Month: February 2019

On “healthy” rhetoric and “healthy” democratic deliberation.

I’ve been struggling in my work to find a good term for when a community is firing on all cylinders as far as deliberation. I’ve ended up on “healthy” as the term, but I REALLY dislike the metaphor.

What I really mean is “good enough” argumentation. I’m moved by Winnicott’s notion of “good enough” mothering. But that’s too complicated a term, since it means explaining what Winnicott was saying. (And Winnocott is kind of problematic.)

The “healthy” term, though, is really vexed. For one thing, it’s kind of ableist. While I think that people with all sorts of disabilities can enact [whatever we’re calling good-enough] argumentation, so this isn’t some kind of intentional delegitimizing of people who aren’t healthy, I’m twitchy about how associational thinking is so dominant. If we talk about good enough argumentation as “healthy,” I think there is a good chance of it seeming to say than people who aren’t “healthy” can’t participate.

Second, the “healthy” metaphor seems to me twitch-inducingly close to the ultimately-genocidal metaphors of some people being cancers on or infections of the body politic.

In western culture, we tend to think of a “healthy” body as one that is free of bad things (some day, I would love to write a long post about how I think that’s a bastardization, in Burke’s term, of Christian notions). Were we able to think of a “healthy” body as one that is effectively incorporating the challenges of new situations, then “healthy” would be a perfect metaphor for what democracy needs to be.

I’m headed to a conference about healthy rhetoric, and I’d love to be able to offer useful alternatives to that metaphor. Thoughts?

Teaching a class on Hitler

I mentioned elsewhere that, after years of avoiding it, I decided I should teach a course about racism.  I was hesitant because I think there are too damn many white people telling non-white people about their experiences. I decided to teach it when I realized my goal wasn’t telling non-white people about their experiences, but about trying to get people currently on the winning side of institutional racism to understand why and how we’re winning, and how to talk to other people of privilege about racism without falling into the thoroughly useless slough of white liberal guilt.

My area of scholarly interest (sometimes I say “expertise,” but I really shouldn’t, since there is no way to be an expert on this) is train wrecks in public deliberation (aka, pathologies of deliberation). Cases that I thought would be really different turned out to be very similar: evasion of policy argumentation in favor of factionalized zero-sum thinking; the reduction of the varied array of available policy options to This Policy or Doing Nothing; the assumption that the course of action is obvious, and motivistic dismissals of anyone who criticized This Policy, or even wanted time to think (they’re on the side of the enemy, they want us to do nothing, they’re cowards, they’re effeminate); faith in The Will, so that a plan is completely impractical is irrelevant because Real Americans (Athenians, Germans, Whatevs) who beleeeeeve enough can make it happen (meaning political discourse is now reduced to the scene in Peter Pan when the audience claps enough to make Tinkerbell shine again); and, well, a lot of other things.

Those things (scholars of rhetoric would call them topoi) show up in all sorts of places. I’ve listened to people appeal to the “if we commit with full will to this plan it must succeed” topos in gatherings of political groups, MLA Delegate Assembly meetings, far too many State of the Unions or political speeches generally, Sunday school, faculty meetings, Fourth of July speeches, homeowner association meetings, even a random guy who stopped to talk to me while I was weeding appealed to it. It’s in self-help rhetoric, pickup artist rhetoric, the entire world of make money fast, any incarnation of prosperity gospel, weight-loss ads, and far too much discourse about politics.

My goal in teaching, like my goal in scholarship, came to be to persuade people that what matters about what people argue is what it means for how they think about political argument. And, it’s pretty clear that certain topoi are consistently problematic, such as the “if you have enough will” topos.

It’s hard for people to see the problems with many of the most consistently disastrous topoi since it often took years before the disastrous outcome happened. (And, as with the slaver state commitment to slavery, when their commitment turned out to be disastrous, they just pretended they’d never had it—a not uncommon response to profoundly disconfirming evidence.) And even now, many generations later, many descendants of the people who made the disastrous decision to go to war over slavery won’t admit it’s a mistake.

War, famously, has a way of testing theories very quickly: no battle plan ever survives contact with the opposition, and the enemy has a vote. Someone might argue that the CSA was right to go to war to protect slavery and get some supporters, but they’d have a very hard time getting anyone to support the argument that they won that war.

I developed a course, “Deliberating War,” that was an attempt to: 1) complicate students’ understandings of public discourse, especially to disentangle deliberation from compliance-gaining; 2) get them to see some of the patterns about disastrous public decision-making; 3) get students to see that, just because someone says “We have to go to war because otherwise the enemy will destroy us, so this is self-defense” doesn’t mean it is. And, of course, Hitler figured in that course. (Most of that course was about the Peloponnesian War, but that’s a different post.) Hitler also figured in the “Rhetoric and Racism” course I teach. And, consistently, in anonymous end-of-semester evaluations, students said they wanted to know more about Hitler.

I’m not Jewish. I’m not German. I was once translation fluent in German, but I now struggle. So, once again, there is an issue of feeling like an interloper.

Talking about Hitler is always talking about persuasion. And it’s also, interestingly enough, talking about how false models of persuasion mean that people get persuaded.

So, I girded my loins, and created a course on Hitler and Rhetoric. It’s a funny course in a bunch of ways. It gets a huge number of students who sign up, get the syllabus, and then drop. A large number get as far as when the first paper is due, and they drop. It is, fundamentally, a course about the distinction between deliberation and compliance-gaining models of public discourse, and so student papers have to be deliberation. Students are well-trained in papers oriented toward display (as though that is compliance-gaining), and so can be intimidated when you ask for deliberative papers.

My goal in the course was to have students begin with Hitler’s rhetoric, then move to the rhetoric that supported him, and then have the third paper about the Hitler comparison, but that never happened. Here is what did happen.

I explain elsewhere why I write prompts the way I do. Here’s the information I gave students about the papers:

The prompts are designed to get more complicated and more time-consuming as the semester progresses—you’ll need a lot of time just for research for the final paper. I’ve made an effort to come up with topics that are comparable in terms of work and difficulty. Sometimes we can work out other topics, but only if you come talk to me at least two weeks before the paper is due.

Whether or not you do outside research, remember that you have to cite the sources of ideas as well as language–it doesn’t matter if the source is another student, another class, a paper for another course, the Internet, a book, or an article. If you have any questions about how to cite appropriately, or if you are nervous that you are plagiarizing, just write a note in the margin of your paper to that effect. Any handbook tells you how to cite sources, including webpages; papers without appropriate citation will be considered late.

I’ve grouped the assignments on the basis of course readings, but, if you discuss it with me at least one week before the paper is due, you can do an assignment from another part of the course. I just need to make sure that you write on a range of topics, and that your papers remain within an appropriate range of difficulty. If you simply turn a paper in from another part of the course, you can expect icky consequences.

