Month: June 2018

How abusers negotiate

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/the-8-prototypes-for-trumps-border-wall-photos

I really wish more people read Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. Granted, it gets into the weeds about various battles, but the meta-arguments about argument are brilliant. There is, for instance, what’s typically called “The Melian Dialogue.”  The Melians were neutral, a stance that the Athenians (in a “you’re with us or against us” attitude) took as hostile, and “plundered” the area, thereby completely alienating them. Then the Athenians decided to conquer the area, and offered two choices: surrender (and be conquered), or fight (and be conquered). The Athenians reject any possibility of deliberation, any appeal to higher values, and insist on a crude might makes right ethic. The Athenians refuse public deliberation (something they had been famous for loving), denigrate rhetoric, and begin the negotiations by saying persuasion is impossible, and the Melians should just be realistic: “the question of justice only enters where the pressure of necessity is equal, and that the powerful exact what they can, and the weak grant what they must.”[1] Justice, then, isn’t an overarching principle that applies in all situations, but only something you consider if you must.[2] The Athenians, famous for their love of argument, rhetoric, and deliberation, refuse to listen to arguments.

Instead, the Athenians tell the Melians that they should submit to what would likely be a brutal surrender because the Athenians are going to crush them either way. The Athenians frame the Melians as irrational because they choose not to submit, and the Athenians present their offer to let the Melians surrender as a kindness. The Melians, not the Athenians, are responsible for any violence or cruelty on the part of the Athenians.

That’s how abusers negotiate. There are two really interesting moves that abusers make in negotiating: first, they insist that they are entitled to what they want; second, and connected, since they are entitled to what they’re demanding, the other person (or group) is at fault for refusing, and is responsible for whatever the abuser does as a consequence of being refused.

Victims of their abuse are at fault for having “brought it on themselves,” and by “brought it on themselves” abusers mean that their victims didn’t do exactly what the abuser wanted. Abusers negotiate by doing anything they can to win, including violence, for which they don’t take responsibility. The victim is responsible for the consequences of the abuser not getting their way.

It’s also how they think. They believe they are genuinely entitled to whatever they’re trying to get, that their right to the thing they want is grounded in the fabric of the universe and God/Nature’s will, and therefore they are also entirely right to do anything to get their way: the ends justify the means when it’s their ends.[3]

Hitler did this a lot, and it always played with his base. He said that Germany was entitled to Czechoslovakia because reasons and if people refused him, they were responsible for the consequences of not letting him have his way—that is, a war he would frame as justifiable pre-emptive self-defense. The victim is responsible for the consequences of the abuser not getting his way.

Hitler was never willing to negotiate on a reasonable basis about whether Germany really had a right to Czechoslovakia—he was Athens screaming at Melos. He did the same with Poland. If England and France didn’t allow him

to take Poland, THEY were responsible for the ensuing war. If they didn’t let him get what he wanted, they were responsible for what he would do.

And, as Shirer describes, it went over beautifully with his base. Hitler’s base did believe that Germany was entitled to European hegemony, and so, when Hitler described his invasion of Poland as a counterattack, they were willing to see it that way. They didn’t want war, so they said, but they were willing to support war to get what they wanted. All they wanted was to get everything they wanted without having to go to war, but they wanted it enough to go to war. England, France, and Poland could have stopped him anytime by simply surrendering, so the war was their fault. And, oddly enough, Hitler’s rhetoric throughout the war that Germans were the victims of the war played well. Germans were victims because they hadn’t been able to get what they wanted.

That’s how abusers “negotiate”—they say they want everything, and anyone who doesn’t give the everything they want is responsible for the negotiations breaking down. They aren’t responsible for making unreasonable demands. They want the premise of the negotiations to be that they will get everything they want.

Trump promised a wall to his supporters. He is, and has always been, unwilling to deliberate about whether the wall is likely to be effective, good in terms of cost/benefit analysis, or in any way reasonable. He promised it; he wants it; and he will choose to do extraordinary harm to get that wall. And, when he chooses to do the harm for a wall he chooses to support, he will blame others for the choices he has made, on the grounds that they are responsible for his choices.

That’s how abusers negotiate.

 

 

[1] Another translation is: “since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

[2] This stance is often, inaccurately called “realist” (since it’s typically very divorced from reality, it seems to me strategic misnaming), and it’s often attributed to Thucydides by people who obviously didn’t read the whole book. He is condemning the attitude—Athens’ coming to reject deliberation in favor of power politics is, he is clear, a tragedy—a bastardization of the emphasis on expediency of rhetors like Pericles and Diodotus.

[3] Arguing for a “might makes right” ethic, social Darwinism, the miracle of the market, the prosperity gospel, or any other version of the “just world model” involves mental gymnastics when the in-group is not succeeding. When the in-group is succeeding (or has succeeded), success is proof of being entitled to success (the fittest survived, might made right), but when the in-group is failing, that isn’t disproof of the basic principle of might makes right, nor is the success of the out-group proof that they deserved their success. Success of the in-group is proof that the in-group is entitled to success, but success of the out-group is never proof that they were entitled to success.

What I have to say about civility (selections from Fanatical Schemes)

[Selections from Fanatical Schemes: Proslavery Rhetoric and the Tragedy of Consensus]

[The argument that the Civil War was caused by the extremism of “both sides”] typifies one conventional way of understanding conflict, exemplified in the saying that “it takes two to make a fight.” According to this view, if there is a violent conflict, it is the result of at least two parties who refuse to compromise, so both parties are to be equally blamed for their intransigence. This sense of a public sphere of compromise and concession is often connected to privileging civility, a powerful, but very vague, concept. “Civility” tends to be defined through negation: it is not emotional or abusive; it does not involve personal attack; it is not offensive. Offending one’s audience, it is argued, alienates them, and persuading them necessitates moving them to one’s side, not pushing them away:

When the ebullitions of passion burst in peevish crimination of the audience themselves, when a speaker sallies forth, armed with insult and outrage for his instruments of persuasion, you may be assured, that this Quixotism of rhetoric must eventually terminate like all other modern knight errantry and that the fury must always be succeeded by the impotence of the passions.  (John Quincy Adams, Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory I: 365.)

