Thank You for Arguing (Revised and Updated)

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Thank You for Arguing (Revised and Updated) Page 42

by Jay Heinrichs


  DOROTHY SR.: Shhh.

  ME: Students would repeat something historically important, playing the main characters themselves.

  GEORGE: So who gets to play Judas?

  DOROTHY SR.: Will you please be quiet?

  ANOTHER PARISHIONER: Shhh.

  Another time, I was explaining to Dorothy Jr. the etymology of the medical terms she loves.

  Persuasion Alert

  Speaking of pretension, I need a device to lay some more cool rhetorical facts on you without turning you off. So I resort once again to self-deprecation, nerdily reciting rhetoric facts in a dialogue that has me nerdily reciting rhetoric facts. Ooh, weird.

  ME: Dialysis—a figure of speech.

  DOROTHY JR.: That’s nice.

  ME: It’s where the speaker puts both sides of an issue next to each other in a sentence. Like the one-two beat of a heart, see.

  DOROTHY JR.: Dad, I—

  ME: Doctors stole a bunch of figures at a time when rhetoric held a higher status than medicine—metastasis, antistasis, epitasis, metalepsis…

  DOROTHY JR.: Dad, I don’t care!

  Then just the other day, while flying back from a consulting trip in North Carolina, I found myself lecturing on rhetoric to my startled seatmate, a young woman who had just graduated from journalism school.

  Useful Figure

  METANOIA: A self-editing figure, which corrects an earlier phrase to make a stronger point. It’s a faintly ironic way to spruce up a cliché such as “Don’t get me started.”

  ME: Do they still teach you to cover “who, what, when, where, how, and why” in a newspaper story?

  SEATMATE: Yes, they do.

  ME: Journalism got that right out of classical rhetoric. Know who Cicero is?

  SEATMATE: Um, I think I…

  ME: He said that the orator should cover all these bases during the “narration” at the beginning of a speech.

  SEATMATE (giving frozen smile): …

  And don’t get me started about the birth of the American republic. Actually, do get me started.

  Channeling Cicero

  You often hear about America’s founding as a “Christian nation,” but its system of government owes a greater debt to rhetoric—even though the discipline was on the decline before the Revolution. In the 1600s, Britain’s Royal Society of leading scientists called for “a close, naked, natural way of speaking” that would “approach Mathematical plainness.” It issued a manifesto urging speakers of English “to reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style; to return back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men deliver’d so many things, almost in equal number of words.” The society’s ideal of a one-to-one word-to-thing ratio probably hadn’t been achieved since humans lived in caves, but their plea helped scrape off some of the gilding from that day’s overelaborate speech.

  Persuasion Alert

  Now we’re into the narration, which uses storytelling to establish the facts. You can make a concept into a character by introducing opposing ideas and their advocates as villains. That nasty Royal Society!

  Of course, among those who employed amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style were Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. But every movement has its casualties.

  Nonetheless, sheer academic inertia allowed rhetoric to maintain a large presence in higher education up through the eighteenth century, and everyone who attended the American Constitutional Convention had a thorough grounding in it. John Locke, the modern philosopher who inspired the founders the most, occupied a rhetoric chair at Oxford. Late in life, Jefferson credited Locke, along with Cicero, Aristotle, and Montaigne, with helping inspire the Declaration of Independence.

  The founders were absolutely mad about ancient Greece and Rome. They lived in knockoff temples, wrote to each other in Latin, and commissioned artists to paint them draped in togas. The founders did more than just imitate the ancients, though; they virtually channeled their republican forebears. Admirers called George Washington “Cato,” after a great Roman senator. When they bestowed the “Father of Our Country” label on Washington, they actually quoted Cato—who called Cicero the father of his country.

  It seemed as though everyone wanted to play the part of Rome’s greatest orator. Caustic, witty John Adams liked to consider himself the reincarnation of witty, caustic Marcus Tullius Cicero. Adams even recited the Roman orator as a sort of daily aerobic workout. “I find it a noble Exercise,” he told his diary. “It exercises my Lungs, raises my Spirits, opens my Porrs, quickens the Circulation, and so contributes much to [my] health.” Alexander Hamilton liked to sign his anonymous essays with Cicero’s nickname, Tully. Voltaire called Pennsylvania leader John Dickinson a Cicero. John Marshall called Washington a Cicero. But some people thought Patrick Henry, who spoke fluent Latin, was the Cicero who beat all Ciceros (except the original one). Witnesses say that when he shouted, “Give me liberty or give me death,” he threw himself on the floor and played dead for a moment. It brought the house down.

  Classic Hits

  SLAVES MADE THEM LIBERAL: While some of the founders disliked slavery, nearly all tolerated it, because it served what to them was a higher purpose. In a classical sense, slavery was consistent with republican values; after all, it had existed in every previous republic in history. The Romans had slaves. So did the Athenians. More important, slaves were part of the ancients’ agricultural economy; they allowed the owners to live free of any interest—or as they put it, “liberally.” Ironically, slavery’s essential evil became a political reality only when the notion of disinterest faded.

