Back to Volume 12
	The Risk In Communicating By Frank Walton

Over the past few years, a series of influential books and articles have been published that provide novel perspectives on the evolving power and largely misunderstood workings of communication (marketing, politics, news) in American society. This thinking, along with every day’s headline news, argues that we rarely anticipate and more rarely plan for unintended consequences of our communication. Cumulatively, these insights make a compelling case for the communications professional to add a new dimension to our planning and actions—we must assess the risk in communicating.

Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, created a stir in the public policy world with his book, The Paradox of American Power (Oxford, 2002). (The book was named “best book of the year” by both the Washington Post and The Economist.)

Nye faulted American foreign policy not for its use of “hard power.” (We are awfully good at hard power. We took Baghdad in three weeks, and even through the global economic downturn we remained the richest nation in the world.) America, however, Nye asserts, is inept and getting worse at exerting “soft power.” Nye argues that “soft power” is “an indirect way to exercise power. A country may obtain the outcomes it wants in world politics because other countries want to follow it, admiring its values, emulating its example, aspiring to its level of prosperity and openness. In this sense, it is just as important to set the agenda in world politics and attract others as it is to force them to change through the threat or use of military or economic weapons.

This aspect of power—getting others to want what you what—I call soft power. It co-opts people rather than coerces them. Soft power rests on the ability to set the political agenda in a way that shapes the preferences of others” (italics added).

While the United States has been getting worse at soft power for a long time, especially since September 11, 2001, there have been myriad recent examples of the U. S. being clueless about soft power. The Bush Administration appointed Charlotte Beers to change the world’s mind about us; the initiative lasted about ninety days.

Other efforts seem equally clubfooted. The September 18-24, 2003, issue of Al-Ahram Weekly Online reported that in July 2003, the U.S. Department of State started printing a glossy monthly magazine called Hi and distributed it to newsstands in fourteen Arab countries, targeting the 18 to 35 age group to win the “hearts and minds” of Arab and Islamic societies.

Apparently it is a huge flop. Al-Ahram asserts that critics see Hi as “soft-sell propaganda,” the apolitical content of which fails to bridge any gaps with Arabs. The article seemed to misapprehend fundamentally what is attractive and repellent about American culture: “Do editors really imagine the average Egyptian will spend five pounds to read about sand-boarding, when he could buy good American cigarettes instead?” Chris Toensing, editor of the Washington-based Middle East Report, is quoted as saying, “The Hi editors are saying, ‘why have a dialogue on such issues as U.S. Middle East policy, which, after all, is not up for discussion? We’ve had plenty of dialogue with Arabs about the subject, anyway. Learn to accept what you cannot change.’”

A magazine vendor at the American University in Cairo “pointed to the dusty stacks of unsold copies of Hi.” The “soft power” idea caught traction following Nye’s book in a number of places. The May 2002 issue of Foreign Policy contained Douglas McGray’s “Japan’s Gross National Cool.”

McGray, a Foreign Policy contributing writer, argues that even though Japan’s economy has been stagnant for a decade, the country continues to be a soft powerhouse, sustaining influence in the world through its “gross national cool.”

Despite its economic woes, Japan continues to be a world leader in fashion, graphic design and printing, popular culture (comics, karaoke), children’s toys and games (Hello Kitty, Pokemon, computer games/animation, etc.), and consumer electronics. You do not have to have a thriving industrial economy to be effective at soft power (Sweden and Switzerland are also good at gross national cool).

In the following year there was considerable discussion about the McGray Foreign Policy article; it was quoted in the news weeklies, and in the December 15, 2002, issue of The New York Times Magazine, in the feature, “The 2nd Annual Year in Ideas,” McGray’s concept of “gross national cool” (or in the case of Japan, “Pokemon hegemon”) was listed among the most important ideas of the year.

The “soft power” concept connects well with recent thinking on politics and culture. There are several essays in Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress (Basic Books, 2000) that set the stage for “soft power”—particularly Francis Fukuyama’s influential article, “Social Capital,” and several others: “Does Africa Need a Cultural Adjustment Program?” “Moral Maps, ‘First Word’ Conceits and the New Evangelists,” “Changing the Mind of a Nation: Elements in a Process for Creating Prosperity,” to name a few.

“Soft power,” however, is not a new idea. In fact, it is a very old idea. It is much the same as the Aristotelian “ethical appeal” – one of the three important means by which one can persuade others to want what you want.

Edward Corbett and Robert Connors capture the concept in Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student (4th edition, Oxford, 1999): “Ideally, people should be able to conduct a discussion or argument exclusively on the level of reason. But the rhetoricians [of classical Greece] were realistic enough to recognize that people are creatures of passion and of will as well as of intellect. We have to deal with people as they are, not as they should be.

