The Public Discourse

...But when cool-eyed politicians and billion-dollar corporations are to be found leading the chorus of impending doom, as is often the case these days, it's a good bet that something more than mere expressiveness is at work...

...Then, too, the seriousness and prudence of our governing class also contribute to the tendency of American puolic discussion to announce danger and crisis at every fresh turn of events...

...But in fact "Joe" is a grotesque caricature who deserves only our resolute disbelief...

...it is the rhetoric of a demoralized and stalemated polity...

...In 1967 and 1968, when the social and political order really did seem to -be breaking down, he was deeply upset and genuinely apprehensive...

...A crisis is not just any sort of problem...

...I myself am not so sure...

...It is instead a much more primitive and powerful form of advocacy, which addresses itself to the political rather than the intellectual problems of legislation...

...The more prudent and responsible they are, the more likely they will be to overestimate the dangers inherent in the current state of affairs...

...Food prices are up, like everything else, but so far wages have kept pace...

...But that is not all that "crisis" means...

...But if one disregards the public discourse for a moment and consults the evidence of one's own experience, a different picture emerges...

...In the 1960s the word was used so frequently that it became virtually synonomous with "problem" - although it never entirely lost its connotation of emergency and deadline...

...some people had trouble getting all the heating oil they wanted during the winter...

...For crisis-mongering is fundamentally a dishonest rhetoric, and a corrupting one...

...afterwards, one is often no less fearful of confronting what did happen...

...There are only problems, confusing and mostly intractible - problems, and a small pack of policy hucksters trying to manipulate our hopes and fears and, in the bargain, corrupting the public discourse...

...To some, perhaps, this spreading of the rhetorical riches will seem a good thing...

...Calling a problem a crisis, in short, is an ideal ploy for an advocate...

...The objective of a debater, by contrast, is to move people to agree...

...There isn't a -constitutional crisis," and there wont be a meat shortage crisis...

...But in Webster's Third, published in the 1960s, the word is given an additional set of meanings: -an unstable set of affairs in which a decisive change is impending," or a psychological or social condition characterized by an unusual instability caused by excessive stress and either endangering or felt to endanger the continuity of the individual or his group...

...The word itself is unnecessary to them, and using the word would require them to achieve a distance from the experience of the crisis that they do not have, do not want, and do not seek...

...Today, for example, we have not only the liberals' constitutional crisis" - but also the oil companies' energy crisis'" and the journalists' crisis of the First Amendment...

...It is one thing to exaggerate the gloomy side of things, and quite another to rush about shouting "crisis" at the slightest provocation...

...Incidentally, one of the surest ways to tell a real crisis from a phony one is to observe how the people involved speak of it...

...The idea of crisis provides the ideal rhetoric for this sort of advocacy...

...Consider the evidence: For something approaching a year now, the nation has been caught in the grips of a severe energy crisis and has as yet done nothing to alleviate it...

...The President also seems to be resisting a not unpolitical investigation into whether White House staff members knew about an espionage operation run by his campaign organization...

...In January this bad situation became worse when a bitter constitutional crisis erupted over the nature and very existence of the powers of Congress...

...At Harvard, for instance, where we went through genuine crises in 1969 and 1970, people have never called them that...

...To Art Hoppe, for instance, this "everyday-life" perspective is personified by "Joe Sikspak," a brutish, hypocritical clod of a person who is intended to invite our contempt for his self-centered insensitivity, his un-awareness of the world, and his indifference to the "important" things...

...Well, some parts of the answer are apparent enough...

...Nobody is in a panic, gloom does not prevail...

...it is, more precisely, a problem that is in the process of being resolved, for better or for worse, once and for all...

...The repeated use of the word also guarantees that in time we will stop listening to warnings of crisis...

...Second, there is the fact that ritualistic hysteria has established itself among our cosmopolitan intellectuals as the preferred mode of expressing interest in public affairs...