  All during the Revolution, theatergoers flocked to performances of Joseph Addison’s smash hit, Cato. Its plot—a noble democrat struggles to save the republic from tyranny—paralleled their own cause. Cato-esque George Washington saw it many times, and to cheer the troops he had the play performed at Valley Forge, twice. When his officers threatened to mutiny, Washington imitated the rhetorical techniques that the Cato in the play used to put down a mutiny. Patrick Henry lifted his liberty-or-death line straight from Addison’s script. And before the British hanged him, Nathan Hale, the American spy, wrote his own epitaph—“I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country”—by cribbing Addison (“What pity is it / That we can die but once to serve our country!”).

  The tragedy of the Roman Republic enabled a self-induced case of déjà vu. After reading a biography of Cicero in 1805, John Adams wrote, “I seem to read the history of all ages and nations in every page, and especially the history of our country for forty years past. Change the names and every anecdote will be applicable to us.”

  That must have been nerve-racking. Cato was a tragedy, and so was the demise of the Roman Republic. Cato committed suicide at the end of the play—and at the end of his real life—and the bad guys did Cicero in a few years later. But all that classical nostalgia had a serious purpose. The American system was more than an experiment in political theory; it also attempted the most ambitious do-over in world history. The Revolution would let history repeat itself, with some major improvements.

  The most important upgrade was an antidote for factionalism. What killed democracy in ancient Athens and destroyed the Roman Republic, they believed, was conflict between economic and social classes. Factionalism scared the Americans even more than kings did. So the founders established a system of checks and balances. The Senate would represent the aristocracy, being chosen by state legislatures. The “plebes,” as the Romans called common citizens, would elect the House of Representatives. And both groups would choose the president. Each faction would keep the other out of mischief.

  Which begs the question: What with all that checking and balancing, how could anything get done? Their answer lay in rhetoric. The new system would “refine and enlarge” public opinion, Ha
milton said, by passing it “through the medium of a chosen body of citizens”—rhetorically trained citizens. The founders assumed that this natural aristocracy would comprise those with the best liberal education. “Liberal” meant free from dependence on others, and the liberal arts—especially rhetoric—were those that prepared students for their place at the top of the merit system. These gentlemen rhetoricians would compose an informal corps of politically neutral umpires. They would serve, Hamilton said, as a collective “impartial arbiter” among the classes.

  The founders weren’t starry-eyed about their republic. They knew that occasionally, inevitably, scum would float to the surface. Hamilton even understood that political parties—which the founders equated with factions—might someday “infest” their republic. But he and his colleagues believed that the symptoms could be ameliorated by the combination of checks and balances and the “cool, candid” arbitration of the liberally educated professional class. Congress would serve as a “deliberative” body, Hamilton explained. Rhetoricians might be in the minority, but that was all right, so long as they held the swing votes; being neutral by definition, they were bound to hold the swing votes.

  The nation had no lack of rhetorically educated candidates. To gain admission to Harvard in the 1700s, prospects had to prove their mastery of Cicero. John Jay read three of Cicero’s orations as a requirement of admission to King’s College (now Columbia). College students throughout the colonies held debates in which they pretended to be English Whigs debating ancient Greeks and Romans. Before he led New Jersey’s delegation in Philadelphia, John Witherspoon was a professor of rhetoric and James Madison was one of his students.

  Alas, the founders’ classical education failed to prepare them for an enormous political irony: those same leaders who were supposed to counterbalance political parties—the enlightened, disinterested few—wound up founding them. Each party, Federalist and Republican, rose to prevent the rise of the other. Each claimed not to be a faction at all; each vowed to prevent faction. Hamilton thought he was defending the rhetorical republic against the democratically inclined Jeffersonians, who, Hamilton thought, would encourage factionalism and prevent the election of a liberally educated aristocracy. The Jeffersonians defended the agrarian culture that the ancients had considered essential to personal independence. In fighting what they thought were threats to disinterested government—democracy and commercialism—both groups formed permanent competing interests.

  Hamilton had originally thought of the American republic as an experiment that would test a hypothesis: whether people were capable of “establishing a good government from reflection and choice,” or whether their politics were doomed to depend on “accident and force.” By 1807, with the nation slipping further into factionalism, he had concluded that the experiment was a failure.

  The political divisions brought a shocking collapse of civility. Newspapers in the early 1800s filled their columns with violent personal attacks and political sex scandals; editorials even went after saints like Ben Franklin and George Washington. Hamilton’s dreaded “accident and force”—along with diatribe and personal attack—took the place of deliberation. Politics became mired in tribal language and fueled by a deep national division—not between social classes, as in Rome, but between sets of deeply held beliefs and values.

  The modern candidate would have felt right at home.

