Rhetoric's Dilemma

Matching the rhetoric to the audience, that’s the rub. Watching it in action from our media and government’s attempt to persuade us we may catch a glimpse of our reflection in their mirror. How are we seen? A bit thick frankly. Logos is wasted on us other than the framing of the matter in a particular way which occludes the central question, it is left to one side. Pathos is the main instrument used. The continuous repetition of ‘hard cases’ in immigration, abortion or gay marriage induces in the spongiform brain of the populace a volatile conviction. Ethos in the form of an identity parade of respected figures from a variety of worlds tell us what they think. Mary Robinson, on the radio yesterday, with the particular brand of fatuous waffle that she is noted for managed to combine immigration and climate change without mentioning the people who are left behind. They are the ones who have no money to pay smugglers.

Richard Whately in his Elements of Rhetoric refers to the difficult question of whether the truth readily persuades when powerful rhetors champion it.

The former of these questions was eagerly debated among the ancients; on the latter, but little doubt seems to have existed. With us, on the contrary, the state of these questions seems nearly reversed. It seems generally admitted that skill in composition and in speaking, liable as it evidently is to abuse, is to be considered, on the whole, as advantageous to the public, because that liability to abuse is neither in this nor in any other case to be considered as conclusive against the utility of any kind of art, faculty, or profession; because the evil effects of misdirected power require that equal powers should be arrayed on the opposite side; and because truth,having an intrinsic superiority over falsehood, may be expected to prevail when the skill of the contending parties is equal, which will be the more likely to take place, the morewidely such skill is diffused.*

Whately’s footnote:
*Arist. Rhet., Ch. I.—He might have gone farther; for it will very often happen that, before a popular audience, a greater degree of skill is requisite for maintaining the cause of truth than of falsehood.There are cases in which the arguments which lie most on the surface, and are, to superficial reasoners, the most easily set forth in a plausible form, are those on the wrong side. It is often difficult to a writer, and still more to a speaker, to point out and exhibit in their full strength the delicate distinctions on which truth sometimes depends.

Matching pathos with pathos, and ethos with ethos is a losing strategy given a public that is stunned by repetition coming from a craven media all singing the same hymn, ‘onward progressive soldiers on the right side of history against the rebarbative dark of populist right wing elements’.


Dharma or traditional righteousness and the candid hearts that are receptive to it is what we need.