Lingua Franca

Robert Dessaix addresses the up and down sides of flattery, opining that we can all do with a bit of buttering up!

Transcript

Remember the story? A fox is out walking one day when he sees a crow pick up a nice, fat piece of cheese and fly off with it to a high branch in a tree.

'Oh, Crow,' he calls up to her, 'I'm sure your voice must surpass all other birds', just as your feathers surpass theirs in glossiness and your eye theirs in brightness.'
(Such eloquence in a fox.) So Crow opens her beak to caw, dropping the cheese to the ground. Fox snatches it up and scoots off.

Fair exchange: Crow gets to feel good about herself, while Fox gets the cheese. Flattery in a nutshell.

This is a story that the deliciously named Willis Goth Regier, author of In Praise of Flattery, would like us all to take seriously - indeed, to teach our children ('flattery is best perfected if practised from childhood', he says) because it's short (this fable) and full of memorable lessons: identify what you want, and who's got it; respectfully tap into his or her vanity, risking nothing of your own; take what you can and get out fast. (Don't hurry, but be quick!)

The trouble is that flattery has been called by such awful names: toadying, fawning, grovelling, gushing, bootlicking, brownnosing and worse. Why such hostility to something that comes so naturally?

What is flattery, after all? It's just praise, given whether earned or not, in order to get something in return: the cheese. Usually from someone higher up the tree than we are. What's wrong with that? Why has flattery attracted such opprobrium over the centuries, starting with Socrates?
After all, according to Willis Goth Regier, almost everyone identifies with Fox. There have been surveys.

Mostly it seems to be disapproved of because it's seen as dishonest and self-regarding: Crow doesn't have a beautiful voice, Crow caws rather unpleasantly, Fox just wants the cheese.

But Regier points out early on that truth is not the measure of whether something is flattery or praise of a more praiseworthy kind; the kind we call applause, appreciation, a compliment, an homage, a tribute or rave.
Anyway, Fox was right - Crow's feathers were lustrous, Crow's eyes were clear and bright - Fox wasn't lying about that.

But Fox didn't care about Crow's feathers or eyes. He just wanted the cheese. That's what makes us feel uncomfortable. That's why, presumably, Dante left flatterers to rot in a ditch of excrement in the Eighth Circle of Hell,
between pimps and seducers in the first ditch and those selling preferments in the church in the third.
Dante makes it clear that, for him, flatterers are no better than whores.

Yet in overwhelming numbers we tend to sympathise with Fox, rather than Crow because, well, why should the high-flyers at the top of the tree keep all the cheese to themselves?
Flattery could be seen as one of the neater solutions to the problem of sharing things around.

The important thing - and this is where In Praise of Flattery comes in handy - is to understand how to flatter and how to be flattered, to know the rules and abide by them. (Regier offers 128 of them.) If you're going to wheedle, learn to wheedle well, without harming yourself or others. Make it a fair exchange. Let's restore flattery to its proper place in society.

Flattery is all around us - let's be frank - we all indulge in it every day of our lives: 'You're looking well', 'Delicious meal', 'Lovely to see you again', 'My, isn't little Bobby growing up to be a fine, young man.'
Actually, little Bobby is turning out to be a surly thug,
but by forbearing to say so, we may be able to offer his parents a little hope. God knows, they need all they can get. Leave the truth about Bobby to the professionals.

In autocratic states - in czarist Russia or in Stalin's, in Napoleonic France, in Nazi Germany and no doubt in Zimbabwe and Burma today - we routinely adulate the potentate, the 'great and wise leader, beloved of the people, saviour of the nation', in return for privileges or just being allowed to stay alive (Napoleon, Catherine the Great, and Julius Caesar - going right back - were unquenchable in their lust for praise, lapping it up like honey. And Napoleon didn't just drop cheese in the laps of those who flattered him: he gave one brother Holland and another brother Spain. A man called Brouet wrote an appalling, but flattering, poem about him and was made post-master general of Italy. Napoleon liked you to be nice.)

In democracies (so-called) the powerful court the electorate, flattering us, our wisdom, our greatness, our sense of justice, in return for even more power and superannuation schemes you could only dream of. And flattery. Nowadays they have banks of nodders follow them around - have you noticed? (Regier actually mentions nodding as a form of flattery.) Here no session of parliament is now complete without rows of nodders set up behind whoever has the floor; while outside parliament nodders appear as if by magic, nodding and smiling like mindless glove-puppets at every syllable the politician utters. Once upon a time slaves abased themselves and kissed the king's feet. Now they nod.

We flatter when we fall in love, showering the irredeemably plain with tributes to their attractiveness; what we want in return is to reproduce in a secure environment. The Earl of Chesterfield once assured his son that 'every woman is infallibly to be gained by every sort of flattery and every man by one sort or another.'

