Every now and then, I catch my more senior colleagues casting longing glances back to the public life of the Sixties, which, for all its asperities, exhibited more vibrancy than contemporary rhetorical culture. Several years ago, I began teaching at a small Midwestern liberal arts college, and I recall vividly when one of my new colleagues showed me, with no little chagrin, a program of student papers for an annual academic fair on our campus. Despite our school’s legacy of neo-Calvinist transformationalism, which in the late Sixties was almost indistinguishable from a neo-Marxist social critique, most of these essays in the program represented politically conservative commitments. On another occasion, I heard a peer confess feeling disoriented upon seeing student residences dotted with Bush/Cheney signs on a campus that witnessed, thirty years back, Nixon burned in effigy.
When I ask students why they do protest so little, they reassure me that they write a lot of e-mail. Oh, and they cultivate blog presence, too. But it’s hard to be impressed with point-and-click activism. Thirty years ago, in protest of an administrative decision to scuttle the college’s adherence to a particular brand of neo-Calvinist thought, students from our school joined professors for a sit-in. When I told my students this story, one asked, “What’s a sit-in?”
I sound nostalgic and more than a little censorious. But I’m not trying to resuscitate protest rhetoric. A picket line in our cafeteria today would be as odd as those red-faced street preachers who used to point their bibles at our windshields. I am curious, though, about what this change means.
One place to start looking for an answer is a series of Notre Dame lectures by the late Wayne Booth, published in 1974 as Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent.1 Booth’s death this past October prompts a reexamination of his depiction of the rhetorical culture of the Sixties and his intuition that student rhetoric anticipates the discourse of the broader culture.
As a University of Chicago dean at the height of that turbulent decade, Booth stood between administrative rationalists and student ranters. These opposing sides, he argued, shared an essentially religious commitment to the segregation of fact from value. He could find no more articulate advocate for this divide than the public intellectual Bertrand Russell, “perhaps the last and greatest modernist to embody both extremes of the creed.” Russell, in other words, managed to speak for both sides of the divide—the champions of “fact” and the champions of “value”—because both were willing to defer to his faith in critical doubt—i.e., his insistence that mind, world, and knowledge can be reduced to what can be known by science. Buy into Russell’s dogma that we only know for sure what we can’t doubt, and here’s the insight you’re left with, Booth concluded: “I can only trick you, or force you, or blackmail you, or shoot you—and thus change your mind permanently.”
Booth’s counter was to doubt the doubters—in hopes, perhaps, that two negatives would undo a positivist. Watch, for instance, how he (Q) jabbed questions into a passage from Russell’s What I Believe (R):
R: “Man is a part of Nature, not something contrasted with Nature.”
Q: I agree, but this seems to me to be precisely what you deny when you choose to rule out all of man’s values as irrelevant to Nature.
R: “His thoughts and his bodily movements follow the same laws that describe the motion of stars and atoms.”
Q: Why? What kind of laws? The laws—no doubt extremely general—of Supreme Being? You have rejected those. The law of gravity? Of chemical combination? You have made a huge leap here. …
R: “Of this physical world, uninteresting in itself, Man is a part.”
Q: The original proposition reasserted and still unproved.
R: “His body, like other matter, is composed of electrons and protons, which, so far as we know, obey the same laws as those now forming part of animals or plants.”
Q: So far as we know, in your sense, we can also say that they don’t.
R: “There are some who maintain that physiology can never be reduced to physics, but their arguments are not very convincing.”
Q: Why? Let’s see one. And what about psychology and politics and ethics?
R: “And it seems prudent to suppose that they are mistaken.”
Q: Why? What a curious inversion of Pascal we have here!
But Booth did more than scrape the skeptics. He built a kind of transcendental argument based on what he took to be indisputable about the nature of the person: “Man is essentially, we are now saying, a self-making-and-remaking, symbol-manipulating creature, an exchanger of information, a communicator, a persuader and manipulator, an inquirer.” If this is true to human experience, then even “in a time when ‘everyone believes’ that ‘there are no shared values any more,’ ” our nature requires adherence to one “firm public value”: that we ought to engage with each other argumentatively. John Lennon’s lyrics, Vietnam protests, and Auden’s poetry are thus just as important as academic papers, logical arguments, and scientific formulae. All can be instances of the rhetoric of assent.2
Some variation on this theme continued to be integral to Booth’s work even up to his final book, The Rhetoric of Rhetoric.3 In what follows, I’d like to critique an omission in this book (as representative of an omission in the whole of his work), but I find that criticism daunting to mount, not only because I admire him so much, but also because he has, in a way, anticipated my criticism: “I can only answer, ‘Sorry, but did your last short book cover everything?'” At times, his book does read like a short course on the Rhetoric of Everything. From the history of rhetorical theory, to the contemporary state of rhetoric in education, politics, and media, to a “rheterology” of science and religion, the book frames “Listening Rhetoric” in a way deftly helpful for pastors, teachers, media practitioners, and anybody else interested in the “art of discovering warrantable beliefs and improving those beliefs in shared discourse.” One chief obstacle to such discovery and improvement is what he called “rhetrickery,” a sophistic vice whose origin Booth traced to the dualism he had explored some thirty years back in Russell’s rhetoric.
