Don Watson

A Conversation with Don Watson.

Monday, 14 February 2005

Language that becomes monstrous, a managerial style language that serves power, and simple and honest language that starts as the best kind of conversation, where you are mindful and really listening.

Where empathy becomes the first principal of writing and, in a way, being human.

These are some of the thoughts Don Watson shared, in a generously given interview, with ANZAPT.

He is a historian, speech writer, flim writer and author of books including Watson’s Dictionary Of Weasel Words, Death Sentence. The Decay of Public Language and Recollections of a Bleeding Heart.

What follows is, for me, the best kind of conversation where these ideas were expanded, along with reflections on Winnicott’s writing and how it helped him in his work in the Prime Minister’s office, psychiatry as a vocation and the experience of working amidst the constraints of a language that describes “ patient contacts”, “health consumers”,” short and long term health outcomes” and the dreaded “ significant adverse event.”

DK: Psychiatry registrars must work in the public system where, in one moment we are hearing and experiencing the most raw, deeply felt and unique human experience, and the next moment are filling out patient contact sheets and trying to reduced this to some kind of public health speak. You have written about some of these in your book, such as hospitals referring to negative patient outcomes (you’re dead). Have you come across many other professions that struggle with this kind of language?

DW: You go and talk to people who work in the justice system as I did a few months ago, the Department of Justice. The Justice Department is partly a grievance department for people who are outraged by something that’s happened to them,… and there are people there who will say, if we replied to these people in ordinary English saying, “We wish we could help you but we can’t. Not now, at least. We understand how miserable and aggrieved you must feel…” If we wrote to them in words we might use to speak to a friend, then we might have fewer problems and get only one letter instead of fifteen, and they might suffer less frustration and misery.

People in the banking industry who have to write corporate letters, memos and speeches complain about the same thing. They feel like they’re speaking Swahili.

DK: It sounds like, neither the people speaking this language, nor the people being spoken to, are enjoying it?

DW: The only people enjoying it are the people who use it as an expression of power or those who have simply lost the ability to speak any other way. They turn this on when they go to work and some – the very advanced ones - I don’t doubt they talk to their children in the same way when they come home.

DK: A new term turning up in the media is hot housing, where parents push their child –taking their three year old to swimming, dancing and debating. It’s all condensed down to one term, when it actually denotes so much more: The parents’ frustrated ambition or need to live through their children, where their identity stops and their children unique identity starts, and no doubt much more. The whole sad or compassionate or thoughtful conversation behind why a parent would do this is lost by reducing it to two words.

DW: Take that fantastic word ‘closure’; as in, “I want closure.” It took about 4 days after the tsunami for victims’ relatives to say, “I want closure.” If they find the body they have some kind of closure and when they have closure they can move on. Now I have not experienced the loss and I cannot say for sure that it doesn’t help, but I am confused by this ‘closure’, and sceptical about the idea that it even exists. I suspect that the fashion for the word has left people thinking that it actually works.

You reach closure as if there is a point where grieving begins and grieving ends and that it’s only available to the white middle class, and only to this generation.

DK: Have you read much of Winnicott?

DW: Some. I love the way he writes.

When I was working for Paul Keating, I used to talk to an old Winnicottian called Harold Bridger. He recommended him to me. Harold was a therapeutic constant voyager and I would see him when he was in Australia. It wasn’t as if I would go back to the PM’s office and say, “I see what the PM’s doing here. It’s all because of his mother…” But, in a sense, as Harold always said, being aware of a psychological context for his behaviour, for my colleagues’ behaviour – for my own - did make things easier. This diagnosis, dodgy as it may have been, at least helped ward off a certain amount of despair and anger which allows other, perhaps more useful, thoughts. Not that it always succeeded in this. But it helped, and what’s more I think it kept the mind alive when instinct might have told it to shut down. Even if it was the wrong understanding, it was understanding of a kind – a benign misunderstanding.

DK: Well, probably it wasn’t.

DW: I don’t think it was entirely, either. I think it helped to explain Paul and the people around him and there is a chapter in the book that talks about this. And I suspect Winnicott is the only one I could have used. He was not given to talking in absolutes, as I recall. He tolerates contradictions such as the link between depression and altruism, and unconditional love and permanent indebtedness. And Winnicott writes in plain English. The word ‘closure’ does not come to mind when one thinks of him – ‘coping’ does. He helped me cope. But I did not then and I have not yet achieved closure, and I don’t expect or wish to.

DK: Winnicott's writing is so knowledgeable and so thoughtful yet, he also tolerates the process of"not knowing" and "not understanding". He often thinks aloud in his writing. He is the oppositeof black and white thinking. He respects the complexity of people and society, which is incredibly reassuring.

DW: Exactly, that's my point. If you want to start with the language in any department abolish theword "outcome" for a start.

Take the Education Department, where the word "outcomes" puts much of the curriculum beyond ordinaryunderstanding. You will see the word "outcome" or "outcomes-based" several times in onesentence. The idea that education must be "outcomes-based" has possessed them. It seems to havebecome an article of faith, an ideological absolute, a little like "closure", and not unlike thekind of semantic imperatives of totalitarian regimes. Which is to say it is Orwellian, if not Stalinist.But it's such a silly idea. I mean, everything is outcomes based. Running a chook farm is outcomesbased, being a chook is outcomes based.

I don't know how your clients think, but whenever I talk to people who work in government departmentsof any kind, I find the language is as far removed from what I know about human behaviour as it is possible to be.

And it is hard to say what comes first, the language or the purpose and objective. What appears to be mastery of the jargon is usually a concession of defeat. These things are too difficult to understand or too tiresome, so we won’t have words for them. Instead, by using these others words, we will pretend we understand. The words then become habit; the habit becomes the jargon – the official, mandated language – which means that your chief instrument is blunt and completely unsuited to your purpose. Unless it is your purpose to bamboozle, mislead or keep yourself and everyone else in the dark.

DK: The fact that this language offers so few options, such an impoverished way of describing, means that it can’t handle any form of complexity.

DW: No, most language we use in conversation is conditional, poetic language is often conditional, we build arguments conditionally: this is because we know so much of life is conditional and qualified; that it is full of possibility and nuance and our words very often not up to the task of defining it. So the moment you’re defining something that’s complex and conditional in the pseudo emphatic and definitive words of professional jargon you know you’re in strife. You’re having us on.


DK: As a trainee, learning and then experiencing counter transference in the space of a conversation has changed the way I understand myself and my relationship to the rest of the world. I am amazed that language and conversation, as part of a human exchange, can convey so many facets of human relationships. I wonder where this kind of jargon fits in with all of that?

DW: There's a book, The Gate, by Francois Bizot, a Frenchman who was in Cambodia before the KhmerRouge took power. He was captured by the Khmer Rouge and held in the jungle. He was an anthropologist but the Khmer Rouge thought he was a spy. It turned out his captor was a man called Douch who later ran Tuol Sleng, the school in Phnom Penh that Pol Pot turned into a torture chamber and slaughter house.

Duoch was a mathematics teacher but of course he was also a full blown Khmer Rouge ideologue. Bizot spent his days chained to a tree and every now and then he saw the revolutionaries take Cambodian prisoners to the jungle. There they killed them with a shovel. Ammunition, you see, was not to be wasted on such counter-revolutionary scum.

He said Douch could talk to him about all kinds of things, and they held long conversations like the two intelligent human beings they were. Bizot spoke Khmer, Douch spoke French. But every now and again Bizot would cross some ideological line. Douch would then become a raving lunatic spouting insane slogans at him. At that point the exchange between the two human beings stopped. One human being became a monster. And Bizot knew then that he was a moment away of having the shovel brought down on the back of his head.

That is the ultimate offence of this kind of language. When you write or speak in jargon – in slogans - you are not having a human exchange. If you enforce that kind of language in organisations you commit a breach of human rights. Karl Kraus always insisted that the misuse of language was in every instance a moral crime. This may sound like an extreme view but maybe we should it seriously for a while.

To take it on this language is to undermine your own capacity for self-determination, your reason and vocation. To inflict it on someone else is to do these things to them. You might want to forgive it in somewhere like the diplomatic corps where weaselling is a traditional part of the job, an essential skill: but in jobs which are also vocations, like teaching or nursing, psychiatry, social welfare of any kind, then it seems to me unforgivable slumming.

DK: So what is the way back from monstrous language to language that is human and full of meaning?

DW: Think of the best conversations you have had with yourself or someone else. They depend on your being mindful of what the other voice is saying. You’re not trying to squeeze it into your own terms and they are not trying to do it to you. The most irritating conversation is the one with an ideologue, a zealot or a monomaniac who converts everything you say into the currency of his own dogma.

I remember when I was an academic, there was a sociologists who seemed to do it to me over and over again. I would say something quite matter of fact or something that had some specific meaning to me, and they would immediately turn it into sociological terms: as if to say “what you really mean is what Weber meant by this or that”. But it was not what I really meant at all, and if it was, the coincidence was of no interest to me. Dogmatists are just another form of that species of incredibly irritating people who never hear a thing you say. There must be a psychological term for it. Psychosomatic deafness.

If you start from a position of what constitutes a satisfactory conversation, or what makes for aterrible one - and apply it to your language; that seems to me a good first principle for any organisation or profession. It’s that empathetic thing: of listening, of not filling the silences with your own voice. This is the first principle of writing anything, and of being human for that matter.

DK: Thank you very much for your thoughts and your time.

Deeta Kimbero me. Dogmatists are just another form of that species of incredibly irritating people who never hear a thing you say. There must be a psychological term for it. Psychosomatic deafness.

If you start from a position of what constitutes a satisfactory conversation – or what makes for a terrible one - and apply it to your language; that seems to me a good first principle for any organisation or profession. It’s that empathetic thing: of listening, of not filling the silences with your own voice. This is the first principle of writing anything, and of being human for that matter.

DK: Thank you very much for your thoughts and your time.

Deeta Kimber

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