From the ancient Greeks on, rhetoric has come to mean many things at many different times to many different people. In the contemporary vernacular, rhetoric still carries the connotations it acquired during the Enlightenment - the practice of twisting the meanings of words to suit a selfish or disingenuous purpose. Tell someone you're studying rhetoric, and they're likely to reply, "So, you're learning how to bullshit." We often deride politicians just as they deride one another for refusing to "drop the rhetoric" and "talk straight." One might consider this definition one along a spectrum representing rhetoric's many functions - and one we can comfortably file somewhere near that spectrum's low end.
The kinds of rhetoric that draw the most attention from modern and contemporary scholarship, however, are deliberative and heuristic rhetoric, both of which aim at negotiating uncertainty. We use deliberative rhetoric to decide on a course of action when we can't know for sure which course is best - or at least we should - and in that respect deliberative rhetoric is also heuristic, or a mode of discovery.
The scope of communicative practices one considers rhetorical as described above, then, depends upon one's threshold for withholding claims to certainty. As soon as we are certain, we have no need for rhetoric. If everything is uncertain, rhetoric is suddenly everywhere.
Luckily for us, we live somewhere in between these polarities - with just enough knowledge and belief to keep us from disintegrating into chaos, and just enough uncertainty to require frequent and consequential deliberation and heuresis. When we stray too far to one side or the other, problems arise, and deliberation and discovery become impossible. Take for instance the current political climate, wherein two parties not only holding to their irreconcilable ideological differences but making those differences the primary focus of debate find themselves in intractable position after intractable position. In the end - because of a lack of rhetorical sensibility, with which the debate might be steered toward acknowledging points of uncertainty and addressing them in the spirit of deliberation and discovery - we all lose.
Instead of demanding them to "drop the rhetoric," we ought to ask our politicians to pick it the hell up. More and more one overhears expressions of frustration that our politicians don't understand that Americans tend to value a pragmatic approach to producing results more than an intractable devotion to ideology, whether ours or someone else's. By reintroducing into the public discourse the concept of rhetoric as deliberative and heuristic, and by explicitly holding up deliberation and discovery as primary American virtues, we might offer a point around which the vast majority of Americans (and judging by Congressional approval ratings, we are nothing less than a vast majority) can rally.
Well said!
ReplyDeleteI would interject only a small nuanced quibble. For the reasons implicit in your last paragraph, we do need rhetoric when we are certain. It is an excellent, if not the only, tool for nurturing what David Hiley calls deep doubt - a subjective check on the potential for tyranny (in belief and in action) that certainty so easily spawns.