Nearly every kind of organization—from art museums to local school boards—must face stakeholders who are too easily baited into the rhetoric of political outrage. This rhetorical bomb-throwing has taken some of the fun out of studying these cases.
As a young scholar I wrote a book with the subtitle, Case Studies in Constructive Confrontation. It included a series of vignettes in which a righteous advocate pitted him or herself against someone equally righteous in their enthusiasm to rebuff the attempt. It well may be that only my mother ended up reading Persuasive Encounters (Praeger, 1990), but it was a good exercise in testing the proposition that we are—at some levels—changeable. My cases in this 1990 study ranged from John Lennon to former New York Mayor Ed Koch, from Phil Donahue to psychiatrist Thomas Szasz. Even abolitionist Wendell Phillips shows up to take on the defenders of slavery. In every instance I focused on an advocate in a specific moment facing a mostly “hostile” audience: perhaps the ultimate trial-by-fire for any public person. With all of these cases and more, no one can say I didn’t cast my net widely.
In every instance I was doing what trained rhetoricians are prone to do: looking for how advocates uses the resources of language to clear a pathway to the common ground of audience beliefs, values and familiar idioms. The payoff was to see if any could achieve the rhetorical equivalent of a bases-loaded home run.
This professional fantasy easily comes to students of persuasion: can an advocate win over a skeptical audience? It sometimes happens in the movies and our dreams; why not in real life? As a faithful adherent to the idea that we respond to reason, I felt that there are instances when a very compelling advocate could turn the room around. After all, Mary Richards sometimes succeeded in softening up Lou Grant. And who can forget Henry Fonda silencing the suspicions of eleven other jurors in the classic Twelve Angry Men (1957)?
My book examples came with a standard set-up: describing the context of a person’s appearance to a group, including some samples of their appeals, then looking for evidence of how an audience reacted. Could we see persuasion magic in a meeting between Mayor Ed Koch and a vocal group of citizens in a public meeting of District 6, in a meeting room near the East River (1988)? Could he convince them that he was working on the prevention of crime, do better on garbage collection, and spare the neighborhood of development that would partly cut off access to the waterfront? He was fun to watch because he was the rare politician who was comfortable telling a room full of constituents that they were wrong. Once, when enemies followed him around town with bullhorns shouting their abuse, he easily rose to the challenge by shouting back with his own bullhorn—and in one case—delivering insults to the ears of protesters standing in front of Bloomingdales. Only in New York can you move from an elegant fragrance department in a department store to rhetorical slugfests just a few steps away. “I never feared speaking to any group,” Koch once noted. “I love the combat of the street in politics.”
If I once looked forward to finding encounters that would pit an advocate against a hostile audience, the fun has faded. It seems like too many of our leaders and their stakeholders have too often gone from being “outspoken” to blatantly toxic. Nearly every kind of organization—from world-class art museums to local school boards—must be prepared to face true believers who now routinely overuse the bloated rhetoric of outrage and vituperation. This crudeness has even crept into the pathetic public rhetoric or our former president. Before Donald Trump, presidential rhetoric used to be routinely understood as a tool of verbal unification rather than division. But if everyone is shouting insults, very few are interested in finding agreement.
We are perfectly content to be consistently wrong.
Additional encounters I looked included Phil Donahue in a Moscow studio trying to get Soviet youths to admit to the authoritarian nature of their government; Senator Ted Kennedy facing a mob of Bostonians who were furious at his support of school busing; and the legendary Edward R. Murrow (recreated below by actor David Strathairn) confronting television news directors about their “insulation from the real world.”
I have gotten a little smarter since the book. A theoretical problem with examining change as a result of public rhetoric is that rapid attitude shifts rarely happen. In The process of persuasion is better understood as incremental: usually occurring over an extended period of time and made easier if one’s initial stance has not been witnessed by many others. So, it follows that I did not find much evidence of immediate attitude shifts within the audiences to these exchanges. As current levels of contemporary political discourse remind us, we are amazingly content to be consistently wrong.
The one clear exception was the artificial one of Brian Clark’s play, Whose Life is It Anyway?(1981). On film, it’s a tour de force performance by actor Richard Dreyfuss, who plays the role of a paralyzed accident victim demanding that the plug be pulled on his life support. His doctors resist even when they are taken to court. In this case, he does eventually get his way by persuading a sympathetic judge. Theater can make clear what real life obscures. But the point stands: persuasion happens over time, and attitude shifts are not easily observed. As with Mr. Clark, perhaps only in our heads or in fictional narratives are we are allowed to imagine how dramatic confrontations might yield a stunning result.