If we conceive of rhetoric as the art of discovering all the available means of persuasion, we will be disposed to make use of whatever effective (and, one would hope, legitimate) means lie open to us…Aristotle recognized…the ethical appeal, the persuasive value of the speaker’s or writer’s character…

The ethical appeal can be the most effective kind of appeal; even the cleverest and soundest appeal to the reason could fall on deaf ears if the audience reacted unfavorably to the speaker’s character. The ethical appeal is especially important in rhetorical discourse, because here we deal with matters about which absolute certainty is impossible and opinions are divided…

The ethical appeal is exerted, according to Aristotle, when the speech itself impresses the audience that the speaker is a person of sound sense (phronesis), high moral character (arête), and benevolence (eunoia). Notice that it is the speech itself that must create this impression. Thus, a person wholly unknown to an audience… could by his or her words alone inspire this kind of confidence.”

Nye’s “soft power” is actually a highly important, mostly forgotten, and rarely mastered set of techniques in communications practices by effective persuaders. And there is yet another dimension of interest. “Soft power” is conveyed very much by what we do not say.

Matt Ridley argues in Nature Via Nurture: Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human (HarperCollins, 2003) that anthropologists and sociobiologists now believe that communication among early humans was gestural long before they spoke. Humans first communicated as much in facial expression, hand gesture, and posture as they did in grunts and moans.

There is also significant data arguing for highly complex communication among other species, all on the level of gesture, facial expression, and body posture and movement. So, Ridley argues, there are profound ways in which humans still today unintentionally communicate through gesture, expression, and movement.

According to Ridley, how we communicate is at least as important as what we say. Gesture, posture, and movement provide profound cues that psychologists and students of communication are just beginning to understand (especially as they come to new understandings of autism, non-verbal communication as in sign language for the hearing- impaired, and in the communication of animals).

Finally, the “soft power” idea is echoed in Virginia Postrel’s argument about the substance of style (The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness, HarperCollins 2003). Postrel shows how technology— telecommunications, digital imaging, graphic design, advanced and made-to-order manufacturing— have created a new and different consciousness and demand for “surface”— non-linear, non-verbal expressiveness in “surfaces” which provide a value beyond utility: pleasure.

Developed economic societies (especially the United States, Western Europe, and Japan) now demand pleasure through surfaces just as much as we demand perfect performance, functionality, and low price. The winners in our society convey surface pleasure: the Mini Cooper, Apple’s iPod, the Aeron desk chair, flat screen TVs, Viagra, etc.

Postrel’s surface pleasure or “aesthetic value” is soft power par excellence; it is Aristotle’s ethical appeal on steroids. The most successful organizations in the future, and especially the most successful communications, public relations, and marketing companies, are going to have to be expert masters of the ethical appeal, of the ability to make others want what we want. We know the profound importance of expressing sound sense, high moral character, and benevolence in all communications— not (just) because we are particularly virtuous, but because it works (Aristotle knew; Joseph Nye reminds us). Every fallen angel of recent years, from Martha Stewart to Dick Grasso to His Eminence John Cardinal Law, failed the tests of sound sense, high moral character, and benevolence. We sometimes seem to be living in an age in which the character flaws, and sometimes crimes, are what we know most about a public figure.

The December 8, 2003, issue of New York magazine had a cover feature, “Stars Gone Wild! Why Celebrity Culture Is Spiraling Out of Control,” by Simon Dumenco, which analyzes how our media predominantly covers public figures who do not have sound sense, high moral character, or benevolence. Think Michael Jackson, Kobe Bryant, Robert Blake, Rush Limbaugh, Liza Minelli and David Gest, Paris Hilton. Dumenco writes, “the celebrity-industrial complex isn’t, duh, about uplift anymore.”

One dimension of the tragedy of how some Iraqi detainees were treated by their American guards at the Abu Ghraib prison is how the stories and images undermined the United States’ ethical appeal—our ability to project sound sense, high moral character, and benevolence.

In the economic and technological boom of the late 1990s, companies’ communications and marketing mix often de-emphasized or ignored “soft” approaches such as community relations, corporate social responsibility, environmental sustainability.

Brand was nearly universally defined as product attributes, not also the attributes of the organization marketing the brand. Because of the damage caused by the failure of soft power before us today —in U.S. foreign policy or in the saga of Martha Stewart—we can no longer afford not to consider, and manage, our ethical appeal.

Communications is the effort to create community. John Durham Peters, in Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (University of Chicago Press, 1999) reminds us that our concept of communication is rooted in the ancient Greek word koinoo which, like the Latin communicare, means to make common or share. Koinoo also means to pollute or make unclean.

Peters writes, “The brutal rigor of this insight is found in a logion of Jesus concerning the purity of foods: ‘Whatever goes into a man from outside cannot defile [koinosai] him, since it enters, not his heart but his stomach…What comes out of a man is what defiles [koinoi] a man. For from within, out of the heart of a man, come evil thoughts, fornication, theft…’ To think of the sharing of inner life as an unmixed good rests upon a rather unrigorous account of the human heart. Communication is a risky adventure without guarantees.”

In the past few years, those of us who communicate in our work and profession have, in a way, been read the Miranda rights—for communicating. Anything we say, and how we say it, may be held against us. Only with this in mind will we have the slightest chance to create community. The risk in communicating is greater than it has ever been in history, and how we manage that risk will be the test of our talents and wisdom as communicators in the coming years.