The hope is that a rhetor can find a civil way to make any argument–including dissent. Yet, dissent is inherently disruptive, and necessarily upsetting to anyone who identifies with the current system. Hence, as various scholars have noted, privileging discourse that is not upsetting necessarily furthers the disenfranchisement of the already marginalized (see especially Darsey).

This notion of the power of civil discourse is wonderfully optimistic, as it suggests that there might be a discursive solution to every conflict, that violence happens when only rhetors make their arguments badly. In its most extreme form, this theory of rhetoric makes an absolute distinction between the content and form of an argument, so that abolitionists were not wrong to want slavery abolished, but in how they made their case. Had abolitionists tempered their rhetoric, had they not armed themselves with insult and outrage, they might have persuaded slavers to free their slaves; this was the argument that Channing made in Slavery. Condemning abolitionists for their vehemence, Channing promises a different kind of criticism of slavery: “I propose to show that slavery is a great wrong, but I do not intend to pass sentence on the character of the slave-holder” (16). As demonstrated by the reaction to Channing’s book, his readers did not see the distinction; his book was characterized as “pouring oil on a conflagration” (Austin 11), and, despite Channing’s claims to reject violence, “it is insurrection that he preaches” (Austin 14). The 1836 anonymous response insists that, although Channing may not have intended “to excite the blacks to take ‘vengeance,’ and free themselves,” “no work has appeared (so far as I know) so well adapted to produce precisely that attempt” (11). Proslavery readers saw no difference between his rhetoric and the rhetoric of the people he condemned.

As will be discussed in the seventh chapter, the issue of civil language came up continually in regard to the anti-slavery petitions presented to Congress. When a Representative from Massachusetts, George Briggs, pointed out that the language was respectful, James Bouldin (from Virginia) responded that the very nature of the petitions–their criticizing slaveowners–meant that they were inherently disrespectful (40). If “civility” and “respectful” are seen as synonymous, there is no such thing as civil criticism of people higher in any hierarchy. Criticism is only permitted when it is superiors criticizing inferiors, which means, necessarily, the hierarchy itself cannot be criticized; substantive social change is impossible. It is equally impossible if “civility” is defined by the reaction of the audience–that is, if it is assumed that “uncivil” and “upsetting” are synonymous, then civil disagreement on central issues is impossible. Under such limitations, rhetoric cannot solve political conflicts.

I do not mean to suggest that the narrative of proslavery forces provoked by abolitionists is obviously false; it is clear that anti-abolitionism significantly increased in the mid-1830s, and proslavery rhetors certainly blamed abolitionists for their actions. Although I will argue that seeing abolitionist rhetorical stridency as the catalyst for anti-abolitionism is a mistake, it occurs naturally from the sensible project of looking at what participants in a debate say about their motives in getting uglier. In addition, our habit of imagining issues as binaries, coupled with how difficult it is to articulate the relation between rhetoric and reality, means that there is a tendency to assume that discourse either really is or really is not about the purported issue. To suggest that proslavery rhetors were not really provoked by abolitionist rhetoric seems to imply that that rhetoric did not really bother them, and that’s an absurd proposition. People argued about slavery because they genuinely (and vehemently) disagreed about it.

[….]

If “civility” and “respectful” are seen as synonymous, there is no such thing as civil criticism of people higher in any hierarchy. Criticism is only permitted when it is superiors criticizing inferiors, which means, necessarily, the hierarchy itself cannot be criticized; substantive social change is impossible. It is equally impossible if “civility” is defined by the reaction of the audience–that is, if it is assumed that “uncivil” and “upsetting” are synonymous, then civil disagreement on central issues is impossible. Under such limitations, rhetoric cannot solve political conflicts.

[….]

Abolitionist rhetors were no more emotional than proslavery ones, and they were far more rational. Emotionalism and rationality are not at opposite ends of a spectrum; they are only tangentially related (unless one has the circular, and useless, definition of each as the absence of the other). William Lloyd Garrison, whose writing style I personally find irritating, engaged in rational argumentation insofar as he accurately represented his oppositions’ arguments and engaged them. He strove for internal consistency, his paper presented multiple sides of various arguments, he published arguments with which he disagreed. Harriet Beecher Stowe, another author often condemned for polemicism, demonstrates deep knowledge of proslavery rhetoric in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Passionate, sentimental, committed, and assertive, these authors still managed to represent proslavery arguments clearly and accurately. Abolitionists were not more histrionic than proslavery rhetors, but they did have more uteruses among them, and I would suggest that the extremely sexist tendency to perceive women as more emotional, coupled with a desire to shift the stasis away from slavery, facilitated the creation of a political, and then scholarly, consensus about the fanaticism of abolitionists. Women were excluded from public discourse because they would be emotional and irrational; they would, in other words, behave the same way proslavery rhetors already did. Whether we are to understand histrionic outbursts as a point of white male privilege, or to see proslavery rhetors’ condemning abolitionists for doing what they themselves do as yet another instance of cunning projection, is unclear to me. But it is clear they did it.

A famous exponent of an extreme version of this tendency is Frank Owsley, who blamed “egocentric sectionalism” for the war, a flaw practiced more by the North than the South: “The people in one section failed in their language and conduct to respect the dignity and self-respect of the people in the other section” (Stampp, Causes, 56). It is striking the extent to which this echoes proslavery rhetoric. By “the people” of the south Owsley means slavers–if anything, abolitionists had far more respect for the dignity and self-respect of slaves and African Americans than did slavers–and the war was caused by not respecting their feelings. Owsley does not condemn the south for failing to respect the feelings of the north; this is not, despite his concluding sentence (that unity is in danger when “one section fails to respect the self-respect of the people of another section” 58), an image of mutual respect.[i] Less extreme versions of this explanation arise in Tise and Faust, both of whom still accept that there was something provoking in abolitionists’ rhetoric. What one wonders is just what Owsley, Tise, and Faust think abolitionists should have done instead–there was, as made clear in the gag rule, no way to criticize slavery that was not provocative; slavers took any criticism as a personal attack.

To blame abolitionists for incivility is to preclude abolition. My grievance is not with the notion that public discourse ought to have certain standards, and that billingsgate should be avoided–I hope it’s been clear that I consider proslavery rhetors’ reliance on smear tactics was juvenile, hypocritical, and destructive. The problem is that conventional notions of civility, which tend to emphasize whether the audience is offended, inevitably put an impossible burden on dissenters. That latter point cannot be emphasized enough. While calls for social change might themselves call for more or less violence, they always necessarily involve criticism, and no one likes to be criticized. To prohibit anything other than “civil” political discourse, as long as “civil” is defined as discourse that does not upset anyone, is to prohibit social change.

