Political Writing: A Guide to the Essentials

A Guide to the Essentials

Adam Garfinkle, David Brooks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317462521
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

Writing well, and persuasively, is not only a discipline that can be learned, it is one deeply rooted in the classical arts of rhetoric and polemic. This book introduces the essential skills, rules, and steps for producing effective political prose appropriate to many contexts, from the editorial, the op-ed, and the polemical essay to others both weighty and seemingly slight.

1	FUNDAMENTALS OF RHETORIC AND POLEMIC

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Before delving into the practical how-to tips on effective political writing, a little background is necessary. There is nothing whatsoever about how to do anything in this first chapter, but there is a good deal about what it is you are actually doing when you write to persuade. Understanding the history and nature of the activity one is pursuing is ultimately critical to pursuing it effectively. It is as Terrence Deacon says: “Knowing how something originated often is the best clue to how it works.”¹

Take medical research as an example of the point. There is a lot to be said for enlightened tinkering in medical technology and for trial-and-error intuitive research into diagnostics and treatment. Much useful medical knowledge has been amassed that way over a long period in human history. But knowing something about chemistry and biology at their scientific foundations has served as a mighty accelerant to applied medical research in recent centuries, particularly so in recent decades, as we have learned to plumb the genetic code that constitutes the operating system, so to speak, of our species. The same goes for political writing. Knowing the essential nature of the activity—how it was conceived and has grown over time—proves ultimately to be a key to effective praxis. So in this first chapter, we will learn about how political persuasion has been understood and taught in different times and places, and we will peer briefly into the foundational psycholin-guistic nature of human persuasion in political life itself.

If you were to look up the word rhetoric in the dictionary, it would tell you more or less the following: Rhetoric is the art of using language to persuade or influence others. It would tell you, too, that the etymology of the word started in Greek and traveled through Latin to get to us. If you were to look up the word polemic, you would find, perhaps to your surprise, that its root is from the Greek word for war. A polemic, originally a theological term, is defined as language used to create controversy in contesting a thesis or point of view.² Polemics is making war, or rather pursuing conflict, with words instead of literal, physical weapons. So rhetoric and polemic are closely related concepts, but they are not exactly the same.

To study rhetoric and the character of successful polemic is a very old pursuit. Indeed, if you were among the tiny fraction of elite men in Europe who received a formal education between the collapse of the Roman Empire and the advent of what we very loosely refer to as modernity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, rhetoric would have been a major part of your curriculum, as would the grammar of Latin and Greek (the languages of the few historical classics available at that time), Christian theology, some mathematics, and maybe a smattering of law. By the High Middle Ages (that’s the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries), rhetoric was one of only seven standard liberal arts subjects for those privileged enough to go to school; it was coupled with logic and grammar in what was known as the foundational trivium of all education.³ The basic idea was that logic is 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—the adaptation of language to circumstance, in other words. Thus, rhetoric was understood by teachers and students alike to constitute a most practical pursuit as the terminus of prior understanding. (That’s why I asked my students to read Aristotle’s “Rhetoric and Poetics.”)

Now, why was this? Why was rhetoric so important in premodern times? There are two classes of answers to this question. One, well grasped by our forebears, is rather pedestrian, though still important to understand; the other is surprisingly philosophical in nature. Let us take these briefly in turn.

What were formally educated individuals (almost exclusively males) doing in those premodern days? What were they seeking through their learning in the first place? In the main, they were preparing for the sorts of careers befitting their social station, positions that would have been situated particularly in cities where politics tended to happen (as it still does today in most places) in the thickest and most consequential ways. (Landed aristocrats, whose fortunes and status lay in agriculture, were in general less apt to concern themselves with educating their young men in language arts, but this varied widely from place to place and from time to time.) And what were those urban careers? One might seek work in law or politics. One might become a military officer. One might become a physician. One might become a clergyman, or, with a basis in the approved faith of the time, a scholar and an educator.

