Ad bellum proliferandum

some thoughts on rhetoric

Sometimes, I struggle to post here, and it’s because I don’t have anything in particular that I want to write about. Other times, though (and more often, if I’m honest), I’ll have multiple thoughts that haven’t yet sorted themselves enough for me to get started. This past week has been one of those, where I have two legitimate inroads to the things I want to say, and each time one inched into the lead, I’d find something that moved me in the other direction. So this post may be two introductions to the same topic, and by the time I’ve written them through, the topic itself may end up being shorter than I’d expected.

Introduction #1

I think sometimes about how and where I find the things I read. Every once in a while, someone will ask me how I came across something, not expecting a reply that’s several layers deep resulting from a series of serendipitous, curiosity clicks. I like to joke that I read like a fox and write like a hedgehog, but that’s pretty much the truth.

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

I have a core set of subscriptions that serve as starting points for me, but it’s not unusual for me to chase multiple links out from something, until I’ve arrived at a place quite different from where I began. For me, that’s always been the appeal of the open web, the prospect of always finding more to read, more to think about.

When I write about those things here, I almost always find myself tracing back to those origins though, as a way of providing some context and connection, not only for an imaginary reader who follows those traces like I do, but as a way of figuring out my own thought processes, too. I learn a lot about how I think, just by reading myself reading.

Where I ended up a few days ago was on this passage, from an account of Michael Strevens’ book The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science:

What launched the Scientific Revolution in the 1600s, Strevens argues, is something else — a commitment to ceaseless combat.

In the past, scientists in different schools of thought (think the Atomists and the Aristotelians) would quarrel, and then split. The secret sauce of the Scientific Revolution were new rules of arguing that made it possible to stay in conversation with one’s frenemies forever.

This account is from a post by Brandon Hendrickson, one where he responds to a slew of comments that he received for a book review he wrote. I first came across his review (and thus his engagement with the comments) because it was part of the annual Book Review Contest that Scott Alexander runs over at Astral Codex Ten, which you might have heard of (and which I subscribed to) following the kerfuffle that he had with the NYT a couple of years back. See? Layers.

[I should also note that Hendrickson’s post is only part 1 of at least a couple, because he’s responding to the more-than-400-comments he received on the review, a prospect that exhausts me just to think of it. But his opening lines also get at a little of what I want to write about: “My review of Kieran Egan’s The Educated Mind got over 400 comments — many of them incredibly negative! This is an unmitigated blessing.” I’ll say more in a few minutes, but first, I want to include my second introduction.]

Introduction #2

I don’t remember where I saw this, but once upon a time, I read an interview with a scholar in my field who had been a journal editor for many years. I don’t even remember the question to which he was responding, but he was talking about the fact that one of the rites of passage for graduate students in the field was writing (and submitting) an essay that tried to answer the question “What is rhetoric?” once and for all.

As someone who’s written my fair share of attempts at this question, I felt a little called out, but only gently. He was pretty nice about it, but my vague recollection (and/or projection?) was that he said something to the effect that the vast majority of those essays would never see the (published) light of day, nor should they. On the one hand, rhetoric is such a nebulous notion (when it’s not being unfairly misunderstood) that those of us who go on to “profess” it are very nearly compelled to engage with the question at one point or another. (and that’s to say nothing of all of the friends, family, or acquaintances who will ask “But what is rhetoric?” when we tell them that’s what we study.) On the other hand, though, there’s only so many 25-page essays one can read addressing the question before one’s eyes glaze over.

[There used to be a site called Googlism which would basically generate a page of autofilled answers to a simply query. One year, I used it to generate a page of autofills for the phrase “rhetoric is…” and the results were fantastic—I used to hand out copies at the start of my rhetoric courses.]

I’m thinking about this now, though, because one of the things that I’m facing with my project is the prospect of writing to a general audience explicitly about rhetoric, and this has given me a little pause. My project draws heavily on rhetorical tropes, and advocates for a certain approach to (public, civic) rhetoric. It’s entirely fair of a reader to ask what that might actually mean. As a consequence, I find myself mulling the question over, even as I’ve been perfectly content to work with whatever definition happens to strike me at the moment. (I’ve always been partial to I.A. Richards’ claim that rhetoric is “a study of misunderstanding and its remedies,” but there are other good ones out there, too.)

Photo by Sebastian Bill on Unsplash

As I’ve been thinking about this, I feel like I’m slowly beginning to approach an answer (as opposed to the answer) that works with what I’m doing.

Conduction

And as I get closer, I suppose it’s time to join these two introductions, because Hendrickson’s account of Stevens’ argument is the passage that happened to trigger this reflection for me. I wince a little bit at the notion of “ceaseless combat,” but it connects for me with the epigraph* from a book that’s pretty canonical in my field, Kenneth Burke’s Grammar of Motives: Ad bellum purificandum, which translates roughly to something like “towards the purification of war.” Like Richards, Burke found rhetoric necessary because we fundamentally disagree. We’re sometimes able to transcend our disagreements temporarily and/or partially, but rhetoric itself implies competition, conflict, division, what Burke in some places calls the Scramble. What does it mean for Burke to advocate for the purification of war, as opposed, say, to its elimination? Burke was a pragmatist, and didn’t believe that it was possible to do away with conflict or disagreement. But among other things, war is a particularly wasteful way to engage in disagreements; for Burke, who was writing his Motives trilogy right around World War II, resorting to war was a failure of discourse. Insofar as Burke had an ideal, it was found in the “dialectic,” the ability to engage with many voices and perspectives and arrive at a resolution (however temporary or partial). This engagement was certainly “ceaseless” in Burke’s eyes, and he might even have been content to describe it as combat (whose etymology includes “con-” or with).