 

[i] It is also interesting that Owsley asserts that “The language of insult which the so-called fire-eaters employed, however, was not usually coarse of obscene in comparison with the abolitionists; it was urbane and restrained in a degree–but insulting” (58). This is simply not the case.

Why we should stop arguing about civility

Too often, when there is some controversial public action, we have an argument about civility—whether the action violated norms of civility, and whether there should be more or less civility. That whole argument is a red herring.

The civility/incivility binary is what people in rhetoric call ultimate terms (or, more precisely, binary paired terms). It’s fallacious all the way down, first by assuming that actions can be divided into that binary (even making it a continuum doesn’t help), and then pretending that there are objective measures of civility/incivility—that it isn’t a judgment strongly influenced by in-group/out-group thinking. The civility/incivility argument gets us nowhere, and we need to walk away from it. There are two other arguments worth having: one about fairness, and one about strategy.

1. Why the civility/incivility argument is a waste of time

In rhetoric, we talk about “ultimate terms” which are terms where arguments go to die. They are terms that are all connotation and no denotation (freedom, terrorism, rights, political correctness, fascism).[1] People think they know what those terms mean, but they get really mad if you ask them to define those terms. They’ll say, “You know what I mean.” Ultimate terms are generally defined by opposition to an equally imprecise term (civility is not incivility).

Ultimate terms are often loyalty terms (by using those terms you’re showing your membership in some group), and so asking for a precise definition shows you aren’t loyal to that group. (If you ask a certain kind of person to define terrorism precisely, they’ll get really mad; if you ask another kind of person to define neoliberal precisely, they’ll get really mad.) A lot of times, an ultimate term means “not loyal to in-group” (that’s what “politically correct” means, for instance). Ultimate terms are in some kind of binary, with a good ultimate term (what one scholar of rhetoric called God terms) associated with the in-group and the bad one (Devil terms) with the out-group (conservative v. liberal or progressive v. neoliberal). Again, people get really mad when you say they’re using something as an ultimate term.

Another sign that something is an ultimate term is that it is either only used for the in-group or only used for the out-group. So, for instance, no one says that their in-group engaged in incivility and that the out-group engaged in civility. They’re terrorists; we’re freedom fighters.

There is another problem with the concept of civility, and I wrote a long and pedantic book about it: people tend to assume that civility is an objective standard, but we think civility has been violated when we feel offended. (This is a version of complementary projection, when we project our own feelings and reaction on to someone else—I feel offended, so you were offensive.) When the in-group is hostile to the out-group, we don’t feel offended, so it isn’t incivility.

In other words, people in power always control the rules of civility. The rules of civility never apply equally to all groups.

As a side note, I will say that the ignorant nostalgia about civility really gets on my nerves. No, people did not used to be more civil. Charles Sumner was beaten into unconsciousness on the Senate floor. So, just stop clutching your pearls.

The civility/incivility argument is toxic at the base. Walk away from it.

2. The fairness argument

One characteristic of a rational argument (that is, a useful, not necessarily unemotional) argument is that people are willing to listen to one another, and that the rules of the argument apply equally to all parties.

Sarah Sanders has actively advocated allowing private businesses, such as restaurants, to refuse service on the grounds of ethics.[2]

That just happened to her. She has no right to complain about it.

That is the argument we should be making. Not the civility argument, but the fairness one. On what grounds is she saying that the Red Hen did anything wrong?

There are four.

People have tried arguing that the two cases aren’t comparable because discrimination on the basis of religion is prohibited but it’s okay to discriminate on the basis of politics–that’s exactly reversing what the ruling meant. A private business is allowed to serve or not serve anyone, unless their choices about serving are discriminating against a protected class. Anyone can throw someone out of their business if it isn’t discrimination on the basis of race, gender, religion (unless it’s done for religious reasons–at least that’s now the argument being made by people who lost this argument once before).

There is a second argument, which is that discriminating on the basis of religion is okay, but not on the basis of politics–and that’s a really interesting one. This is, in fact, the argument the neoconservatives and fundagelicals use a lot. They believe that they have sincere religious convictions for their actions, but other people don’t. It’s why they put “sincere” into the “religious convictions” criterion. They sincerely believe that they are right, and that everyone knows they are right, and some people pretend they aren’t. (I also wrote a really pedantic book about this.) One really important aspect of sloppy Calvinism (and there’s a lot of it around) is the assumption that the truth is obvious and so people who are acting on sincere religious belief will always be GOP. They think it’s a violation of their religious beliefs that they have to pay taxes to support abortion, while ignoring that it violates the religious beliefs of Friends, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and various others to pay for war, and a violation of many Christians’ beliefs to pay for the death penalty. The people who cheered the cake ruling don’t actually want religious freedom for everyone; they want the freedom to force their religion on others.

The third argument is the consequence of inoculation. A lot of conservatives believe that “liberals” believe that we should be entirely tolerant and never judge anyone. The neocon propaganda machine has been really effective at spreading three messages: 1) “liberals” have contempt for anyone who does manual labor; 2) Democratic candidates promote abortion; 3) “liberals” advocate complete tolerance and therefore are total hypocrites when they criticize anyone. All three of those are wrong, and rely on a lot of false equivalencies–no, calling someone racist is not just as bad as being a racist.

The fourth one is important for understanding why so many people are repeating the argument that Sanders is a victim of incivility (which is all part of the snowflake right whingeing about being victims of everything). It enables a kind of preemptive hostility and discrimination. The narrative is that “liberals” (a devil term) promote total tolerance of anyone, and so something like the Red Hen incident show that liberals are just as intolerant as the right AND don’t have God on their side. Any and all incivility on the side of the in-group is wiped off the slate because we just did it too. (This is another red herring, but it’s one we need to point out, and that’s tricky.)

If the argument is civility/incivility then the neoconservatives can dodge the fairness argument. The “you’re not tolerant” is also a red herring. The fairness argument is where we need to keep the debate.

