Conversation: A History of a Declining Art by Stephen Miller

My first conclusion about this book came in the beginning chapters, where I was struck by the shortcomings of the author's style. Rather than a pleasant, accessible, conversational tone that would have been awfully appropriate for a book on conversation, Miller had a high school-essayish sort of approach, with an attempt to sound learned and proper coming off as more pretentious and amateurish than anything else. I, of course, live in mortal fear of falling to the same fate, but that is beside the point. I am not an elderly man positing myself as a witty, expert conversationalist.

Miller, in fact, came off rather snobbishly. I understand his righteous intellectual anger at the state of reasonable, rational discourse in America, but dismissing all Bible-believing Christians as unconversable was fairly harsh. Many of them might be unable to hold an intelligent conversation, but certainly not all of them, thank you very much.

Miller was often tedious, too often really. His haphazard history of conversation was not particularly enlightening, though his piece on Spartan society gave me something to think about. Apparently in Spartan society boys, from a young age, were consigned to the army and assigned an older "mentor," in a form of state-sanctioned pedophilia. Fascinating stuff. Anyways, the opinions of Hume, Johnson, Montaigne, et. al. on every subject, including each other, failed to excite much interest in me.

The modern history was nothing I did not know already. Kids instant message instead of talking face to face. Texting is destroying the language, whittling it down to nothing. Political rhetoric is emotionally charged, making it nearly impossible to reason out issues rationally. But I don't think the conversational landscape has any more weeds now than it ever did. Just because Miller's golden age - the 1700s in Britain - had a few intellectuals espousing the joys of discourse, it doesn't mean the society's state as a whole was rosy.

In a culmination of inadequacy, Miller ends on a dour note. One should never do so in such a book, even if it is justified. A pessimistic outlook is an insult to the reader, essentially telling him that even though he now has all this information and is as enlightened on the subject as the author, he is not capable of improving the general situation. Like, "This is the way the world is, and there is nothing you can do about it." My deepest desires are for arresting conversations, and I'm not giving up just because Stephen Miller is. Though they have been few and far between, I have had excellent conversations before, and I expect to have some more in the future. All hope is not lost.