I was a consummate bookworm when I was a kid, became an addict to social media when it started in the early 1980s[1], and have never stopped reading, although I’ve shifted from fiction to non-fiction, from books to magazines and online. Through this practice, I’ve become increasingly sensitive to how writing styles can correlate to the purpose, often hidden, of the author. To use a gross sample, if I see a lot of hysterical adjectives, if I see a lot of exclamation points, both of which are designed to activate our emotional response systems, I become immediately suspicious of whatever it is I’m reading. In a nutshell, I automatically suspect the argument being advanced, whether it be intellectual or commercial (i.e., BUY THIS PRODUCT, IT’LL CURE ALL YOUR ILLS!), is less than compelling, perhaps even fraudulent[2].
A more nuanced collection of examples, and therefore difficult to detect and positively correlate, is the august tone I find in National Review articles. They have a ponderousness to them that projects an authority that precludes a need to rely on facts or right reasoning to make their point. (I should note that contributor David French is less willing to use that form that most other NR contributors.) Add in their flight from an initial NeverTrump stance to a YesTrump position and its concomitant moral and ethical problems, and I find them so irritating I resist visiting the NR website. They start with the assumption that their ideology is correct, push through or simply ignore the oppositional facts and arguments like a bulldozer through a china shop trying to buy a single teacup, and end with a righteousness unearned.
This habit of mine may also explain why I read The Persuaders with such interest, although its topic is a bit of a sibling to my sensitivities on the matter of communications. This tome investigates how various entities attempt to persuade us to take political positions and buy commercial products, not through rational expostulation, but through sleight-of-hand and knowledge of how minds work.
So, several months ago when Eve Fairbanks published a meditation on how her communications with conservatives, family or otherwise, raised the hair on the back of her neck (my description), I was fascinated:
I grew up in a conservative family. The people I talk to most frequently, the people I call when I need help, are conservative. I’m not inclined to paint conservatives as thoughtless bigots. But a few years ago, listening to the voices and arguments of commentators like [Ben] Shapiro, I began to feel a very specific deja vu I couldn’t initially identify. It felt as if the arguments I was reading were eerily familiar. I found myself Googling lines from articles, especially when I read the rhetoric of a group of people we could call the “reasonable right.” …
When I read [Bari] Weiss, when I listened to Shapiro, when I watched [Jordan] Peterson or read the supposedly heterodox online magazine Quillette, what was I reminded of?
My childhood home is just a half-hour drive from the Manassas battlefield in Virginia, and I grew up intensely fascinated by the Civil War. I loved perusing soldiers’ diaries. During my senior year in college, I studied almost nothing but Abraham Lincoln’s speeches. As I wrote my thesis on a key Lincoln address, Civil War rhetoric was almost all I read: not just that of the 16th president but also that of his adversaries.
Thinking back on those debates, I finally figured it out. The reasonable right’s rhetoric is exactly the same as the antebellum rhetoric I’d read so much of. The same exact words. The same exact arguments. Rhetoric, to be precise, in support of the slave-owning South. [WaPo]
Is it OK to condemn or agree based on rhetorical style. No.
Is it OK to research based on rhetorical style? Yes.
Returning to my initial point, this is why the style of communication is as important as the subject and argument itself. A style that seeks to obscure, which attempts to ally itself with some moral goodness using vacuous or theological arguments, I’ll tell you there’s a dozen more strategies available to those who would rather twist words and appeal to invisible beings than admit they are in the wrong. That’s part of my analytical approach to reading any piece, fiction or not (although purposes are rarely shared between the two categories).
Moving on and breaking the thundering tone of my moral outrage (see, I can do it, too!), I now suspect I understand what a professor of Rhetoric does. From the same article:
Proslavery rhetoricians talked little of slavery itself. Instead, they anointed themselves the defenders of “reason,” free speech and “civility.” The prevalent line of argument in the antebellum South rested on the supposition that Southerners were simultaneously the keepers of an ancient faith and renegades — made martyrs by their dedication to facts, reason and civil discourse.
It might sound strange that America’s proslavery faction styled itself the guardian of freedom and minority rights. And yet it did. In a deep study of antebellum Southern rhetoric, Patricia Roberts-Miller, a professor of rhetoric at the University of Texas at Austin, characterizes the story that proslavery writers “wanted to tell” between the 1830s and 1860s as not one of “demanding more power, but of David resisting Goliath.”
Perhaps I’ve developed an informal sense of rhetoric. Rhetoric would have been an interesting subject to study in college, if only I had known it even existed. After all, it appears to study, at least as one subject, how those employ rhetoric to obscure repulsive practices and thoughts, clothing, in this case, the pus-filled body of slavery in the finery of freedom, minority rights, and even, in the case of the Fire-Eaters, the Word of God. I get a lot of pleasure in taking apart missives which I consider misleading, exposing the methods of the charlatans to the world. Bringing light to darkness makes me feel like I’ve done a bit to make the world a better place, transient as it may be.
Fascinating article, good read.
1 “Social media” of the era were Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes), of which I ran one of a type known to encourage enthusiastic communication (rather than the other major purpose for which BBSes existed, which was file-sharing) for 20 years, and spent inordinate amounts of time programming, using, and indulging in activities affiliated with them.
2 Such suspicion does not preclude admiration for the communication, however. Both my Arts Editor and myself found the commercials for Enzyte, a supplement for “natural male enhancement,” quite charming, if that’s the word for it. The CEO of the manufacturing company of Enzyte, Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals, ended up in the pokey, along with his mother (!), and the company went bankrupt, thus suggesting art and ethics are tenuously connected, at best.