3. Effectiveness

Are lefties justified in shouting neoconservatives out of restaurants? Yes. Absolutely.

Is it rhetorically savvy? No. This article  explains why, and the books in the links are really good and worth reading.

Whenever someone makes this argument—that it’s rhetorically unwise to shout people out of restaurants–, there tend to be three responses. First, a lot of people respond with “But it’s justified to respond with deliberately outraging protests.” It is. I agree. That isn’t the argument.

Second, a lot of people respond by saying that doing nothing or trying to please the extremists on the other side doesn’t work. I agree. But that’s an instance of trying to think about this issue from within the civility/incivility binary, linked to a binary of “us” and “them,” and we need to get away from both of those binaries. I don’t think we can persuade Sanders, or die-hard Trump supporters. But there are others who are open to persuasion—not immediately, and not easily, but it’s possible. And there isn’t a binary between being “nice” to Trump administration members and shouting at them in restaurants. Both of those are bad choices, and they aren’t our only ones. We have more choices.

Third, a lot of people present deductive arguments as to why deliberately outrageous arguments should work. I don’t care whether they should work; I care whether they do. I’d love for them to work; a part of me cheers every time someone shouts a homophobe out of a business, and I’ll admit to enjoying seeing Nazis punched. But I honestly can’t think of any times that it’s worked well for the left. It can sometimes work for the right, in that it gets what is inaccurately called “the middle” (not really the middle, but the intermittently authoritarian) to want more law and order because they fall easily into the “both sides are just as at fault” narrative and increased order would seem to be a solution to that problem. We should do what has worked.

Neoconservatism has made an unholy alliance with fundagelicals to promote unrestrained capitalism and authoritarian neo-Christian policies in the US, and to support an openly apocalyptic foreign policy (that is, one explicitly oriented toward nuclear war in the  Middle East). That’s bad. And as long as we argue about civility, they’ll win the argument.

They’ll lose the argument if it’s about fairness, and that’s the argument we need to have.

[The image is from MLK’s debate with Kilpatrick on NBC, available here.]

[1] In some circumstances, the terms can be used precisely. “Fascism” and “neoliberal” are, among political theorists, very precise terms, for instance. If the term is not being used as an ultimate term, then the person using it can define it without getting mad.

A rambling narrative about my writing projects

My first publication was in The Nation Weekly (a journal that briefly existed in the 70s), and the second was in a collection about Writing Centers. Both of those were things I happened to write for various reasons that someone else wanted to publish for their own reasons. In graduate school, a colleague wanted to publish a special issue about reading, and I was working on how John Muir read the landscape, and so that happened.

I then entered into years of hostile readers, bad choices about where to submit, misunderstandings about the genres of academic writing, and a failure to seek out better advice. (That’s kind of funny if you think about it—I was failing to try to figure out my rhetorical situation.)

It was clear from my dissertation work that John Muir’s inability to persuade conservationists to preserve the Hetch Hetchy Valley when he had previously been so successful was the consequence of the intellectual milieu changing—from Romanticism (dominant when he was first writing) to a kind of proto-third-way-neoliberalism (the best use of public resources is the one that advances market interests while remaining in public ownership). It was also clear to me that there was a hermeneutic and epistemological issue at play: people disagree(d) about what to do in regard to the environment because they disagree(d) about what the natural environment means—how to read it. And people disagree because of questions of how to know what we read: are our value judgments in the environment or in our minds? (This is valuable regardless of whether people value it, or this is valuable to the extent that people value it.) Everyone was reading Nature as though it were a book, but they brought different notions of how to read, and that’s why they disagreed about what to do.

There was another interesting glitch, that I couldn’t quite process. There were, as I was writing my dissertation, major scholars who argued that you could dismiss environmental concerns on the grounds that the kind of people who had those concerns were irrational.

So, I thought, my first book should trace out the connections I suspected were there: attitudes toward nature, epistemologies, and hermeneutics, and somehow it would end up on that point about dismissing arguments on the basis of motivism. It would move from the American Puritans up to Muir and the Hetch Hetchy Valley debate.

Looking back on this, I came to see that graduate school sets people up for the mistake I was making. In graduate school, you read the most famous scholars’ most recent work (except in the case of teacher who wants to trash another school of thought or scholar, in which case you read their early work, and spend a class talking about how simplistic and jejeune their article is). Scholars, toward the end of their careers, write in a completely different way from people early on—they can engage in grand narratives, broad brushes, and assertions that come from having thought about something for thirty years. We try to write what we read, and so junior scholars are set up for failure by trying to write in the way that an established scholar can write—the rules are different.

Eventually, I tried to write a book that started and ended with John Muir, but was almost entirely about the American Puritans. (A university press was interested, and kept telling me they would let me know—their editor was ill. There were many emails about how they would let me know in three weeks as the tenure clock was in the final seconds and a dean was telling the department not to support me. I have literally never heard a final word from them. They were discontinued. I was denied tenure. I got a better job.) I also directed a first-year comp program and pissed off a dean. I tried to publish an article about Horatio Alger, and another about Robert Montgomery Bird, and both were stymied.

I moved to a department that had more people publishing in the history of rhetoric, and those faculty gave me really useful readings of my manuscript, and I connected with a better press, and I got a book manuscript accepted, and then I published pieces from it (not the normal chain of events).

That book was about the 17th century New England Puritans, and how their notions of rhetoric, epistemology, and public deliberation did and didn’t fit together. No one in rhetoric and writing had written on the Puritans for a long time, and so I couldn’t make the normal scholarly moves of “They say but I say.” There was no current “I say.” Also, it irritated me off that one part of my argument was that we got the transmission model (the thesis-first) from the Puritans, and it came from their belief that persuasion doesn’t really happen. You tell  people the truth, and they recognize it. Good people act on that truth, and bad people dismiss it (a model of persuasion oddly persistent even in current studies). One of the reviewers (a comm and not comp person) insisted I put my thesis first. I grumped about it.

