W. H. R. Rivers reports that in small groups in Polynesia & Melanesia, decisions are often arrived at & acted upon, though never formulated by anybody. The Western observer, listening to the proceedings of a native council, realizes after a while that the original topic in dispute has changed. Inquiring when they are going to decide the question in which he is interested, he is told "that it had already been decided and that they had passed on to other business. The decision had been made with none of the processes by which our councils or committees decide disputed points. The members of the council have become aware at a certain point that they are in agreement, and it was not necessary to bring the agreement explicitly to notice."

Separation of oratory from decision-making isn't unique to Melanesians. People long familiar with Westminster democracy accept that there is a large element of play in it.

Democracy, as we know it, developed under literacy. One essential element of literacy is separation of thought from emotion & behavior.

Speech everywhere combines phonemes (sound units), tonemes (tonal units), and kines (body units). Some linguists prefer to study phonemes alone, but tonemes (which favor the expression of emotions) and kines (which are actual body movements) remain integral parts of speech. They are especially important in nonliterate languages. Ultimately, it's impossible to separate word from thought, thought from emotion, emotion from behavior.

In oral societies, perception or cognition is associated with, or immediately followed by, an "emotion." Every idea is not only a state of knowing but a tendency toward movement: "To see her is to love her"; "I shuddered at the thought."

Emotion effects both heart & lungs. "Every emotion quickens the action of the heart and with it the respiration," observed Darwin. "When a fearful object is before us we pant and cannot deeply inhale."

Emotion tends to beget bodily motion. In Homer, the manliest warriors wept openly, beat their chests, tore their hair, and when this was sung about in the Athenian market-place, it's probable that listeners joined in the expression of these emotions.

Hearing these accounts meant experiencing them. But one can read them without emotion. Any newspaper front page is a mass of tragedies, yet we read unmoved. We could never act or dance such tragedies without emotion. Nor sing them. Nor express them as poetry. But reading is different. Silent reading is thinking deserted by emotion. It leads to a high degree of separation of mental concepts from the plurality of the concrete.

Perhaps all people find it necessary to separate, to some extent, group decision-making from oratory & emotion. New Guinea administrators struggle with this problem when they seek to dilute the tone of political criticism. In principle, they offer opposition parties the right to be heard on radio; in practice, they often present that criticism as faulty, something best corrected right then on the air.

One appreciates their dilemma. The very medium of radio magnifies & intensifies political criticism. When such criticism reaches oral peoples orally, emotion & action are easily aroused, no matter how remote, or imperfectly understood, the issues.

Democracy takes many forms. But Western democracy is deeply rooted in literacy & not easily transposed into other media.