But although Booth’s long argument with modernism has helped to disrupt the dualism between romanticism and rationalism, anyone who pays much attention to our public discourse today has to wonder about the persistence of the fact/value divide. There are some continuities: as in Booth’s day, we are still long on aspirate assertion, short on clearly consonanted reasons. But more and more, our dominant dualism emerges between preference and procedure. When I ask my students why they don’t protest administrative missteps, they tug down their designer ball-caps and say they’re not sure what channels to use. This delicate attention to procedure would, to put the matter gently, strike students of the Sixties as odd. But even more significantly, it has a privatistic momentum. The old fact/value divide compelled people to pit “What is rational?” against “What do I feel?”—a dualism that is at least half public. Today, the tension is between the questions, “What do I want?” and “How do I get it?” Or, better, “What should I wear?” and “Do you take Discover?”
Somebody ought to write Postmodern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent, this time critiquing a representative intellectual for our time. Any takers for Richard Rorty? Dubbed by Harold Bloom “the most interesting philosopher in the world today,” Rorty, like Russell, is an adroit rhetorician capable of speaking to non-philosophical audiences. But unlike Russell, whose rhetorical notions encouraged the noisy but sometimes necessary activism of the Sixties, Rorty’s discourse tends toward the privatistic. He would strenuously object to this characterization, noting that he has spent a great deal of ink on cultivating public-mindedness in such works as Achieving Our Country. But he brackets to private life such concerns as religion, sexuality, and other projects of self-perfection. This bracketing gives the American experiment the feel of a satellite dish network: politics becomes the technical procedure to keep the satellite online, so we can all go home and watch what we want.
At times, nonetheless, Rorty sounds very much like a rhetor of assent. Indeed, Booth included him among “those who have taught me a lot about rhetoric, even when I sometimes disagreed with them.”4 Furthermore, Rorty’s construction of a dialogue with Steven Weinberg sounds like Booth’s dialogue with Russell. Weinberg, one of today’s great preachers of the gospel of objectivity, insists that there is as much correspondence between scientific laws and nature as there is between your insistence that a stone in your backyard is objectively heavy and the stone’s “actual” heaviness. Give an ear to Rorty’s response:
But ask yourself, common reader, in your capacity as everyday speaker about rocks, whether you recognize anything of the sort. If you do, we philosophers would be grateful for some details. Do both the subject and the predicate of your sentences about rocks (“This rock is hard to move,” say) stand in such a relation of correspondence? Are you sure that hard-to-moveness is really an aspect of objective reality? It’s not hard for some of your neighbors to move, after all. Doesn’t that make it an aspect of only subjective reality?
Or is it that the whole sentence stands in one-to-one correspondence to a single aspect of objective reality? Which aspect is that? The rock? Or the rock in its context, as obstacle to your gardening endeavours? What is an “aspect” anyway? The way something looks in a certain context? Aren’t some contexts more objective than others? …
I can come up with conundrums like this for a long time, but I suspect that Weinberg would not see the point of my raising any of them. The difference between us is that I am in the philosophy business and he is not. I concoct and hash over conundrums like that for a living.5
You may be beginning to understand why Booth refers to Rorty as “excessively relativistic,” when passages like this one, with its seemingly irresistible sequence of questions, offer more velocity than validity. Here is no inquiry to be considered, only a momentum to be admired—apparently on the grounds that clever performance achieves solidarity quicker than truth claims.6 But what else is there besides performance when, as Rorty argues in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, language has no access to truth, the self has no identifiable nature, and society has no warrantable goal but to avoid causing pain?7
Thirty years ago, on the very day my fellow professors and their students desecrated Nixon’s image, the Ladies Guild decided to plant petunias on our campus. It must have looked like a Neil Simon troupe stumbling onstage during the second act of The Crucible. But the story also suggests that there was a time when the line between the politics and petunias (or, as Rorty’s essay has it, between “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids”) was more sharply drawn than it is now. We’re not likely to see such back-to-back performances of beautification and protest on our campus today, because politics and petunias have, if not exactly kissed, at least become indistinguishable from each other. Not that there are fewer performances—only that they now fold together so well that they appear seamless. As sociologists Nicholas Abercrombie and Brian Longhurst argue, our mass-mediated lives, lined with speakers and screens, encourage us to construe public life as a sequence of performances in which “we are audience and performer at the same time; everybody is an audience all the time.” In other words, the diffusion of our mediascape wreaks havoc with once tidy modernist dualisms, such as the public/private divide: “Performances for diffused audiences are public and private. Indeed, they erode the difference between the two.”8
Rhetorical criticism of Rorty’s performances might suggest a different set of questions than the ones Booth raised about Russell. In comparison with students of the Sixties, students today may look indolent, apathetic, and egocentric. But what if their classroom quiescence is actually a species of what speech therapists call topophobia, the fear of speaking in public? What if Rorty’s garrulity is only the strange obverse of a pervasively felt stage fright?9
I listen to students for a living, as they talk in the classroom, on the sidewalk, at the coffee shop. Their vocal quality is sibilant, often nasal, with plenty of back-of-the-throat fry. Few students use their chest cavity for resonation. They often qualify their own remarks, deprecate themselves, leave sentences unfinished. Their favorite tag is some variation on “You know what I mean?” Now, you could say that all these apparently modest habits of discourse suggest a mastery of the rhetoric of assent. But it sounds to me like a loss of rhetorical nerve, as if students have picked up Booth’s inflections but not his convictions. They sound like actors who have mastered a dialect but can’t remember their lines. Call it the rhetoric of accent: slow to speak, slow to anger, and quick to shrug.