I intended that book to be the first part of a series, so that the next book would be looking at the rhetorical theories, epistemologies, hermeneutics, and attitudes toward nature in the late 17th and early 18th century American culture. I read a lot of 19th century American popular literature, but I couldn’t write that book. The erasure, dismissal, rationalization, and rhetorical shittiness about the indigenous peoples was too awful for me to manage. For instance, I had an article about Robert Montgomery Bird and the paradox that the same actions were to be condemned when done by Native Americans but considered heroic when done by “whites” (aka, why I can’t watch most movies). One reader said, and I’m not kidding, “But don’t you think they deserved it?” I put that and the Horatio Alger article away.

grrrrr

I have been a fan-girl of Hannah Arendt since junior high school when I read Eichmann in Jerusalem. In graduate school, for reasons even now I can’t determine, I ran into a Habermas article with an amazing endnote about how rhetoric (bad) and communicative action (good) interact. He cited speech act theory, so I took a class with John Searle (I think I got a B+, and I still really appreciate that class). As a Comp Director, I found myself in a lot of uselessly non-arguments about argumentation—people opposed teaching argumentation because they believed that no one is ever persuaded of anything (they taught the 5 paragraph essay, and they had noticed that that genre is unpersuasive, and so concluded persuasion is impossible). Their perception of persuasion is that a person has the truth, and tells it to another (the recipient) and then that person has the truth. If the recipient doesn’t have the truth at the end, then it’s proof that persuasion isn’t possible. (You hear both of those arguments a lot still.)

That’s an obviously silly model of persuasion, but, oddly enough, it’s dominant, and not restricted to one political group or philosophical approach. You can hear poststructuralists, neoconservatives, neopositivists, and behavioralists all cite studies that show no one is actually persuaded by evidence, and cite studies to support their position. (I think that’s funny.) Wayne Booth and Jurgen Habermas both nailed this one, showing that a lot of people toggle between two models of persuasion (neither of which is the one on which they actually operate): they toggle between the notion that you are persuaded by unemotional logic or you are persuaded by emotion. Oddly enough, the people arguing for it’s all emotion cite scientific studies to support their point. If they really believed it’s all emotion, they wouldn’t cite studies; they would just assert their point. Their engaging in argumentation shows that they think argumentation does potentially have an impact. This is sometimes called the pragmatic contradiction.

This problem (people engaged in persuasion who insist that no one is ever persuaded) starts from asking the wrong methodological question. You have a person who believes s/he has the truth (the experimenter) and s/he asks the experimentee what s/he believes, then presents an assertion that the experimentee is wrong. The experimentee doesn’t immediately convert on the basis of this short interaction, and the experimenter concludes that persuasion doesn’t happen! The experimenter has given the experimentee objective evidence (rational) that the experimentee doesn’t instantly accept, so the experimentee is irrational.

The irrational (no logic, all emotion)/ rational (no emotion) split is like dividing everything into round or green. Some people (roundists) are very narrow in their definition of what is round, and they declare everything that doesn’t fit that narrow definition as green. Therefore, skyscrapers are green. The greenists are very narrow about what is green, and call everything else round.

This might seem like a silly example, but it’s how American media presents politics. Major televisions media accept the Us or Them binary and then find all sorts of reasons at this or that moment to draw the lines differently. Unhappily, too many Christians do the same, accepting the premise that all the various positions can be divided into two, and then you argue about where the Us v. Them line is drawn. Given Christ’s message, we really should know better.

In any case, my point is that believing that squirrels are evil beings trying to get to the red ball is rational, and truly patriotic, means that you will perceive anyone who disagrees with you on that point as irrational and unpatriotic. And I saw that how “argumentation” was (and is) taught would reinforce that foundational fallacy.

I was convinced that the hostility to teaching argumentation in first year composition came from two places: 1) different conceptions of what it means to participate in democracy; 2) the rational/irrational split. So, I thought, I would write a book that would show the connections between models of democracy and pedagogies and that would end more hopefully and pragmatically, with a long discussion about what advances in argumentation meant for the teaching of argument.

So, what became Deliberate Conflict was supposed to be about half of a book. I wrote that book, and then farmed out parts (that isn’t how you’re supposed to do it) and it was too long. I had to take my favorite part (about Arendt) and put some of it into an article.

I had a bit of a glitch with moving (having been given tenure) to a new place and with certain promises being given that were cheerfully reneged, and so had to write two books to get associate professor and three for full. (And, yes, I’m bitter about that, since the two people who made that happen have never apologized or even acknowledged that their regneging might have caused me some grief. One of them has twice told me it was no big deal.)

Here things get complicated, since I was given my first paid leave in my career. I got my degree in 1987, and it was 2003 (or 4—I’m vague on that). I had been directing a very large first year composition program at my first job, and a slightly smaller one at my second. I HAD A LEAVE. I sent out a bunch of articles.

One of the articles I sent out in 2003 or 4 was the one a colleague (in 1992 or so) had told me was unpublishable because my argument about how whites justified pre-emptive violence against indigenous people “ignored that they started it,” and it got an award. The best vengeance is success.

I had long since moved on to the argument that agonistic rhetoric was the bomb, and the post-bellum shift away from agonism was bad. And a graduate student asked me, “If antebellum methods of teaching rhetoric were so good, why couldn’t we solve the slavery problem rhetorically?” So, I set out to write a book about the slavery debate. It was an elegant plan for a book, with five chapters: the public pro-slavery; the counter-public pro-slavery (since I wanted to undermine the public/counter-public binary which is often a good/bad or bad/good binary), the public pro-slavery, the counter-public anti-slavery, the public pro-slavery, and the mediators (that no one talks about anymore, but were once the heroes: Webster, Clay, Calhoun).

It ended up being a book about the proslavery argument between 1830 and 1835. (In other words, every book I’ve written has started out as a much longer book.)

The Civil War didn’t happen because both sides were fanatics, nor because they couldn’t compromise. The Civil War happened because the Constitution gave an advantage to slave states, slavery became the single identifying sign of Southernness, and fanaticism on behalf of slavery was a sure path to political success in a slave state. The Civil War happened because, having won every “compromise” in regard to slavery (that is, the US was becoming increasingly a slave nation) the slave states saw a political opportunity when Lincoln was elected. Their extremist rhetoric got them extremist politics and a war they never needed to have.

They thought they needed the war because they lived in an informational enclave in which various events (e.g., the mass mailing of AAS pamphlets) were a fact, although they didn’t actually happen (there was no flooding of the South with those pamphlets). They also lived in a culture in which it was dishonorable to argue pragmatically about various outcomes, including failure, and so it was the classic situation of amplification.