  You Can’t Keep Good Rhetoric Down

  Throughout this country’s history, “values” have fostered occasional breakdowns in political debate, as citizens took sides around their ideals and formed irreconcilable tribes. When the abolition of slavery competed with states’ rights, the result was civil war.

  Persuasion Alert

  Continuing my oration, I now come to the proof part. Some rhetoricians say you can merge the proof with division. I’ve done that as well.

  While the current division in values is not nearly so severe, tribes have been forming nonetheless. In 2005, Austin American-Statesman reporter Bill Bishop found that the number of “landslide counties”—where more than 60 percent of residents voted for one party in presidential elections—had doubled since 1976. By 2010, a majority of Americans occupied these ideological bubbles. Since then, the situation has gotten even worse. In the 2016 election, landslide counties comprised 60 percent of the population.

  When we split into tribes, even reality gets a tribal spin. A lot of well-informed people were shocked when reports came out of “fake news”: deliberately planted falsehoods, some of it backed by the Russian government. Alarming as these reports are, an even more insidious trend infects our politics. More and more of us trust only the facts that come from our side of the political divide. If a fact comes from a media source or institution we don’t support, we refuse to believe it.

  “You heard it on Fox News?” a Democrat snorts. “Then it’s not true.”

  “CNN said it?” a Fox fan retorts. “The lamestream media always lies.”

  Journalists as a whole are under unprecedented attack as both political extremes reject any attempt at real journalism. One telling piece of evidence: “media” used to be plural. Now it’s one big corporate/liberal/elitist/treasonous hot mess.

  Well, it can’t be all bad. Not all of our facts come from the news, right? There’s always science. And most of the statistics about the economy and social conditions come from government agencies.

  Oy.

  Science has taken such a beating that nearly all climate scientists say they “believe” in climate change, and legitimate biology teachers “believe” in evolution—putting established climate science and genetics in the same faith-based category as angels. (In a 2011 Associated Press poll, 77 percent of Americans said they believed in angels—a belief that’s mercifully hard to fact-check.) And try using FBI statistics on the historically low crime rate to talk a parent into letting her child walk to school. The FBI? Are you kidding?

  So the three pillars of fact in a modern society—journalism, science, and government—are all tumbling down. Pundits say we have entered a “post-truth” era. The Oxford Dictionaries even named “post-truth” the 2016 word of the year.

  But we’re not in a post-truth era. There will always be truth. We just don’t know what it is. And then there’s the capital-T Truth of belief and values.

  It’s more accurate to say that the world has stumbled into a post-fact era. Having lost trust in the sources of facts, we don’t have any common ground of reality to debate with. In a fact-based society, we could start with the assumption that the Earth is warming. Lots of government-funded statistics and years of science say so. Now let’s argue about what to do about it. Should we risk harming the economy with strict carbon limits, or put our resources into preparing for the inevitable floods and ecological changes? Or have I framed the issue all wrong?

  Not that many people want to debate in the first place. Our tribal mindset has destroyed what little faith we had in deliberative debate. Even as individuals, we think so little of argument that we outsource it. We delegate disagreement to professionals, handing off our arguments to lawyers, party hacks, radio hosts, H.R. departments, and bosses. We express our differences sociopathically, through anger and diatribe, extremism and dogmatism. Incivility smolders all around us: on our drive to work, in the supermarket, in the ways employers fire employees, in social media, on radio and television, and on Capitol Hill.

  Persuasion Alert

  This is a pretty informal version of the refutation, where I state my opponent’s argument, or an anticipated objection from the audience, and smack it down.

  But as you know, we make a mistake when we apply the “argument” label to each nasty exchange. Invective betrays a lack of argument—a collapse of faith in persuasion and consensus.

  It is no coincidence that red and blue America split apart just when moral issues began to dominate campaigns—not be
cause one side has morals and the other lacks them, but because values cannot be the sole subject of deliberative argument. Of course, demonstrative language—values talk—works to bring an audience together and make it identify with you and your point of view. But eventually a deliberative argument has to get—well, deliberative. Political issues such as stem cell research, abortion, and gay marriage deal with the truth’s black-and-white, not argument’s gray. Even climate change became a wedge issue when Al Gore declared it a “moral issue.” Before that, a great many Republicans acknowledged the truth of human-caused warming; after Gore began speaking out, nearly all Republican leaders became climate change deniers.

  When politicians politicize morals and moralize politics, you have no decent argument. You have tribes. End of discussion.

  On the other hand, deliberative argument acts as the great attractor of politics, the force that brings the extremes into its moderate orbit. The trick is to occupy the commonplace of politics, that Central Park of beliefs, and make it the persuader’s own turf. You can’t pull people toward your opinion until you walk right into the middle of their beliefs. And if that fails, you have to change your goal—promote an opinion that lies a little further into their territory, or suggest an action that’s not so big a step.

  In other words, you have to be virtuous.

  The Great Attractor

  Remember Aristotle’s definition of virtue: “a matter of character, concerned with choice, lying in a mean.”

 

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