I need to start on my syllabi really soon. I will probably do that later this week or this weekend.
I was thinking about my classes, and I kind of paused over one of them. I’ll be teaching rhetorical theory in the fall. And of all the courses I teach, that one is the toughest sell.
Just consider the title of the course: Theories of Rhetoric.
Those are two things that most undergrads spend their scholastic careers trying desperately to avoid. NOBODY wants to take a theory or a rhetoric class. Both of those things just scream “hard” and “boring.”
And that’s kind of been the point of this whole podcast for the last few years, you know? To show that neither one of those things are true. To show that both of those things are valuable and applicable. But that isn’t necessarily clear at the outset.
A lot of people who have gone through school have heard about Descartes. He is the guy who pretty much invented the scientific method. Descartes stressed that we should be rational and scientific at all times and in all things. He is one of the primary people who moved us into the Enlightenment in that regard.
But he had a critic in a guy named Vico. We’ve talked about this before, but I want to review.
Vico said, yeah, science and rationality are great, but that’s not how we live our lives. Yes, we need science and logic for some things. But you don’t decide who to marry or what to get for dinner using the scientific method. For the daily, life-kind of decisions you use humanistic, even rhetorical means of making decisions. You weigh the pros and cons, yes, but it is a subjective, qualitative thing. When my friends and I decide what we’re going to watch we don’t form a hypothesis and test it – we create arguments and weigh them.
In that sense, life is much more rhetorical than it is scientific. But we don’t think in those terms.
There was a time when rhetoric was seen as the pinnacle of education. You went to school specifically so you could eventually learn rhetoric.
But these days most people don’t know what that word means.
And I’m not here to pine for a lost time, hundreds of years ago when my niche subject was a big deal. But, I am here to make the argument that we are surrounded by a subject that we tend to think of as “out of touch” or “unfashionable.”
I think some of that is because we don’t know what that word means. And that is not the fault of the lay-audience, if you will. On the one hand, we could make it easy: rhetoric is persuasion! Ta-da! Simple. But if you ask somebody who is a supposed expert in rhetoric they will most likely tell you that it is much more complicated than that. And it is! But that is a real fast way to confuse, and even turn-off an audience that just wants to understand what we are on about. If we, as the experts, can’t even say what it is, then how exactly are we supposed to explain ourselves to non-experts?
And that’s why I think a class like Theories of Rhetoric can be so valuable, actually!
Now, look. I tell all of my students that I am well aware they are most likely not going to grow up to be rhetorical scholars. This is not the thing they are going to focus on in their working life. And I admit they aren’t going to need to write rhetorical theory or rhetorical criticism papers in their adult lives, either. These are not philosophers and projects they will have to cite or reproduce after this class! And they are generally shocked. They look at me with wide eyes. Because in their minds it sounds like I am admitting this is a pointless class.
But, I tell them, I argue this class is incredibly important and useful even though you will not do those things.
So let’s talk about what you will do in this class, I tell them. You will analyze complicated ideas and texts. You will not only learn to make arguments, but you will learn to understand arguments. You will be required to understand complex ideas and apply them to problems in order to come to solutions. You will be asked to synthesize and apply complicated concepts to come to creative outputs.
These papers that you write? Nah, you probably won’t have to write that again. But when you write those papers you are learning synthesis, information application, and creative problem solving. And if you don’t think those are valuable skills, then I have no idea what you plan on doing after school.
You probably won’t be asked to cite Plato or Nietzsche in your life after school. But if you want to be successful and well-grounded, you will have to be able to tell when somebody is making a good argument or a bad argument. You will have to be able to tell when somebody is trying to manipulate you. You will have to know when somebody is manipulating facts, and what you think is true and what isn’t.
So when people ask me, “are we ever going to use any of this out in the real world?” I can honestly answer, “Yes. If you don’t, you’ll be a lot worse off, both professionally and personally.” Because when we teach these seemingly lofty and out-of-touch ideas we’re really teaching the most fundamental things to the human experience.
And it doesn’t have to be complicated. I hope I have, at this point, convinced you that language is important. Words drive us – they drive culture and society. Everything from a simple word to the narratives they craft shape who we are and how we behave.
When I taught the grad seminar in rhetoric, it was organized around two basic ideas. One, it was basically chronological. It was what many people in my field call “Plato to NATO.” But that seemed directionless. I wanted to give my students some thematic ideas to work with, so they weren’t going in blind. So, I built my class around three basic questions: What is truth? What is reality? What is rhetoric?
I told them, there are some words that are easily defined because we generally share an understanding of what they mean. There are other words that are dependent on time, location, conversation, or even the individual. Often, it is those words that defy meaning that are the most powerful. Words like “beauty” or “power” or “patriot” do not just represent an idea. They are the notions by which cultures rise and fall. The definitions of some words are not a matter of what is in the dictionary, but a matter of society’s very structure. The words “truth,” “reality,” and “rhetoric” are some of the driving ideas behind Western civilization.
We spend a lot of time in my classes talking about some pretty complicated and intense topics. I mean – the third persona? Material rhetoric? These are not things that you just casually stumble upon in your pleasure reading. But even the most basic concepts can seem daunting. It is really hard to get my students to understand that a Neo-Aristotelian criticism is more than just identifying pathos and logos. Or that using the pentad is more than just saying, “here are five things.” Because we tend to latch on to the simplest things and call it good. We don’t want to hear, “but it isn’t that simple.” Because we like to assume things are just as they are on the surface.
