The Burden of Persuasion: Why Rhetoric Matters

Safety is the Cootie Wootie.

"The mechanism of intimidation is framing, not just the use of words or slogans, but rather the changing of what voters take as right as a matter of principle. Framing is much more than mere language or messaging. A frame is a conceptual structure used to think with. Frames come in hierarchies. At the top of the hierarchies are moral frames. All politics is moral. Politicians support policies because they are right, not wrong. The problem is that there is more than one conception of what is moral. Moreover, voters tend to vote their morality, since it is what defines their identity. Poor conservatives vote against their material interests, but for their moral identity."

...

"To a large extent, Democrats don't understand this. They think that language is neutral and that reason works by logic. If you just tell people the facts and reason logically, everyone should be convinced. But they aren't, because language works by framing and by brain mechanisms. Framing is just the normal way people think and talk. Conservatives tend to understand this. They avoid using liberal language. They frame issues very carefully to fit their goals. Democrats need to do the same - avoid using conservative frames and instead frame the issues with their own values.


...

"We Americans care about our fellow citizens, we act on that care and build trust, and we do our best not just for ourselves, our families, and our friends and neighbors, but for our country. Americans are called upon to share an equal responsibility to work together to secure a safe and prosperous future for their families and nation.

The conservative consolidation of power violates this most basic of democratic principles. It replaces social and personal responsibility with personal responsibility alone. It approves of the government over our lives by corporations for their own profit, and hence sees government by, of and for the people as immoral and to be eliminated.

The conservative move to defund government is a means not an end. What conservatives really want is to run the country and the world on conservative principles: to control reproduction (no abortion); to control what is taught (no public education); to control religion (conservative Christianity); to control race and language (mass deportation of Hispanic immigrants); to guarantee cheap labor (no unions); to continue white domination (no affirmative action); to continue straight domination (no gay marriage); to control markets (eliminate regulation, taxation, unions, worker rights, and tort cases); to control transportation (privatize freeways); to control elections (institute bars to voting)."

George Lakoff, 9/11: Intimidation by Framing.

The Burden of Persuasion

Thus begins a new and intermittent serial post: a compilation of rhetorical devices, tropes, tactics, and strategies. It is the skeleton of a non-fiction work I've been compiling for several years intended primarily for writers and arguers. At the end, the reader should be able to click the Label 'Rhetoric' or 'Burden of Persuasion' and produce the whole thing either for review or copying and pasting.

First up, one device which should be familiar to us all. Many, though, will be quite obscure.

Alliteration is a figure of speech which repeats the same sounds at the beginning of, or sometimes within, several words in close sequence. Alliteration calls attention to a phrase and fixes it in the reader's mind, and so is useful for emphasis as well as art. Sometimes several words not next to each other are alliterated in a sentence. Here the use is more artistic. Alliterations may also be employed to emphasize antitheses as well as similarities. Alliteration can be overused—and dreadfully so.

Examples

• Alliteration can produce a satisfying sensation in the listener.

• Veni, vidi, vici. Julius Caesar

• Let us go forth to lead the land we love. J. F. Kennedy, Inaugural

• The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,/The furrow followed free.  Coleridge

• The moan of doves in immemorial elms,/And murmuring of innumerable bees.  Tennyson

• Ah, what a delicious day!

• I shall delight to hear the ocean roar, or see the stars twinkle, in the company of men to whom Nature does not spread her volumes or utter her voice in vain. --Samuel Johnson

• In some cases he could establish a first rough draft, with versions following in well-spaced succession, changing in minute detail, polishing the plot, introducing some new repulsive situation, yet every time rewriting a version of the same, otherwise, inexisting story. --Vladimir Nabokov, Transparent Things

• O brood O Muse upon my mighty subject like a holy hen upon the nest of night.
 O ponder the fascism of the heart.
 Sing of disappointments more repeated than the batter of the sea, of lives embittered by resentments so ubiquitous the ocean’s salt seems thinly shaken, of let-downs local as the sofa where I copped my freshman’s feel, of failures as frequent as first love, first nights, last stands; do not warble of arms or adventurous deeds or shepherds playing on their private fifes, or of civil war or monarchies at swords; consider rather the slightly squinkered clerk, the soul which has become as shabby and soiled in its seat as worn-out underwear, a life lit like a lonely room and run like a laddered stocking. William Gass, The Tunnel

• Yes, I have perused that puny packet of purple prose, but I shall proffer no pronouncement upon it at present.

