Rhetoric

 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 steady rise in health, wealth, leisure, 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 add the 42 years that take us back to 1900. Some lucky few saw a disappearance of comfort and privilge 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.)

    

    An erudite and well-researched book[1] came into my hands a few years ago that puts the argument that, in a democracy, the art of Rhetoric matters. From the classical Greeks to the republican Romans, from Pericles (c. 450 BC) to Cicero (c. 50 BC), the art of Rhetoric was regarded as an important area of study; crucial to the process of government.  On the other hand, 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. 

    When I was a teenager, I found and bought a second-hand copy of Archbishop Whately's 'Elements of Rhetoric' (1828)[1] which argued that persuasive argumentation required good logic. But at that age I sided with the idealistic Socrates rather than the pragmatic Whately. This book by Rob Goodman [1] argues that we should study and understand the importance of persuasion in modern politics in our tottering democracies. 

    Goodman's book 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 are unduly swayed by the first two? 

    

[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)