And I get that! I understand wanting to take everything just as it is. And I think people confuse what we are asking them to do. I’m not asking them to do a literary analysis. I’m not asking them to find some great string of symbols buried in a speech. I’m just asking people to find the rhetorical tools they used to make a good (or bad!) speech.
And inevitably people squirm at this. Students balk, and ask, “Do I really think people set out to do that, or were they thinking about this when they wrote it?” And they are almost always shocked when I laugh and say, “Oh, I highly doubt it.”
This causes great unrest! If the speaker didn’t mean it, then why are we studying it??? They cry.
Listeners, here is a great truth:
When I, or anyone else tells you, this speaker appealed to ethos, or this speaker created a second persona, or whatever, they are not telling you that the author sat down intending to do it. They are telling you that we have been observing speakers for thousands of years. And in those thousands of years, we have noticed that successful speakers do certain things. And those successful speakers have learned from other successful speakers that those things work. So, the same tactics have been used over and over again. Successful speakers follow similar patterns. And these things that we are teaching you are just that – the patterns that we have noticed. We aren’t telling you that a speaker sat down and said, “I’m going to make a logical appeal!” or “I’m going to create the ideal audience with certain metaphors!” But they DID those things because that’s what good speakers have always done, and we put a name to it. And the REASON we do that is so YOU can be aware of what good speakers do so you can say, “Oh…this person is trying to convince me of something!” or “Oh! This person is trying to include, or even silence certain people. That tells me something about their ideology!” That’s legitimately useful information. You can make better decisions if you can be aware of this kind of thing. And you know what? THAT is what we want. We don’t care if you can write an 18-20 page paper so much as we want to know you can analyze problems, synthesize information, and make good decisions.
We academics tend to get wrapped up in our own little cocoons, you know? We all think our disciplines are the most important.
I’m not here to tell you rhetoric is the end all be all. I mean, it is for me! It is pretty much my whole life! But I’m not here to tell you it should be yours. But I hope if you’ve been listening for a while you see its value.
That’s all I can hope for, really.
I’ve talked before about how AI is going to change education. And I heard somebody on another podcast, Crossroads, produced by the National Cathedral, talking about how AI is going to change everything we know. He compared it to the internet – it’s just going to become ubiquitous. And I thought about that for a while. How we can rage against it all we want, but the truth is, it is coming – if you don’t embrace it, you’re just going to be eventually left out. Because AI is THE technology revolution of this millennium.
And I want to emphasize AGAIN how this changes how we need to approach education. We have spent the last few decades putting EVERYTHING into STEM education. Which is great. It brought us AI. And the temptation is to keep pumping funding into STEM because AI is a technical revolution. Tech Bros will love that. But I am here to tell you that is the opposite of what we need to do.
The technology exists. And truth be told, it can improve itself. AI is generative. It writes code, it can design machines. AI can do all manner of technical and scientific things that are well beyond us. But it can’t be human.
So THAT’S where we need to be expanding our educational emphasis. We need to be teaching our kids that their humanity is invaluable. We need to be teaching them that empathy, deep analysis, humanistic reasoning, critical decision making, and emotional intelligence are sacrosanct. In short, we need to be teaching them the things the machines can’t do. I hate to put it in such crass, capitalistic terms, but if people want to be valuable in the work force, you have to show that you can do the things that the machines can’t. Otherwise, your only real value is feeding prompts into a chatbot.
At least until we come to our senses and grant universal basic income to everybody and it’s just computer scientists, artists, teachers, and philosophers who make anything beyond that.
So ALL of this is why I think classes like Theories of Rhetoric are valuable. Because when you engage with these supposedly pointless ideas, you are actually engaging with the most human parts of us. And I think that is so important today.
But machines aside. Let’s bring this to the very immediate.
I have not hidden the fact that I have serious problems with Donald Trump. I have used him as an example over and over again – not just as a bad speaker, but as a bad dude.
What makes us human is important to that.
The MAGA movement is very invested is denying what is human in many people. I could go on and on about migrants, women, the LGBTQ population – but one of the most glaring examples was when he made fun of disabled people in front of an entire rally. It was not just distasteful. It was cruel and dehumanizing. Donald Trump has no respect, or even acknowledgement for other’s humanity.
Quintillian said rhetoric was a good man speaking well. He had lots of ideas about how studying rhetoric would make you a good person, and you couldn’t master rhetoric without becoming a better person in the process. I have a lot of doubts about that, but I do think there is value in exploring our humanity as part of our education. If you never explore your humanity, you will never learn to respect it.
So in that sense, subjects like rhetoric, English, the foreign languages, religion, and history matter more than we can possibly imagine. And we can’t forget the social sciences! I know plenty of scientists and engineers who like to sneer at humanists because we “don’t do real scholarship” but which one of us is about to be edged out by AI?
Ten years ago when people couldn’t get a job, the chorus was, “ha-ha, learn to code!” Now it seems to be, “ha-ha! Learn to weld!” Maybe we’re all in trouble.
Music in this episode is “Fearless First” by Kevin MacLeod at https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3742-fearless-first.
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