The prompts ask that you apply a concept from rhetoric. You can use anything (other than ethos, pathos, or logos) from Jasinski, and here is a list that is likely to help:

    • any of Burke’s terms from “Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’”
    • art of masculine victimhood (Johnson)
    • the four terms described by O’Shaughnessy (pages 4-5)
    • condensation symbols (Jasinski)
    • dissociation (the rhetorical concept)/paired terms (it’s rare that you can do one without the other)
    • dog whistle politics
    • enthymematic reasoning (beginning from common ground)
    • identification through transcendence/common ground
    • inoculation
    • interpellation/constitutive rhetoric
    • jeremiad
    • prophetic ethos
    • rhetoric of survivance (Powell)
    • specific or universal topoi
    • stock topics (policy argumentation)
    • ultimate terms

Some good resources for the papers include:

    • The Domarus collection of Hitler’s speeches and proclamations. Available here.
    • This collection of Nazi propaganda
    • Here is a link to the official records of speeches in the Reichstag (in German). This is July 13, 1934—for other dates, just use the forward or backward arrows.

Paper One. Use a concept from rhetoric (from Jasinski or the list above—NOT ethos, pathos, or logos) to explain something puzzling about one of these speeches by Hitler:

    • April 12, 1922 speech in Munich
    • Something from The New Germany desires Work and Peace (not the March 23 speech)
    • “Sportspalast speech” (you can hear it here)
    • April 28 1939 speech (coursepack)
    • Deliberations with his generals (from Hitler and His Generals: Military Conferences 1942-1945; edited by Helmut Heiber, David M. Glantz) (some is in the coursepack, but a lot of it is really fascinating)
    • Invasion of Poland
    • February 20, 1933 “Speech to the Industrialists”
    • Announcement of the Soviet invasion June 22, 1941
    • November 8, 1942 (“Stalingrad speech”)
    • November 8, 1943 speech (a recording is here: )
    • His “last speech”

For these papers, your audience is other class members, and so the “puzzling” something should be something that you find interesting or weird about the text—that it doesn’t fit your image of Hitler, for instance, or that it seems completely different from other things we’ve read, or that you can’t imagine it being effective, or something along those lines. In class, we’ll go over thesis questions (that is, a statement of the puzzle you’re pursuing) so that we can make sure that you’ve got a manageable topic.

Paper Two
1) Trace out the development (or not) of a specific rhetorical strategy (use Jasinski or the list above—NOT ethos, pathos, or logos) from at least three speeches within a set such as these:

    • Hitler’s speeches about the Soviet Union
    • Goebbels’ birthday speeches for/about Hitler
    • Hitler’s declarations of war/speeches at the moment of invasion
    • Hitler’s speeches about (references to) the United States/FDR
    • If you didn’t do this for the first paper, you can write about Hitler’s deliberations with his generals (from Hitler and His Generals: Military Conferences 1942-1945; edited by Helmut Heiber, David M. Glantz)
    • If you’d like to do a different set, you need to get written approval from me by 2/27
    • Nazi theories of propaganda: in addition to what Hitler says in Mein Kampf, Goebbels’ Knowledge and Propaganda, and Our Battle Against Judah.

2) Or, write about the rhetorical strategy of one of these texts resisting/criticizing Hitler and/or Nazism. Use a concept from Jasinski or the list above (you can also use “rhetoric of survivance”—you can’t use ethos, pathos, or logos).

    • Otto Wels’ March 23, 1933 speech against “The Enabling Act.” This one is harder than it looks, since it’s short. You’ll need to talk a lot about it in the context of Hitler’s speech and the rhetorical situation.
    • Various responses to the “Aryan Paragraph” (you’ll need to talk about all of them probably, since they’re all pretty short—you can find them in M. Solberg’s A Church Undone)
    • von Papen’s “Marburg Speech” (You’ll find Evans’ discussion of that speech helpful [II; 27-41] and Ullrich
    • Clara Zetkin’s 1933 Reichstag speech (if you can find the full text in English, or can read German)
    • July 2017 speech by the President of France
    • Thomas Mann’s “This Man is My Brother” (coursepack)

Paper Three. For this paper, write about characteristics of Hitler’s rhetoric in other places. Use terminology from this class (that is, again, something from Jasinski or the above list, and not ethos, pathos, or logos). Thus, you won’t just be showing that they were praising Hitler or repeating what he said—you need to show that a concept from rhetoric helps us understand what is or is not the same about this rhetoric.

    • Adolph Eichmann’s testimony and/or interrogation answers (pick one section from this). You can also watch Eichmann’s testimony here.
    • The Nazi Generals’ discussion of their situation (from Tapping Hitler’s Generals)
    • The Daily Stormer style guide
    • Hermann Goering, Reconstruction of a Nation (1934)
    • Aryanism.net or something from David Duke’s website
    • This site (essentially, a guide how to argue for white supremacy)
    • Gertrud Scholtz-Klink’s speeches about women and Nazism
    • A pamphlet released after things started going badly in Stalingrad: What Does Bolshevization Mean in Reality? Be forewarned, it’s really grim and deliberately horrifying—even I find it almost unreadable.
    • Theodore Bilbo’s Take Your Choice. Bilbo was a segregationist who cited the same authorities the Nazis cited. He was an Alabama governor and Senator, and his book is from 1948.
    • How Nuremburg defendants framed/explained their actions (see Interrogations), showing that a rhetorical concept explains their strategies (so you have to think rhetoric does).
    • F. von Bernhardi’s 1912 Germany and the Next War

==========
And here is the TOC for the coursepack

Rhetoric and Hitler Table of Contents

Syllabus
Rhetoric and Hitler: an introduction
Kenneth Buke, “Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’”
O’Shaughnessy, from Selling Hitler
McElligott, from Rethinking Weimar Germany
Hitler, March 23, 1933 speech
Sample papers
“Advice on Wrting”
Hitler, speech to the NSDAP 9/13, 1937
—. speech, 8/22/39
—. interview with Johst
—. speech, 1/27/32
Tourish and Vatcha, “Charismatic Leadership and Corporate Cultism at Enron: The Elimination of Dissent, the Promotion of Conformity and Organizational Collapse”
Entry on interpellation
Hitler, speech 4/28/39
Selection from Hitler’s Table Talk (480-83)
Kershaw, from The End (386-400)
Hitler, speech 7/13/34
Longerich, selection from Holocaust (Nazi evolution on genocide)
Selection from Hitler’s Table Talk 12-16, 422-426
Entry on inoculation
Selection from Tapping Hitler’s Generals (30-62)
Kershaw, from Hitler, The Germans, and the Final Solution (197-206)
Selection from Mayer, They Thought They Were Free (166-173)
“Dog whistle politics”
Selections from Shirer’s radio broadcasts
Selection from Snyder’s Black Earth
Selection from Hitler’s Table Talk (75-79)
Selection from Spicer’s Antisemitism, Christian Ambivalence, and the Holocaust
Hitler, speech 4/12/22
“Dissociation” from Perelman and Olbrecths-Tyteca’s The New Rhetoric
Selection from Encyclopedia of Rhetoric
Selection from Eichmann in Jerusalem
Selection from Eichmann Interrogated
Selection from Hitler and His Generals
Selection from Ordinary Men
Louis Goldblatt’s testimony before the Committee on National Defense Migration
Letter to Mr. Monk
Thomas Mann, “That Man is My Brother”
“Masculinity and Nationalism”
“Art of Masculine Victimhood”
Hitler, speech 6/22/41
selection from Longerich’s Hitler
selection from Maschmann’s Account Rendered

