What’s in a word?

rhetoric (n) /rɛtərɪk/: the art of using language to persuade or influence others.

When we hear the word ‘rhetoric’ today, it carries a mildly negative connotation. Typically, we say it to mean ‘frilly speech’ or to suggest someone is speaking without conviction to act.

‘Don’t give me that rhetoric about XX.’

‘Very nice speech, but its just a bunch of rhetoric.’

etc..

This word’s current (lowly) status is not without justification, but its origins tell a different tale. The word’s etymology is Latin and rhetoric originally represented part of the trivium — the basis of all education — alongside its counterparts logic and grammar. The idea was, generally speaking, that logic was the art of thinking; grammar, the art of forming symbols and combining them to express thought; and rhetoric, the art of communicating thought from one mind to another.

Back then, few people (mostly men) received an education. Very very very few of those read or wrote. Thus, a learned ability to verbally communicate thoughts effectively was critical. Not just to get people to act or think or vote in certain ways, but to ensure that the recipients of your fleeting, spoken thoughts were given an adequate chance to internalize and potentially adapt them as their own, thus enabling more effective, virtuous growth in and through community.

With the advent of the printing press and the deep rooting of Enlightenment ideals across the western world, the volume of written and scientific knowledge exploded. There was, almost overnight, significantly more to learn and thus, significantly less time to focus on the manner in which one communicated (much less spoke verbally) about these topics.

Essentially, with enlightenment, we got better and better at doing things, making things, and thinking about things. As such, the stakes got higher and so did the stakes for being right — but our ability to express ourselves effectively did not advance in unison.

Though formal study began to subside, the importance of rhetoric did not.

See, there’s another part about rhetoric I haven’t yet discussed. Thoughtful design and delivery of spoken ideas have to deal with this inherent tension between emotion and reason wrestling within every human soul. Rationality is this constrained force which leads us to act directly in our own self-interest. Emotionality, on the other hand, is transcendent and beautiful, but also, easily manipulated.

Enlightenment enhanced and honed our capacity for rational thought and action. However, in doing so, it did not eliminate our emotional side.

In opposition to what economists will tell you, generally speaking, we are deeply emotional — not purely rational — creatures. We act and think and vote with our hearts at least as often as with our heads.

Thus, making decisions is not simply a matter of thinking through the series of likely consequences to a given course and choosing A over B. It is a complex mess of the soul which yells out “who are you to say what the optimal course of action is, this feels right” OR “I believe this to be true, evidence be damned.”

So, it is not just a matter of science and experimentation which dictates our beliefs and thus our actions. It is a wooing of our emotions, of our very souls.

Rhetoric — the delivering of ideas influentially — plays a key role in guiding and directing our souls to those beliefs we hold most dearly. In other words, people who are able to speak influentially into our lives have a greater ability to shape our preferences than do, say, a statistically valid experiment.

And this is great news for Christians living in close community like the early church. It means we are actually more likely to be influenced, formed by those around us, those who really know us and share something deeply in common than by the cold, amoral world which dictates the ‘rational course’ for a given individual.

On the other hand, it is rough news for people living in an abstract, dislocated, disconnected world; for those living outside the warm, authentic embrace of community. This isolated, fragmented city of strangers is the tragic place we now find ourselves. As such, we are vulnerable to whomever or whatever speaks most powerfully and most influentially to our lonely, individual lives.

And, when we don’t have an authentic community, rooted in Christ to base our confidence, there is one force which possesses the power to sway us more than all others: fear.

In today’s political arena and daily life, fear is the guiding force. It is the tool used to guide our behaviors — to tell us what to buy and how to vote and how to think about other people from other places. And fear holds this power because we have nothing else to ground us. It is in such cultural systems that our emotional side is most vulnerable to fear.

For this reason, because rhetoric is so pervasively used to make us afraid, we look down on it as a tool of deception.

And, in a sense, we are right. Fear is deception. Fear is the clinching refusal to acknowledge the truth: that we are not the masters of our own destiny; that the world and its goings on are entirely out of our hands. It is the nagging, insistent lie, that we should — we must — do something, anything, everything to stop this madness — to save ourselves.

Fear is a lie in the sense that it embodies a deep forgetfulness of the fact that all these questions and doubts are God’s, not ours. Moreover, fear drives that ultimate, rational human act — our incessant pursuit of power.

French sociologist and lay theologian Jacques Ellul says pursuit of power is “the very act of us trying to be like God…a doomed attempt to quell our fears and assert our own specific, limited, human goals.” The two concepts (fear and power) go hand in hand everywhere you see them.

For, as one of our most powerful and controversial figures recently asserted: “Real power is — I don’t even want to say the word — fear.”

But, that’s a quote and a story for another post.