Talk About the Passion

The agent rejections I've gotten for my unpublished novel EULOGY (the submissions that made it past the junior-assistant slush pile readers and received non-form responses from agents who actually bothered to comment) all seem to have some form of this statement: "I'm just not passionate enough about it." What does that even mean?

I can think of three ways to speak about passion. We can speak about the Passion of the Christ, something Mel Gibson and the German villagers at Oberammergau have famously attempted to do, a notion that entails passive suffering and willing death. We can speak of passions as including such things as bodice-ripping sex and breast-heaving emotion and even fandom of various stripes, among others, a notion that encompasses strong, transitory feelings. Or we can speak of, say, one's life work or interests or enthusiasms—such as 'she has a passion for science' or 'accounting is his passion' or 'his passion for model railroading kept him active late into his dotage.'

My feeling is that these literary gatekeepers mean something closer to the second of these three senses. A recent post by BlckDgRd points to Michiko Kakutani's top 10 reads of 2011 which, in a way, confirms this intuition. Ms. Kakutani's blurbage for the books she has chosen contains the following tells: "Mr. Richards has magically translated the fierce emotion of his guitar playing to the page;" "Saul Bellow was a gifted and emotionally voluble letter writer...a seeker and searcher, vacillating between the emotional poles of exuberance and depression;" "This super-sad, super-funny novel...write movingly about love and heartbreak;" "The author’s most deeply felt novel yet;" "tough guy known for his tender love songs...who turned his own heartache over Ava Gardner into classic torch songs;" "Mr. Roubini’s pessimistic forecasts once earned him the sobriquet Dr. Doom;" "an illuminating book that is as provocative as it is impassioned." The writers, she senses, are passionate beings, and their writing bodies forth their emotions. Somehow.

I've written previously about Kakutani's disdain for modernism and her affection for Romanticism with respect to Tom McCarthy's C and shown her affinity in this regard with the average sort of reviewer on Amazon.com. These readers want to feel something when they read novels, and they want to know that the writers they read have the sort of passion that will allow them to feel sympathy. Writers can signal this by the type of prose (flowery, purple, figurative, poetic) they use and the extent to which they document the 'inner lives' of their characters.

Regular readers will understand my allergy to affective language—as a tool for political and/or emotional manipulation of crowds. If not, click the term "Enthymemes" in the Labels column on the right.

One of my ongoing series here, Fear of Metaphor, is an ongoing attempt to take a look at, inter alia, philosophical aspects of rhetoric as a form of emotive or affective language perhaps as a way of training myself to understand the tastes, nay the demands, of the readers on that broad continuum that includes Kakutani, the literary agents my manuscript keeps bumping into, and Amazon.com reviewers.

Feck! Mo' Better Feck!

Just a quick follow up to my "Feck! Feck! Feck!" post of yesterday.

If you want to see other related posts about similar topics, click here, and scroll down.

On Sunday, Roger Ailes, the founder and CEO of FoxNews appeared on ABC's This Week talking head gabfest, along with mainstay George Will, Arianna Huffington, and Paul Krugman. He was practically incoherent—except for his truculence. His statements were simply a memorized set of talking points which primarily plugged his network's slogans. Here's the transcript. The one bit of candor that slipped out was really quite revelatory: Barbara Walters asked Ailes if his latest commentator, Sarah Palin, was qualified to be President. Here's his response:

WALTERS: ...Do you think she has the qualifications to be president?

AILES: FOX News is fair and balanced. We had Geraldine Ferraro on for 10 years as the only woman the Democrats ever nominated. Now we have the only woman that the Republicans nominated. I'm not in politics, I'm in ratings. We're willing. [I think he actually said 'winning'.]

HUFFINGTON: Roger, you clearly are in ratings, but if you are in ratings, can you explain to me why FOX went away from the meeting the president was having in -- why did you go away, 20 minutes before the end?

AILES: Because we're the most trusted name in news.

There. "I'm in ratings." But when contradicted—Obama's Q & A with the Republicans was the most highly-rated political news of the day—he resorted to a slogan. "Trust us." The two—ratings and trustworthiness—are fundamentally incompatible. Ratings is about 'entertainment'; trustworthiness is something else altogether having to do with such things as truth, accuracy, and fact-based premises.

Another telling moment came in a give and take with Krugman in which Krugman accused Ailes's network of deliberately misleading its viewers in an effort to keep them uninformed about the health care reform issue. Ailes responded that the American people were not stupid, a non sequitur, then, after some cross-talk, accused the President of trying to take $500 billion away from old people—a thoroughly discredited canard.

I think this highlights some of what I was saying yesterday about enthymemes: the right tends to demagogue the issues, often using false or discredited assertions as the unspoken premise of their argument. Yet, to the extent the propaganda is "catapulted" and reinforced by misleading/slanted/biased reporting, these assertions become commonplaces. FoxNews watchers will get what Ailes is saying because they believe its unspoken premise to be true. As Aristotle taught, it is extremely difficult to dispute an engrained, unspoken premise.

The problem lies in the failure of the right-wing to engage not only the left-wing but the mainstream in dialogue. President G.W. Bush pre-screened audiences and questions every time he engaged in dialogue, even, it was suspected, press conferences; it was clear that the press was intimidated by Bush because he froze out any news organizations who challenged his assertions. So-called political debates have become primarily chances for the candidates to spout their talking points from their campaigns; they talk past each other, and the questioners never get a chance for follow-through. Congressional representatives stand up and speak to empty chambers; they don't respond to valid points from the other side; they merely posit their focus-group tested talking points. Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing radio talk show hosts pre-screen the few callers they take, refusing to take criticism unless they have specifically planned a response to a specific point. Similarly, Limbaugh and Palin and others refuse to appear on non-sympathetic news shows which might challenge them to articulate their views and unspoken premises. Cable news commentators tend to be bomb-throwers: they make outrageous claims (usually to self-selected, sympathetic audiences), guaranteed (on the Ailes model) to generate controversy, with little or no regard for the truth; and often they are in the direct employ of political organizations or their PR flacks, though this is never disclosed. Mainly, they attack anyone who would challenge their views—whether it is the 'mainstream' media ('liberal' media in their minds) or other commentators. A challenge to their point of view is personally threatening to them and they often resort to vile ad hominem attacks to defend their positions.

Radical views fester in the hot-houses of cloistered communities. Today, a new poll came out showing that sizable percentages of avowed Republicans either believe or don't know whether Obama should be impeached (for no apparent reason), that he was not born in America, that he is a socialist, that he wants the terrorists to win, that ACORN stole ten million votes in the last election, that Sarah Palin is more qualified than Obama to be president, that he is a racist who hates white people, that gays should not be allowed to serve in the military or teach in schools, that gay couples deserve no state or federal benefits, that sex education should not be taught in schools, that the Genesis version of creation in the Bible should be taught in public schools, that contraceptives should be outlawed, that the birth control pill is abortion, and that abortion is murder, and, lastly, that their state should secede from the Union.

This refusal to engage is the state of our public discourse at the present time. President Obama made what I take to be a serious attempt to get past this situation with his televised, un-prescreened Q & A with Republican members of Congress. Anyone who saw it would conclude that he has a firm grasp not only on all the issues, but on the pros and cons of both sides of the issues. Yet, FoxNews cut away once it became clear that he was able to actually answer and engage with the questioners, even challenging the unspoken premises behind many of their questions.

As the old saw has it, sunshine is the best disinfectant. Enlightenment comes from education, to which many on the right are just plain averse; they want their views to be reinforced, not challenged. The question is how to engage the hermetic recesses in which these sorts of radical views prevail in a way which is neither preachy and arrogant nor militant and threatening. Obama, in Jedi-master mode once again, may have shown us the way. Will he be able to follow through? Will we?

Feck! Feck! Feck!

My online dictionary defines 'feckless' as lacking in effectiveness or vitality. This pretty much describes the public image of Congressional Democrats.

From its inception, WoW has urged them to use effective rhetorical framing of the sort advocated by George Lakoff and Drew Westen (full disclosure: a personal acquaintance and professional colleague of Wisdoc). Many felt it was precisely the Obama campaign's and Howard Dean's Democratic Party's campaigns' uses of positive framing that produced their stunning electoral victories in November, 2008.

Now we read that Rahm Emanuel, President Obama's Chief of Staff, who has written an entire chapter of a book criticizing Lakoff, is urging Obama and the Dems to ignore framing issues and concentrate on making Harry Reid-type legislative deals a la Sens. Ben Nelson and Mary Landrieu. This, of course, is the same

Rahm Emmanuel, the man who tried to kill the 50 state strategy before it started, the man who insisted with the DLC that we should ignore the progressive base to try and win moderates, the man who is probably the reason Dean got fired from the DNC.

If the Democrats again choose to make their case like John Kerrys and Harry Reids, they are going to suffer a similar setback as Kerry did in a very winnable 2004 election.

And, guess what? The opposition hasn't stopped trying to frame their way back into power.

Nine months after he penned a memo laying out the arguments for health care legislation's destruction, Republican message guru Frank Luntz has put together a playbook to help derail financial regulatory reform.

Here were Luntz's ten frame points for defeating healthcare:

THE 10 RULES FOR STOPPING THE “WASHINGTON TAKEOVER” OF HEALTHCARE

(1) Humanize your approach.

(2) Acknowledge the “crisis” or suffer the consequences.

(3) “Time” is the government healthcare killer.

(4) The arguments against the Democrats’ healthcare plan must center around “politicians,” “bureaucrats,” and “Washington” … not the free market, tax incentives, or competition.

(5) The healthcare denial horror stories from Canada & Co. do resonate, but you have to humanize them.

(6) Healthcare quality = “getting the treatment you need, when you need it.”

7) “One-size-does-NOT-fit-all.”

(8) WASTE, FRAUD, and ABUSE are your best targets for how to bring down costs.

(9) Americans will expect the government to look out for those who truly can’t afford healthcare.

(10) It’s not enough to just say what you’re against. You have to tell them what you’re for.

Sound familiar?

Now here's Luntz's latest position paper on killing financial reform, along with comprehensive energy reform the next big Democratic legislative push. The idea is to frame the legislation as a big government program, excessive bureaucracy, a give away to special interests, potentially corrupt, full of earmarks and backroom dealing, anti-freedom, anti-populist, anti-small business owner, tax and spend, another big bank bailout, etc., etc. We've seen this approach time and time again by the right. Demagogue the debate. These are emotional issues with many voters. Defending the move with talking points about what it does and doesn't do, what it does and doesn't contain will not work. And that approach very well may have lost health care reform.

Democrats do not seem to have learned: there is a real marketing angle to getting significant legislation passed. Everyone must be on board. Essentially, it takes a movement. Lakoff argues this point here:

the movement must already have:

* A popular base;

* organizing tools;

* an overall narrative, with heroes, victims and villains;

* a generally accepted, morally-based conceptual framing;

* a readily recognizable, well-understood language;

* funding sources;

* and a national communication system set up for both leaders and ordinary citizens to use.

The base is there, waiting for something worth getting behind. The organizing tools are there. The rest is not there.

This is basic Communication 101. To be effective, there must be a moral component: reform is fundamentally right because [...] and its opponents are fundamentally wrong because [...]. And, connected to this, there must be an emotional component; the arguments must touch people where they live; bread-and-butter, kitchen-table, passion-arousing issues. Having logic and facts and good policy on your side is a plus, but it is not sufficient to win the day. You must be persuasive.

Classical, Greek rhetoricians understood this and had a word for it: enthymeme. In the parlance of our times, looking simply at the English cognates, we could translate this as using "memes" which enthuse our audience. Here is an excerpt from my draft, unpublished non-fiction treatise: The Burden of Persuasion.

"According to Aristotle, the basic unit of factual argument is the "enthymeme". Etymology: Gk: en- in, thymos mind. Thus, "to establish in the mind." An enthymeme is an informally-stated syllogism which omits either one of the premises or the conclusion from a standard syllogism. The omitted part must be clearly understood, felt, or believed by the audience. Whenever a premise is omitted in an enthymeme, it is must be either a truism or an acceptable and non-controversial generalization. By making the audience supply the missing premise or conclusion, i.e., work out the syllogism for themselves, you impress the conclusion upon them, yet in a way gentler than if you spelled it out in so many words. The audience must supply the missing term for itself.

Of course, this is the ultimate aim of argument: persuading the audience not only to agree with what you are saying (the point of rational, logical, syllogistic-type arguments), but to actually believe that what you are arguing is what they have been feeling and thinking all along. Not just saying what you feel you need to say (and saying it well)—which often comes across as lecturing or arrogance or talking-down-to-them—but persuading your audience by arguing from a common set of assumptions. When you argue from common ground, you identify with the audience, its passions and beliefs, and they instinctively feel you are one of them and will more easily be led to agree with you."

The Democrats seem not to have learned this lesson in basic communication. They come across as feckless. And so long as they rely solely on Kerry/Reid-esque wonkishness, they will continue to argue amongst themselves about minute and ultimately negligible policy differences, meanwhile losing the larger battle for the hearts and minds of the very electorate they want to rehire them later this year and, again, two years hence, an electorate that is beginning to demonstrate a fair amount of discontent. This article from the BBC, "Why do people often vote against their own interests?" makes this very point: the people do not like being lectured to by people who feel like they know more than them. My response is that 'what we have here is a failure to communicate'—a failure Obama seems to have tackled head on by meeting with the Republican congressional delegation at their annual retreat in Baltimore on Friday.

Here then is a big 'feck you' for the Congressional Democrats: listen to the electorate; identify morally and emotionally with their fears and concerns; don't get defensive, but share their outrage; you don't have to demagogue the issues, but don't lecture them or preach to them or try to tell them what you think is best for them; establish common ground; frame your policies and programs in the terms of what they already feel, believe, and think (in that order!)—because this is what you, too, truly feel, believe, and think; be real: go with what you feel and believe, not with figures and charts (that stuff is back-up support for when you're challenged by knowledgeable opponents; you must have it and you must know it and be able to deploy it appropriately, otherwise you're just demagoging); show how the opposition's policies and programs (to the extent they actually have them) are simply not consonant with what the majority of the electorate truly feel, believe, and think; and, most importantly, don't use Capitol Hill jargon and double-speak and policy-lingo—not only use arguments from common ground, but also use language that shows you share their concerns—that is, be relevant!

Don't Let the Door Hit You...

As Pres.* Bush makes his farewell star turn, he keeps repeating one message: At least his administration kept the country safe after 9/11. Indeed, after that terrible day, there have been no more attacks on the "homeland".

But, the President* is being far too modest in his accomplishments. This guy named Jon Swift, I think, gets it just about right:

"After Hurricane Katrina President Bush kept our cities safe. ...

After the October 2008 stock market correction there have been no Great Depressions. ...

After Iraq and Afghanistan took a turn for the worse, President Bush kept us from losing any wars. ...

After the District Attorney firing scandal, the outing of Valerie Plame and other scandals, President Bush restored integrity to government. ...

After divisive elections President Bush united our country. ...

After Abu Ghraib, President Bush reaffirmed America's adherence to the Geneva Conventions and against torture. ..."

I would note, too, that after the President's re-election in 2004, we no longer needed to keep up with those color chart threat alert levels to know how much danger we were in. And it is truly comforting to know we are leaving precisely none of our children behind.

BTW: Mr. Swift, if you're reading this, I enjoyed that travelogue of yours about the horses and giants and such.

"Sailing in atmosphere"

Today, we look at "Language", the antepenultimate chapter of James Wood's How Fiction Works. Words must be well-chosen, unexpected, stylish. Bellovian. Still, with style, the poet in the writer threatens to overwhelm the point-of-view in character. Language, then, must be fitting and pretty—though never prettified.

Wood makes a stab at defining the nebulous concept "voice" (footnote 53, p. 150): "It is partly by shifts in register that we gain a sense of a human voice speaking to us... Likewise, by dancing between registers a character sounds real to us... Movements in diction capture some of the waywardness and roominess of actual thinking..." By employing a mix of erudition and vulgate—a "mélange" he calls it of different levels of diction—"[b]y insisting on equalising [sic] all these different levels of diction, the style of the sentence works as style should, to incarnate the meaning, the meaning itself, of course, is all about the scandal of equalising different registers." (pp. 151-2) In this last, he is speaking specifically about a passage from Roth, but it has applicability across the board.

Wood's definition is insufficiently robust to account for the "voice" that animates and takes over so much of what passes for popular literary fiction, e.g., The Lovely Bones, Vernon God Little. It is more than mixing levels of diction; it has to do with attitude and sentiment and it reflects the form, plot, and even story of the narrative. In fact, from Wood's depiction it's not entirely clear what he feels about "voice" in this broader sense—if anything. Yet, this "unique voice" is what literary agents and editors are eager to lap up and foist on the public.

Next, he moves to a discussion of metaphor. "Metaphor is analogous to fiction, because it floats a rival reality. It is the entire imaginative process in one move. ...Every metaphor or simile is a little explosion of fiction within the larger fiction of the novel or story." (p. 153) This, of course, is all well and good, but it begs the questions: how does metaphor work? and what, precisely, does it mean "to work"?

"Metaphor which is 'successful' in a poetic sense but which is at the same time character-appropriate metaphor—the kind of metaphor which this particular character or community would produce—is one way of resolving the tension between author and character..." (p. 159) Okay. I guess we all saw that one coming. Not a real stretch. And not very informative either, though he provides a number of good examples in context.

I think we can agree that good fiction makes good use of figurative language. Figurative language (such as simile, metaphor, etc., etc.) falls under the rubric of "rhetoric". Rhetoric (the subject of another nonfiction book I've been working on) is traditionally opposed to logic, though both are means of persuasion; logic relying on the appeal to reason and argument, rhetoric to the senses, to emotion, and to the sentiments and mores of the community. Metaphors, in other words, provide narrative color and, as in any good work of art, shouldn't clash. Metaphors et al., to my mind, are useful in fiction to persuade us of the "reality" of the character.

Here again, Wood falls victim to his own schema. This is where his analysis stops. He says fiction 'works' when the metaphors (the figurative language, the rhetoric) seem organic to the character's own POV and not the author's. And he provides a number of sweet examples of metaphors and shows how they work. That's fine and a good and important lesson for fiction writers and prospective critical readers, as far as it goes. But it fails to see through the curtain of figurative language and recognize the essential illusion of fiction. It misses the forest for the trees and is why Wood can give no account for story, plot, and form and their place in understanding the function of fiction.