The Secret to a Good Conversation

The claim that conversation is a dying art has become itself a familiar conversational topic. As with many laments of cultural decline, the charge is most often levied by the old against the young. Our loquacious forebears, we are told, spent their time chattering away in smoke-filled drawing rooms, coming up with such ideas as human rights, constitutional government, and modern art. Today’s young people, in this telling, have ushered in the tyranny of the tongue-tied. Stupefied by our phones, we shirk face-to-face contact. When we are roused to banter, we find ourselves regurgitating political talking points or desperately summarizing a half-remembered television show. A burgeoning industry of featuring conversational prompts (“Can love really cure all?”) tries to supply training wheels for basic skills of human will end our misery by drafting our conversations for us. Its remarks could hardly be more hackneyed than what we say ourselves.