...there are in cities men who hate the people (demos), and if ever the lot falls to them they will destroy the people (demos). But the people itself ought to keep watch and elect all those who are well-disposed towards itself, and ought to choose as its army-commanders those who are suitable for the job, and to choose others to serve as guardians of the law, and so on.

—anonymous Greek sophist, author of the Dissoi Logoi

In the wake of 9/11/2001, the Indiana legislature passed a bill requiring that public schools re-institute a time-honored practice that many of us remember from our youth: of standing every morning, saluting the flag, and pledging allegiance both to it "and to the Republic for which it stands." Starting with the 2005-06 school year, the day has begun with the principal's or his representative's directing of the pledge, and immediately following that a carefully non-denominational "moment of silence." This is a conservative community, where student-initiated Christian prayers are still the norm at commencement exercises every spring. No one, as far as I know, has voiced the slightest concern about this new State-sanctioned practice; nor has any student, so far as I am aware, hesitated (at least on the basis of any contrary principle of conscience) to stand with reverence while the generality of that body perform the ritual devotion.

Among faculty, in the first days of the Fall 2005 term, I only heard expressions of gladness and praise for the practice, praise tinged with a hope (however faint) that it might go some way to restoring traditional discipline—reminding the less grounded of this present generation of public-school students that some things are sacred. And far be it from me to disagree with the nobler intentions behind such legislative initiatives. Indeed, what harm can this one do? What could be more sensible and innocuous than for a people to continually remind itself, through its most cherished institutions of State, Church, and School, of their common and uniting allegiances? Certainly there is a good deal to be said for the practice. As President Lincoln put it: "United we stand, divided we fall."

Yet, "on the other hand..." (as good Tevye so often deliberates in Fiddler on the Roof). And the fact is, as anyone caught between two or more versions of Truth comes to know, there are many "other hands"—potentially, at least, as many as minds to conceive and fight for them. No one has appreciated this fact more than the ancient and oft-maligned Greek sophists, whose most democratic art of rhetoric has been reduced in our Western heritage to such unfortunate pejoratives as "sophistry" and "mere rhetoric," dismissed, by the demagoguery of much that passes in the United States today for public discourse, as self-indulgent and even treasonous speech.

Hence my unease with this latest flurry of public declarations of an ambiguously interpreted patriotism. To whose vision of flag and republic are we pledging ourselves? Likewise, when we cover ourselves with yellow ribbons and constant protestations of support for our troops, to whose definition of "support" are we publicly understood to commit ourselves? In a July 21, 2003 comment in neighboring Evansville’s Courier & Press, I supported our troops by worrying about the several young women from Perry Central High who were financing their future educations by becoming "traveling soldiers," as the Dixie Chicks might have put it, and by worrying about what message my young students were getting from the popular rush at the time to pillory those Southern songsters for daring (despite that pointedly troop-friendly song) to question our President's latest war. Yet to at least one outraged reader, my version of support was insipid and unpatriotic, a grave insult to the courage and moral fiber of those young soldiers of both sexes who were willing to sacrifice all, if necessary, for the freedoms I thoughtlessly enjoyed.

The point is not whether I or the Dixie Chicks are right about the inadvisability of the ongoing Iraq phase in the President’s potentially unending war against the enemies of freedom, but the irony of so many efforts to shout us down—to create a climate (in the name of a universal struggle against the enemies of democracy) in which one does not feel safe in exercising the democratic responsibility of a reasoned public discourse and dissent within our own borders. The same people who condemn the totalitarian instincts of a radical Left, which on our college campuses have not always been above shouting down the most reasonably-considered opposition to their own Utopian visions, now egregiously commit the same sin from the halls of their own power and influence. In any case, sexist or thoughtless sentimentalist that I may be, I knew enough when one of those girls came back from Iraq for a period of recuperation, after having been burned in an ambush that killed a number of her fellow soldiers (men and women), to just embrace and wish God's blessings on her, never mind what her own opinions about Bush's war might be. The fact that I denounce the war doesn't mean that I denounce her, or that I fail to admire the courage and faith that by all accounts have distinguished her service as a Marine.

Our quintessential American Henry David Thoreau, in his essay "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience," argues from the moral high ground of his Transcendentalist faith against another American President's war of aggression against Mexico, and he preferred jail to paying his tax in support of that campaign. All Polk’s rhetoric about self-determination aside, it doesn't follow that his war was just, that it wasn't motivated by chiefly un-humanitarian aims. We might still argue with some of Thoreau’s most basic and principled assertions, such as the one (grounded in a frontier ethic of unencumbered individualism) suggesting that the government that serves us best will govern us least—or not at all. The reality that we seem to have inherited, ushered in by those who claim to reduce government’s strangle-hold on our economic lives, is one in which the interests of extreme wealth are most truly unbridled while the unfortunate masses of lesser humanity are subjugated to the operations of a neoliberal global economy that has neither heart nor conscience. This new reality may be touted as an expression of Thoreau's and Emerson's own principle of self-reliance and individual initiative, but clearly the domestic profiteering post-Katrina is not the reality that either of those men contemplated.