All of these professions put a premium on knowing how to be persuasive, whether to argue in court, to fight the battles of theology and persuade one’s flock or one’s students, to command troops, or to get and bend the ear of the prince and the royal court. Indeed, the Greek idea of the agora, the public square, is the original direct democracy of the city-states, where the purest form of political rhetoric ever existed. Language was deemed important because it was clearly of enormous practical use to those who mastered it.

Note that for the most part, these examples refer to oral language, and this for the simple reason that before Johannes Gutenberg, and for several centuries after his invention of moveable type around 1450, most Europeans could neither read nor write. Therefore, the educated needed to speak to people, not write to them. The same was true generally outside the Western world. What was written was mostly “scholastic” in nature, which means that in Europe and its eventual colonial appendages it remained largely within the Church—the Catholic Church, for that was the only religious establishment within the broader culture until well into the sixteenth century.

What was written was not, however, simply theological in character. On the contrary, all elements of human knowledge fell into the ambit of the scholastic tradition; it is just that the master narrative was a religious one, and so all study and writing and rhetoric had to conform at least loosely to the premises of faith. The tradition of skilled polemic, in writing more than in speaking, arose within the scholastic tradition, and while it certainly encompassed theology, it engaged issues of formidable range and complexity. Not least among them was how the clergy should be organized and how the Church should and should not relate to temporal authority. And so the premodern polemical traditions of religion-dominated discourse adapted themselves readily to nicolaus Copernicus’s sun-centered universe. The Church “fathers’’ were deep into politics all along. Nowhere is the bridge from the old to the new clearer than in the way the English author Thomas Hobbes wrote Leviathan (1651), one of the three or four most influential books of all time on political philosophy.

The tradition of teaching students how to form arguments, how to articulate them in speech, and how to write them down is as old as it is controversial. You can see in Socrates’s opposition to writing itself—a testimony we have only because his student Plato wrote it down—a foundational controversy about the nature of human virtue as regards language.⁴ You can see controversy, too, in Aristotle’s view of the tension between emotion and reason in the design and delivery of rhetorical discourse. Aristotle was bothered by the flamboyant trickery of the courts. Like Benjamin Franklin in a different time and place, he loathed lawyers. He urged educators to stress logic as well as the dramatic arts when they taught young people how to think and act, how to speak and listen, and how to read and write. He refused to countenance an understanding or teaching of rhetoric that reduced it to a guide to unscrupulous manipulation.

Socrates never stood a chance in his arguments against writing, although his opinions were, and in the philosophical tense remain, quite powerful. The schism between emphasizing logic versus style never really went away in education. Especially during the Enlightenment, also known as the Age of Reason (ca. 1660–1789 C.E.), educators in rhetoric differed vociferously on whether to stress logic and content or emotion and style. The pre-Enlightenment inclination of the Middle Ages (ca. 500–1500 C.E.) toward stressing style over logic carried over almost unmolested into the Enlightenment itself, proving, if nothing else, how conservative and ponderous educational institutions can be. But eventually, as the Age of Reason gained traction in European culture, the pendulum began to swing back toward Aristotle’s predilection, thanks in part to the remarkable seventeenth-century political thinker John Locke. The underlying reason for this, most likely, is that as the rigid “estates” of the feudal era began to give way to the rumblings of early modern capitalism, education in rhetoric acquired another purpose: the general refinement of manners, taste, and social sensibility as the number and social diversity of educated people expanded. One learned to speak well in order to climb the social ladder, or to move sideways to benefit within one’s own social class. Rhetoric merged to a considerable extent with the generic category of manners, which has a fascinating and hardly trivial social history of its own.⁵

Eventually, an even more expansive form of Enlightenment ideals held that when individuals refined their minds, all of society benefitted. This idea still holds true today: It is the bedrock justification, ultimately, for a liberal arts education. That is good to know, because the gargantuan costs of such an education, at least in the United States, can no longer be predicated on the strict economic recompense graduates can expect to gain from it.

