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Gravitas

History and Commentary From a Prairie Perspective
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Gravitas is a word borrowed from Latin, the forerunner of all the Romance languages. In English, the dictionary meaning is dignity. It is more than that. It is the skills in words and manner which adorn expressions of truths and make the expression of untruths believable. It is now a human quality which is eroding.

During the dawn of the democratic ideal in Greece, history was as much made by orators as it was by armed conflict. Greece was the home of gravitas until the power centre of the known world became the Roman Republic and then the Roman Empire. The history of Rome is not without falsehood and bloodshed, but in the first stumbling steps Rome made on the long journey to responsible government, its most notable leaders – for good or for ill – had gravitas. They had the calm and confident mastery of words and actions which made others trust them. They had gravitas.

Gravitas is not cold, calculated reason. It is also revelation, a window into the soul of the speaker. It was so for Abraham Lincoln when he spoke at Gettysburg. His well-chosen words were tinged by grief for the dead and for his own part as a leader in the maelstrom of an internecine war.

In 1940, when a pugnacious Winston Churchill became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, the only European nation opposing the might of Nazi Germany, he promised to expend “blood, toil, tears and sweat” in the battle against the Axis Powers. His words inspired a nation and history remembers them still. Winston Churchill had gravitas. He made an embattled nation believe in victory.

In their times and torments, both Lincoln and Churchill spoke to people they could see. They could gauge the effect of their word upon their listeners. In 2017, face-to-face discussions, in the governments of nations and in diplomacy, are still the most effective way of averting threatened destruction.

Twice I have been enlisted by others in social networks without my prior consent and twice I have escaped from them. I choose my own friends and trusted associates. Gravitas demands it.

The internet, through social networks, gives people of low intelligence and little learning the opportunity to influence the affairs of nation. Finding the quality of gravitas in their confused effusions is rarely possible. Nowhere is the decline of gravitas more apparent than in the man brought into the most powerful position in the world by a needlessly complex electoral system. Donald Trump uses the social networks to lie, mislead, insult and threaten. He has no gravitas. Nor do those who are in a position to restrain his dangerous actions but fear to do it.