Is it important to study Rhetoric?
What if we really are in the 'End Days'? Not, perhaps, the dramatically choreographed 'End Days' of the the Book of Revelations, with the 'Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse', and the 'Beast'. But an end of the sustained steady rise in health, wealth, leisure, and size of the human population; an end of the 'Good Times'.
For such it has been all my 84 years of life. And making small adjustments I could say the whole of the twentieth century. Some lucky few saw a disappearance of comfort and privilege in the early part of the 20th century, but the majority of Europeans will have seen an enormous improvement (in health, social care, longer holidays, opportunities for travel.) I have had it lucky all the days of my life, from the little bottles of free milk in my school-days, to the free education for seven years at the best universities in the country, to the free bus-travel in my retirement. My children enjoyed free education from age 5 to 22, and my grandchild are following in their footsteps. I bought my first house at the age of twenty nine.
But there are signs that this run of good luck is ending. Our electorate and their 'news-media' have asked six successive governments to restore the steady increase in 'well-bing' that we enjoyed in the twentieth century (Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak, Starmer). All have failed! It could be that we are lazy, or tired, or not motivated, or uncertain of the future.
(I remember now being told by a Finnish doctor that is it not alcohol that an alcoholic craves, but a steady increase in blood-alcohol level.)
I think we need our leaders to make some new plans for us, creat new goals.
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In my teens I read Plato's shorter Socratic dialogues and was dazzled. I loved his routing of the Rhetoricians. But, for fairness, I found and bought a second-hand copy of Archbishop Whately's 'Elements of Rhetoric' (1828)[2] which argued that persuasive argumentation required good logic. However, at that age I sided with the idealistic Socrates rather than the pragmatic Whately, and regarded rhetoricians as deliberate deceivers. Socrates famously argued that rhetoric was a dishonourable substitute for philosophy, a prostitute science, studying and teaching the art of subverting the proper science of good government.
A few years ago an erudite and well-researched book[1] came into my hands which makes the argument that, in a democracy, the art of Rhetoric matters. From the Greece of Pericles to the Rome of Cicero, (i.e. roughly from 450 BC to 50 BC)[3], the art of Rhetoric was regarded as an important area of study; crucial to the process of government and the administration of justice.
This book by Rob Goodman [1] argues that, in our tottering democracies, it is vital that we study and understand the importance of persuasion in modern politics.
Unfortunately, Goodman's book does not practice what it preaches; it reads like a Ph.D. thesis. He summarizes all the writings of Cicero, Burke, Macaulay, and Schmitt on the skills of the orator. But I have got nothing out of it. Nothing except the following single question.
Take the four contemporary politicians: Trump, Farage, Biden and Starmer. Do we think that we, the public as a whole, are unduly swayed by the first two?
REFERENCES
[1] 'Words on Fire' (2022) Rob Goodman, Cambridge University Press.
[2] Richard Whately (1787–1863), an English academic and Archbishop of Dublin, authored the highly influential Elements of Rhetoric (1828).
[3] Pericles (c. 495–429 BC) to Cicero (106 – 43 BC)