I was working on this book in 2003, and I thought the Iraq War was the same situation. It was a war that never needed to happen, and it happened because large numbers of people believed things that were false (Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and he had WMD), but they lived in a world in which those myths were foundational facts.

That seemed to me demagoguery. And, so, I got interested in demagoguery. And I read everything recent about demagoguery (there was not much in rhetoric and writing) and wrote an article arguing that rhetoric should pay attention to demagoguery. And the responses are there to read. I ran into a really kind and smart person at an airport who asked if I was going to respond to them, and I said no. I wanted to get the argument going, and I thought I had, and I also thought that responding to those articles would have involved my saying, “Yeah, I’m just gonna repeat what I said, since y’all obviously didn’t read the article I wrote, and just responded to something in your heads.”

I never said demagoguery was about emotionalism, for instance. Sheefuckingeesh.

And then I started working hard on a book about demagoguery. And it was going gangbusters, and it’s a weird book, and it was sent to readers, one of whom said demagoguery was a dead issue.

The book is a point by point refutation of common notions about demagoguery. Demagoguery isn’t just about the demes, it isn’t necessarily emotional, it has a weird relationship to expert discourse. I deliberately chose to have a section on a person I admire. And it has a chapter in which my point is that rhetoric can enable someone to identify shitty expertise discourse. But it’s a weird book, inductively argued.

In any case, my point in all of this is that a scholarly trajectory isn’t something you direct from the beginning. Trajectory is, I’d say, entirely the wrong metaphor. It’s more like following scat. You have something you’re hunting, and you follow the scat of the thing you’re hunting. I’ve had a lot of setbacks—a press that was uncommunicative and then went under, a dean out to make sure I was denied tenure, people in power who cheerfully reneged on promises, unsympathetic reviewers. But I’ve also had a lot of good breaks, reviewers who saw promise, editors who turned hostile reviews into a forum, hitting the job market at good moments, supportive colleagues and challenging students.

Nicholas Taleb has an analogy I think is really helpful. He says that you should imagine a study in which a thousand people are asked to engage in Russian roulette. After five shots, there will be some people standing. He points out that those people will be asked about their strategies, and whatever those people say they did will become the mantras for success in…. in his case, it’s finance.

There are no strategies that will guarantee success in our field. There are some really good books out there about what are strategies you can try, but there’s no guarantee.

You do any job for love or money. No one does academia for money, so it had better be for love. And what is it you love? When I started teaching, it was for love of teaching, but promotion required publication, and I came to love research. (I still don’t love publishing.) And this Robinson Jeffers poem has always moved me:

“I hate my verses, every line, every word.
Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try
One grass-blade’s curve, or the throat of one bird
That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky.
Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch
One color, one glinting
Hash, of the splendor of things.
Unlucky hunter, Oh bullets of wax,
The lion beauty, the wild-swan wings, the storm of the wings.”
–This wild swan of a world is no hunter’s game.
Better bullets than yours would miss the white breast
Better mirrors than yours would crack in the flame.
Does it matter whether you hate your . . . self?
At least Love your eyes that can see, your mind that can
Hear the music, the thunder of the wings. Love the wild swan.

He’s referring, of course, to Yeats’ “Wild Swans” poem, and his own sense that he could never be Yeats. And, initially, he’s seeing writing as nailing down the thing about which he’s trying to write (note my own “nailing” metaphor above). But we will never nail to the wall anything about which it’s worth writing. We need to love what we’re trying to write about. We need to love the thing we’re chasing. It isn’t about shooting something; it’s about following a trail. I generally hate my writing, and find the slippage between what I say and what I’m trying to say sometimes incredibly discouraging. But I love democracy, and I try to make that good enough.

Migration to Hope: A Call To Action

[This is a guest blog post by Michelle Castillo]

I remember it like it was just yesterday: we had been learning about racisim and discrimination in Ms. Moxley’s fourth grade class. We had read a picture book about Rubi Bridges, and I had been reading Number The Stars – a book about a girl living through Nazi-occupied Denmark- as my take-home book on the unit.

And I was deeply affected.

I went home and at night in my prayer, I cried. I demanded that God tell me how people – how adults – could do such horrible things to other people, to hate so deeply without knowing them, just based on the color of skin or a different belief system. I promised God I’d do everything in my power to change that. And, as all little girls should, I felt I would.

In undergrad, I was blessed to have taken Trish Roberts-Miller’s class on the rhetoric of racism that helped me answer the “how” that comes down to, simply in my mind, fear. Fear of the “other,” that allows us to strip the “other” of humanity and project fear’s progeny of anger and hate into the unthinkable things we do to “others,” like enslave, hose, beat, bomb, and destroy.

Today, our government is tearing children, in some cases toddlers, away from their parents for seeking asylum in our borders. These are families that are fleeing violence and persecution from their countries, and the only way — let me say this again — the only way they can seek asylum is to present themselves at the border. And for doing that, our government is taking their children away. They could be us. Some of us are them. Some of us, our parents or grandparents or great grandparents were them. We could have been them had we been born in another place.

This administration is weaponizing the most powerful feeling on Earth, that many faith traditions use to explain God,
that of a parent’s love for a child — that would literally walk a thousand miles to protect their children from violence only to have that child ripped from their arms — to achieve its twisted immigration ends of deterrence.

Their message: “if you come here with your children fleeing violence, we’ll take your children, so don’t come.”

And this government is getting away with doing this state sanctioned violence towards children – today, right now – because 1) we’ve allowed Trump and his enablers to call immigrants “animals,” to strip all of us, really, that don’t see the world as they do of our humanity, and 2) because of the silence of some of our friends.

Friends that don’t like to talk politics.
Friends that voted for him because he was “prolife” but are now silent in condemning this torture of children.
Friends who, yeah feel bad this is happening, but it’s not happening to them, doesn’t impact anyone they know, so they’re staying out of it.
Friends that see this as a partisan issue and they’re Republican so even though they’re morally repulsed by the idea, they’re uncomfortable speaking out.
Friends that don’t yet know the power of their voice in creating change.

Friends, I realize this has been a long post, but since you’ve stuck with me this far, I’m here to ask you to break your silence. If you haven’t called your elected officials, if you haven’t donated for the legal defense of these children and their families, if you’re a person of faith and haven’t prayed for these families, please do.

