The Rhetorical Nightmare
When I was in graduate school, I was assigned to teach Rhetoric. Despite my having nothing resembling a classical education, my department informed me that teaching Rhetoric was a larger appointment and therefore a larger stipend (as in, just over the poverty line and not under it). I figured, well, I’ve read a bunch of non-fiction, narrative and otherwise, this shouldn’t be too hard. I had autonomy over my syllabus, so I wasn’t too worried starting the semester.
The reason I was at least somewhat successful as a Rhetoric teacher was because the students knew even less than I did. I could write a treatise on the strange behavior of this particular crop of freshmen, whose high school experiences were interrupted by COVID, but teaching them something I knew absolutely nothing about was, yes, a teaching moment.
As the Rhetoric department of my alma mater sees it, a proper rhetorical argument consists of three (and sometimes four) elements. Ethos, the appeal to credibility, pathos, the appeal to emotion, and logos, the appeal to reason. The “sometimes-Y” of Rhetoric, as I learned to teach it, is kairos, the context in which an argument is presented.
As the semester wore on, I was able to find (with the help of my teaching advisor), tons of texts explaining how an argument works, pulling from textbooks and commercials and movie trailers. The students seemed to understand what I was getting at, and the course ended. I myself learned a lot about rhetoric in the process, and happily moved on to a second year of teaching. I could see the forms of rhetorical arguments wherever I looked.
But now, we are living in a rhetorical nightmare. Going online and watching the news is a testament to the fact that rhetoric, all of those appeals, are useless. When is the last time that an appeal to credibility has worked? At this point, I assume that a politician or public figure trotting out their bona fides will only work if they’re talking to an audience of like-minded people. When we have a president who regularly denies that his successor (who is also his predecessor) legitimately won his election, the concept of anyone listening to an opposing argument on the grounds of its rhetor’s accomplishments is laughable.
Meanwhile, the ascendant fascist Right has made it abundantly clear that they are not interested in facts. Any application of fact, historical or recent, is waved away if it doesn’t serve their agenda. There’s a reason Black, queer, and indigenous history is being scrubbed from government websites and the American education system is being stripped for parts. The less access that Americans, particularly young ones, have to history that troubles dominant narratives of rugged (White, straight, Christian) individualism, the less the people can fight back. Liberals aren’t off the hook either. If you can’t take warnings about a genocide from the International Court of Justice and the United Nations as a legitimate call to action, you are turning a massive blind eye to injustice.
And then there’s pathos. In the purely academic way that I was trained in rhetoric, an appeal to emotion is meant to be a mere dusting, just a little something to hook the audience and give the argument resonance. The problem with appealing to emotion now is that the powers that be simply don’t care. To engage with media today is to wade through a river of misery, as we are bombarded with images of crises both abroad and domestic. Even if our elected officials stay away from the media, they won’t even deign to respond to a human being talking to them. How many clips have circulated recently on social media of activists and organizers confronting politicians on both sides of the aisle, pleading with them to do something, anything, to stop the war, to halt climate change, to support some sort of infrastructure that might help people outside of D.C.? How many times have those unmediated displays of emotion worked? When confronted with the needs of the people, the powerful sometimes offer a mealy-mouthed rationale, but often wander off like an automaton who has been ordered to redirect.
Despite Kamala Harris’ pontificating, it doesn’t seem that there’s much preoccupation with context and timing with our leaders either. Maybe their hands are tied by corporate interests, or they are willing to sacrifice the Earth for the kingdom of Heaven. But there’s a lack of urgency, which leads common people to despair, as they see things getting worse and worse with no one intervening.
I don’t think that we’re fully beyond saving at this point. The obstacles standing in the way of progress are easily identifiable, and we need to pay attention to each other and organize within our own circles. But we can’t keep pontificating on why X needs to happen in order to achieve Y. Our systems are broken, and traditional ways of changing peoples’ minds aren’t as efficient as they once were. I don’t entirely know what we should do, but I think we can find it in each other.
I started writing this essay several months ago. At the time, I put this piece on the shelf, in a fit of self-defeating anxiety about offering my two cents to a world on fire. Perhaps things would get better, I also thought. I was mistaken. A man-made famine in Gaza, the decimation of our already-pathetic healthcare system, and mass denial that regular people could do anything about it has consumed this summer. But, I suppose this is what we can do. In spite of the maddening dissonance, we can create, we can look to the past, and we can look to each other to get through. There’s a theory that only 3.5% of a society needs to dissent in order to fully topple a destructive regime. So, we should communicate with each other in the best way that we can, in the hopes that we can collect the energy needed to make things different, if not better. How do we do that? I’ll try to use my rhetorical skills as I do my part.
