The Talking Cure

...Miller concludes with three chapters on the sorry state of conversation in postwar America...

...Yet many political writers, especially, though not exclusively, bloggers, now seem incapable of considering the possibility that those with whom they disagree are anything but traitors or imbeciles...

...But there's no good alternative to this method, and some of the writers Miller analyzes (I think particularly of the section on Virginia Woolf) lead him to insights about the nature of conversation itself...

...These were places where the art of polite conversation was practiced and judged with great sophistication by the burgeoning middle classes...

...The Earl of Shaftesbury outraged the ecclesiastical establishment by proposing, in an originally anonymous collection of writings called Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), that modern society should be governed, not by the recondite principles of religion, but by the ideals of politeness...

...Then, too, there is the inevitable difficulty in defining conversation...

...Miller devotes much of the book to the interpretation of literary works, and it is reasonable to wonder how accurately novels and poems reflect historical data about a subject as elusive as conversation...

...it is "an unrehearsed intellectual adventure...

...While a variety of extremist and obscurantist ideologies goaded the nation towards violence, the presence of a civilized and intellectually vibrant con-versible world seemed to offer something better—a national and cultural life defined by reciprocity instead of aggression and bombast, good humor instead of excessive gravity, moderation instead of fanaticism...

...The Romantic poets of the 19th century turned these proclivities into fullblown (and sometimes half-baked) philosophies...

...Nor is it a stretch to suppose, as Miller does, that the modern habit of responding to critical remarks with insincere acquiescence—"I hear where you're coming from," "Thank you for sharing that"—has its roots in the counter-cultural nonphilosophies of the 1960s...

...One wonders, for example, whether some of the unfettered rage so evident in our political life isn't in some measure related to our failure to practice the art of conversation...

...You don't call a man a traitor if he's across the table from you...

...The chief of those ideals was that of cultivated conversation: Free-flowing, good natured, cultured, aimless but reasonable conversation...

...Throughout the latter 17th and early 18th centuries, roughly speaking the age of the later Stuarts, coffeehouses sprouted throughout the cities of England, Scotland, and Wales...

...Conversation has been written about many times over the last three centuries, but just now, awash as we are in Barton Swaim is writing a book on 19th-century Scottish literary critics...

...Quite apart from all the distractions of modernity, technological and otherwise, conversation has been dealt successive blows by the philosophies of self-absorption...

...The notion that personal liberation is the highest good, as radical subjectivists from Michel Fou-cault to Norman Mailer have held it to be, poisons conversation: For conversation removed from the possibility of disagreement becomes mere talk, and not very interesting talk...

...There had, of course, been conversation before and during the English civil wars...

...The activity of speaking face to face with friends and family for extended periods has been, it sometimes seems, outlawed...

...teenagers "text" friends in the same room...

...There are PDAs, laptops, and BlackBerrys to keep us disengaged from those around us...

...and our restaurants and pubs, places formerly thought to foster conversation, now throb with "music" so loud as to force people to shout...

...Almost every major 18th-century writer, from Alexander Pope to James Boswell, wrote extensively about their own skills in conversation, and especially the skills, or shortcomings, of others...

...That purposelessness probably has a lot to do with why, as Miller's discussion suggests, Americans have never been brilliant conversationalists...

...and there are the ever-mutating codes of political correctness to discourage us from uttering more than banalities lest we scandalize the enlightened...

...Nobody, certainly nobody in our cities, can engage in conversation for more than 10 or 15 minutes without a cellular phone blurting out some idiotic melody, with the inevitable result that one of the conversation's participants is pulled away for some, no doubt significant, reason...

...What is it...

...Miller is right to insist that the defining component of genuine conversation is that it has no stated purpose...

...Michael Oakeshott is quoted as saying that conversation "has no determined course, we do not ask what it is 'for...

...Addison wrote at a time when general elections in Britain made elections of our own day seem cheerful by comparison...

...Principal among the spirits of the "convertible world," as it was known, was a writer Miller rightly takes more seriously than is customary in modern scholarship, Joseph Addison, whose hebdomadal essays in The Spectator (1711-12) did more than any other publication to promote the virtues of conversation...

...Is it simply a matter of not talking to people often enough...

...but for them, as also for the saner thinkers of the French Enlightenment, polite conversation represented one of the few societal conventions keeping civilization from degenerating into disunion and civil war—as, quite literally, England had in the 1640s and '50s...

...The Age of Conversation was dead...

...From Benjamin Franklin's essay "How to Please in Conversation" to Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, Americans are too prone to think of aims and advantages to enjoy conversation for its own sake—although, if I may be permitted to indulge in a little regional conceit, I think this is less true of southerners...

...Miller reckons that, by modeling in beautifully direct prose the good humor and civility of polite conversations, and by making the goings-on of the conversible world seem so attractive, The Spectator helped to lower the temperature of the British polity...

...The book's merits are many, its flaws (an unreliable index, the author's fondness for the word "imply" and its cognates) few and minor...

...Stephen Miller wishes we thought about conversation as much as we thought about sex, and has said in an interview that he wants people to think about their "conversational life" more than they do...

...Families dine in front of televisions...

...indeed, many thought civil war was inevitable...

...Thus, to oversimplify somewhat, whereas the great figures of 18th-century literature generally held that enlightenment was found mainly through debate and discussion within the perimeters of reason and civility, the Romantics—of whom Jean-Jacques Rousseau, alas, was the primogenitor— believed just the opposite...

...The great value in Miller's book is the number of questions it raises...

...Miller's essay, as he calls it, begins with the ancients' views on conversation...

...He succeeded with me...

...It was that relationship—the relationship, in other words, between talking together and living peaceably together—that animated a remarkable number of the 18 th century's boldest intellects...

...and although, to his credit, he eschews cultural pessimism, the evidence is undeniably grim...

...Yet as early as the 1750s, the con-versible world had come under attack: From novelists such as Henry Fielding, who lampooned the culture of politeness as a culture of pretentiousness and hypocrisy, and from poets such as Thomas Gray, the author of the most popular poem of the century, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," really a hymn to glum solitude...

...Initially I wondered why Miller had felt it necessary to begin with the ancient world (Job, Plato's Symposium, Cicero's On Duties), but Cicero, it seems, was the first to deal with the vital question about conversation, namely the connection between the habits of cultivated conversation and the stability of the state...

...William Wordsworth's massive poem "The Prelude," to take the greatest instance, taught that true enlightenment would only be found in nature and the simplicity of rural life...

...Readers whose interests lie outside 18th-century writing may be surprised to discover just how large the subject of conversation loomed in the minds of Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, and especially David Hume...

...but polite conversation, which is to say conversation shaped and defined by a complex code of manners, was largely an invention of the 18th century...

...what Stephen Miller calls "conversational avoidance devices," the subject seems refreshingly relevant...