This All Has Been Related Before

Sometimes hospitals are like airplanes for me, at least in regard to reading.

Because my mom was usually sleeping when I sat with her in her hospital room, I caught up on some reading of academic journals. Although it's possible that someone else has read "Decorous Spectacle: Mirrors, Manners, and Ars Dictaminis in Late Medieval Civic Engagement," "Rogerian Principles and the Writing Classroom: A History of Intention and (Mis)Interpretation," "'Breaking the Age of Flower Vases': Lu Yin's Feminist Rhetoric," and "Acts of Institution: Embodying Feminist Rhetorical Methodologies in Space and Time" within the walls of Allen Hospital in Waterloo, Iowa, it ain't probable.  So while she snoozed, I ventured into catching up on past issues of Rhetoric Review along with reading some magazines.

One article I found both interesting and aggravating is "We Can't Handle the Truth: The Science of Why People Don't Believe Science" by Chris Mooney in the latest issue of Mother Jones, a decidedly liberal public affairs magazine.

If you got a chance, give it a read. But my reader response brain kept thinking about how much of the ideas and evidence presented in the article was related millennia ago by the ancient Greek and Roman rhetoricians, namely Isocrates, Aristotle, and Cicero, along with the modern Rhetorical Dude, Kenneth Burke. 

Here are some quotation nuggets from the article for enticement:

• "We're not driven only by emotions, of course--we also reason, deliberate. But reasoning comes later, works slower--and even then, it doesn't take place in an emotional vacuum. Rather, our quick-fire emotions can set us on a course of thinking that's highly biased, especially on topics we care a great deal about." 
• "In other words, when we think we're reasoning, we may instead be rationalizing."
• "In other words, people rejected the validity of a scientific source because its conclusion contradicted their deeply held views--and thus the relative risks inherent in each scenario."
• "And that undercuts the standard notion that the way to persuade people is via evidence and argument. In fact, head-on attempts to persuade can sometimes trigger a backfire effect, where people not only fail to change their minds when confronted with the facts--they may hold their wrong views more tenaciously than ever."
• "Given the power of our prior beliefs to skew how we respond to new information, one thing is becoming clear: If you want someone to accept new evidence, make sure to present it to them in a context that doesn't trigger a defensive, emotional reaction."

When I read the last statement in the article, which is near the end, my internal response was, "Well, no shit, Sherlock." But emotional and defensive reactions will happen. Some "contexts" are going to create them no matter how hard you try.  

But the reason I related the classical rhetoricians above is that their treatises lay out similar injunctions and ideas about how effectively working with pathos--appeals to emotions--is crucial to persuading an audience to your cause, your ideas, and your evidence.

What the old Greek and Roman guys also point out in their tomes is that pathos just isn't about emotions. On a more complex and realistic level, pathos represents an audience's values, assumptions, and beliefs. And as Aristotle relates, the consummate rhetorician--or "persuader" in Dubyian terms--creates trust and belief in what's he or she is saying. From the Greek, pistis can be translated as trust, belief, or reliability. And a persuader must create pistis to be successful.

But back to pathos relating to beliefs and assumptions. As the Mother Jones article intimates and as we have seen via examples in politics and elsewhere, you can give folks the exact same evidence, facts, studies, and data, but they'll come to very different conclusions as to what should or should not be done based on their core beliefs, assumptions, and values that pertain to how governments should work, what constitutes "life," how men should act, what "feminism" means, et al.

For me, the reality that some people--whether they are right-wingers, Marxists, pro-life Democrats, Birthers, etc.-- cannot and will not be persuaded by strong evidence calls up the concept of Burke's terministic screens and how people have interpreted what he has to say about them. 

I've always thought of Burke's terministic screens as a set of beliefs, values, and assumptions about the world--mediated by language--that act as almost a protective field around one's mind that lets in ideas and evidence that the "symbol-using animal" (Burke's definition of humans) will let persuade him or her. The "bad" ideas and evidence, well, they just bounce off our screens because we don't like what they're selling. We can't rationalize the way we want to. 

However, I don't think the points brought up in the article or the rhetoricians' ideas about pathos and terministic screens mean that we can't persuade people. 

We can. 

We can do so if we use language and actions that cohere with and connect to shared beliefs and assumptions about whatever we're talking about. Or, to put things more succinctly, good arguments begin in agreement. 

The Rhetorical Dude abides. He wants identification to precede persuasion. 

Grouchy Old Men

I have reasons why I'm usually reading three of four different books at the same time, but right now I'm reading the work of two grouchy old men along with my devotional slog through the whole obtuse but intellectually compelling A Grammar of Motives by Kenneth Burke.

Besides Professor Burke, the curmudgeons on my reading list are H.L. Mencken (The American Language) and Anthony Bourdain (Medium Raw).

I've read lots of Mencken. He did very interesting and insightful work on a range of topics (Treatise on the Gods mixes erudition and humor quite well), and I've heard about how excellent The American Language is supposed to be. The man doesn't disappoint. I've always enjoyed the Sage of Baltimore's style--how he uses simple and complex sentence structures and selects a wonderful variety of word choices, the high and low--and his Juvenalian study of American English at that time is a lot of fun. Besides focusing on our use of the English language, the book is also an examination of American character. In particular, one statement stands out for me when Mencken talks about how Americans love to adopt new or in vogue words, how they are not linguistically conservative like the British: "A new fallacy in politics spreads faster in the United States than anywhere else on earth, and so does a new fashion in hats, or a new revelation of God, or a new means of killing time, or a new shibboleth, or metaphor, or piece of slang" (30-1).

Spot on.

Bourdain of No Reservations fame, on the other hand, writes like he tends to talk, which goes against the usually useful mantra of folks who teach writing. But Bourdain talks/writes in very interesting ways (except for the overuse of profanity), and his book, and I hadn't realized it came out this year, courts my fascination with food, my growing exasperation with the Food Network, and other food/cooking concerns. His "Heroes and Villians" essay, for example, has the directness of a punch in the gut, and I look forward to reading the "Alan Richman Is a Douchebag" chapter.

But rather than this post being some sophomoric book report, what I'm pondering is why I'm drawn to such grouchy old men. Even Burke in his massive tome has occasional snarky comments about Aristotle, Emerson, Kierkegaard, et al.

Sure, I'm getting older myself (creeping up on the big Four-O); however, I think I've always sort of been a seventy-five year old dude in a younger body ("What the hell are all these people texting about? Don't they have better things to do?").

I should be thankful, I know. I have the loving Mrs. Nasty as my wife, and my kids are my main joys even though there are some times when I understand the old saying, "Madness is hereditary. You get it from your kids." I've been called a lot of names in my life, but my favorites are "Dad" and "Daddy."

I'll chalk up my grouchiness and penchant for reading grouchy old men to my defensive pessimism, which is a phrase I was introduced to recently from an article in Ode Magazine, and I can't link the article from Ode's website for whatever reason (See why I'm defensively pessimistic, especially about technology?).

So I'm thankful but wary.