We want to find more intentionality than diverse actors will allow. The culprit is the pronoun “they,” which over-simplifies our world and catches us in traps of our own making.
As humans we are hardwired to look for motivations behind human behavior. It’s our destiny to think in story-like structures, which usually include answers to the “whys” of any action. Give stage or film actors a line or a specific movement, and they are likely to ask a director for the motivation behind it. Like them, we are all actors.
We are usually right to assign responsibility for conduct to a fully functioning adult. It is not unreasonable to assume that individuals can make decisions from an array of available choices. Notwithstanding some neuroscientists who want to reduce human conduct to chemistry, most of us make the reasonable assumption that people really do have intentions. They act on their beliefs, habits and preferences. Notwithstanding myriad sources influence, they are still capable of choosing between on specific choices.
But this simple logic is where things drift to complications. This pattern of thinking can easily be overextended when assigned to individuals or groups. It is sometimes a considerable stretch to have the insight to know the causes of conduct.
Take the case of individuals first. A simple example: a friend who is a geriatric psychotherapist frequently complains that staffs in nursing facilities usually assume that a patient is “acting out” when they are unkind or manipulative. In our language these kinds of descriptions usually imply volition: the patient intended to behave in a certain way. The problem, of course, is that most of these folks have dementia, which robs them of the essential gift of agency. Their behavior is not necessarily what they would have done if the neural pathways once available to them were still intact. The result is sometimes to punish the patient rather than to acknowledge that their behavior is not easily overridden.
We can’t easily scale up the idea of purpose to large and diverse groups.
In cases of groups, assigning intentionality can easily drift into fantasy. A while back a guest newspaper column by Max Boot also caught my eye because of this problem. He criticized the Republican Party for carefully nurturing negative attitudes about scientific research and serious intellectual inquiry. In effect, he made the Party an agent engaged in a concerted effort to dumb-down complex problems such as climate change, immigration reform and a sometimes-sluggish American economy. On the other side, we have heard members of the GOP make the absurd claim that Democrats are trying to “groom” children to accept an alien social identity.
The problem is that individuals—even in groups—rarely have the same reasons or motivations for their actions. Boot is right that many in the GOP are suspicious of reasoned arguments based on solid science. My doubts extend only to attributing a clear purpose to the party itself. The problem with his assertion is that political groups in the United States are almost never well organized. “Members” see things from their own unique perspectives. And most have only paper-thin levels of loyalty. Maybe the military or any tightly run corporation may have “intentions” or “missions,” but parties: not so much.
The same mistake is often made about the President, who is supposedly able to control of a dizzying array of national challenges. But the real story is that we also assign too much agency to the Presidency. For example, most economists believe the chief executive cannot significantly change the course of the economy. We may want to think of the American business cycle as under the thumb of the White House. A more accurate view is that our multifaceted economy is an engine without a single engineer. Indeed, most presidents would welcome the chance to be as powerful as is widely believed. The norm for these leaders is to leave office frustrated at how little influence they were able to exert over the many far-flung agencies of the federal bureaucracy. F.D.R., for example, complained that he couldn’t even get fundamental changes in the Navy, even though he was its Commander and once served a stint as the Navy’s Assistant Secretary.
The prime rhetorical culprit here is the pronoun “they.” The English language invites us to singularize responsibility under the umbrella of this term. But a better reading of the world as it is usually means that we can’t scale up the idea of purpose to large and diverse groups. The pronoun over-simplifies our world, catching us in traps that sacrifice accuracy for a degree of unearned clarity.
How we assign motives to others is a fascinating subject. For a more systematic account from the writer about this process see The Rhetoric of Intention in Human Affairs (Lexington, 2013).
In every instance I was doing what trained rhetoricians are prone to do: looking for how advocates uses the resources of language to clear a pathway to the common ground of audience beliefs, values and familiar idioms. The payoff was to see if any could achieve the rhetorical equivalent of a bases-loaded home run.
In cases of groups, assigning intentionality can easily drift into fantasy. A while back a guest newspaper column by Max Boot also caught my eye because of this problem. He criticized the Republican Party for carefully nurturing negative attitudes about scientific research and serious intellectual inquiry. In effect, he made the Party an agent engaged in a concerted effort to dumb-down complex problems such as climate change, immigration reform and a sometimes-sluggish American economy. On the other side, we have heard members of the GOP make the absurd claim that Democrats are trying to “groom” children to accept an alien social identity.