Category Archives: Rhetorical Mastery

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The Cheapest Path to Redemption

Problem Practices, Rhetorical Mastery, , , , , , , ,

In the 21st Century we are less likely to round up a hapless critter for a ritual “casting out” of guilt. Instead, we usually pick a plausible member of our own species and find a way to say they are not “us.”

[Rhetoric is preferable to violence. But rhetoric can be used to produce its own form of aggression. Scapegoating is near the tipping point where verbal acts become threatening.  This feature of language is a burden every lover of words must carry. ]

Rhetorical victimage is a very common trope. Sometimes it only inflicts a minor wound on another, but it is more generally the language equipment of a demagogue ready to trade accuracy for advantage.  You know the drill: If I can blame others, I’ll probably relieve some of the guilt I have for not performing better. The rhetorical forms of this victimage are everywhere, playing to simpler instincts to rebuke rather than include. Rhetoric is unfortunately the perfect tool for transferring responsibility for an unwanted outcome to less favored individuals or groups within a culture.

  • “True, I flunked the course. But I had a lousy teacher.”
  • “We’d be a good organization if only we had different leadership.”
  • “The problem with our country is that it has too many illegal immigrants.”

The most egregious use of rhetorical victimage is in politics, where cultural outgroups are sometimes vilified to the advantage of an ingroup.  It can be a verbal form that ignites fires of hate.

trumpOur 45th President was especially shameless at shifting the blame for our national woes to everyone but his followers. A sandwich of invective laced with lies is his thing. This may be a natural human habit we all have from time to time, but rarely has a national leader so consistently sought favor by rhetorically degrading others for the obvious benefit of excluding them from the tribe. The targets are as familiar as the overblown language: “the radical left,” the current president,” “the liberal media,”  “recent immigrants,” and so on. Trump is one of a long line of American demagogues, from Huey Long to James Curley to Joseph McCarthy.  The surprise to me after 45 years of studying political rhetoric is that the nation has not outgrown its love of political flamethrowers.  Paraphrasing an insight from the Netflix’s series, The Diplomat (2023), perhaps it is not enough to be a decent person “in a time when decency has lost its hold on the public imagination.”

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                 Kenneth Burke

The master-critic Kenneth Burke was a great observer of our communication routines, and never more so than when he described this “scapegoat principle.”  For most of us working to understand why we say the things we do, this familiar rhetorical form offers the psychological benefits of transferring guilt to others.

Burke noted that groups or individuals face two options when a decision or action didn’t turn out as well as they wished.  If we screwed up, we could accept responsibility and note with regret that our efforts failed to work out. He called this the “mortification” option, as in “I thought I could fix the bad feeling between Bill and Fred, but I think I just made it worse.  I’m not very good at playing the role of mediator.”  But doing this, of course, carries no obvious rewards, and requires a certain degree of grace and humility.

So we usually opt for the second choice: we scapegoat the problem to others. It’s easier to blame Bill or Fred because doing so is an act of personal redemption.  In this form our words are all too familiar: “Things are not going very well in my life right now and it’s her fault.”  Like a fast-acting pill, the shifting of unwanted effects to others lifts us from the burdens of self-examination. In Burke’s language, we have “cast out” the problem. Perhaps this is why we have parents, pets, uncles, Republicans, socialists, and college professors. We can feel better when we believe that others are worse.

Many groups have used sacrifices to purge the group of its problems. The most traditional victim was a four-legged animal that would be sacrificed to cleanse away problems usually caused by other humans. In the 21st Century we are less likely to round up a hapless critter for this ritual “casting out” of guilt. Instead, we usually pick a plausible member of our own species and simply lay on verbal condemnation. Think of Puritan purges of “witches,” Hollywood purges of communists, or internet trolls and their venom. For weak minds, anonymous comments online represent a perpetual Lourdes of guilt transference.

It would be nice if we could chalk up this human habit as but a small foible in the species. But the consequences of blaming others can’t be so easily dismissed. It’s worth remembering that Hitler’s murderous purge of supposed “non-Aryans” from German society—first with words and later with death camps–was fresh in Burke’s mind when he fleshed out the scapegoating principle.

 

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What We are Saying is Less Transmissible Than We Think

Problem Practices, Rhetorical Mastery, , ,

In theory, communication looks straightforward. When we address others to pass on what we assume are clear ideas with unambiguous meanings we have confidence that the effects we intended will actually happen. Not so much.

[We speak. We write. We create works of art. All the while, we try to have confidence that the effects we intended will register with audiences. If it were only so. This reworked essay from 2015 argues that a presumption of alignment is reassuring, but also an illusion: an insight we sense this most when a friend or family member reminds us that we have not really understood them.]

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All communication is translation. Accurate communication as a form of simple transfer is not so easy. Shared meaning as a requisite of clear understanding is harder to achieve than we imagine. It turns out that we aren’t very good at transferring even simple information or individual preferences to others. Even when the language remains the same, there is always an interpretive function which requires that the words pass through the filter of our experiences. Linquists can especially get deep in the weeds of dissecting translation that does not really work. And teachers working the divide between western and non-western languages know that exact equivalents are difficult. For example, a Japanese dictionary apparently can have the same word or phrases for the English forms of “ask”, “depend”, and “rely.”

This doesn’t mean that we are always in a solipsistic fog.  Some statements are relatively obvious and can produce a quick consensus. “Turn right” is not a vague command, but it can be ambiguous if the sender and receiver are facing each other. Similarly, statements like “He failed algebra in high school” or “She dislikes liver and onions” are mostly concrete and stipulative: two features shared with most kinds of mathematical statements. In math, common agreement about basic terms leaves little room for confusion. Yet, even moving to the slightly more complex task of naming simple objects can be problematic;  my idea of a “camera” is one that uses film and yours is the digital device in your phone.

These simple challenges with individual words are heightened when we scale up to the meanings of cultural products like speeches, songs or movies. At this level, the hope for uniformity of meaning pretty much goes out the window. For example, ask someone what songs are on their music player, and you will get a list of favorites that are likely to be more personal than communal. What means so much to one enthusiast is often unlistenable to another. Young adults are especially tuned in to hit the scorn button when they hear the favorites of older family members. I can still see my parents brace themselves for the inevitable taunt when I passed nearby as they were listening to completely uncool music. Similarly, in the presence of my favorites, my children returned the favor with polite silence. Who could not love jazz played on steel drums?

There’s a simple lesson here.  Never assume too much. Don’t overestimate the potency of your own fluency. It is not a bad idea to periodically check with a receiver to see if what you intended is what they actually heard.