Note, too, that the study of language and rhetoric through the ages inevitably collided with larger intellectual and social realities. So, for example, when educated classes in early modern times (ca. 1600) began to separate learning in general from theological frameworks, Latin and Greek were pushed to the side to make way for the emergence of colloquial languages—English, French, Italian, Dutch, and so forth. It was only in the seventeenth century that most of these languages finally acquired systematic written forms; before that, again in the West at least, only classical languages were committed much to paper—Latin, Greek, and, very occasionally by European non-Jews, Hebrew.

Just a century or so later, the colloquial languages had become dominant. Why? The proliferation of printing presses certainly helped, but the phenomenon was also tied to the development of nationalism in the first modern nation-states. The raising up and formalization of colloquial language is a process we see in every European society and in every maturing European state in the seventeenth through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Some languages are relatively new in formalized written form: Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian, and Gaelic are some noteworthy examples.

As the English, Scots, Dutch, Danes, Swedes, French, and other Europeans developed a sense of themselves as separate nations, they nonetheless remained affected by pan-European ideas of the past. Some of the major influences, like the Holy Roman Empire, were religious in character, but others were broader than that. Starting from the Italian Renaissance and marching across Europe in the 1600s and 1700s, for example, a trend toward the neoclassical arose in Europe, embracing the forms of ancient Greece and Rome. Frederick the Great of Prussia built Sanssouci in Potsdam, with a spanking new Greco-Roman ruin he could see out his back door. (It’s still there, by the way.) In architecture, literature, and, yes, rhetoric, the Europeans of that day held up Athens and Rome as models for emulation. They read Aristotle, but also Cicero, Seneca, and Cato. And as they did, they reinforced the understanding of rhetoric as a subject of key importance, a veritable portal to professional success and social refinement.

This was so on the Continent, but also in England, and from England neoclassicism came to America. Look at the libraries of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to see whom the Founders read and tried to emulate. They studied the Greeks and Romans, too. But their language metaphors also came from a literary canon that included the Bible and related Christian religious works, especially Protestant ones. Mainly from these two sources, in ways they themselves could not have understood, John Locke and Charles de Montesquieu, Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Baruch Spinoza and Immanuel Kant, Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill created modern political thought out of the classical and the biblical. They took the forms from the classical age, and the moral content from the Bible and its Enlightenment-era expositors, and blended them together against the backdrop of the new scientific Age of Reason. When they did, rhetoric gradually lost its pride of place among educators. New subjects ranging from Newtonian physics and related mathematical concepts to engineering soon emerged and could be formally taught. There was more to know, and so there was less time to focus on how one spoke within the schemes of formal education.

The understanding and uses of rhetoric also changed for social reasons. The wealthier classes grew with the advent of modern capitalism. The rise of the middle class brought with it increased economic specialization, urbanization, and literacy. More people wished to—and did—educate their children, mainly their sons, at first. So educators had to broaden their offerings and adjust their techniques. The many books we have in the Western tradition about education as both philosophy and vocation—like Rousseau’s Émile, to take the best-known example—and the formal “science” of education itself, date from that time.

The arch conservatism of the universities, including their wish to teach rhetoric in the old ways, remained a strong current for a long time. Even into the 1820s in the United States some universities continued to hold their commencement and baccalaureate ceremonies in Latin. That is why undergraduate diplomas from Ivy League schools, as well as many others, are still written in Latin. But the old way of teaching rhetoric diverged ever more sharply from the sensibilities of the new classes. Students began to object, just as tenth graders in recent times have resented being forced to read Beowulf, Shakespeare’s sonnets, and other (to them) indecipherable and apparently pointless tracts.

If anything, European universities were vastly more conservative than American ones. In France before 1789, those who saw rhetoric as central to education and emphasized its dramatic, nonrational, or arational elements appealed to a class in decline: a rather foppish bunch of aristocratic patriarchs who wore womanly clothing, silly wigs, refused to pay taxes, purchased instead of earned state and ecclesiastical offices, and delighted in figuring out ways to steal land from its less-well-positioned owners. Seeing rhetoric this way was of a piece with the whole aura of the ancien régime, and when that regime fell, first in France and then all across Europe aided by the armies of Napoleon Bonaparte, so in due course did the old concepts of teaching rhetoric.

In the New World, especially its English-speaking parts, the retrea...