========

Here is the course calendar. It’s pretty messy, so, if you’d like a copy that’s a table, just email me:

8/29 First day of classes
8/31 Read “Rhetoric and Hitler: an introduction” and the course syllabus (especially the part on microthemes). Microtheme (due by 8:00 am [not as attachment—please never send microthemes as attachments]: what questions do you have about the class? What other rhetoric classes have you taken? What other courses about Hitler have you taken? What questions do you have about the material?
9/3 Labor Day
9/5 Read sample papers (coursepack) “Hitler’s speech to the NSDAP September 13, 1937” (coursepack) and “Advice on Writing” (coursepack and here https://www.patriciarobertsmiller.com//advice-on-writing/ ) Microtheme (due in email, by 8:00 a.m.): how is this advice like or unlike your writing processes on previous papers? What surprises you about the papers? What aspects of them do you especially like? What are some questions you have about the prompts? What prompt do you think you’ll answer? If you were going to write about this Hitler speech, what are some puzzles or odd things you might identify?
9/7 Read Evans, I: 1-76; Ullrich 92-109; Gregor 57-89. Microtheme (due by 8:00 am : What questions do you have about the reading? What sorts of topoi did the historical and cultural circumstances provide a racist and authoritarian rhetor like Hitler?
9/10 Read Ullrich 174-181, “Nation and Race” from Mein Kampf, and Burke’s “Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’” (coursepack). Microtheme (due by 8:00 am : what questions do you have about the reading? Which of Burke’s unification devices do you see in this chapter from Hitler? A lot of students find “Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’” a really useful basis of analysis—using it for their papers.
9/12 Read Ullrich 436-445; Evans I: 310-354. Read O’Shaughnessy (Selling Hitler cp) 4-5 and 170-181. Read McElligott (Rethinking cp) 181-207, and Hitler’s March 23, 1933 speech (cp) and Jasinski “Case Construction” and “Stock Issues,” (you can get that through the UT library—it’s an ebook). Microtheme (due in email, by 8:00 a.m.): apply the Jasinski to the Hitler speech. What kind of case does he make? Which stock issues does he use?
9/14 Microtheme (due by 8:00 am ): read the section in the syllabus on thesis questions, and submit at least one thesis question. You’re welcome to submit more than one. This is not your thesis statement.
9/17 1.1 due. If you’re the sort of person who prints up drafts, please include them. Microtheme (due by 8:00 am to patriciarobertsmiller@gmail.com): where is your thesis statement? Where is your thesis question? What is your primary text? How many quotes do you have from that text?
9/19 Read Longerich’s explanation of Nazi evolution on genocide (coursepack) and Evans III: 3-23 (in coursepack), Hitler’s August 22, 1939 speech (coursepack), and selections from his Table Talk (12-17; 422-26, coursepack), and article on inoculation. Microtheme (in email, by 8:00 a.m.): How does Hitler inoculate his audience in the speech?
9/21 Read Hitler’s interview with Johst (January 24, 1932, coursepack) and his (long and boring) speech before German industrialists (January 27, 1932, in the coursepack) and Ullrich 290-293. Microtheme (due by 8:00 am : German industrialists would later support Hitler wholeheartedly, but, as Ullrich says, this speech didn’t do the trick. Apply Burke, topoi, or one of the other concepts from the reading to discuss this speech.
9/24 Return 1.1. Microtheme (due by 8:00 am : 2 Read Jasinski on “prophetic speech/ethos,” article on charismatic leadership (coursepack) and “Our Hitler” (1935 birthday speech) http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/unser35.htm Microtheme (due in email, by 8:00 a.m.): apply either concept (prophetic speech or charismatic leadership) to the reading.
9/26 Otto Wels decided to respond to Hitler’s speech in favor of “The Enabling Act.” Before doing any of the reading, make some notes as to what you would do in that situation. Then, read the information on “interpellation” (coursepack) and Wels’ speech (coursepack) and Hitler’s response (coursepack). Also read McElligott 214-215 and Evans’ discussion of the Enabling Act. Microtheme (in email, by 8:00 a.m.): did Wels take the strategy you would have? How would you characterize Wels’ response? Are you surprised or puzzled by it? What rhetorical strategies does he use? How is Hitler’s rhetoric different in this speech from his speech earlier that evening? Why wasn’t that speech in the Nazi pamphlet? How does Hitler hail Germans such that they should support him?
9/28 Class cancelled because of individual conferences.
10/1 Microtheme (due by 8:00 am : revised introductions for your first paper. Make sure that your introductions sets up your thesis question, and that your thesis statement is delayed till the end of your paper.
10/3 1.2 due. Include all previous versions of every paper. If you’re the sort of person who prints up drafts, please include them. Microtheme (due by 8:00 am : what changes did you make to your paper? Where is your thesis statement? How much close analysis do you have in your paper?
10/5 Quiz.
10/8 In class: return 1.2 and go over sample student material.
10/10 Read William Shirer on Hitler’s April 28, 1939 speech 397-404, coursepack), and then that speech. Microtheme (in email, by 8:00 a.m.) what seems weird to you about Hitler’s speech? What rhetorical strategies does Hitler use?
10/12 Microtheme (due by 8:00 am : read the section in the syllabus on thesis questions, and submit at least one thesis question. You’re welcome to submit more than one. This is not your thesis statement.
10/15 2.1 due. Include all previous versions of every paper. If you’re the sort of person who prints up drafts, please include them.
10/17 Read Mein Kampf 176-186, 394-412, 579-589, selection from Table Talk (480-482) and this material on propaganda: “The Nature” http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/dietz.htm “First Course” http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/lehrgang.htm “Directive” http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/bolshevist.htm and Kershaw 386-400 (cp). Microtheme (in email, by 8:00 a.m.): As always, just feel free to react to the material, and don’t worry about reading the Mein Kampf carefully (the Kershaw will also have a lot of references you don’t get). What rhetorical strategies are constant in this material, and what changes?
10/19 Read background to the “Night of Long Knives” (Ullrich 458-473) and Hitler’s July 13, 1934 speech justifying the massacre (coursepack). Microtheme (in email, by 8:00 a.m.): As always, just feel free to react to the material. What rhetorical strategies does he use? This happens to be one speech where there is reasonably good evidence (which Ullrich mentions) that it was persuasive. Can you speculate as to why it worked?
10/22 [Return 2.1] Read these articles about American Nazis: https://the-avocado.org/2018/08/11/how-we-got-here-the-mad-legions-of-america/ and https://the-avocado.org/2018/08/11/how-we-got-here-the-mad-legions-of-america/ (you can see footage from the rally here https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/542499/marshall-curry-nazi-rally-madison-square-garden-1939/) and https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/8/15/16144070/psychology-alt-right-unite-the-right . Microtheme (in email, by 8:00 a.m.): how similar (or not) are the rhetorical strategies?
10/24 This reading is fairly disturbing: it’s about how various groups (such as“ordinary Germans” or military officers) rationalized supporting the regime. Selection from Tapping Hitler’s Generals (30-62, coursepack), Kershaw, “Popular Opinion” (197-209, coursepack), selection from They Thought They Were Free (166-173, coursepack). Microtheme (due by 8:00 am ): these readings all concern the complicated interactions of coercion, rhetoric, compliance, and belief. What role do you see rhetoric playing for these various kinds of Germans?
10/26 Read Hitler’s speech announcing the invasion of Poland (https://fcit.usf.edu/holocaust/resource/document/HITLER1.htm), “dog whistle politics” (coursepack), and excerpts from Shirer’s radio broadcasts (coursepack and here https://www.patriciarobertsmiller.com//excerpts-william-shirers-berlin-1999/). Microtheme (in email, by 8:00 a.m.): As always, just feel free to react to the material. Also, how is Hitler framing the situation? Are there dog whistles and, if so, what are they and how do they function?
10/29 1.3 due. Include the marked copies of 1.1 and 1.2.
10/31 Read background to invasion of the USSR; (Snyder [Black Earth] in coursepack and this: https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005164) read Hitler’s speech on Stalingrad (http://comicism.tripod.com/421108.html) Microtheme (in email by 8:00 a.m.): what are Hitler’s main rhetorical problems and constraints with this speech?
11/2 Quiz.
11/5 2.2 due. Include all previous versions of every paper. If you’re the sort of person who prints up drafts, please include them.
11/7 Read Hitler selection from Table Talk 75-79, Spicer 105-120, Hitler’s April 12, 1922 speech and Perelman on dissociation (all in coursepack) and Jasinski on dissociation (ebook). Microtheme (due by 8:00 am : How does he use dissociation? Also, note his use of religious rhetoric. 11/9 Read “Duties of a Law-Abiding Citizen” (from Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem). Arendt is a tough read because she engages in a lot of indirect paraphrase (so she is often describing a point of view she does not have, such as that Eichmann was a victim) and the selection from Eichmann Interrogated (both in the coursepack). You might also find this background helpful: https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007412 Microtheme (in email, by 8:00 a.m.): do you see any of Hitler’s topoi in Eichmann’s rhetoric about himself or his situation? What is Eichmann’s argument, and how does he make it?
11/12 Return 2.2. Read Hitler’s September 30, 1942 speech and and background information from Kershaw 534-555 (both in coursepack) Microtheme (due by 8:00 am :
11/14 Read selection from Deliberations with His Generals (coursepack). Microtheme (due by 8:00 am : how is this private and deliberative rhetoric like or unlike his more public rhetoric?
11/16 Microtheme (due by 8:00 am : Introductions for 3.1.
11/19 Microtheme (due by 8:00 am necessary but not sufficient for getting an A on 3.1 or 3.2). Draft of 3.1. 11/21 Thanksgiving break
11/23 Thanksgiving break
11/26 Read the speeches by Speer and Goebbels trying to make the best of a bad situation: (Speer) http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/tatsachen.htm
and (Goebbels): http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb40.htm Microtheme (due by 8:00 am : what rhetorical strategies do they use? How is their rhetorical approach different (from each other, or from previous speeches of theirs) or alike?
11/28 3.1 due. Include all previous versions of every paper. If you’re the sort of person who prints up drafts, please include them. For class, read http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-stupid-ways-alt-right-destroying-itself-from-within/ Microtheme (in email, by 8:00 a.m.): What do you think about the strategy of humor in regard to Nazis?
11/30 Read selection from Ordinary Men (coursepack). Microtheme (in email, by 8:00 a.m.): this is a difficult reading, and it’s challenging for thinking about rhetoric—what difference did rhetoric make in the “persuasion” of these “ordinary men”?
12/3 Return 3.1 In class: quiz. Microtheme (in email, by 8:00 a.m.): what’s a concept from this course that you used outside of class? How did you use it? Or what’s a concept from this class you’ve found really useful outside of class?
12/5 Read this article about modern Nazis’ use of digital spaces: “Killing 8chan: The Heart of Modern Nazi Terrorism [CW]” https://c4ss.org/content/51110 Microtheme (due by 8:00 am : In what ways are these Nazis like the Nazis they admire? What rhetorical concepts help us understand these groups? What surprises you (or not) about them?
12/7 Read Goldblatt’s speech before the Congressional Committee on Japanese internment (which they called “evacuation” coursepack) Microtheme (in email, by 8:00 a.m.): what’s a concept from this course that you used outside of class? How did you use it? Or what’s a concept from this class you’ve found really useful outside of class?
12/10 Last day of classes
3.2 due. Include all previous versions of every paper, your filled-out gradesheet, and printed versions of any plus or check-plus microthemes. If you’re the sort of person who prints up drafts, please include them.

We’ll be talking about Cabaret, so, if you have a chance, you should try to watch it.

Folk rhetorical theory and the “argumentum ad Hitlerum”

[This is a talk–a revised version of one I posted earlier–so it doesn’t have links.]

Wayne Booth once complained that, when he mentioned he was an English teacher, people on trains wanted to talk about commas. If he had told them he taught rhetoric, they would have said something about Hitler. In papers in argumentation classes, Hitler references are as common, and as welcome, as dawn of time introductions. Like dawn of time introductions, Hitler references aren’t unwelcome because they’re always wrong, but simply because they’re so easy, so thoughtless, and so rarely relevant. In politics, it’s even worse; hence the argumentum ad hitlerum fallacy, or Godwin’s law. Despite the miasma of Hitler references in politics, and Hitler’s reputation as the most powerful rhetor, teachers and scholars of rhetoric tend to avoid him.

We do so for various reasons, but at least one is that the popular (and even, to some extent, scholarly) understanding of Hitler’s power is far more simplistic than the case merits that it seems hopelessly complicated to try to get in and untangle it. I want to argue that is why Hitler should figure more in our teaching and scholarship. The popular (let’s call it folk) explanation of Hitler’s success is simplistic and inaccurate, but it’s powerful in that it fits with the folk explanation of persuasion, which fits with the folk explanation of what distinguishes ethical from unethical persuasion, which fits with folk notions about what constitutes good versus bad citizenship.

Talking about Hitler is a way of talking about the problems with all those mutually confirming, and similarly damaging, folk explanations.

And here a note about terminology: when I proposed this paper, I was strongly influenced by Ariel Kruglanski’s discussion of lay epistemology—that is, the common sense way that non-experts think thinking works. But, the more I worked on the issue, the more I realized that it isn’t a question of experts v. non-experts—Kenneth Burke, various scholars of demagoguery, some historians, and other experts assume the explanations I’m talking about. I came to think the better analogy is Christopher Achens and Larry Bartels’ discussion of what they call the “folk theory of democracy” which, as they point out, serves as the basis for a lot of scholarly work on political science and theory.