As fourth grade Michelle quickly learned, she can’t change the entire world. But you can impact those around you. And that’s a hell of a start.

Advice for graduate students and junior faculty about writing

For years, I’ve been intrigued by the paradox that people who have written well enough to get to graduate school (or to finish, or to write a first book) at some point find themselves unable to write. I fell deep into the research on that issue, and I thought I would write a book about it. Well, actually, I did, but I’m not sure about trying to get it published. Today I found out that the place I published it still exists, and so here it is.

Demagoguery of the Elite (aka Rhetoric Society of America paper)

It’s common for people to assume that demagoguery is a subset of populism (so it is not a problem of elites), but the notion that demagoguery and populism are necessarily connected is actually problematic—and largely the consequence of some of most influential writers on demagoguery (such as Plato and Hobbtes) being what Robert Ivie calls “demophobic” as well as a misunderstanding of how the term worked in the classical era.

Basically, my argument is that assuming that demagoguery is necessarily a subset of populism is that it makes three characteristics crucial to the definition of the term:

    1. audience (non-elite)
    2. style (rhetoric with particular characteristics, especially recurrent topoi),
    3. and political consequences (sometimes simply policies with which they disagree, sometimes ones that are agreed to have been harmful).

Why have all three? You end up with a Venn diagram that, for no particular reason, makes the bad policy decisions of the non-elite more important than ones made on the part of the elite, or on the part of groups that include both.

There are four conditions under which it seems to me reasonable to restrict the study of demagoguery to the non-elite. The first is if the evidence suggests that the elite never make bad decisions; the second is if the mistakes of the elite are never due to demagoguery; the third is if the kind of demagoguery to which the elite are susceptible is significantly different from that to which the non-elite are susceptible, and the fourth is if the who study of demagoguery is part of a project to discredit democracy.

What I want to say is that, if we are instead concerned about this overlap—disastrous public decisions and a particular kind of rhetoric—then we should focus on that intersection. I’ve been doing that for some time, and, like many others, have ended up with a definition that emphasizes:

    • treating issues as us v. them (an in-group and out-group);
    • scapegoating an out-group for the problems of the in-group;
    • therefore calling for purifying our community, nation, or world of the out-group through disenfranchising, expelling, or exterminating that out-group;
    • so, it’s a reframing of policy discourse as performances of in-group loyalty.

There are a bunch of other characteristics, but that isn’t really the point here—the point is whether any of the above four conditions matters—do elites never make bad decisions? when they do, is the rhetoric different? That isn’t what I see, and it seems to me that they are just as susceptible to demagoguery as any other group, but, as I’ll argue, that’s partially the consequence of the ambiguity in the notion of elite.

Before I get there, though, I should talk about why there is the assumption that demagoguery is necessarily populist discourse, and there are two brief answers. One is that, for people like Plato, Plutarch, Hobbes, Le Bon, and even Reinhard Luthin, the study of demagoguery is part of a project to discredit democracy. For them demagoguery epitomizes the unreliability of the “masses” and their profound lack of fitness for power. It’s a circular argument: democracy is bad because it gives power to people who are susceptible to demagoguery, and demagoguery is defined in such a way that only the masses’ supposed susceptibility to it is noted.

The second is the assumption that in the classical era it always meant populism and it was always use in a derogatory way. At least until Plato (and, in some cases, even after) it was a neutral term meaning simply the leader of the democratic party—that is, the one with policies oriented toward helping the demes. The leader of the that party was a demagogue, but he wasn’t necessarily a non-elite. Pericles, Cleisthenes, Alcibiades, and Themistocles were all demagogues, and they were all members of the elite.

Assuming that demagogues were necessarily non-elite (or populist) is like a scholar two thousand years from now assuming that any Democratic candidate was a populist who supported democracy.

Nor was there necessarily the assumption that demagogues were irresponsible in their rhetoric. Andocides, in Against Alcibiades, condemns Alcibiades not for being a demagogue, but for acting like one (4.27)–that is, pretending to be a champion of the demos, when he really is not. Hyperides, in his attack on Demosthenes, says a demagogue “worthy of the name should be the savior of his country, not a deserter” (Against Demosthenes Fragment 4, column 16b, line 26), suggesting that the term might be used as a term of praise.[3] Isocrates, for instance, praises Theseus and calls him a demagogue (Helen 37); he regularly refers to Pericles as a demagogue (see, for instance, Antidosis 234, To Nicocles 16, On the Peace 122). Like many other writers, Isocrates compares current demagogues to previous ones, criticizing the current ones as worse than those before (see, for example, On the Peace 126). At one point in Aristophanes’ The Knights, one of the slaves explains, “Demagoguery is no longer a job for a man of education and good character, but for the ignorant and disgusting” (The Knights 190).[4]

Thucydides is often assumed to be an elitist who objected to Cleon on political grounds—that Cleon was a populist. But Cleon was no more populist than Pericles, and Pericles is the hero of the piece. Thucydides objected to Cleon’s rhetoric, just as he objected to Alcibiades (a demagogue) and Nikias (an elitist). Thucydides’ history is a classic Greek tragedy, and the tragedy is about rhetoric, not about class.

Aristotle, interestingly enough doesn’t use the term demagoguery to mean populists exclusively. He mentions demagoguery within the oligarchs, for instance, thereby raising the question of a demagoguery of the elite. And that’s the question I want to pursue.

There are a lot of problems with assuming that demagoguery is necessarily exclusively connected to populist policies, audience, or discourse. One of them, as mentioned previously, is the toxic fantasy that the elite are inherently better at decision-making, and therefore elite rhetoric is necessarily better in some way—a notion that posits a stable elite, and even that doesn’t make much sense. Do we mean elite in terms of economic class, political power, education, or culture? Those aren’t the same, after all. University professors might be considered cultural and/or educational elite, but we generally aren’t politically or economically elite.