The troubadours are to blame for a lot of this, forever writing gushing poems of longing and desire: 'The fairest woman who ever used a mirror', 'her ivory is more than ivory's whiteness/Sun is pale where the whiteness glows' and so on. The point, as historians have explained, was not whether or not any of this was true - whether the lady's beauty put the sun's radiance to shame, whether the troubadour was sick with longing or not - the point was that, in return for singing her praises, he expected a new horse.

We flatter our children, we flatter our friends, we flatter our enemies, we flatter ourselves, and not only with words. If you ever watch the ABC architecture program Grand Designs, you'll know how desperate the English can be to flatter themselves architecturally. All those accountants from Scunthorpe, on Grand Designs, who flatter themselves that they're country squires or Italian counts.

We flatter God the same way, of course, building him palaces more lavish than any other buildings on earth. It's never enough, though. He seems insatiable. He wants words as well. Muslims, Christians, Jews, even Hindus, in the Bhagavad Gita, ceaselessly flatter their gods.
It's not a matter of whether or not He deserves all this adulation ('You are the greatest', 'I love nobody else but You' and so on); it's a matter of what we want in return.
According to Regier, who has studied these supplications,
it's usually health, wealth or victory. Presumably God knows that He's being flattered (or 'worshipped' in church-speak), but just can't say no.

If you choose your kind words carefully however, as flatterers often do, wanting nothing at all in return for them, then you are just being eloquent. Denis Donoghue, in his arrestingly erudite, if brief, volume on eloquence
(called simply On Eloquence) argues that eloquence is like dancing: you're not actually trying to get anywhere when you do it.

Eloquence is pure art, not craftiness. According to Donoghue, eloquence has no aim apart from wanting life to be more abundant. (Don't you like that?) Unsurprisingly, Donoghue suspects that pure eloquence of this kind is on the wane. Wordsworth thought it was two centuries ago
and it's unlikely that things have got any better since. Wordsworth blamed the burgeoning of cities, where men (his word) 'craved extraordinary incident' to relieve the dullness of their occupations, which (in Wordsworth's words) 'the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies'.

In an age of mega-cities and instant messaging (about either the present or the immediate future, as a rule),
Donoghue finds it harder and harder to convince his students of English at New York University that 'aesthetic finesse, beauty, eloquence, style, form, imagination, fiction, the architecture of a sentence, the bearing of rhyme, pleasure ... are places of interest and value in a poem, a play, a novel, or an essay ...'. His students don't want pleasure. Not being landed gentry, they want a job.
And for that, self-interested rhetoric - or flattery, if you prefer - will prove a much more useful accomplishment than mere eloquence.

Of course, like most other human behaviours, flattery has an up side and a down side - but mostly up, according to Regier. The down side is that is that, if you are the flatteree, it can blind you to the truth and that can give rise to awkward situations. Holbein, for instance, flattered Anne of Cleves, and Henry's hopes, in the portrait he painted of her for Henry VIII before they met.
Once she'd arrived in England, Henry found himself forced to marry 'the Flanders mare', as he called her. He was not pleased and had the marriage annulled. Anne did not lose her head, but Holbein must have had a sticky moment or two wondering about his own.

If you're being flattered, always remember that it's just a rhetorical device. Enjoy it while it's still to some extent plausible.

The up sides to flattery are more numerous, for both flatterer and flatteree - and 'flatteree' is the standard term in Flattery Studies, by the way, even if it's not in your dictionary. Flattery lowers aggression levels, for instance; it encourages improvement (flatterees want to live up to it); it sweetens human intercourse, raises downcast spirits, comforts the sad, rouses the apathetic, stirs up the stolid, cheers the sick, restrains the headstrong, brings lovers together and keeps them united ...
I'm quoting Erasmus here, as a matter of fact, he couldn't speak more highly of flattery. In the same vein, Tolstoy said that 'even in the very warmest, friendliest and simplest relations, flattery or praise is needed just as grease is needed to keep wheels going round.' Just so.

Truth? God forbid - who needs the truth, apart from generals planning an attack? The truth is unfailingly unpleasant. The truth is that everything is getting worse and will end badly - who needs to hear that over breakfast? Grovel by all means, court me, fawn on me, seduce me with your blandishments, caress me, woo me, pander to my vanities ... and you can have as much cheese as you like.

Are you sneering at me? You think you're above flattery?
Don't flatter yourself. All of us, without exception, flatter and succumb when it suits us to flattery's flummery.
And we do so because we know that, to be below flattery, is to be nobody at all. Quite literally.

Thank you for your kind attention.

Publications

Title: On Eloquence
Author: Denis Donoghue
Publisher: Yale University Press,
distributed in Australia by Inbooks.

Title: In Praise of Flattery
Author: Willis Goth Regier
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press,
distributed in Australia by Inbooks.

Presenter

Maria Zijlstra

Producer

Carey Dell