paradigms for exhortation, that is, for a communications act whose intent is to alter attitudes or behavior.

1. reasons-supplied
2. reasons-not-supplied

That is, you can tell your audience why there is a need to urge them to change, or you can simply urge them and not say why there’s a need.

I’m thinking of this because the messages of Peggy and Marge this weekend were largely hortatory, because the basic thrust of their message was firmly in line with exhortations I give frequently in my teaching and preaching, and because it seemed that their message met with less resistance than mine, a fact for which I am seeking a reason. And it occurs to me that I am an intense seeker and supplier of reasons, and Peggy and Marge, at least this past weekend, were not.

Now there can be many explanations for this phenomenon which have nothing to do with supplying reasons. To name a few:

• Guest speakers from out of town usually get more respect than the home-grown product. It’s why speaking is such a lucrative gig; organizations know the persuasion value of having an “expert” come from elsewhere to say what the leaders of the organization have been saying all along, knowing that the expert will be better heard.
• That the guest is paid and that the organization has put forth effort to bring them in heightens the perceived value of their opinions. As Gerald Weinberg has put it, “the more they pay you the more they respect you.”
• The larger the audience that is “going along” with what is being said, the greater the speaker’s credibility in the mind of the average audience member. “All these people aren’t disagreeing, therefore the speaker must be right.”

Thus, supplying or not supplying reasons can in no way make or break an audience’s receptivity. But I hypothesize that giving reasons within an exhortation can have a multivalent effect on that receptivity.

These are ways in which giving a reason can undermine a message:

• A hearer can judge that the reason does not apply to him/her, and thus feel exempt from hearing the message.
• A hearer can fail to understand the reason given. Since the reason is given as support for the exhortation, the exhortation loses credibility when the reason isn’t understood.
• A hearer can simply disagree with the reason given. Again the exhortation loses credibility.

On the other hand, despite these dangers, supplying reasons can greatly enhance a message’s effectiveness. I suspect this effect will show itself in the long run and not immediately. Why? Because when I listen to a rhetorically effective message, I can be led into a sense of strong immediate agreement. But if the purpose of the message was to change my behavior, then when I go out into the world and behave differently, the question will arise as to why I am behaving in the new way. It will arise in the minds of others to whom my behavior is peculiar, and in my own mind.

If the reasons I am able to give, to myself and others, are non-existent or weak, and if there is any social pressure to revert to my old and customary behavior, I’m very likely to revert. So, while in the message that asks me to adopt new behavior, the giving of reasons may undermine the immediate rhetorical aim of having the audience bond emotionally to the message, it may have an opposite long-range effect: of making the new behavior easier to adopt and to persist in.

In part 2 of this post, I’ll flesh out these abstract ideas with some examples.

For any of you from my own meeting who read my blog, go check out Peggy Parsons’ gracious thanks for our efforts.

I just left a longish comment on Quaker Renewal Forum. I won’t repeat it here, just link to it.

Last week while I was working full-out on the meeting’s first-ever television production, I failed to notice that FGC registration came and went.

Saturday night at Robin’s place, I was gratified to learn that two Quaker bloggers had signed up for my workshop at FGC. This was something of a wakeup call, reminding me that I’ll need to give some fresh thought to that workshop before July rolls around.

Rather more urgent wakeup call was today when I got an email from the Conference Coordinator saying that FGC was fully booked and registration was closed. As a workshop leader, I have to register and book housing, and I hadn’t done so.

Fortunately, they reserved spaces for workshop leaders and their families (I hope I can sneak in Giuseppe my elder under the “family” provision), and will let me register as soon as they can set up a password-protected site for that purpose.

Today I see the number of bloggers signed up for my workshop is three: Robin, Martin, and Joe G. The beginnings of a high-quality group, I’d say. My eagerness for the event has skyrocketed!

Today I finished directing my first televion project. It was amazing. It was exhausting. It was wonderful. And of course it’s not over. Many hours of post-production await me and my fine video team.

We set up a complete three-camera studio at Berkeley Friends Church in order to tape Quaker Heritage Day. We put the control room out in the narthex, and let the church sound system take care of the sound, which it does quite will without much intervention. If there’s anything really bad about this production, it’ll probably be the sound, and that would be, ironically, because the sound system is so good — it might have made us complacent. We were very sloppy about miking the speakers and teaching them how to use the equipment.

Many thanks to Berkeley Community Media for the use of their equipment, and for lending us intern Myriam Beltran, who did a superb job on camera 3.

We hope to have this thing ready for cablecast by mid-April. Our next project: a training video for conscientious objectors. Watch this space!

Robin M: “I still can’t quite believe that I invited all these people over to my house and all we ate was take out pizza and salad.” She also served good drinks. Blueberry juice, yum! But I was there for the company and conversation, which were both wonderful.

Here’s the gang: