The ethics of rhetoric

by Richard M. Weaver

We must take notice in this connection that the lavish use of detail is sometimes defended on the ground that it is illustration. The argument runs that illustration is a visual aid to education, and therefore an increased use of illustration contributes to that informing of the public which journals acknowledge as their duty. But a little reflection about the nature of illustration will show where this idea is treacherous. Illustration, as already indicated, implies that something is being illustrated, so that in the true illustration we will have a conjunction of mind and pictorial manifestation. But now, with brilliant technological means, the tendency is for manifestation to outrun the idea, so that the illustrations are vivid rather than meaningful or communicative. Thus, whereas today the illustration is looking for an idea to express, formerly the idea was the original; and it was looking, often rather fastidiously, for some palpable means of representation. The idea condescended, one might say, from an empyrean, to suffer illustrative embodiment.

To make this difference more real, let us study an example of the older method of illustration. The passage below examined is from an address by Rufus Choate on “The Position and Function of the American Bar as an Element of Conservatism in the State,” delivered before the Law School in Cambridge, July 3, 1845.

But with us the age of this mode and degree of reform is over; its work is done. The passage of the sea; the occupation and culture of a new world, the conquest of independence—these were our eras, these our agency of reform. In our jurisprudence of liberty, which guards our person from violence and our goods from plunder, and which forbids the whole power of the state itself to take the ewe lamb, or to trample on a blade of grass of the humblest citizen without adequate remuneration: which makes every dwelling large enough to shelter a human life its owner’s castle which winds and rain may enter, but which the government cannot,—in our written constitution, whereby the people, exercising an act of sublime self-restraint, have intended to put it out of their power forever to be passionate, tumultuous, unwise, unjust, whereby they have intended, by means of a system of representation, by means of the distribution of government into departments independent, coordinate for checks and balances; by a double chamber of legislation, by the establishment of a fundamental and permanent organic law; by the organization of a judiciary whose function, whose loftiest function it is to test the legislation of the day by the standard of all time,—constitutions, whereby all these means they have intended to secure a government of laws, not of men, of reason, not of will; of justice, not of fraud,—in that grand dogma of equality,—equality of right, of burthens, of duty, of privileges, and of chances, which is the very mystery of our social being—to the Jews a stumbling block; to the Greeks foolishness,—our strength, our glory,—in that liberty which we value not solely because it is a natural right of man; not solely because it is a principle of individual energy and a guaranty of national renown; not at all because it attracts a procession and lights a bonfire, but because, when blended with order, attended by law, tempered by virtue, graced by culture, it is a great practical good; because in her right hand are riches and honor and peace, because she has come down from her golden and purple cloud to walk in brightness by the weary ploughman’s side, and whisper in his ear as he casts his seed with tears, that the harvest which frost and mildew and cankerworm shall spare, the government shall spare also; in our distribution into separate and kindred states, not wholly independent, not quite identical, in “the wide arch of ranged empire” above—these are they in which the fruits of our age and our agency of reform are embodied; and these are they by which, if we are wise,—if we understand the things that belong to our peace—they may be perpetuated.[153]

We note in passing the now familiar panorama. One must view matters from a height to speak without pause of such things as “occupation and culture of a new world,” “conquest of independence,” and “fundamental and permanent organic law.” Then we note that when the orator feels that he must illustrate, the illustration is not through the impertinent concrete case, but through the poeticized figment. At the close of the passage, where the personification of liberty is encountered, we see in clearest form the conventionalized image which is the traditional illustration. Liberty, sitting up in her golden and purple cloud, descends “to walk in brightness by the weary ploughman’s side.” In this flatulent utterance there is something so typical of method (as well as indicative of the philosophy of the method) that one can scarcely avoid recalling that this is how the gods of classical mythology came down to hold discourse with mortals; it is how the god of the Christian religion came into the world for the redemption of mankind; it is how the logos is made incarnate. In other words, this kind of manifestation from above is, in our Western tradition, an archetypal process, which the orators of that tradition are likely to follow implicitly. The idea is supernal; it may be brought down for representation; but casual, fortuitous, individual representations are an affront to it. Consequently the representations are conventionalized images, and work with general efficacy.

This thought carries us back to our original point, which is that standards of pertinence and impertinence have very deep foundations, and that one may reveal one’s whole system of philosophy by the stand one takes on what is pertinent. We have observed that a powerful trend today is toward the unique detail and the illustration of photographic realism, and this tendency claims to be more knowledgeable about reality. In the older tradition which we set out to examine, the abstracted truth and the illustration which is essentially a construct held a like favor. It was not said, because there was no contrary style to make the saying necessary, but it was certainly felt that these came as near the truth as one gets, if one admits the existence of non-factual kinds of truth. The two sides do not speak to one another very well across the gulf, but it is certainly possible to find, and it would seem to be incumbent upon scholars to find, a conception broad enough to define the difference.

One further clue we have as to how the orator thought and how he saw himself. There will be observed in most speeches of this era a stylization of utterance. It is this stylization which largely produces their declamatory quality. At the same time, as we begin to infer causes, we discover the source of its propriety; the orator felt that he was speaking for corporate humanity. He had a sense of stewardship which would today appear one of the presumptions earlier referred to. The individual orator was not, except perhaps in certain postures, offering an individual testimonial. He was the mouthpiece for a collective brand of wisdom which was not to be delivered in individual accents. We may suppose that the people did not resent the stylizations of the orator any more than now they resent the stylizations of the Bible. “That is the way God talks.” The deity should be above mere novelties of expression, transparent devices of rhetoric, or importunate appeals for attention. It is enough for him to be earnest and truthful; we will rise to whatever patterns of expression it has pleased him to use. Stylization indicates an attitude which will not concede too much, or certainly will not concede weakly or complacently. As in point of historical sequence the language of political discourse succeeded that of the sermon, some of the latter’s dignity and self-confidence persisted in the way of formalization. Thus when the orator made gestures toward the occasion, they were likely to be ceremonious rather than personal or spontaneous, the oration itself being an occasion of “style.” The modern listener is very quick to detect a pattern of locution, but he is prone to ascribe it to situations of weakness rather than of strength.

Of course oratory of the broadly ruminative kind is acceptable only when we accredit someone with the ability to review our conduct, our destiny, and the causes of things in general. If we reach a condition in which no man is believed to have this power, we will accordingly be impatient with that kind of discourse. It should not be overlooked that although the masses in any society are comparatively ill-trained and ignorant, they are very quick to sense attitudes, through their native capacity as human beings. When attitudes change at the top of society, they are able to see that change long before they are able to describe it in any language of their own, and in fact they can see it without ever doing that. The masses thus follow intellectual styles, and more quickly than is often supposed, so that, in this particular case, when a general skepticism of predication sets in among the leaders of thought, the lower ranks are soon infected with the same thing (though one must make allowance here for certain barriers to cultural transmission constituted by geography and language). This principle will explain why there is no more appetite for the broadly reflective discourse among the general public of today than among the élite. The stewardship of man has been hurt rather than helped by the attacks upon natural right, and at present nobody knows who the custodians (in the old sense of “watchers”) are. Consequently it is not easy for a man to assume the ground requisite for such a discourse. Speeches today either are made for entertainment, or they are political speeches for political ends. And the chief characteristic of the speech for political ends is that it is made for immediate effect, with the smallest regard for what is politically true. Whereas formerly its burden was what the people believed or had experienced, the burden now tends to be what they wish to hear. The increased reliance upon slogans and catchwords, and the increased use of the argument from contraries (e.g., “the thing my opponent is doing will be welcomed by the Russians”) are prominent evidences of the trend.[154]

Lastly, the old style may be called, in comparison with what has succeeded, a polite style. Its very diffuseness conceals a respect for the powers and limitations of the audience. Bishop Whatley has observed that highly concentrated expression may be ill suited to persuasion because the majority of the people are not capable of assimilating concentrated thought. The principle can be shown through an analogy with nutrition. It is known that diet must contain a certain amount of roughage. This roughage is not food in the sense of nutriment; its function is to dilute or distend the real food in such a way that it can be most readily assimilated. A concentrate of food is, therefore, not enough, for there has to be a certain amount of inert matter to furnish bulk. Something of a very similar nature operates in discourse. When a piece of oratory intended for a public occasion impresses us as distended, which is to say, filled up with repetition, periphrasis, long grammatical forms, and other impediments to directness, we should recall that the diffuseness all this produces may have a purpose. The orator may have made a close calculation of the receptive powers of his audience and have ordered his style to meet that, while continuing to “sound good” at every point. This represents a form of consideration for the audience. There exists quite commonly today, at the opposite pole, a syncopated style. This style, with its suppression of beats and its consequent effect of hurrying over things, does not show that type of consideration. It does not give the listener the roughage of verbiage to chew on while meditating the progress of the thought. Here again “spaciousness” has a quite rational function in enforcing a measure, so that the mind and the sentiments too can keep up with the orator in his course.

Perhaps this is as far as we can go in explaining the one age to another. We are now in position to realize that the archaic formalism of the old orator was a structure imparted to his speech by a logic, an aesthetic, and an epistemology. As a logician he believed in the deduced term, or the term whose empirical support is not at the moment visible. As an aesthetician he believed in distance, and that not merely to soften outline but also to evoke the true picture, which could be obscured by an injudicious and prying nearness. As an epistemologist he believed, in addition to the foregoing, that true knowledge somehow had its source in the mind of minds, for which we are on occasion permitted to speak a part. All this gave him a peculiar sense of stature. He always talked like a big man. Our resentment comes from a feeling that with all his air of confidence he could not have known half as much as we know. But everything depends on what we mean by knowing; and the age or the man who has the true conception of that will have, as the terms of the case make apparent, the key to every other question.