Lend Me Your Ears

What makes a man a sophist is not his faculty, but his moral purpose.

-Aristotle, Rhetoric

We are, as a nation, and perhaps in the Western world in general, at a crucial moment in terms of our development from a world of tribes, clans and nations into a world that is more global.  There is great potential for us to finally recognize that all of humanity is bound together and that our collective well-being may very well be dependent on how we deal with that reality.  This moment has created anxiety, as such moments always do.  It was this way in the days leading up to the enlightenment when those who began to develop a proto-scientific approach to the world were labeled sorcerers and heretics.  It was this way when an obscure sect of the Judaic faith began to openly challenge the Roman declaration that Caesar was Lord with the contrary assertion that, in fact, a Jewish man who had been crucified as a rebel, Jesus of Nazareth, was Lord. I imagine it was probably this way when the first band of roaming nomadic hunters discovered that they could settle down and raise crops and livestock.

Anxiety is a fixture in much of human history, it is rooted in our fundamental drive to survive, animals experience anxiety too.  Humans, who are able to reason and also use written and spoken words to persuade others, have a unique (as far as we know) ability to actually track the ways that our anxiety works itself out through history.  In this technological age, we now have the ability to actually watch as our anxieties work themselves out in real time, on the internet.  I'm writing this morning to appeal to you, my fellow human beings: we need to get our stuff together, this mess is not pretty.

As you may be aware, we have an election coming up next year, and no matter what side of the current political divide you happen to occupy, and especially if you find yourself somewhere in the middle, all of us very much need to learn some things from the deep history of the art of rhetoric.

The ancient Greeks considered Rhetoric to be one of the three great "arts," with grammar and logic, in fact, it was the art that synthesized the other two, it applied the rules of grammar towards expressing the work of a reasonable mind and expressing it in such a way as to convince others of something that we call truth.  As you may have noticed, of late truth has been orphaned and wanders alone in a wasteland of ill-formed opinions and poorly reasoned emotional reactions.  True rhetoric is the last shred of clothing this poor wraith has left and false rhetoric circles her like so many vultures and carrion crows.

While we may disagree across the political spectrum on what exactly the Mueller Report implicates with regard to the cultural gut check that is the Donald, one thing is clear: rhetoric is being used against us with some terrifying implications.  The power of rhetoric has been known for thousands of years, it's like a loaded gun just laying around for anyone to use.  One of the principles of Rhetoric is the idea of Kairos, which any of you Greek freaks will know concerns time.  The effectiveness of rhetoric is deeply dependent on timing, whether you are telling a joke or making an inaugural address.  The rhetoric of fear, anger and anxiety hit this nation at just the right time, and it was aided by a government that is clearly hostile towards our nation.  It's not all the Russians, but their timing was impeccable even if it was accidental.

This loaded gun of rhetoric has been picked up by some bad actors, the forces of xenophobia and separation, the corrupted mongers of war and greed. They have found that the internet creates a "target rich environment," in which they can maximize the lethal impact of their weapon, and they have loaded up on the ammunition of logical and rhetorical fallacies.  So my fellow citizens, we need to learn to take away their bullets.  The gun of rhetoric, much like our 2nd Amendment totems, is not something we can simple do away with, we need to learn to use it, and how to defend against it.  Unfortunately, like an unarmed populace we have not been trained well.  If you were to hand one of those dreaded AR-15's to a person who has never handled a gun before, they would probably have a hard time loading it and firing it at all, much less in an effective manner.  So it is with rhetoric, and it is not a one-sided problem.

Here's the fun thing, I have friends who occupy both ends of the political spectrum, and I see what they share on Twitter and Facebook, and most of the time I simply hang my head, because they have obviously been victimized by someone using one or more of the rhetorical fallacies with deadly effectiveness due to their own confirmation bias.  As far as I can tell, no faction on the current spectrum (including my own) is immune.  I find myself daily having to sort out what truth actually is, and wishing, somehow, someway, I didn't have to do so much for myself.

I have this cognitive dissonance that sometimes grows very loud: I know most of these people, and I know they're too smart and thoughtful to actually believe the crap that they're sharing, yet they do share... often they share a lot.  They share hateful ad-hominem (against the person) attacks, they share straw man fallacies by the score (that's setting up your opponent to be exactly the sort of sinister idiot that you can easily dismember). I feel like the world of social media has become a disaster of epic proportions because it is precisely like that metaphorical loaded gun, but it's actually perceived like a loaded gun in a video game.  We don't think of the internet as the real world, and the people we attack and vilify there we do not consider real people.  I have never felt a pang of guilt for shooting someone while playing a video game, but I am sure that if I shot someone with an actual gun, even if it was justified and even righteous, I would certainly feel remorse about it at some moment.  The problem is that the rhetorical bullets that are being shot in the cyber-world are having actual consequences in the "real" world.  The line has been blurred and maybe even disappeared.

I think one of the elements of rhetoric that the ancients always had to assume was the presence of the other, the interlocutor, the dialogue partner, you had to face your adversary or even your friend and know that you both had the same tools and were playing by the same rules.  If you lied they were going to call you on it if they could, in internet arguments the rules of rhetoric simply don't matter, which is why they end up being mostly futile.  I have had a few social media discussions over the years that stayed on the rails, but they are exceptions rather than the rule.

It may be the case that the work of philosophy and theology is irrelevant to the post-modern age.  It may be the case that the "Arts" of grammar, logic and rhetoric are nothing but relics of a by-gone era, and if that is so I hope humanity finds some other framework for... well, being human, but I am not sanguine about the possibility that other systems are able to possess the moral foundation that the old ways have.  Without a moral foundation, as Aristotle implies, we will be utterly at the mercy of sophists and charlatans, which is a great danger to our very civilization.