...For the real-life Joe, as opposed to Hoppe's fabrication, is each of us as we live our daily lives - which is to say he is imperfect, fallible, and guilty of a multitude of sins, yet also sensible, decent, and not without imagination or concern for others...

...The answer, of course, depends on which evidence one looks at...

...Normal deliberative processes may have to be suspended, objections based on principle may have to be ignored...

...It is not for the most part the sort of intellectualized advocacy that one finds in a debate where the object is to urge one course of action as opposed to another by building a logical case...

...In part the word denotes a problem that is large, '• widespread, and intense...

...Once they are persuaded of this, the problem will go to the top of their agenda for action - and once it is there, people will act, and something will usually be done...

...Persons with experience of the world know that the future is perversely unpredictable...

...Exactly what gets done is influenced by many things, the most important of which is the way in which the people who act perceive the problem...

...Life not only could be worse - it has in fact been worse, and not so very long ago at that...

...Apparently, the keepers of that rough Beast have finally turned him loose on the world, and our very survival - as a free and democratic nation, as an economic sys tern, as a Judao-Christian civilization, as an energy-consuming, meat-eating people - now hangs in the balance...

...Today, by contrast, he is aware of any number of problems in the nation and difficulties in his own life, but he is not aware of a general crisis...

...In short, the situation seems no more than normally abnormal, and offers no special cause for alarm...

...and even now, when they are safely a part of history, people persist in speaking of them euphemistically, as "April 1969" or "May 1970" or some other vague entity...

...All in all, things look pretty dismal...

...New York City has occasional brownouts on hot summer days...

...Politically, the objective of an advocate is to move people to act...

...According to the defenders of our civil liberties, the nation is rushing headlong into a crisis of press freedom and of the First Amendment as a whole, and before that happens the imposition of food price controls should long since have precipitated a drastic meat shortage crisis as predicted by Secretary Bute in an earlier incarnation...

...The public discourse today is full of the sound and smell of crisis, not because we have finally arrived at the apocalypse, but only because crisis-mongering has become such a popular form of advocacy over the past decade...

...If there is anything interesting about our current crises, it is that some of them are not attached to liberal legislative programs as once was the case...

...When people are involved in a real crisis, they feel the fact only too keenly...

...The change in definition reflects the fact that the word has become a device of advocacy, no longer a means of identifying a turning point in the past, but a means of creating such a turning point in the present or near future...

...During the Cuban missile crisis, which suddenly created a real possibility of nuclear war, he knew there was danger...

...During a crisis one is afraid of what might happen...

...To such persons, speaking of our public problems fearfully and with an exaggerated sense of foreboding is the norm, and is considered the hallmark of an especially fine sensibility...

...The Supreme Court held that newsmen have to testify in court like everyone else, and now the newsmen are trying to get Congress to pass a law exempting them from this duty...

...Indeed, things in general seem to be looking up...

...Gasoline prices seem to be up a bit...

...So on the evidence of our senses, including common sense, there is no way the present time can reasonably be interpreted as a time of grave crisis - and yet, in spite of this plain fact, our pundits and leaders persist in announcing the onset of any number of crises, large and small...

...Thus, from having been a term that was retrospective and descriptive, crisis" acquires the new sense of being prospective and prescriptive...

...There do seem to be some disputes in Washington, as usual...

...The President refuses to spend money appropriated by Congress, which seems questionable inasmuch as his veto was overridden...

...While they were going on and during their immediate aftermath, they were referred to as "the recent events...

...Thus, the original (and still the central) meaning of the word has been corrupted...

...especially such a social condition requiring the transformation of existing cultural patterns and values...

...They therefore are alert to the fact that in every innocent event there lurks some potential danger, that the most humdrum problem contains within it the seeds of catastrophic disaster, and that when something can go wrong it will - except of course when it doesn't...

...To them, a problem that is small and little discussed doesn't exist at all...

...For one thing, our news media are constitutionally committed to a method of exaggeration...

