“If three Americans were dropped from an airplane at 10,000 feet, by the time they had reached the ground they would probably have formed an association and elected themselves president, vice president, and secretary-treasurer,” wrote E. Digby Baltzell years ago. Today, the plummeting Americans would turn themselves into a communications committee and brainstorm “messages” to “get the word out” or “raise awareness” of their plight before they hit the ground.

Messaging is second nature. If you ask kids to pick an issue that concerns them and do something about it, very often they will choose a bad behavior and develop a communications plan against it. They have learned that style of engagement from their elders.

“Strategic communication” (trying to get other people to do something by sending them some kind of message) has its own folklore. We assume that effective messages are short, simple, and memorable. They stress benefits and don’t complicate matters by mentioning any drawbacks. If a message mentions opponents, it disparages them. Ideally, the message comes from famous and cool supporters. The more repetition, the better.

We borrow these techniques from commercial advertising, the medium in which we swim. But commercial advertisers want people to do things that are (1) conceptually simple, (2) available, (3) normally free of organized enemies, and (4) of tangible value. Tropicana, for example, wants us to fork over cash for an available good that affords some pleasure and health benefits and that may have competitors, but that no one is advertising against. To be sure, the value of the Tropicana brand is non-tangible, and the cost of their product may be too high. They address those challenges by appealing to emotions.

Political campaign face a similar situation and borrow most of the same techniques. Like buying orange juice, voting is conceptually simple and available. Most candidates are in zero-sum struggles for votes, a situation that encourages far more negative advertising than we see in the commercial world. Also, the benefits of voting are non-tangible, which is why candidates either resort to nebulous sentiments or try to make their impact appear more concrete than it is. But most of the principles of commercial advertising apply.

The principles apply, too, if you want people to buckle up or not to drink and drive. Those are concrete choices, available to all who have cars in the first place.

But the normal forms of strategic communication cannot work if:

• What you want people to do is unavailable. Individuals cannot join labor unions if there aren’t any, for example.
• What you want them to do is complex and requires experience to grasp and to value. For example: “Understand American history” means nothing unless one understands something about American history already.
• What you want to communicate is complex, ambiguous, or sensitive to context, and a simple message is worse than none.
• People don’t trust you. OR
• You can only afford to purchase a tiny slice of the public’s attention, and competing or even contrary messages occupy much more time

Most of the things that I care about–civic engagement, deliberation, literature and the humanities, effective public institutions, social justice–face all of the challenges listed above, which is why I am generally skeptical about the advantages of a “communications” strategy. Organizing and recruiting people to have tangible and rewarding experiences is much more promising.

I am reading Richard Wolin’s The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s in preparation for his visit to Tufts on Dec. 10. It’s a great story about how almost all famous French intellectuals became Maoists between 1968 and 1974. They knew little about the actual Chinese Cultural Revolution, and their infatuation with a movement that was actually tyrannical, murderous, and conformist paradoxically helped them to move toward the libertarianism of the late 1900s.

Although most of the following points are not explicit themes in Wolin, reading about a large number of post-War French intellectuals suggested some distinctive features that they shared (which set them apart from leading thinkers in the US and Britain).

They were almost all radical critics of their society, political structure, and culture, yet they held extremely privileged positions in state-sponsored institutions. So they might actively favor the Soviet Union and the rebels in Algeria, which were literal enemies of France, while teaching at the École Normale Supérieure, which provided status, leisure, and a comfortable salary at the French taxpayers’ expense. This situation is easy to satirize and has been seriously criticized. There might, however, be some value to state-sponsored “gadflies.”

They were internationally famous, chic or cool, with huge student followings and celebrity status, even though their work tended to be theoretical–with much more metaphysics (or anti-metaphysics) than moving narrative.

Despite their deep disagreements, they formed a dense and closed network. In all times and places, famous people tend to know other famous people. For example, in yesterday’s Times, we read that Christopher Isherwood socialized in Los Angeles with: “W. H. Auden, Aldous Huxley, Alec Guinness, Hope Lange, Marlon Brando, Terence Rattigan, Truman Capote, Francis Bacon, Gore Vidal, Richard Burton, Jane Fonda, Igor Stravinsky, Mick Jagger and Jeanne Moreau.” That’s an impressive list, but it represents a tiny percentage of the world’s cultural figures at the time. Many of those individuals probably did not know one another. In contrast, I suspect that a French post-War intellectual like Louis Althusser or Simone De Beauvoir had direct interactions with every other French intellectual of comparable status. They all lived in the same neighborhoods of one city, and most had been educated in the same small university programs, by the same teachers.

Writing was their job. To be sure, Lacan was a psychoanalyst, Lévi-Strauss collected some field data in Brazil, and Foucault haunted archives and prisons seeking material for his histories. But “the text” and the way it was constructed was their central interest. Because they were writers more than specialists or experts, they could switch genres while maintaining their distinctive styles. Sartre led the way by writing drama, systematic philosophy, literary biography, political polemic, and memoir–all of it immediately recognizable as Sartre’s writing.

They were remarkably subject to fashion. Existentialism, Stalinist communism, structuralism, aestheticism, Maoism and Trotskyism, post-structuralism and deconstruction, identity politics, and human rights rose and fell in quick succession between 1955 and 1975. The major thinkers–people like Sartre, Lévi-Strauss, and Foucault–were relatively independent, and one can explain their development as a result of intellectual struggles and discoveries. But other intellectuals seemed mainly interested in staying current, trendy, and avant-garde. That is how Wolin depicts Julia Kristeva and the influential editor Phillipe Sollers. I was left thinking that these people acted just like experts on fashionable clothing or interior decoration, except that their writing was even more pretentious. They also reminded me of some kind of popular and mean high school clique that arbitrates what is “in” and disparages what isn’t.