This is a lesson that began to be learned by the world in ancient Greece in the several hundred years between Solon and Alexander. The startling thing about Greek democracy was not that it was exclusionary and tolerated slavery but that it emerged at all. The enduring success of the Greeks was probably not that some great democratic leaders and spokesmen appeared, such as Solon and Themistocles and Pericles, but that Plato and Aristotle and the Sophists provided the theoretical understanding of practical democratic ideas.

Democracy meant a society in which public policy was created by public discourse. The mark of the free man was his ability to participate in the debate over issues that affected his life. Lacking the technology of the printing press, the free man had to be educated in the arts of discourse, and that is what the Sophists provided. Education was instruction in the arts of public discourse and debate. I know of no finer literature on the subject than that which the Greeks and Romans have left to us, unless it is the literature of our own early democracy and the pages of the Federalist.

The kind of understanding Plato sought had to do with the purposes of discourse. How can we tell whether what we are doing will lead us toward the good or toward evil? Discourse of this kind is not a matter of questions of fact, but of interpretations of fact, and of thought about principles of interpretation. The goal was persuasion toward decision and action. Persuasion was directed toward important things, things men care about.

The trap to avoid was the trap of eloquence without understanding, without morality. Language and thought are deeply tied up with morality and religion. In John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, for example, written about 1665, a character of particular interest is Mr. Talkative, son of Say-well who abides on Prating Row. Mr. Talkative is not faulted for talking too much, but for failing to see the necessary connection between words and understanding. "The soul of religion is the practical part" argues Bunyan's Christian, and Mr. Talkative is a man of glib facility and no commitment.

The Sophists of ancient Greece were the Mr. Talkatives of their time. Fluent in the techniques and tricks, they were barren of substance and conviction. Their name has come to stand for rhetorical facility at the service of any master. They cultivated technique and ignored truth, or put truth at the mercy of casuistry. Some of the most profound insights of western philosophy appear in Plato's dialogues and in Aristotle's essays on politics and ethics and rhetoric, but in time sophistry won out.

It was not possible to sustain that higher quality of thought. The high quality of Roman rhetoric at its peak in the years of Cato and Cicero and Caesar was also gradually undermined. In time the shift took place from discourse as the vehicle of public policy to discourse as the art of elocution, of rhetorical display. Empire replaced republic. Since then, the moments of greatness in public discourse have alternated with long, arid periods in which rhetoric became a narrow "academic" subject or the dramatic art of oratorical display. For every Lincoln there have been a thousand Edward Everetts.

The modern pattern, the 20th century pattern, has had two dominant characteristics: the first is reflected in the triumph of science; the second reflected in the triumph of populism. Science places greatest emphasis on neutral language, as does commerce. The spiritual and the poetic are modes of thought inappropriate to scientific discourse, and they are only devices to be used by commerce in its own behalf. Populism, expressed in the socialist tradition of identifying democracy with the worker, the poor, and the uneducated, speaks the limited language of the common man. Words and ideas in such a culture must be kept simple. If every man has one vote, every man has one voice; in fact, all voices and all ideas are equal.

While this was not yet true in the generation of Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas or even Franklin Roosevelt, it is true today -- of all parties. And, unavoidably, the result is constantly shrinking vocabulary, the pidgin grammar, the abandonment as "elitist" of all standards of usage.

This has taken place, of course, in the century of truly mass communication and education. In fact, in the thirty year life of television during which we have taken our mass culture to a world culture. Is it happening at a time when American culture and American democracy are in decline?

The momentum of American cultural imperialism, transmitted by film and television, has been at its greatest during this period of deterioration of public discourse. The theater of Shakespeare and Shaw has been overwhelmed by that of Tennessee Williams and the deliberate vulgarity of Marlon Brando in "Streetcar." Popular culture prides itself on echoing, even imitating and admiring, the language of the street, or of what used to be called "the gutter." An editor once told me that freedom of speech would finally appear in this country when a certain four-letter word could be used in Time Magazine. Trashing the language, as trashing the streets, is the self-indulgence of some at the expense of the rest of us. Eventually the situation may reach the point of graffiti on the New York subways -- lacking in imagination of design, just scribbles and marks, the frustration of the ignorant, the brute substitute for language and thought.

The primitive art of the cave-painting has more utility of expression than subway graffiti, but popular culture, especially in television, seems incapable of coping with subway language. It can only record it, for all of us. Communication is for the mass, and mass communication is increasingly television. Television, which is viewed as a triumph of the visual, is actually an oral/aural medium ... The spoken word has replaced the written word, at least in the lives of large numbers of people. It is as if we were back in the days of Hebrew and Greek and early Christian society. In those days, everything depended on oral tradition -- listening, remembering, reciting, and debating were the skills of social survival. Only a handful could read or have access to the written texts and documents. Now, a diminishing number depend on reading and an increasing number depend on what they hear. Listening is passive in its relation to speaking, as reading is to writing. Few of us speak on television; almost all of us listen to it.

We don't listen very well, I expect. I am much taken by the Sperry Television commercials that explain how that company teaches its employees how to listen. Listening skills are critical in an oral culture. Yet the Greeks didn't teach listening, and we don't, either.

We have not yet absorbed the impact of what it means to shift from a newspaper-reading-culture to a television-watching-and-listening culture. For one thing, we read faster than we listen, because speaking, like writing, slow and difficult is a process. The image of effortless fluency in the "rolling writer" commercials for the Pentel pen is an illusion.

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