Here are the four folk explanations:

    • The folk explanation of what happened in Germany is that Hitler is the exemplar of a magician rhetor because he “swung a great people in his wake” (Burke 164), hypnotized the masses (and his generals, the generals claimed post-war). The disasters of Nazism are thereby explained monocausally: Hitler was a pure rhetorical agent, whose oratorical skill transformed the German people into his unthinking tools.
    • This explanation appeals to the folk explanation of persuasion, in which a rhetor determines an intention, identifies a target audience, and then creates a text that contains the desired message (often presented visually as an arrow) and shoots it at the target. If it hits, the target audience now believes what the rhetor wanted them to believe, and it was effective rhetoric. (Obviously, this reduces all public discourse to compliance gaining.)
    • Ethical rhetoric is one in which the rhetor, and the message the rhetor is sending, are ethical. And that is determined by ethical people asking themselves if the message is ethical (sometimes by whether the rhetor is ethical); Hitler’s rhetoric was unethical because it was intended to do unethical things. This is the folk explanation of the ethical/unethical distinction.
    • There are unethical rhetors out there, and, therefore, good citizens are ones who think carefully about the message being shot at them.. That is, the dominant popular way of describing and imagining participants in public deliberation is as consumers of a product—they can be savvy consumers, who think carefully about whether it really is a good product, or they can be loyal consumers, who always stick to one brand, or they can be suckers, easily duped by inferior products (and so on). Good citizens think carefully about the political messages they consume. Ethical citizens recognize an unethical rhetors and unethical messages, and resist them.

These are powerful narratives in that they enable the fantasy that each of us is a good citizen, an ethical person, who recognizes unethical arguments, and would, therefore have opposed Hitler, and continues to oppose anyone like Hitler. (Hence argumentum ad Hitlerum—it isn’t about the political figure in question; it’s about a performative of being an ethical person with good judgment.)

These models are refuted by theoretical work (e.g., Biesecker’s 1989 “Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation”) or empirical work on political reasoning (e.g., the work summarized in 2013 The Rationalizing Voter). They aren’t just wrong; they’re importantly wrong. They rely on a pleasurable but entirely indefensible othering of Germans.

That’s wrong, as I’ll discuss, but it’s importantly wrong because this explanation of what happened in Nazi Germany can make people feel good about themselves while they’re replicating the errors that Germans made. It says that, if you believe you are thinking critically about what a rhetor says, you are making sure it fits with what you think is ethical, and you only put your trust in someone you think is ethical, then you will never make the mistake Germans did.

This explanation of what happened in Germany is partially the consequence of post-war renarrrations of pre-war events. Large numbers of Germans post-war claimed they didn’t know about the genocides, they had nothing to do with it, and they resisted Hitler in their hearts. The Wehrmacht officers claimed they were just following orders (sometimes unwillingly), didn’t know about the genocides, and couldn’t break their oath to Hitler. Officials of churches claimed they were the real victims, and had resisted the Nazis all along.

None of that was true. Christopher Browning (Ordinary Men), Robert Gellately (Backing Hitler), Ian Kershaw (Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution), Michael Mann (Fascists) and various other scholars have shown that participation in, support for, or pragmatic acquiescence toward the genocides, imprisonment, and war-mongering of the Nazis were considerable and often strategic and instrumental. People were not swept up by Hitler’s rhetoric. Support for the Enabling Act was a strategic gamble. Support for Hitler and the Nazis increased after he took power because people liked the improved unemployment rate, the remilitarization of Germany, the rejection of various treaties, the reassertion of German’s entitlement to European hegemony, the conservative social agenda. Ian Kershaw says,

“The feeling that the government was energetically combating the great problems of unemployment, rural indebtedness, and poverty, and the first noticeable signs of improvement in these areas, gave rise to new hopes and won Hitler and his government growing stature and prestige.” (Hitler Myth 61)

They either liked or didn’t care about the antisemitism, jailing of political opponents, politicization of the judiciary. They didn’t think Hitler was unethical, and they didn’t think his policies were unethical. Many thought he was a decisive leader who was getting things done, and many thought he was chaotic and unpredictable, but getting them what they wanted.

For instance, the Wehrmacht was not constituted of innocent victims of Hitler’s rhetoric or hopelessly bound by their oaths. As Robert Citino says, “The officers shared many of Hitler’s goals, however—defiance of the Treaty of Versailles, rearmament, restoration of Germany’s Great Power status—and they had supported him as long as his success lasted” (Last Stand 205). The officer class helped Hitler come to power in 1932-33 because

“They saw Hitler as a fellow nationalist, a bit crude, but one who could win the masses to the nationalist and conservative cause. His opposition to Marxism, his plans for German rearmament, his anti-Semitism: all these things harmonized well with the essentially premodern world view of the officer corps.” (Citino, Last Stand 211)

That he would later destroy Germany, enable the USSR to gain territory, and destroy the German officer class meant that post-war they could try to present themselves as having been victims all along—but they had helped him get into power, supported him in power, knew about the genocides, and engaged in them.

Similarly, that Hitler did, as he said he would, disempower the churches and imprison those who resisted Nazi control of the churches means that some people now try to claim that the two major confessions—Catholic and Lutheran—resisted Hitler and Nazism. But they only resisted Nazi interference in Church power, and then only fairly late. There was criticism of the euthanasia program, and some criticism of the extermination of converted Jews, but it was little and it was late. The Church Wars were about issues of Church autonomy, not genocide. Like the officer class, many Catholic and Lutheran church officials would regret having supported Hitler (many would claim that the problem wasn’t Hitler, but Nazi administrators acting on their own initiative), but support him they did. Had the Catholic party (the Centre Party) not unanimously voted for the Enabling Act, it would not have passed.

Catholics and Lutherans were concerned about reinstating the privileges reduced by the Socialist Democrats (who believed in a separation of church and state) and the political agenda they believed was the core of being “Christian”—opposition to birth control, homosexuality, abortion, pornography.

Germans were persuaded during the Nazi regime—people came to accept and act on policies they would have balked at before 1930—but not because they heard a Hitler speech and were magically hypnotized. They did so, largely for instrumental reasons.

Culturally, our discussions of Hitler are dominated by what Ian Kershaw calls “the Hitler myth”—that he was a magically charismatic leader who overwhelmed Germans’ capacity to judge. That isn’t what happened: Germans judged, and they liked what they saw.

My point is that these four folk explanations–of Hitler, persuasion, ethical rhetoric, and good citizenship– are not just inaccurate, but are inaccurate in ways that reinforce factionalism, obstructionism, and politics as performance of in-group loyalty. Talking. more about Hitler is a way to talk about what’s wrong with those explanations.

Avocado toast, Orwell, homelessness, and prosperity gospel

When I was teaching first year courses in argumentation, one of my favorite texts for sparking interesting arguments about poverty, homelessness, and working conditions was George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. His description of poverty usefully vexed a tendency to approach the issues in “liberal v. conservative” ways, and helped students move beyond thinking about an economic issue in terms of feeling or not feeling “sorry” for the homeless, let alone overworked and underpaid dishwashers. The book shifted the argument from whether the homeless are or are not “bringing it on themselves” (that is, whether their identity is villain or victim) to policy arguments about strategies. On the whole, the self-identified Christians in the classes at Berkeley tended to argue for some kind of intervention, with disagreements (even among themselves) as to what it should be. I liked that. I don’t like binaries.

I moved to a much more conservative region, and discovered the book didn’t thwart the “they brought it on themselves and therefore don’t deserve help” argument, for some self-identified Christian students. The first time it happened, the student (call zir Chester) was really angry with Orwell. Chester said something like, “Well, of course he’s homeless; he’s wasting money.” My response was, “How so?” Chester answered, “He talks about smoking, so clearly he’s spending money on cigarettes.” Other students pointed out that Orwell very clearly said he (and other “tramps” as he called them) were picking up discarded cigarette butts, and smoking them, or picking out the last bits of tobacco and re-rolling them. There was no evidence he was spending money.

Chester argued that meant that Orwell and the tramps must have been spending money on rolling paper. Some students argued that we don’t know that, but one student (call zir Hubert) said, “Even if he was, that would have been a few pennies.” Chester said, “He should have saved those pennies.” I liked Chester a lot, but at this point even I was confused—“And done what with them?” Chester said, “Save them.” Hubert asked how—Orwell couldn’t open an account with a few pennies, and it wasn’t as though he could buy stock (or whether buying stock at that point was even a smart investment—this was the 30s). Chester brushed off any of those questions about how, practically, Orwell could have taken the few pennies he might (or might not) have spent on rolling paper (or perhaps even tobacco) and invested it for financial security.

That was my first exposure to prosperity gospel.

Orwell’s situation wasn’t some consequence of his personal failings or lack of work ethic; it was the consequence of a world economic situation, and the ways his government was (or was not) responding to them. Hubert didn’t see how Orwell’s refusing to smoke would change the worldwide and systemic factors that caused homelessness and poverty—Hubert wanted to know what to do with the pennies.

The Huberts of the world now post on Facebook and tweet about how bizarre it is that some political figure argues that “millennials” or “urban poor” (do I hear whistling?) or “that person using WIC” (that whistling is really loud) or “immigrants” (why are my dogs barking?) aren’t really poor because they eat avocado toast, have nice shoes, bought chips, have i-phones.

The Huberts of the world point out that there is no practical action a person could take that would mean forgoing avocado toast, chips, i-phones, or nice shoes would enable that person to gain financial security.

But for the Chesters of the world, getting economic security isn’t an pragmatic (and economic) system of taking money from one place and investing it; it’s a spiritual system (an issue of “character” or “will”). Orwell’s mistake, for Chester, wasn’t spending money on smoking—it was smoking. Smoking is an indulgence.

In this world, smoking, avocado toast, nice shoes, chips, i-phones are all indulgences. If you are the sort of person who engages in indulgences, you will never be rewarded with wealth. Had Orwell refused to smoke, he would have … I don’t know, something. This whole way of thinking seems to be so blazingly irrational, and theologically indefensible, that I’m still unclear on the relationship of claims.

This notion that being a person who resists smoking (but doesn’t always resist sexual assault) also has to do with the current fundagelical obsession with control (largely Strict Father Morality). In this world, good people, especially good men, control their desire for indulgence (they also control others, but that’s a different post). If they are in control, they are rewarded with wealth (which, oddly enough, enables them to have all the avocado toast they want, but no one claims this ideology is internally consistent). The assumption is that being a rigid person who believes in God and engages in strict self-control means you will prosper.

So, it isn’t about what you would do with the money you saved by not smoking or not eating avocado toast. It’s about being the sort of person who doesn’t indulge in smoking or avocado toast. We don’t need an argument about avocado toast; we need an argument about prosperity gospel.

Conservative Christians’ support for Trump isn’t hypocrisy

[Image from here]

Many people are dismayed and shocked at how self-described conservative Christians are justifying our government’s heartless treatment of immigrant children. Since most (perhaps all) of these “Christians” are descendants of people who made exactly the same decision they are now characterizing as “irresponsible parenting,” it’s tempting to call their stance hypocritical.

It isn’t. There is no conflict between American conservative evangelical Christians’ support for an authoritarian, anti-democratic, corrupt, bigot and their fundamental values. Those are their values. They’ve always supported bigoted authoritarianism. They always do.

Self-identified conservatives are, as Elizabeth Theiss-Morse’s research shows, if they consider themselves patriotic, “more likely to set stricter boundaries on who counts as American and therefore  to limit who should receive the benefits of group membership.” (98) What Theiss-Morse calls “strong identifiers” (that is, people who identify strongly with their in-group)  tend to rely heavily on stereotypes about groups. So, people who self-identify as conservative evangelical Christians are more likely to believe stereotypes about out-groups (immigrants, poor people, non-whites, non-conservatives) as lazy, indulgent, weak, and therefore not deserving of support.

Self-identified conservative Christians read Scripture as advocating an us v. them attitude that calls on Christians to protect “us.” And they define “us” by political, not Scriptural, agenda. And certainly not by what Christ emphasized.

Look, for instance, at a defense  of how “evangelicals” are supporting Trump . And notice, first, that the author assumes that all evangelicals are white, and politically conservative. In other words, as I said, Brown’s sense of “us” (which he falsely identifies as evangelicals) is actually his very narrow sense of who is truly “us.” The no true Scotsman fallacy.

Brown’s argument is fallacious and authoritarian to the core. It’s also a rejection of Jesus.

Brown doesn’t think self-identifying evangelical Christians count if they don’t share his very narrow political agenda. They aren’t even in his world. He only thinks in terms of his in-group’s self-identification: as “evangelicals” who have a very specific (and very new) political agenda.

Brown admits that politically conservative white evangelicals “made a gross miscalculation” to think Trump would “change the moral fabric of the nation,” and defending Trump’s treatment toward others has “compromised [their] moral authority]”.

But, he says, ignore all that because Hillary Clinton would have made things much worse because “she would be a staunch opponent of our religious liberties, a zealous advocate for abortion, and a supporter of radical LGBT activism.”

Let’s be clear: Brown is not an advocate of religious liberty on principle. He is, as he says, concerned about “our” religious liberties (meaning his). He isn’t concerned about the religious liberties of evangelical Christians who disagree with him about politics, let alone about the religious liberties of non-Christians. Trump’s judicial appointments are doing extraordinary damage to the principle of religious liberty. But, he’s doing great for people who want the liberty to treat other religions in a way they wouldn’t want to be treated. Brown likes that.

Brown is only concerned about the very narrow “us” and he wants that “us” to be treated differently from how other groups are treated.

HRC wasn’t an advocate for abortion, and he isn’t supporting a policy agenda that would reduce abortion. Radical LGBT activism is simply his term for queer people asking that they be treated as Brown wants to be treated, that they have the same rights he does. Brown doesn’t like the idea that the government would treat others as he wants to be treated.

Jesus never mentioned abortion or homosexuality, and, as many people have shown, Scripture is more oriented toward issues of our treatment of the poor than it is about abortion or homosexuality.  As has been shown over and over, bigoted readings of clobber verses about homosexuality are incoherent.  Yet Brown never mentions anything about the poor, about a Christian attitude toward immigration, about opposition to violence and war.

Brown thinks, correctly, that Trump is promoting Brown’s very limited political agenda. Brown thinks his political agenda is evangelical Christian. That’s where he’s wrong. What Brown wants the government to do is a violation of how Jesus says we should behave.

Brown might be able to cherry-pick Scripture to argue that his political agenda is Scriptural, but he can’t cherry pick what Jesus said—he wants a government that enables him to do unto others as he would not have done unto him.

Brown’s “Christianity” is religious demagoguery. He is arguing for a government grounded in an “us” (people who think the way he does) who are privileged in every aspect and a “them” (people who disagree with him) who should be punished, marginalized, and treated differently.

Unhappily, Brown is not unusual for conservative Christianity. It’s worth remembering that conservative Christianity was on the side of slavery  segregation , and are still on the side of marital rape. Conservative Christians justified Roy Moore’s pedophilia, Trump’s sexual assaults (he bragged about watching underage girls undress), Kavanaugh’s plausible accusation of assault. They don’t really care very much about rape. They also don’t care about the poor.

Advocates of slavery and segregation, conservative Christians, sometimes (rarely) responded to progressive Christian arguments that slavery and segregation violated Christ’s “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” And their argument was always some version of why that didn’t apply, why it was less important than other cherry-picked bits from Scripture. That’s why anti-slavery and anti-segregation rhetoric posed the same assertion that enraged conservative evangelicals: they said, “I am a man.” Conservative Christians rejected that claim; they rejected Jesus’ call.

Current “conservative Christians” are the same. They still can’t defend their politics in terms of what Jesus very clearly said: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Instead, they argue that we are in a battle between good and evil that means we should reject what Jesus said in order to save “us.”

American conservative Christians have always been getting their panties in a bunch about how they are being oppressed, about how they are in an existential fight against extermination, and it’s never been true, and it’s always been in service of enacting oppressive, exclusive, and bigoted policies against some other. It’s always been in service of rejecting what Jesus very clearly said.

Doing unto others as you would have them do unto you means that you, and everyone who disagrees with you, are held to the same standards. Were conservative Christians to follow Jesus’ rule (they don’t, and they never have), then they would have to say that their desire for a “conservative evangelical” to have the “religious liberty” to preach in classrooms, would mean that they’d have to be fine with a terrorist Zoroastrian doing the same.

They aren’t okay with their very narrow understanding of Christianity being treated equally with all other religious beliefs because American conservative evangelical Christianity is, and always has been, a rejection of what Jesus’ commandment that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. American conservative evangelical Christianity has always been on the wrong side of history; it has never been about caring for the marginalized, doing unto others, abjuring violence.

Progressive Christians opposed slavery; progressive Christians opposed segregation; progressive Christians advocate effective policies regarding abortion, progressive Christians advocate compassionate and non-punitive policies about the poor, immigrants, and the marginalized. American conservative evangelical Christianity is, and always has been, about rejecting Jesus’ commandment that we do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Progressive Christians are the ones who’ve taken that seriously.

So, no, conservative evangelical “Christians”’ heartlessness about children being separated from parents isn’t hypocrisy—it isn’t a violation of their core beliefs; it’s perfectly consistent with the values they have and have always had.

On false binaries and teacher neutrality

I was taught and trained by liberal humanists, who relied heavily on the seminar method—we’d read a provocative text, and then come to class and argue about it. The job of the teacher was to mediate the generally vehement debate (it was Berkeley, after all), a task that different faculty enacted in different ways. While some of them clearly favored one side or another (as indicated through raised eyebrows, a smile, or even active participation), most of them tried to keep the debate more or less equal either by staying entirely out of it, and just trying to keep the argument from falling too deeply into ad hominem or ad baculum (although all arguments had at least a few people skid through the edges of those ponds), or a few had the strategy of taking the side of the less-skilled interlocutors (insisting that all points of view be treated as equally valid, even if they weren’t equally well defended) and intermittently playing devil’s advocate of various possible positions. While it was clear that the first sort of teacher was actively promoting a point of view, it was conventional to talk (and think) about the latter two pedagogies as the teacher having a “neutral” stance.

And there are considerable educational benefits of those latter two pedagogies—clearly grounded in the humanist tradition of Mathew Arnold and Kenneth Burke, those teachers treated us not only as though every student’s stance was as valid as any other student’s, but as though our literally sophomoric reactions to the central questions of the Western humanistic tradition were as valid as the authors whom we were reading. One of my favorite professors explained why he had students reading Plato, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud in first-year argumentation courses. He said he wanted students to feel that they too could contribute to the long and great debate, and to see that even famous authors had glitchy (or even actively dodgy) arguments. Coming from a working class background himself, he wanted to undermine the notion that Great Authors had nothing to say to non-elite students, and those students had nothing to say back.

I mention all this because, by talking about problems with this pedagogy, I’m not advocating abandoning every aspect of it—I think there is value to honoring sophomoric reactions to complicated texts, and I often say that I benefitted from being trained by humanists who didn’t make an issue of my gender. On the other hand, I equally often say, there were problems with being trained by humanists who didn’t acknowledge that my gender was an issue.

One such moment was when a class was discussing some writings by the Marquis de Sade, and my own visceral reaction to treating rape as a joke and rape-porn as thoughtful philosophy was shouted down, particularized, and pathologized. That course was taught on the basis of the teacher not intervening at all, and I was suddenly profoundly aware that my stance on the material was not equally valid because it was my stance—a woman whose concerns about being raped on the way home from class were dismissed as paranoia.

I was touchy on this issue because, as I walking home from one of the seminar meetings (which ended in the evening) a car full of men started cruising me, with the men telling me about wanting to rape me. I just walked up to a doorway and knocked, and they went on. Not that it matters, but it was in the midst of a bunch of frats with very bad reputations, and they looked like frat boys to me. Berkeley, at that time, was in the midst of an extraordinary number of rapes.

My professors were neutral on that issue, and my reaction to de Sade was explicitly dismissed as not neutral. One of the students in the class (who later wrote his dissertation on de Sade) said that no one could find de Sade erotic, which meant I was now explaining things like snuff and rape porn in a graduate seminar. I was easily moved into the box of “crazy woman.” One of the faculty, the one reknowned for remarking on the asses of women students, and who was having an affair with an undergrad, did, after that, undermine me in all sorts of ways. The other professor became my dissertation director, and told me he would never teach de Sade again. So, which one was “neutral”?

I’m not sure I believe in neutrality as a goal or virtue, but I would say that the person who most worked toward fairness was the one who acknowledged that his personal experience was particular, and that others had (and have) other experiences.

I loved (and still love) my training—I got three degrees there, after all. I’ve had a dream career, and I still stand back and find footing in principles I learned at the Berkeley Rhetoric program. The Berkeley Rhetoric Department had faculty whose commitment to inclusive deliberation, writing instruction as meaningful intellectual work, and passionate commitment to the notion that all students can engage with the intellectual tradition informs every class I teach.