But I digress. As Louis Menand points out in The Metaphysical Club (2001), the violence of civil war led us from Emersonian and abolitionist moral absolutes to the more contingent truths of the American Pragmatists—whose practical philosophy of what can be agreed upon (and thus made workable) in a given time and place was not so different from the democratic discourse of the early sophists. The pragmatic rhetorics of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey were almost totally eclipsed, Menand suggests, by the second half of the twentieth century, certainly by the time of the impassioned but often unreasoned rebellions of the '60s. Even Martin Luther King, Jr.'s finely reasoned and essentially pragmatic Civil Rights Movement was based in a conception of absolute and inalienable moral principles which, despite the clarity of Thomas Jefferson's liberationist rhetoric, are never self-evident but must ever be argued. Remember that Jefferson himself was an owner of slaves, as were the great democrats of ancient Athens. If such truths as the inalienable rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"—of both white and black men (and women)—are so clearly evident, how to explain that they have so seldom been recognized in the long course of world history? And how to explain that, at this juncture in our own nation's relatively short history, we are once more compelled to argue for the separation of powers—the checks and balances—of our supremely pragmatic Constitution, protections which our present Administration seems so intent on dismantling?

Let me be clear about one thing: I have no quarrel with the ideals of Martin Luther King's or any comparable movement of non-violent and reasoned resistence to oppression. I do not begrudge the Black Church its moral authority, summoned from an expansive interpretation of Biblical scripture and from the suffering of the African American community itself. I even sympathize with the armed rebellion of Marcos's Zapatista rebels in Mexico's southern state of Chiapas—that revolution which after the brief and largely bloodless skirmishes of its first day, whether by design or by blessed circumstance, quickly became a war of Internet-sped comuniqués and treatises, at once poetic and rational, which spoke so loudly to the national and international communities as to seriously hamper the government’s massive push for the Zapatistas' extermination. What I do argue, in this age of increasingly dangerous and conflicting moral absolutes, backed up by competing threats of apocalyptic destruction, is that the moral imperatives of humanity’s shared responsibility for the least of these our brothers and sisters—regardless of color, creed, or nationality—can and must be argued (first and foremost) pragmatically. As Menand suggests—in paraphrase (as I recall) of the sentiments of Jane Addams, who was so influential in the thought of John Dewey—there are no benefits to be gained in human society that are not mutual: we are never truly protecting our own interests while suppressing the rights and privileges of others. This includes the rights of Palestinian rabbles—and present or potential terrorists—to land and water and dignity. As Barry Lopez suggests recently in a perspicacious environmental essay for the journal Granta, we are foolish to swallow the simplistic argument of the pro-war crowd that our enemies are solely motivated by an innate racial or religious hatred of Western democracy.

None of which is to suggest that those who have argued a more hawkish point of view have never had a leg to stand on—or that such arguments should have been dismissed out of hand. Unquestionably we inhabit a very dangerous world; in the immediate wake of 9/11, it was hard to know how to respond: to not respond at all was certainly unimaginable. But in the oppressive political climate that has followed, the politics of fear that the present Administration cynically enflames at every election cycle, it becomes ever more difficult to enter into substantive discussion of what a strong and informed reaction might be. In the simplified rhetoric of Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld, our only choice is the false dichotomy of perpetual pre-emptive warfare or the cowardly cut-and-run. The result of such an impoverished view of the rhetorical possibilities is that the countless other modes of action are never fully vetted, infinite "other hands" that might have yielded a more enlightened and effective course. Instead, in almost the same breath as his long-delayed admission that Iraq had nothing at all to do with 9/11 (as if he had never claimed it did!), our Great and Unilateral Decider asks us to believe that the conflict in Iraq is essential in the struggle against Al-Qaeda. If it has become so, he disingenuously fails to mention, it is surely at least in part because of the great folly of our decision to invade in the first place. Meanwhile, it is a fait accompli, and the only honorable choice to stay the course: to suggest otherwise, in this view, is the height of disloyalty or even treason.

