David Greenberg on Political Spin

Your first choice is by Plato, which I guess means spin is not just a 20th-century invention, but goes back a long way and has been causing controversy for a long time …

Right. The word “spin” for this phenomenon is new, and there are ways that contemporary political spin is different from what Plato wrote about. But it’s essentially the same problem that Plato and Aristotle were arguing about when they argued about rhetoric. And in the Gorgias, Plato – or really Socrates – deplores rhetoric, which is the ancient version of spin: an artful, skilled effort to persuade people in politics, as well as in other areas, of a particular conviction. Plato objects to it because it’s designed to induce a certain feeling or conviction regardless of whether that conviction is truth. So for Plato spin or rhetoric is the antithesis of philosophy. Philosophy aspires to truth and Plato, of course, wants the philosophers to run the Republic.

Today we wonder, “Who is to say who has truth on their side?” And that was the position of some of the Sophists, who were relativists. So, back then this was a battle. And I think Plato’s attitude towards rhetoric has very much carried over into our own day. And I’m still trying to figure out how to characterize our current position towards spin. I think what it is is that we are superficially Platonists, but that deep down we’re Aristotelians.

Which means?

Aristotle took a much more practical view of rhetoric. He thought that sometimes it could be used for good ends, sometimes for bad ends: it depended on the particular rhetorician, how honest he was, and there are all of these situational variables that affected how we might regard any use of rhetoric. For Plato it was all corrupt. It was all designed to induce something other than truth. And he makes the comparison: rhetoric is to philosophy as beauty and cosmetics are to health. A doctor aims to induce health and keep you well and that will make you look good physically. The corrupted version, the superficial version that’s only concerned with outward appearances, is the branch that focuses just on cosmetics and beauty.

And your view is that spin can be good, that it can be put to good use: it all depends what you’re trying to do with it.

Yes, I’m more of an Aristotelian. And, while I fully admit that there are politicians and handlers who misuse spin, who deceive us, I think that a lot of what we complain about is simply spin by the other side, spin by people we don’t agree with. I don’t think it’s the arts of persuasion – even our advanced, technologically refined arts of persuasion – that are really the problem in our politics. Partly the problem is just an ancient resistance to different viewpoints, our insistence that we can arrive at a single truth from which all political and policy decisions can flow.

So tell me about Walter Lippmann’s book on Public Opinion.

Lippmann is one of many early 20th-century philosophers and journalists (and Lippmann was both of course) who are trying to figure out the place of spin – or as it was called then, propaganda, publicity, public relations – in this new modern age, where we had mass democracy, mass media, a shrinking world. And by the 1920s, when Lippmann wrote this book, he had become disillusioned with certain aspects of classical democratic theory that assumed, somewhat naively, that citizens could just be fully rational and knowledgeable in making up their minds about public issues. He saw how often that had not been the case: in the case of the war, and the postwar failure to bring about the peace Wilson had hoped for. He saw how ill-informed people were.

But he didn’t really blame people for being stupid or ignorant. He realized that it was impossible for any person in the modern world to know as much as he or she needed to know to weigh in intelligently on so many different issues that they had to weigh in on. And as public opinion became this governing force in our political life, and as the public became this mass public, this creates a real dilemma. And Lippmann’s solution, a watered-down version of which has sort of been adopted, was having an increasing reliance on experts to help arbitrate the situation. So that experts could sort out truth from spin, truth from falsehood, and present this to the public.

Your next book is The Hidden Persuaders, written in 1957. What is that about?

This is a classic expose of the advertising industry from the 1950s. And what is interesting about the 20th century is that even in Lippmann’s time, in the 1920s, there are anxieties about what the rise of advertising and public relations are doing to democracy, and the degree to which people can be so easily spun or persuaded. It makes a lot of people – journalists, thinkers, ordinary citizens – worried about whether our democracy is as well-functioning as traditionally presumed. But in the 1950s and early 1960s, with television and the vogue of the “advertising man”, these fears about PR and advertising reached fever pitch.

This is the era of David Ogilvy’s Confessions of an Advertising Man, it’s the era that the television show Mad Men is set in.