I’ve travelled the four corners of this world. I’ve fought philosophers and debated with warriors. I’ve held the world in my hand and regarded it like a gumball with a cool swirlly candy-coating.
Always I wonder: Facts? Right and Wrong? Morality and Justice? Truth? Are these things real or are they impossible abstracts that crumble to dust and fall through your hands the tighter you grasp them?
Style though is eternal. It’s always cool. Good manners are always good. The niceties matter.
I mean you gotta figure that your average German soldier didn’t just wake up and think “Let’s see, another busy day for the forces of evil. Gotta finish off conquering the world so we can exterminate the jews, subjugate the lesser races and became the dynasty of evil.”
Only the greatest in the art of naivete believe that all the rest of the civilized world didn’t engage in equal atrocities at some point or another. Are we that good? Is God and right always on our side?
Look at Bill Clinton. This is a bad guy. He’s a womanizer, a cheat, and a liar. He’s also our President.
Been reading P.J. O’Rourke lately? Sounds a lot like “Modern Manners”.
Anyway, as a lame cop-out attempt at answering: I don’t think that there exists now, or ever has existed a society that can be described as being good or evil. Those concepts, in my opinion, can only be applied personally. ‘Am I Good’, ‘Do I consider him evil?’, etc.
I happen to like some of the things Bill Clinton did in office, and how much of a liar and cheat he is may not be much different from some previous presidents. I personally believe that the Republican party had much to gain from finding and publicizing Clinton’s faults.
He does present himself well, though. And the people who can present themselves the best and argue the most convincingly, are usually the ones who are listened to.
But just because you can argue better doesn’t make you right, it just means you win.
Sad, isn’t it.
I think it is easier to find enduring truths in written, rather than spoken words. That way it is easier to get past the rhetoric to determine if there is indeed substance, and there is not the distraction of the arguer’s appearance, voice inflection or body language.
My take on the OP? I don’t see it as either/or. I see style as the way you present your substance. It is up to the target audience to decipher the truth.
Spider Woman, you remind me of an ancient Greek saying;
“The spoken word flies, the written word stays.”
Another equivalent of this is;
“Pale ink is better than flowery oratory.”
Style without substance is pretty much useless, unless of course, you work in Hollywood. That said, style is pretty much window dressing for the real goods in question. Without a message, what use is smooth delivery (except for those selling snake oil)? Please remember, if you’re selling snake oil, then substance is not desirable in the first place. If your priorities are for that which is enduring and meaningful, then substance is everything. For anything to have significance, it must first and foremost have validity.
Esthetics, however cute and attractive, cannot hold a candle to the vital aspects of truth. In order to convince those who are worth persuading, your words must first contain valid information. If you are able to couch those words in eloquent phrasing, so much the better. But the truth will stand upon its own merits long after the bloom is off the vine of glibness.
Hats off to you Spider Woman, your limericks are good, but I like it even better when you cut to the chase.
The ugly truth is so much better than beautiful lies.
Hmmm. Good replies. At first thought I would tend to agree with Spider woman and Zenster. The conundrum though lies in what is truth, what is substance? Hanging around this board, not to mention life in general it seems to me that in general we are unable to agree about the most basic “truths.”
Abortion, religion, politics, when violence is justified, siamese twin seperation, Limericks versus Seussian doggerel, you name it, there are as many different viewpoints as there are people. Tolerance suggests that most if not all of those viewpoints are valid. Since they are so often contradictory how can they all contain truth?
Define truth, show me substance, immutable and solid and I shall concede.
How can you seperate the dancer from the dance?
Failing that, as John Wayne says “It ain’t what you do, it’s how you do it.”
there is one concept about which we pretty much agree:
We seek truth not as empty slates to be filled. By the time we have intellect enought to search for truth, our perceptions are already colored by the limits of our upbringing, intellectual capacity, and the amount of human knowledge garnered at this point in history, plus probably many other things.
The John Wayne quote, and the one about dancing, tell me more about whether your deeds will be remembered and/or credited to you than the actual value of the deeds.
When each person does the best they can to find truth and apply it to their lives within the limits of their particular history, that is more important than all the window dressing in the world.
Awwrighty, so picture a little ragamuffin of a kid raised in, oh let’s say Libya. He is raised in the heart of a terrorist camp and taught to be a “good” Islamic fundamental terrorist. He studies hard, prays is earnest and truthful.
Because of his outstanding character, intelligence, and discipline, at age eighteen he is given a great privilege. He hourney’s to America, the heart of the unbeleiver, and in Holy Jihad he sets off a bomb in a shopping mall, killing hundreds.
He has done a fine thing for his people and for his God. He is a good person.
The ideal post brings wit, pithiness, brilliant exposition, and factual data or links thereto to the service of finding the truth.
Then there are the other posts.
For reading pleasure, I like style even when the content leaves something to be desired. But for service of the goal aspired to, substance with less than true coherentness and less-than-to-the-point examples is better.
Dal_timgar is a case in point (not to flame but to give as example). I usually have some trouble figuring out his point (YMMV, of course). But with two exceptions, what he has to say, when I finally comprehend it, is quite useful contribution to the debate. And I would much prefer reading him, even at the cost of “Huh? What does that mean?” to the person who uses outstanding grammar, syntax, a style William F. Buckley would be jealous of – and no useful content.
I guess from my frame of reference, I would be horrified, because one of my absolute truths is to do no harm. From the perspectives of his compatriots, he is a hero.
Another scenario, set during WWII. Scientists, politicians and soldiers detonate atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the name of patriotism, and to end the war quickly and save American lives. The devastation and destruction caused by this decision was heretofore unknown. The Allies won the war and were hailed as heroes; the backlash came later.
I hold certain truths to be self-evident, and I judge the actions of others by my beliefs. But I do not know with absolute certainty that my truths are the only truths or the correct ones. But because of the way I was raised, to do no harm (and try to help as much as possible, again help being defined from within my frame of reference), this is the way I will continue.
Style gives you popularity.
Substance gets you respect.
Style and Substance creates a lasting legacy.
Right now if you showed a million people in America a picture of Britney Spears there would be just about nobody that could fail to identify her. She is the (latest) embodiment of packaging over content. The essayist Montaigne is lauded for his dense writings on the human condition that next to nobody ever reads, at least voluntarily. Pure substance with zero style. Shakespeare, on the other hand, had both the substance and the style, even if unappreciated in his lifetime. One of the things I think Star Trek got right was that hundreds of years from now, we’ll still be doing Shakespearian productions.
Fractals have substance. Visually they have a beauty which may be interpreted as style.
Personalities:
Einstein had substance. He was an entirely uncultured, uncooth, unrefined and unwashed man. His intellect gave his shabbiness an unmistakable style.
Stephen Hawkins has substance. Despite his apprearance and tendency to drool his has style galore. Even his predisposition to pornography is somehow charming and humanizing.
Art:
Marc Chagal’s works have little beauty in them. They do however have substance in that he manages to convey many emotions in a single painting. The substance in his art has a certain style which is uniquely his.
Now all of these examples above (particularly the last) should be considered as stictly my opinions from my own personal closed frame of reference. As we are discussing the topic of style and substance - a subject strongly given to subjective interpretation - I think my arguments can be fairly deemed to be of *substance[/].
Well, sure. Despite the breakthroughs of folks like Louis Pateur and Jonas Salk, most medical advances over the years have been made by individuals and teams of people who methodically did their jobs, sometimes brilliantly. We benefit from the substance of their efforts, even though there was little else remarkable about them to the world at large. The same goes for countless engineers, inventors, architects, and so forth. The whole world is built on the backs of those who had the “substance.”