And, if you define demagoguery without attention to the class of the rhetors or audience, and instead by the rhetoric, you can see plenty of instances of demagoguery of the elite. Proslavery demagoguery often had an audience of political and/or economic elites (such as Congressional debate over the gag rule, pro-secessionist rhetoric in the secession assemblies, various state and federal court decisions, and very learned books on Scriptural defenses of slavery, legal and philosophical apologia for slavery, the Dred Scott decision); eugenics was predominantly an elite and even expert discourse and generally demagogic; I’ve sat in MLA Delegate Assembly meetings and listened to demagoguery; the US Supreme Court decision Hirabayashi v. US is sheer demagoguery; Alfred Rosenberg, Carl Schmitt, and Ludwig Muller were all elite Nazis writing to other elites; they were building on elite demagogues like Houston Chamberlain, Madison Grant, and Arthur de Gobineau. So, regardless of how “elite” is defined—cultural, political, economic, educational—there are instances of demagoguery within an elite audience.

Take, for instance, Madison Grant’s Passing of the Great Race (1916, the quote below is from the fourth edition, 1922)—sometimes called “Hitler’s Bible” (because of Hitler’s praise of it), and profoundly influential among the elite, but not a particularly big seller. This passage, picked at random, is typical:

Notice the hedging, also the uncited references to knowledge that is vaguely out there—Grant presents himself as someone announcing facts that are well known, and his hedging makes him seem to be a nuanced and careful researcher. He isn’t—he isn’t presenting an anthropological consensus, and his argument is circular (all good things come from Nordics because any sign of civilization is taken as a sign of Nordic presence).

Dimitra Koutsantoni notes that expert discourse often relies on what she calls “common knowledge markers:” “words and expressions that exclusively underscore authors’ beliefs by presenting them as given, as knowledge shared by all members of the community” (166). Koutsantoni argues that “By emphasizing certainty in and attitude toward claims, and by presenting them as given and shared, authors control readers’ inferences and demand their agreement and sharing of their views (power entailing solidarity)” (170). Grant’s use of hedging and common knowledge markers  gives him an air of precision and expertise—he seems to be doing little more than stacking data.

Racist demagoguery surprisingly often claims to be doing little more than stacking data and citing expert consensus, even if, in the cases of David Duke’s My Awakening (1998), Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve (1994), or Theodore Bilbo’s Take Your Choice (1948), they are oriented toward a broader audience.

Demagoguery of the elite can mean demagogic texts and arguments circulated within a political elite (such as Henry Laughlin’s technical and very demagogic testimony in favor of the 1924 Immigration Act racist restrictions), in which he was speaking as an expert (disciplinary elite) to members of the political elite; pro-eugenics demagoguery such as his might also be purely within the disciplinary elite (communications within the Galton Society); and there might also be an attempt to translate disciplinary elite consenses to a less elite audience (Lothrop Stoddard’s Rising Tide of Color).

In many of those situations, rhetors used the same rhetorical strategies typical of expert discourse—hedging, technical language, and common knowledge markers. Sometimes, such as William Workman’s surprisingly boring pro-segregation The Case for the South (1960), the texts are dispassionate (Chappell 142); sometimes hyperbolic and explicitly fear-mongering, such as Bilbo’s 1948 Take Your Choice. Emotionality, like the populist criteria, doesn’t seem to me to have an important difference.

Because demagoguery scapegoats an out-group for all the problems of the in-group, there is almost always an element of fear—an existential threat—but demagoguery doesn’t always have emotional markers. As with the Grant, Workman, or Laughlin, it can have very few boosters and instead appeal to common knowledge markers to establish the existential threat—there can be an emphasis on the rhetor’s self-control in the face of the threat, so that the discourse is not about fear in the in-group, but the threat of the out-group.

Social psychologists call this complementary projection, “in which stereotypes serve as justifications of anxieties (e.g., I fear, therefore you must be dangerous)” (Glick 135). Earl Warren, in testifying for mass imprisonment of Japanese Americans, used the existence of racist fear on the part of himself and various peace officers as proof that Japanese Americans were dangerous, proslavery rhetors regularly used their own fear of slave insurrection as proof that abolitionists were in a conspiracy to incite such insurrections, current anti-immigration rhetoric appeals to xenophobia as evidence of Mexicans being “bad hombres” and “animals.”

Demagoguery of the elite not only regularly engages in complementary projection, particularly through such rhetorical strategies as common knowledge markers, but I would argue it legitimates complementary projection, by making it seem as though there is expert consensus that an out-group is essentially and implacably dangerous. Thus, if we restrict the concept of demagoguery to populist demagoguery, we can seem to give a free pass to the equally damaging demagoguery of the elite, and thereby protect it from criticism.

My argument about demagoguery is that we should focus on the rhetorical strategies and recurrent characteristics, and not on the motives or identities of the rhetors engaged in it. In fact, I argue, the shift of stasis to identity and motive is one of the characteristics of demagoguery—not all such shifts are demagogic but demagoguery always has that shift. Thus, if, as scholars, we make the shift to the focus on identity, we have an inherently demagogic scholarly project.

In short, if we’re concerned about the ways that a kind of rhetoric contributes to disastrous public deliberation then I see no reason to assume that the populism of a rhetor’s political agenda or rhetoric is a distinguishing variable for demagoguery. The notion that elites are immune to demagoguery isn’t just false; it is perniciously so.

[2] Demosthenes uses it simply to mean a leader of the people (see, for instance, Against Aristogeiton II 4).

[3] Lane’s claim that “None of the historians, playwrights, and orators of classical Athens relied upon a perjorative term for demagogue in developing their analyses of bad political leadership” (180) seems to me slightly overstated—they seem aware that there is a perjorative connotation possible. It seems to me similar to how writers might currently use words like feminist, liberal, or progressive. But, certainly, I agree with Lane that they do not use the term in an exclusively perjorative way. Lane credits Plutarch with the demagogue/statesman distinction as we have inherited it—that is, thinking it was present in earlier writers (192).

[4] Although several scholars share this reading (Dover 69, note 1; Lane 185) it’s possible, of course, that Aristophanes is making fun of the tendency that demagogues have to accuse one another of demagoguery, and we’re not to take this comment seriously at all. Still, his criticism of demagogues is their tendency to rely on flattery—that is, not who they are, but their rhetorical strategies.

[5] Aristotle mentions a specific instance of this kind of situation in Rhodes: “the demagogues used to provide pay for public services, and also to hinder the payment of money owed to the naval captains” (Politics 1304b 30).

[6] That Aristotle could refer to “oligarchic demagogues” suggests that the term had shifted meanings between the time of Isocrates and Aristotle, and it no longer signified a leader of the demes.