On the other hand, as suggested by a chapter heading in Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World (1995): “Real Patriots Ask Questions.” To that effect Sagan quotes U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson (1950): “It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.” Any one of us can be wrong: as the American Pragmatists teach us, ideas are social constructs; the best ones can only be arrived at by a free interchange of rational and informed discourse. Impassioned discourse is not out of place, so long as it makes room for reason and a free exchange of information. Let's agree to leave aside, for the sake of argument, the details of whatever absolute Truths we may think to be privy to: the undeniable human fact is that there is not presently the remotest possibility of universal agreement on such points; to deny, with Platonic assurance, that the only Truth worth considering is absolute, unarguable, eternal, is to assure our continued demise and ultimate destruction. We must engage, if we are to avoid that fate, in the sophistic (and pragmatic, moral, life-enhancing) practice of dissoi logoi, the informed and open discussion of opposing arguments—lest the better ones be passed over or completely frozen out of consideration.

In the sophists' day, they were much ridiculed by Socrates and Plato in particular, and to a lesser extent by Aristotle, for going about teaching the arts of public discourse (not to mention "wisdom and moral excellence") to the common rung of people—and for their showmanship (not to mention the audacity of taking money for their itinerant services). Even Isocrates, their student and the best-preserved expositor of their basic philosophy, criticized what he took for the flippancy of many practitioners' technique, preferring a more settled and rigorous gathering of evidence, but in any case both he and they did much to destabilize (as suggested by Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg, in The Rhetorical Tradition, 2nd Edition, 2001) "the unquestioned authority of arguments based on essential qualities"—essential not in the sense of necessary, but of perfectly stable and unerring in substance and nature: beyond dispute.

Socrates and his champion Plato, if you believe I. F. Stone's very persuasive account in The Trial of Socrates (1988), were the most arrogant of aristocrats and anti-democrats, indeed corrupters of youth against the free working out of the legitimate and operational people's State. If you question Stone's account, consider that of Cicero, whose own courageous rhetoric against the encroaching tyranny of the Caesars' Rome was sealed with his blood. Socrates, he writes, robbed the sophists of their proper designation as philosophers, separating "the science of wise thinking from that of elegant speaking, though in reality they are closely linked together." (Rhetoric, as Dr. Thomas M. Rivers of the University of Southern Indiana states in his classes, is at heart a philosophical method.) The fact that Socrates' discourses were "immortally enshrined in the compositions of Plato," Cicero adds, "Socrates himself not having left a single scrap of writing," led to "the undoubtedly absurd and unprofitable and reprehensible severance between the tongue and the brain, leading to our having one set of professors to teach us to think and another to teach us to speak."

"Yet it is important to understand," Dr. Rivers writes in his essay "Antidosis: An Apology for the Art of Rhetoric," that while Plato seems to have prevailed in the long-run of Western history, the sophists were the clear winners in their day. To them, rhetoric was not just a means of conveying a pre-determined metaphysical truth but "a mode of inquiry," a method by which "our communities come to agree on the beliefs and values that we would have within a culture." The crucial problem that American discourse faces today, at a time of increasingly uncompromising challenges from abroad, is that "[i]n a sense, a vast number of American citizens are Platonists, whether they have ever read Plato or not. For too many Americans, language is mostly about communicating truths that are a matter of demonstration, not about shared inquiry and the complexity of persuasion."

Perhaps, when all is said and done, it will be shown that I was wrong to doubt this Administration and its warmongering. In trying to convince you otherwise, I have in this essay even resorted to the occasional "rhetorical flourish," the heavy-handedness (for instance) of the word "warmongering," and the sarcastic "Great and Unilateral Decider." You who read this should certainly be wary of anyone whose argument relies only (or even primarily) on such tactics, though otherwise they are appropriate tools in the good rhetor’s arsenal, as the likes of Cicero and Isocrates (and even Plato!) can scarcely deny. Examine the rhetoric of the warmongerers, though, and ask yourself if their rhetoric ever completely rises above the level of name-calling, political smears, and artless dodges and deceptions. Eric Alterman, in the September 18, 2006 issue of The Nation, gives a pertinent example in the continued trashing (by the likes of Ann Coulter and Robert Novak) of deceased political-journalistic and "sophistic" firebrand I. F. Stone as a "paid Soviet agent"—an accusation so thoroughly discredited that their continued insistence on it suggests that they are either lying or shamefully (and inexcusably) ill-informed.