Yet, on the whole, there was a sense of training as the liberal humanist model. And it didn’t always work. The premise of the first-year argumentation course was that papers should be written to be persuasive to the opposition position (a pedagogy that still informs how I teach). In the teaching practicum, we were asked to write papers like that, and a colleague wanted to write a paper about how, for a woman walking alone every strange man is a rapist—to think otherwise is dangerous. That wasn’t her main point. I think she wanted to advocate some change to campus policies regarding safety or training, but I don’t remember because she never got past that sentence in the paper. She was presenting this paper in a graduate course about pedagogy, and the whole discussion exploded. Several males were insulted to be called rapists, which is how they read the argument, and couldn’t read it as a fairly accurate claim from a perspective they don’t have. The goal of a “neutral” classroom meant that her (our) experience as women who have to treat every strange male as a potential rapist were counted as equally valid as his feelings of being insulted.

One last example. I was teaching in a relatively small college in a fairly small and very conservative town, and was continuing to require that students try to persuade opposition audiences, and I was trying to have the same open and vehement discussions I’d had in Berkeley. We had read George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, and the most talkative student in the class had no sympathy for Orwell or the other homeless—he mentioned smoking cigarettes, so he was clearly using his money irresponsibly. (This is pretty typical of people who believe in prosperity gospel.) My training at Berkeley made me think that I could invite students to make any argument they wanted, and all those arguments would be shared, in peer review, with all the other students.

That made me neutral. But it didn’t at all.

Another student (who had spent some time homeless because his parents had kicked him out of the house for being gay) was livid, but couldn’t make his argument in that college in that community because of the potentially violent consequences to him personally if he came out. Whether I was personally or pedagogically neutral didn’t matter—the classroom wasn’t neutral because the community wasn’t.

One characteristic shared in these examples is the tendency to focus on teacher neutrality as though that is both necessary and sufficient for a neutral classroom, and my point is that it isn’t. I don’t think we can have a “neutral” classroom, and I’ve come to think we shouldn’t. I teach about various genocides, and I feel no obligation to be neutral on issues such as whether they actually happened, whether they were morally defensible, or whether the victims brought it on themselves. They did, they weren’t, and they didn’t. Biology professors don’t have to be neutral about evolution, physics professors don’t have to be neutral as to whether gravity is a fact (or if it’s really “intelligent falling”), and geologists don’t have to allow equal time in the classroom for flatearthers.

But neither does that mean that the teacher has the truth and the classroom should be a place in which we pour our truth into the empty heads of students. My favorite teacher as an undergraduate described teaching argumentation as trying to get students into the range of plausible and well-argued claims. Our job isn’t to reward students for getting the right answer, he said, but for putting together a good-enough argument. And, he said, if you’re doing your job, there should be students getting good grades with whom you deeply disagree, and students getting not good grades who share your politics. That isn’t a neutral classroom, because we bring judgment to bear on the arguments, but neither is it an indoctrination session.

It’s hard for us to think about neutrality effectively in pedagogy because our culture has a sloppy neo-post positivist construction of what it means for anyone or anything (a teacher, a text, an author, a news program) to be neutral. Even in composition studies, there is a tendency to create a binary of epistemologies, and assume that there is either naïve realism (it is easy to perceive Reality) or some kind of extreme social constructivism (so that there is no reality external to language or no human can make claims about it). For naïve realists, a “neutral” statement (aka, objective, unbiased, or factual) is one that immediately appears true to a reasonable person—neutrality is the same as non-controversial. (It ends up being “non-controversial to the in-group”, but that’s a different argument.) For rigid social constructivists, there is no such thing as neutrality, nor even degrees of it, so we are all swamped in our own miasma of socially constructed beliefs (except about social construction, which is a factually-based statement and universally true claim). As is clear from my snark, I don’t think either position is either valid or helpful. But, more important than my judgment is the consequence of the belief that there are only two options: many people defend a simplistic naïve realism because they reject the rigid social constructivism and vice versa.

We can have better arguments about teacher neutrality when we have a richer sense of the range of epistemologies—not all realisms are naïve realism, and not all forms of skepticism are rigid social constructivism. Further, we don’t have to agree on any specific epistemology. To have better arguments about neutrality we just have to acknowledge that there are various kinds of fallibilism—that, because of various kinds of cognitive biases, something might appear to be true and yet be wrong, and we can leave it to others to argue about just how wrong we inevitably are. That is, our job is to make students aware that “neutral,” “objective,” “non-controversial to people like me,” “factual,” and “true” aren’t necessarily the same things. And to acknowledge cognitive biases is not to claim that we have no ability to reflect on our own thinking, to make plausible claims about a shared world, or to assess claims.

In short, I’m saying that neutrality isn’t possible as an epistemological or political position, and refusing to intervene in class discussions doesn’t mean our classrooms are neutral. There is another way to think about neutrality, however, that is potentially useful: that we apply the same standards across all groups regardless of group identity.

Just as there are different epistemologies, there are different biases. And, while we can’t be bias-free (that isn’t how human cognition works) we can be aware of what biases are likely to harm us, our students, and our teaching. The main cognitive bias that makes epistemological neutrality unlikely (perhaps even impossible) is in-group favoritism. We tend to perceive people like us as more reliable (even “objective”), having nobler motives, and providing better arguments (we will tend to fill in the gaps in their arguments). Thus, for instance, the male teachers in my experience thought the male reactions to rape were the unbiased ones, because they seemed unemotional, and an unemotional reaction to the possibility of being raped seemed sensible simply because they shared the experience of not worrying about being raped.

It wasn’t anything about logic or emotion; it was about in-group favoritism, with no awareness that that was what was going on.
We are going to have in- and out-group students in our classes, and we are going to be biased toward in-group members. We can stop trying to be epistemologically neutral and instead strive for being fair.

It’s my passion for fairness that caused me to abandon “open” assignments (which I think are tremendously unfair in all sorts of ways). We can set up assignment prompts that are fair insofar as the projects require comparable amounts of time and effort, will result in “writing” (whether papers, podcasts, multimedia projects, or other kinds of texts) that can be assessed by the same standards, and on which we, the teacher, do not have a “right” (or even preferred) answer.

That last criterion is important. We shouldn’t invite students to write papers that will identify them as members of a group we cannot evaluate by the same standards we would use for members of an in-group. They might be members of groups we find appalling, but we should not set ourselves up as judges of their souls. This emphasis on standards that operate across groups doesn’t mean that there is a level playing field for all points of view. If, for instance, we require that students treat a reasonable opposition argument fairly, and/or use scholarly sources, certain arguments are almost impossible to make. And it’s appropriate that we set such requirements, since those are the conventions of academic discourse we are supposed to be teaching.

One advantage of relatively specific assignments is that it’s more straightforward to ensure that students from various political positions can still write good papers, and even to ensure that writing a good paper does not require students to divulge their political, religious, or cultural views.
And the last point I’d make about teacher neutrality is that many people, especially moderately authoritarian ones (a position that appear anywhere on the political spectrum), assume that we are presenting texts as containers of truth—we should only teach texts with which we agree, and that we think are true. Authoritarian teaching methods—insisting that students agree with everything we say or we have them read—doesn’t successfully inculcate that content (we won’t make students into feminists by having them read Susan B. Anthony). But authoritarian grading methods—insisting that students endorse Susan B. Anthony’s arguments in their projects and class commentary by punishing students who don’t—does model and endorse authoritarianism. And authoritarianism and democracy don’t mix.