THE GREEKS HAD A WORD FOR IT - The Pocket Internet

"THE GREEKS HAD A WORD FOR IT"

(Page 2)

Presumably, the idea of gathering together a small family council to deal with problems is far older than history. The idea of a council of elders to assist a tribal leader appears to be common in the most primitive societies.

"We are generally not surprised
that with an increase in people
there will be a proportional increase
in time, cost and other factors."

But Syracuse was not a small village. It was a city, one that not too much later was to build a theatre seating 15,000.

There is a startling difference in such matters when you alter the magnitude of the population involved.

We are generally not surprised that with an increase in people there will be a proportional increase in time, cost and other factors. If we have six people for dinner instead of three, we expect that they will eat twice as much food. But when it comes to seating arrangements, three people can be seated in only six ways, but there are 720 ways to seat six people. And if you invite twelve for dinner, the hostess has a choice of nearly 480 million possible seating arrangements.

Now a hostess or a tyrant or a king can handle a problem like this with comparative ease, because they can employ any system they choose. But the citizens of Syracuse, the tyrant having been deposed, were unquestionably faced with the difficult problem of treating every citizen equally. Who should speak first, who second, who third? Many citizens demanded their land back. Whose case should be considered first, second, third and so on?

Why not, they may well have asked, have all of us sit down together and discuss this problem with each of his fellow citizens.

Unfortunately, this creates another problem.

"Alas, what
works for
four people
does not
do so well
for a larger
number."

Let us assume that we are a small group come together to resolve our separate points of view about any subject. We are all equals and we need some fair rules. We are, for example, a group of four who decide that each one of us will have a conversation with each other member of the group.

This works out very well. We sit down around a table. Each of us talks directly to everyone else and each has a minute of time to make statements, ask questions or reply. We each may be frustrated by our time limit, but it only takes 12 minutes to complete the entire exercise.

Alas, what works for four people does not do so well for a larger number. For if 12 people sit down at the same table, and use the same rules, it will take two hours and twelve minutes for the same exchange of views. If 39 people sit down around the table it will take over 24 hours for a similar public dialog between each of those present.

In this room there are perhaps 500 people. Were we to sit here until each one of us had a dialog with everyone else,

"It is common knowledge that
turning a problem over to a
committee almost certainly means
that there will be endless delays
in arriving at a solution..."

in which each of us was limited to one minute on his position, we would all be here listening to each other for 24 hours a day for 173 days.

This must have been a problem in 466 B.C. In fact, more than two thousand years later, we have made practically no progress in solving it. Today we have committees both in business and in government which try to do the same thing. It is common knowledge that turning a problem over to a committee almost certainly means that there will be endless delays in arriving at a solution, and quite possibly no solution will ever be attained.

Almost every President of the United States, at the beginning of his term has made the announcement that he, at last, will be a President that will regularly bring his Cabinet together as a group to sit down and have an open interchange of all points of view on the problems of the country. The outcome of this is quite predictable. In less than six months after taking office the President will quietly abandon this idea. The Washington press corps will, with equal predictability, then proceed to write stories about how the President is now surrounding himself with a small coterie of close advisers and there will be much clucking about the alleged formation of a "kitchen cabinet."

Well of course. The President and Vice-President plus the Cabinet members add up to about 15 people. Mutual dialogs become impossible, and at best one ends up with each department head submitting a report which might just as well have been sent in the mail.

"The problem
is mathematical,
not human."

It is in vain that we blame this on the lack of talent or energy of individual committee members. It is in vain that we endlessly devise new systems to correct the faults of committee operations. The problem is mathematical, not human. A dialog between two people is quite practical, but every additional person added to the dialog group introduces a geometric increase in the time required for face-to-face interchanges. For, compared to two people, three people must take three times as long, six people 15 times as long and 12 people must take 66 times as long.

The Syracusans, perceiving that if you talk all day crops will rot in the fields, hit upon the obvious notion of selecting spokesmen to represent the various groups of people who had diverse interests in the community.

Presumably, the notion of a spokesman representing a group is of far greater antiquity than the Greeks. No doubt even the most primitive monarchs and tribal chiefs were approached by groups who hoped to influence their decision and shoved one of their members forward to speak for them all.

"The decision now was in
the hands of the citizens.
The decision depended on
arriving at some kind of
consensus among equals."

This had the additional advantage that if the king were annoyed, he might only cut the head off the spokesman.

But Syracuse didn't have a king any more. The decision now was in the hands of the citizens. The decision depended on arriving at some kind of consensus among equals. A spokesman could no longer hold a dialog with one man, or even with a relatively small group. He had to present his case to hundreds or even thousands.

In 466 B.C., to communicate to a couple of thousand people at a time, you had to fulfill at least one basic requirement. You had to have a very, very loud voice. That was a necessity for about the next two thousand years, until the invention of the printing press. You would wait 450 more years for radio and public-address systems.

But while a loud voice is no longer a necessary requirement, some of the other problems that the Syracusans must have noticed still remain.

For talking to a thousand people, or even talking to fifteen or twenty people, is not like talking to a single other person,

"But if you speak to a thousand people,
you cannot see each of their expressions;
you cannot hear their questions."

even when technological developments make it no longer necessary to raise your voice.

Consider that as a child learns to communicate with others, it is in dialog form. As in a tennis game, the conversational ball is batted back and forth. And it is not only words that are traded. Tones of speech, gestures, facial expressions and all the things we now call body language convey back the effect of the child's communication on the parent. Daddy's frown or Mother's smile are instantly interpreted, and the child soon learns the appropriate and frequently disconcerting response.

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