Analytical Essay

Pessimism and Optimism: Striking A Balance In Discourse

            The most important aspect of a text is its audience. Without an audience, there would be no purpose behind the piece, thus, making it meaningless and pointless. In comparatively analyzing Mann’s Coming Death Shortage and Kalman’s Can Do, the importance of this connection with the audience in its different forms becomes apparent. I found myself wondering how two texts, both focused on encouraging social action, could perform so differently in their connection and relationship to their audience.

            The establishing of the relationship between author and an audience is complex in how it is established and maintained. Many factors contribute to a feeling of closeness or distance between an author and reader including medium, visuals, and evidence/support. One blatant difference between these two pieces is the visual display each author has chosen to showcase their text. While Mann’s work appears as one inclusion in an anthology, Kalman’s piece is an interlacing play between colors, pictures, and font on the New York Times website.  It could be said that Mann’s presentation is classic in that it lets the text, including theories, and research, speak for itself. I would argue that Mann’s layout pales only when in comparison to something as intertextually complex as Kalman’s Can Do. Alone, Mann’s text is very successful in isolating a specific audience and honing in on all aspects of the issue. The problem arises when this is compared with a text that is so modern in its author’s blunt honesty.

            Kalman’s text states all claims as fact in this piece, except for when she is pointing out her gaps of knowledge. She writes on Franklin’s personal life, “But the party had to end. (Why, I do not know.)” (Kalman). This type of sheer honesty is something very attractive to readers and builds a sort of credibility and reliability between reader and author. In opposition to this lies Mann’s text, which in more ways than not, uses scientific research and personal outlook to shield the reader from hearing his own opinion straight from him. I use the word research carefully because it is not so much scientific research as it is scientifically supported conjecture that can in no way be actually proven.

            As Mann ruminates on the concept of a lifespan of 200 years, and what that would do to our established stages in life, he references this period of wanderjahr that “will last into the mid thirties” (164). Yet, no scientist could prove such an idea, and using an overwhelming amount of this type of evidentiary support isolates a reader in that they are unable to disagree or agree with the information given. An abundant amount of his support lies in a state of limbo between being a fallacy – in that it is not factual but conjecture– and smart in that it cannot be disproven by his readers because he is dealing with the realm of the future. He essentially chooses to operate from a distance – writing through the safety of the lens of others instead of his own - as Kalman does. Kalman desires a personal and close relation to her piece whereas Mann would prefer distance between reader and writer.

Mann uses the boundaries set up between himself and the audience –through the implementation of conjecture used as fact- to force them to consider his very specific viewpoint of society. Mann writes, “In March ten respected researchers predicted in the New England Journal of Medicine that ‘the steady rise in life expectancy during the past two centuries may soon come to an end’ because rising levels of obesity are making people sicker” (158-159).  Mann spends all previous pages up to this point building up an image of a society that is bound to consume itself because there are too many people living too long. Yet, he forcefully shatters that idea, not with positive reinforcement, but with the idea that the problem will solve itself due to the human nature of self-destruction. This entire piece forces a very pessimistic and formulaic view of the human race onto the reader.    Repeatedly, generalizations are made about human nature with an outlook of if most people do it this way, then most likely this will occur in everyone or in most cases. For example, Mann speaks of divorce as a “substitute for death” in that all couples will divorce eventually – if given the time – when he says:

Longer lifespans are far from the only reason for today’s higher divorce rates, but the evidence seems clear that they play a role. The prospect of spending another twenty years sitting across the breakfast table from a spouse whose charm has faded must have already driven millions to divorce lawyers. Adding an extra decade or two can only exacerbate the strain. (165)

His entire take on humanity is so wholly grouped as one large mass of mistake-ridden, incapable slobs that there is no room left for the readers to formulate their own take on the issue. This mirrors that of problems that arose in Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s piece Integrating the American Mind. Gates, like Mann, chose to speak from a very specific and passionate stance on the issue. In speaking of race, specifically, Gates strongly interjected his own point of view that integration on a college campus is more of a quota to be filled to make up a diverse campus. His idea of diversity was more of an equation rather than a question of ethics or morals. This directly parallels Mann’s presentation of his views on humanity when he speaks of purification in a way, in saying:

A kind of reverse eugenics might occur, in which governments would freely allow the birth of people with “bad” genes but would let nature take its course on them as they aged. Having shed the baggage of depression, addiction, mental retardation, and chemical-sensitivity syndrome, tomorrow’s legions of perjuring the old would be healthier than the young. (162).