...Real crises, in which the lives and ways of people actually do hand in the balance, are almost never described as such...

...Now it is easy - and some people find it terrific fun - to ridicule this latter kind of evidence and to denounce it as unfit for introduction into the court of public opinion...

...The use of "crisis" as a political rhetoric seems to date back to the New Deal, and has been a standard line of argument for liberal proposals and measures since that time...

...Calling a problem a crisis is thus not only a way of getting the problem on the top of everyone's agenda for action, it is also a device both for forestalling the usual lengthy processes of scrutiny and analysis which attend legislative action and for persuading people to support a course of action which, under normal circumstances, they might oppose...

...All of this helps to explain why there is so much hyperbole in our public discourse, but it does not account for the intensity of this hyperbole or for the special forjn it assumes...

...According to the headlines and the statements of our political grandees, we are indeed eyeball to eyeball with a new...

...This real Joe possesses skills and personal resources, and one of them is the ability to tell a real crisis when it descends on him...

...If they actually use the word -crisis," you may be certain that it is not a crisis, but only an overdramatized problem...

...but then Congress has appropriated more than it should have, given the level of the economy and the rate of taxation, which seems equally questionable...

...Just as every solution implies a particular definition of the problem, so does every definition of the problem imply a particular solution...

...stone age, and the hands of the clock stand at one minute to midnight...

...It expresses an unwillingness or inability to persuade people on the merits...

...something has to be done...

...by contrast, a problem that is only somewhat larger and a bit more widely talked-of not only exists, but becomes, in their front pages, nothing less than a mortal threat to the republic itself...

...Of course there are some problems...

...Then came an international dollar crisis after which we were staggered by an explosive food price inflation crisis, on the heels of which there followed an emerging Watergate crisis...

...As such it is an emergency, and requires immediate governmental action...

...When one looks at Webster's Second, published in the 1930s, all the definitions conform to this retrospective sense of the word, which derives originally from the Greek "krinem," meaning to separate...

...Paul H. Weaver The Public Discourse Thoughts on the Current Crises To judge from what we read in the papers and are told by our leaders and pundits, we are now living through one of the most perilous, most fearsome periods in American history...

...Thus, the trick for the political advocate is to get the problem on everyone's agenda, and to make sure that his definition of the problem is the one that prevails...

...It is a problem with a deadline...

...The question naturally arises: What accounts for this gross disparity between reality and the depiction of reality in the public discourse...

...In 1970 and 1971, when unemployment and inflation began to rise rapidly despite efforts to control them, he was, being no dummy, actively worried...

...There are many ways to get people to act, but the best way is to persuade them of the existence of a serious problem that is getting worse and that therefore requires immediate action...

...when a real crisis does occur, we may be unwilling to rise to the occasion, like the shepherd who heard the word wolf" once too often...

...Why all this talk about crisis at a time that is, if not altogether serene, then at least thoroughly unapocalyptic...

...It was a word for the historian...

...If anyone suggested that one existed, he would blink in disbelief, and he would be right...

...There isnt an energy crisis...

...It attempts to stampede people by scaring them and by promising a decisive turnabout in the course of events that will almost certainly not occur...

...For in its earlier usage, "crisis" was a word that could only be used retrospectively, to designate the point in the past when a problem did in fact come to a head and finally resolved itself one way or another...

...The area in between these extremes is largely terra incognita to our mass media, yet it is precisely in this middling ground that most of the public business is to be found...

...If he succeeds in this, it becomes almost certain both that something will be done and that what finally is done will be more or less to his liking...

...And the future seems to promise more of the same...

...To some extent, no doubt, this latter sort of behavior reflects our national appetite for the symbolic satisfactions of talking apocalyptically...

...There isn't a crisis of the First Amendment...

...Granted that nobody has yet formulated our current situation in precisely these terms, but on the evidence of all these crises, what else is one to conclude...

...Indeed there is something more, and it is called advocacy...