Alterman sums it up in this way: "It may be true, as Stone said, that 'all governments lie,' but democracy cannot function if journalists do too. This is why the success of liars like Novak and Coulter at the center of our political culture is a greater danger to America than a truck full of terrorists bent on doing us harm." And this is why I do not believe that I’m wrong in preferring the sometimes tedious, drawn-out, frustrating workings of rhetoric and diplomacy to the knee-jerk patriotism of an unbending military solution, ambiguously pledged allegiances, and the uncritical art of wrapping political dogma in the red-white-and-blue. In the face of lingering chaos in both Iraq and Afghanistan, of the increasing intractibility of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, of looming nuclear conflicts with Iran and North Korea, of increasing international frustration with our policies, our flair for unilateralism and the double standard, I think I might be excused for doubting that the choice of force and more force is ever going to yield the illusory carrot of security that this Administration so cynically holds out to the American demos.

[Brett Alan Sanders]

In any case, while such are my convictions, it is not inconceivable that I could be wrong. And though by now the burden of proof must surely lie with those who have so severely mismanaged post-9/11 foreign policy, it still behooves me to focus not only on the course that reason and intuition compel me to argue for, but also on the little doubts that prod and niggle – thus protecting me from what otherwise might become just one more pious certainty of its own.

[Brett Alan Sanders]

------Brett Alan Sanders

Author’s note: While the bulk of the conclusion of this essay was written in late July, within a week of my submission of the first part, the brief elaboration on Socrates, Plato, and Cicero has only come together these two and a half months later. Please pardon the unconscionable delay.

Too often our way of talking about the increasing fragmentation of publics is to throw up our hands: “You can’t talk with them because they have gone beyond the pale.” In other words,we decide to declare war. Though I hold no great hope that a revitalized rhetoric can ever eliminate “warfare” – lying, trickery, blackmail, and physical persuasions – I think the command upon us is inescapable: we must build new rhetorical communities, we must find a common faith in modes of argument, or every institution we care about will die.
– Wayne C. Booth


In concluding the first part of this argument on behalf of a revitalized civic  rhetoric, as promulgated by and practiced by such as the Greek Isocrates, I alluded hopefully to Barack Obama as a good rhetor and orator – his discourse, at least, would seem to reflect a real yearning for the not wholly impractical idealisms he speaks of.

Editor Katrina vanden Heuvel, writing in the July 21/28 issue of The Nation, suggests that, “as a constitutional lawyer with a long record of teaching and action on electoral reform and voting rights, he may well be the best prepared President since the founders to take on the electoral process” – which she defines as central to any “holistic democracy agenda” that the larger progressive community might urge on him and pursue during his still-hypothetical Presidency.

Such an agenda, joined and championed by a plethora of Wayne Booth’s “new rhetorical communities,” would “unify and amplify” such particular issues as healthcare, environment, economic injustice, and rampant militarism, which are generally viewed separately instead of as the single multifaceted organism that they form.

“What would a core agenda be?” she asks. “How about Just Democracy – a program to ensure that every vote gets counted, that money talks no louder than the many and that every challenger gets to make his or her case? Media reform is a piece of the puzzle, of course [...] So too is party reform: how can a party that calls itself ‘Democratic’ make unelected superdelegates defining players in its nominating process? There is no need to separate those necessary reforms, but my focus here is on the most important elements of a program to revitalize our electoral process.”

Properly understood, it strikes me that this agenda – which, if there is any doubt, I endorse – also constitutes a program to revitalize the sorry state of our political rhetoric, which cannot flourish in a climate of conscious and unconscious suppression of votes and of considered (or inconsiderate) dissenting opinions. 
___

In the cover essay in the August 2008 Harper’s Magazine, Thomas Frank examines what might well be considered the central dynamic of the Bush-Cheney anti-rhetoric, in this case by reference to the revolutionary student “conservatism” of the 1980s.

“What the rising conservative sensibility of those years treasured above all else,” Frank writes, “was ‘confrontation’ with the left. It called for a quasi-military victory over liberalism; it would have no truck with civility or fair play; and it made heroes out of outrage-courting lib-fighters like Reagan’s communications director Pat Buchanan, the organizer Howard Phillips, and the young Jack Abramoff.

“The first and most notable characteristic of this new militancy was an air of swaggering truculence. There are, of course, bullies from every walk of life and every political persuasion, but on the right bullying holds a special, exalted position. It is no accident that two of the moment’s greatest heroes – Tom DeLay and Oliver North – had the same nickname: ‘the Hammer.’”

The same must have been true as well in ancient Athens – where Plato’s dreamed-of republic and lopsided dialogues did violence to democratic rhetorics – and in Rome, where Cicero’s democratic oratory fell victim to the very real violence of the Caesars’ rising power.