Both do not outright state their opinions but use the lens of others with similar opinions to support their own agenda. The actual humanity/humility factor does not come into play for both Gates and Mann when they speak of people.

            That being said, I will commend Mann on taking such a risk with this specific stance because, as we have seen, it has the potential to be very isolating for audience members who do not share his pessimistic outlook. They can feel trapped and stuck by such a suffocating argument. Mann essentially takes on a moral risk with this argument in that as humans, we should be happy to hear that people are living longer. Human nature tells us that the greatest universal fear is death, for ourselves and for others. Yet, Mann successfully situates this argument in a way that allows us to look past sympathy and into the negative/problematic areas of a longer average lifespan. They are essentially hoping to get an audience to see the negative side of a positive idea. This is a tough feat to conquer – to reprogram an audience to look differently at a very human issue – and though Mann’s evidence has problems of one-sidedness, it is successful in this ulterior point of view.

As chapter 10 of Donald Lazere’s Reading and Writing for Civic Literacy states, “Art enables us not only to perceive other people’s views of the universe but also to perceive the shifts in our own viewpoints as time passes and we change locations in space and in our relations with other people” (246). While Mann took the route of influencing his audience by interjecting his own opinion and tone, Kalman chose to follow this path of inducing, or lulling, the reader into appreciating her argument and its shifts/strengths/shortcomings through personal relation. The information is fed to us in a way that is all too relevant to our current time – with the combination of visuals and condensed information, in that it is straight to the point. It, in a sense, repurposes an history – Benjamin Franklin’s influence – with a modern form of communication and sharing.

 There is a theoretical and inspirational call to subtle positive action in Kalman’s piece. Both Mann and Kalman are trying to encourage their readers to do something. Yet, Mann wants us to look into a seemingly unfixable problem whereas Kalman’s Can Do encourages us to just do something – anything – to think. Yet, Kalman’s approach is not as forceful as Mann’s in that her set up mirrors that of a slow discovery of information instead of a constant dense stream of hypothetical situations and information. Kalman’s strength lies in her sequential setup, because she slowly builds a strong report with her readers. She gains their trust without the blatant use of citations and outside sources. Her claims are allowed to exist as simple fact, mixed with her own personal interjections, giving the piece a unique voice.

            Yet, both of these pieces have a very specific voice –working in very different ways on their readers. One similarity between them is that, structurally, they are both building up an idea and then challenging the very basis of it in the end. There is a running theme between these two pieces that a writer has to make the audience first believe the possibility of the claims being made before he/she can discuss the ethics and aspects/capabilities of them. Mann is claiming that a longer lifespan will have negative repercussions on society, and Kalman is arguing that Benjamin Franklin’s inventiveness is the true American path to take. Yet, before making these large claims, they first build up evidence and credibility to create even the possibility and believability of such claims being possible in the reader. Mann does this by citing numerous scholarly references that think similarly, while Kalman ruminates on every area in which Franklin was even remotely or distantly influential.  

Because of Mann’s attention to the alternative tactics of gaining audience relation, it becomes clear that what Kalman is doing with her piece is essentially easier than Mann’s feat. She is speaking to an American audience that already regards Benjamin Franklin in very highly and she is attempting to call us to a type of action we are used to hearing – “Don’t mope in your room. Go invent something. That is the American Message.” Mann, on the other hand, has set out to truly defamiliarize his topic – in complicating something as morally/humanly simple as the idea that longer life is a good thing. Yet, he blatantly and forcefully challenges that. It would be hard to fully appreciate his stance on this issue if I were not viewing it in direct comparison to a piece as light-hearted and typical in its patriotism as Kalman’s.

Works Cited

Gates, Jr., Henry Louis. "Integrating the American Mind." Rhetorical and Cultural Studies. 342-249. Print.

Kalman, Maira. “Can Do.” The New York Times. And the Pursuit of Happiness, 30 July 2009. Available at <http://kalman.blogs.nytimes.com/>.

Lazere, Donald. "Avoiding Oversimplification and Recognizing Complexity." Reading and Writing for Civic Literacy: The Critical Citizen's Guide to Argumentative Rhetoric. London: Paradigm Publishers, 244-256. Print.

Mann, Charles C. “The Coming Death Shortage.” The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2006, Ed. Brian Greene. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. 157-171.