Virtuous Speech Is Irreducible to Soft Skills

How the reduction of everything to a technique leaves us with an impoverished etiquette of speech

Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash

A couple of weeks ago I wrote what I thought was going to be a throw-away article on the Etiquette of Speech. The piece covered the basics of speaking: really listen to people, don’t interrupt, and don’t talk too much. Pretty simple stuff. Often forgotten, but simple. It’s become my most read article. Why, I wondered. Is there a profound need for basic education on how to talk and listen to other people? A need more pressing than any other topic I’ve ever written about? You can make up a narrative in which this makes some sense: the COVID-19 lockdowns and social distancing plus the negative social effects of social media and smartphones caused people to lose their basic abilities to communicate effectively. It’s plausible. But what made this all click for me was this article from Harper’s Magazine on the soft skills “crisis” and the multi-billion dollar soft skills training industry.

I’ve been blissfully unaware that there’s an entire industry and field of study devoted to developing interpersonal skills, communication skills, resiliency skills, empathy skills, emotional intelligence, and other difficult to define and measure qualities. Of course this makes sense. An employee’s ability to communicate does affect their job performance, so companies have a vested interest in improving communication skills. And the same is true for empathy. A salesperson who can’t show empathy to a frustrated customer will likely lose that customer. All this I understand and can follow. What I don’t concede is that so-called “soft skills” are the kinds of things that can be mechanically taught and measured. At that point, they become just another technique for manipulating other people for your selfish ends. Rather, speech, empathy, and love for other people are expressions of the love that Christ has shown us. And while we can discipline ourselves and intentionally put certain habits of speech into practice, both the habits and the results elude the grasp of strict methods of management and measurement.