Charm vs Charisma

Ian Leslie, on his Substack site The Ruffian, wrote an interesting article entitled “Are You Charismatic or Charming?". It made me start considering my teaching and writing style. Leslie writes:

In a new book, Charm: How Magnetic Personalities Shape Global Politics, the sociologist Julia Sonnevend argues that charm has superseded charisma to become the dominant political style of the twenty-first century. Charm thrives on proximity; on a sense that the politician would be at ease with the voter in person. Bill Clinton, who felt your pain and played the sax, had bags of charm. Charisma depends on distance - on the leader being ‘up there’, gazing down at us. De Gaulle was the archetypal charismatic leader. He believed that a leader must never be ordinary, but wreathed in mystique and larger than life.

The comedian Jimmy Carr has also given this question some thought (standup is as much about developing an onstage persona as it is about jokes), and he offers a succinct definition of the difference. Charm is I come to you; charisma is You come to me. Jennifer Aniston is charming; Angelina Jolie is charismatic. Charismatic people don’t care what you have to say; charming people really do. The essential thing, Carr says, is to know which type you are and inhabit it. (He defines his own persona as charismatic, on the basis that nobody could find him charming.)

My sense is that I lean more in the direction of charisma rather than charm, although my students might offer “none of the above” as a viable alternative. I suspect this is why blogging is better for me than, say, hosting a podcast, or if I did host a podcast it would likely have a format that was just me talking about something rather than an interview show. I’ve sometimes thought I’d like to do a podcast that is just me talking about a play or book for 30 minutes, which really is a lecture, isn’t it? There is a podcast I’ve been listening to called Professing Literature that does this with novels and poetry (and some Shakespeare). The host, a professor at the University of Oklahoma named David Anderson, describes his approach as follows:

Why do great novels, poems and plays move us and excite us? How can they change the way we look at ourselves and the world? What do these authors have to teach us? Why do they matter? There are no better answers to these questions than those provided by the authors themselves. We want to let them speak. Professing Literature is not a broad summary of major works. Instead, it will zero in on one or two key passages, looking at them closely in order to figure out what is at stake. The goal will be to appreciate an author’s brilliance by seeing him or her in action. We will unpack key phrases, images and metaphors and we will consider the techniques the writer uses to make ideas come alive.

I enjoy his 90-minute podcasts. And I find myself thinking about “key passages” in plays I’d like to examine: Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, for instance, or Ibsen’s Brand, or Lillo’s The London Merchant. But I don’t find myself thinking about doing an interview show, for instance; I could see having a co-host, perhaps, but I suspect I’m a solo act.

Anyway, I’m musing.

#Musings