But the other piece of Hendrickson’s gloss that’s important is the phrase “new rules of arguing,” which is a piece of what rhetoric also entails. Looking back five hundred years, I think that we’d all agree that presenting the results of one’s experiments at a gathering of like-minded scientists, or detailing them in the pages of a scholarly journal, offers a more productive alternative than, say, pistols at dawn. For Burke, dialectic isn’t primarily about defeating one’s enemy, but about progress. He explains at one point that this attitude “is based upon a sense of fundamental kinship with the enemy, as one needs him, is indebted to him.” Flash back to Hendrickson’s comment that receiving so many (negative) comments on his review was “an unmitigated blessing”—this is part of dialectic too, the idea that one’s own ideas are improved most (and sometimes even abandoned) when they are submitted to smart folks who oppose them.

Contrary to a lot of the way we conceive of debates nowadays, the goal of engaging in debate shouldn’t be to beat, to “own,” or to destroy the enemy. The fact that so much of our political discourse today reduces to this motive is a symptom of what’s wrong with it. One of the flaws of so-called “horserace” coverage of our political culture (something I’ve got another in-process post about) is that it feeds this attitude, to the point that the same institutions responsible for it now exclaim their shock over how polarized we’ve become as a nation.

Perhaps it’s a lost cause, believing that we might able to talk with each other rather than at or over them, but that’s why I believe that rhetoric also entails a commitment to the “rules of arguing.” Those rules mean that there are clear standards for argumentative success (whether those standards involve an electoral mandate, a jury verdict, or the popularity of a well-reviewed book or movie). Rules also mean that the “kinship” that Burke talks about, while it may never turn into love, requires at least a baseline of respect.

One of the threads that complicates this commitment these days is the attitude that if the rules don’t allow us a “victory,” then we should just change the rules to make that outcome more likely. The blatant gerrymandering happening in a number of states is a sign of this. Similarly, I don’t think we’ve truly come to terms with the depth and extent to which our government has tampered with, suppressed, and sabotaged public discourse through their influence over social media platforms. As little as I care for what’s happened with Twitter, the release of the so-called Twitter Files revealed some real flaws. And that damage has continued to spread in the guise of “fighting disinformation.”

I have one more example of this, one that hits a little closer to home for me. If you follow that link, you’ll see a story about an academic researcher who was allegedly fudging their data, an allegation later confirmed by an independent review, but who is now suing their original critics for defamation (and damages in the tens of millions). The story I’ve linked to is about how the defendants had to turn to GoFundMe to help raise what would have been financially ruinous legal fees, but you can trace back some internal links to see more of the story. As the article notes, even though the truth is an absolute defense against defamation,

But the way the law works is that it’ll take years — and be terrifyingly expensive — for the case to reach the stage where the defendants can even raise that defense. “The system is so broken ... that a case like this will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and go on for years,” defamation lawyer Ken White told me earlier this month. “Realistically, you could wind up going to trial, and even if you’re going to win at trial eventually you’re going to be ruined doing it.”

There’s a term for these sorts of lawsuits—SLAPP, or Strategic Lawsuits against Public Participation—and while many states have individual laws against them, the relative strength and reach of those laws is uneven at best. It’s one of the ways that the legal system in this country has been weaponized. Those who can afford to do so will file lawsuits or cease-and-desist notices with the expectation that their targets will be unable to fight them legally. Or early entrants into a market will request overly broad patents allowing them to basically sue their competitors into bankruptcy (to cite another example that’s had no small impact upon my own career).

I feel as though I’ve drifted a bit from my original point, which was to think about what I mean by rhetoric. I’ve alluded to a few of the relevant features, but I could make them more explicit, I suppose. A lot of rough definitions involve persuasion, changing an audience’s mind, but I’d argue that even before that, there must be some commitment to engaging that audience in good faith. For me, often, there’s an implied ethic, too, one that requires going into that engagement with the possibility that it’s my own mind that will be changed. (I’m not always great at that.) One of the things that Aristotle got right back in the day was his insistence that we resort to rhetoric when dealing with probabilities rather than certainties. That means testing alternatives, changing course when strategies don’t work, etc. It’s more about finding the best option in the moment than being “right.” And even then, you might be wrong.

The phrase “in good faith” is bearing a load above, too, in an era where so little of what happens publicly can be described that way. Burke saw this back in the 1940s, warning that relativism is a “constant temptation” for dialectic. If it’s all fake, and rules are meant to be broken, then whoever has the loudest voice, or the most money, wins, and we’re no longer in the realm of rhetoric. Instead, ad bellum proliferandum.

*I should note that I brushed up on Burke’s epigraph by skimming a discussion of it, whose detail is in no way captured faithfully by my quick summary.