Cicero’s take on the Athenian history just eluded to is particularly hard on Socrates, the presumed source of Plato’s undoubtedly embellished dialogues. Cicero begins, in the sixteenth chapter of the third book of his De Oratore, by contrasting the long tradition of leaders skilled as both men of action and as orators (Themistocles, Pericles, Theramenes), and of others engaged primarily in the teaching of such wisdom (Gorgias, Thrasymachus, Isocrates), with that of others “who being themselves copiously furnished with learning and with talent, but yet shrinking on deliberate principle from politics and affairs, scouted and scorned this practice and oratory. The chief of these,” he wrote, “was Socrates, the person who on the evidence of all men of learning and the verdict of the whole of Greece [...] easily came out top whatever side in a debate he took up” – but who, according to this revisionist treatment, stole from those others the designation of “philosophy” to which “the whole study and practice of the liberal sciences” had formerly been entitled.

“Socrates robbed them of this general designation,” Cicero continued, “and in his discussion separated the science of wise thinking from that of elegant speaking, though in reality they are closely linked together; and the genius and varied discourses of Socrates have been immortally enshrined in the compositions of Plato, Socrates himself not having left a single scrap of writing. This is the source from which has sprung the undoubtedly absurd and unprofitable and reprehensible severance between the tongue and the brain, leading to our having one set of professors to teach us to think and another to teach us to speak.”

Perhaps Cicero is too hard on Socrates, though he hardly denies the eloquence or even the genius of his philosophy. It is likely, after all, that no one really does or ever will know the true and historical Socrates. My brother Kirk R. Sanders, an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and the Classics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, recently told me that he is translating an ancient text by Xenophon, another of Socrates’s students. Xenophon’s Socrates, apparently, has little in common with Plato’s, and (as of yet?) there is no clear way to resolving that contradiction.

Plato, for his part, is likewise not to be dismissed in the areas of philosophical genius and eloquence, but his ideas and their consequences are not therefore to be accepted uncritically. But however beautiful his rhetoric, it remains a rhetoric stained by an essentially anti-democratic and authoritarian socio-political view. Platonic rhetoric, undiluted, exists only to persuade with its beauteous and betimes disingenuous argument of the One and Only Undisputed Truth, which in the world of public affairs can neither be agreed upon nor ascertained. So that as I read the Phaedrus, while a part of me is stirred by the beautifully Quixotic imagery of one “regarded as mad, who, when he sees the beauty on earth, remembering the true beauty, feels his wings growing and longs to stretch them for an upward flight, but cannot do so, and, like a bird, gazes upward and neglects the things below” – while this stirs something in me, as I have said, I, like the old gentleman Alonso Quixana – a.k.a., Don Quixote –, have had to search in other places for hope (which is perhaps “audacious” enough simply grounded in the real possibilities of an Obama Presidency).

For we live here on the humble Darwinian ground, to which the birch-climbing narrator of Robert Frost’s poem only too gladly returns.

____

A President Obama, it might bear repeating, does not in himself constitute such an agenda or promise or program as his candidacy might inspire. Even as he unveils his plans for international and domestic policy, he is not so much the Man with the Plan as the potential center of a movement that will shape and modify what is actually initiated or delivered – or deliverable – during the span of his Presidency. Ideas, as Menand’s American Pragmatists argue (The Metaphysical Club, 2001), are communal or social constructs; and the good rhetor-orator, insists Isocrates, is one of great persuasive gifts but also capable of being persuaded.

I have worried that Senator Obama’s foreign policy has been too slow to cast off the militaristic assumptions of his political opposition, and that his statements on neoliberal trade policies and economic injustice have seemed to waver somewhere between substantive change and appeasement. Through years of my own wrestling with these questions, I have come to believe with fierce passion that what we need is a sustained and drastic demilitarization coupled with significant increases in international aid and diplomacy. To speak, as Obama has, of increasing the military budget and upping the ante in Afghanistan, seems to neglect other facts on the ground, in particular that the overwhelming need for a renewed and expanded social contract at home can hardly be financed without a considerable subtraction of Pentagon monies.

But if Obama is not the Man with the Plan, neither am I. Nor is Katrina vanden Heuvel the Woman with the Plan, though she has proposed a very good one, and in the absence of a better one – and in the spirit of Wayne Booth’s “rhetorics of assent” – I recommend it as a solid working draft for the shared progressive agenda that I hope will take shape in the coming months.

Be all of that as it may, I take some comfort from Obama’s recent elaborations of his plans for Iraq and beyond. Given the mess that he inherits, and the generally conservative undercurrent of the national psyche where national defense and the military are concerned, Obama’s plan for Iraq and Afghanistan does not seem unreasonable – even as it remains inadequate.

-----Brett Alan Sanders