Could we tinker with Booth’s rhetoric of assent to help out the topophobics? Stephen Webb has argued that stage fright is a deeply theological issue, so for starters let’s think about Booth’s theology. He identified himself as “a lifetime pursuer of religious truth” and described his journey “beginning as a devout orthodox Mormon, through increasing doubt to professed atheism, to a recovery of religious belief that some might call mere pantheism, or perhaps Deism.”10 At first blow, these two theological descriptors, one transcendent and one immanent, appear opposed. But he was right to insist upon the importance of both. “Scores of books have reported the quest for a final theory that will explain everything. Why? Because ‘everything’ is really there, waiting to be explained—and it is also here, supporting our pursuit of it.” But what is neither here nor there, Booth thought, is a personal God. Instead he preached a god term, helpful for instilling modesty in people who talk too much, but not finally adequate for people who can’t manage to talk at all.11 What John Updike somewhere describes as our frail and faltering being may well require not just a god term but a Word who, in all eloquent grace and outspoken truth, is God coming to terms with us.
Craig Mattson is associate professor of Communication Arts at Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights, Illinois.
1. Wayne C. Booth, Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1974).
2. These discourses—Lennon’s lyrics, for example—are referred to by John Hammerback, one of Booth’s careful readers, as “reconstitutive rhetoric”—conversionist discourse that works as much by identification and irony as by logic and empirical demonstration. Hammerback draws heavily on Booth (in conjunction with Kenneth Burke and Edwin Black) in developing a model of reconstitutive rhetoric that seeks to explain how certain rhetorics which, by every modernist light, should have failed, nonetheless succeeded. His model posits that some people, when addressed by convincing discourse, don’t just change their minds—they change their identities. See John C. Hammerback, “Barry Goldwater’s Rhetorical Legacy,” The Southern Communication Journal, Vol. 64, No. 4 (Summer, 1999), pp. 323-332.
3. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Rhetoric (Blackwell, 2004).
4. Booth, Rhetoric of Rhetoric, p. 82–83.
5. Richard Rorty, “Thomas Kuhn, Rocks, and the Laws of Physics,” in Philosophy and Social Hope (Penguin, 1999), pp. 184-85.
6. Booth would also want to point out that such a momentum is hardly as overwhelming as it might appear at first. Rorty assumes that if the truth cannot be found to exactly correspond to our statements than the truth must not be findable at all—a dogma Booth deconstructed for more than thirty years.
7. Rorty’s problem may not be merely epistemological but also “acoustemological,” to use Stephen Webb’s neologism from The Divine Voice (Brazos, 2004), which I reviewed in the May/June 2005 B&C. Booth, whose practice of “Listening Rhetoric” makes him attentive to so many aspects of public discourse, is peculiarly unobservant when it comes to the sound of talk. But aurality may be especially important in the Rortyan passage cited above. Rorty cleverly ticks questions off in a list of “conundrums,” but he sounds bored, almost as if he were reading the passage over an intercom. C. S. Lewis accused moderns of being hollow-chested. This discourse sounds hollow-voiced.
8. Nicholas Abercrombie and Brian Longhurst, Audiences: A Sociological Theory of Performance and Imagination (London: Sage, 1998), p. 73, 76.
9. Stephen Webb is helpful again: “Displaced, uprooted, and detached from traditional communities, we often do not know what to say when we open our mouth.” The Divine Voice, p. 77.
10. Rhetoric of Rhetoric, p. 160.
11. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Univ. of California Press, 1969), pp. 275-276. A “god term” is our peculiarly human quest for “pure persuasion, absolute communication, beseechment for itself alone, praise and blame so universalized as to have no assignable physical object”—whatever, in short, we persistently name as our highest good.
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