If today’s students are to become good citizens of the world, they’ll need to be able to argue effectively.
By Jay Heinrichs ’77
Illustrations by Oreste Zevola
“You know why Americans are so fat? They drink too much water.”
It was late at night on the Italian Riviera, and I was eating with two local entrepreneurs, Gianni and Carlo, in the beautiful seaside town of Sestri Levanti. We had already debated politics, the state of education, even the fish population in the Mediterranean (we were in a fish restaurant, and the owner joined in). After a couple of hours and too much wine, Gianni took up the subject of water. “I went to America last month, everybody is with a bottle of water. And”—he leaned significantly across the table—“everybody is fat.”
This launched an argument that took us through another bottle or two of (non-fattening) wine. You could hardly call it high discourse, and I doubt that Gianni even believed what he said. But he was following the age-old European custom that turns argument into a bonding experience.
If it weren’t for the wine, I would have shrunk in embarrassment. People at other tables were looking at us, and they were laughing—with us, most likely, but still. Here in the States, only the rude and the insane disagree in public conversation.
Then again, our aversion to argument is part of our tradition, right? Not if you go back before the mid-nineteenth century. Europeans who visited the States early in our history commented on how argumentative we were. What happened?
What happened was that we lost the ability to argue. At the same time, we forgot the principles that every college student once learned, which foster deliberative argument and, dare I say it, good citizenship.
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Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the making of citizens, mainly because my daughter, Dorothy Jr., will graduate from college this spring, and my son, George, began his first year at Middlebury this past fall. While Dorothy is deciding whether to go to medical school or study the Middle Ages, George has the first-year student’s luxury of dreaming about a still-grander future. During dinner at Fire and Ice recently, I asked him what he thought he’d like to do someday. “I’d like to save the world,” he said. I think he meant it literally. I say all power to him, and I mean that literally as well. College should enhance whatever powers George and his mates have to save this sorry planet we’re bequeathing.
I’m happy to report that faculty at Middlebury and other schools are beginning to talk about the need for the liberal arts to develop these powers.
Professor Paul Nelson calls it developing “a civically responsible human.” Those words came as a surprise. Until recently, I never heard college professors referring to “good citizenship,” even ironically. The mission statements of most elite colleges do not exactly emphasize that outcome—or any outcome for that matter. Most recite a litany of comfortably vague terms, often having to do with the experience of academia rather than its product: “highest quality education” (Williams); “open the minds of students” (Harvard); “love of learning” (Dartmouth). These are all fine ideals but none of the mission statements among Middlebury’s competitors actually talks about preparing students for life beyond academe. Neither did Middlebury, until recently. But I was delighted to discover that the College recently adopted a new mission statement that lists qualities “essential for leadership.” Through their studies, the statement concludes, “students who come to Middlebury learn to engage the world.”
A similar sense of purpose can be found in the report issued by the federal Spelling Commission on higher education late last year. College, it said, should prepare students to become “lifelong learners, productive workers, and engaged citizens.” Students at elite schools might object to the part about productive workers; but if Middlebury helped my son grow into a lifelong learner and good citizen, I for one would be satisfied. And if George went on to save the world, so much the better.
But how does a college go about fostering good citizenship? One excellent approach was employed with great success for some 2,500 years: rhetoric, the art of persuasion. The notion of teaching rhetoric will doubtless raise some academic eyebrows. Sure,
college should instill critical thinking in its students, but why put persuasion at the center of a liberal education?
One answer would be to turn the question back on the questioners: Why did the ancients—who invented liberal studies—place rhetoric first among its disciplines?
But here’s an even better reason: We have become a nation of dupes. Earlier, more rhetorical generations revered the art of persuasion even while their education inoculated them from its seamier aspects. Compare their sophistication with that of our own culture. We’re astonishingly vulnerable to persuasion.
Our futile attempts at “campaign reform” have demonstrated our rhetorical ineptitude. We bemoan the growing power of money in politics—our elected officials have turned into fund raisers who moonlight at serving the public—but what, exactly, does that earnestly grubbed money buy? Ward heelers don’t still dispense dollar bills and free lunches, at least where I live. But campaign funds don’t have to buy elections directly, as long as they can buy advertising. We consumers—sorry, voters—do the rest. Before we can reform our elections, we have to reform ourselves, by dedicating a portion of liberal education to rhetoric—persuasion’s art, and its most powerful inoculant.
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I stumbled upon rhetoric some 15 years ago while wandering through Dartmouth College’s library. I was flipping through books at random, and in a dim corner of the stacks I came upon a large section devoted to classical rhetoric. A dusty, maroon-red volume attributed to John Quincy Adams sat at eye level. I flipped it open and felt like an indoor Coronado. Here lay treasure.
The volume, which bore Adams’ personal autograph, contained a set of rhetorical lectures that he taught to undergraduates at Harvard College from 1805 to 1809, when he was a United States Senator commuting between Massachusetts and Washington. In his first class, the paunchy, balding 38-year-old urged his goggling teenagers to “catch from the relics of ancient oratory those unresisted powers, which mould the mind of man to the will of the speaker, and yield the guidance of the nation to the dominion of the voice.” To me that sounded more like hypnosis than politics, which was sort of cool in a “Manchurian Candidate” way.
In the years since, while reading all I could of rhetoric, I came to realize that the powers Adams described are real, however antique his language may sound today. Rhetoric means more than grand oratory, more than “using words…to influence or persuade,” as Webster’s defines it. It teaches us to argue without anger. And it offers a chance to tap into a source of social power that I never knew existed. You could say that rhetoric talked me into itself.
The ancients considered rhetoric an essential skill of leadership. It taught them to speak and write persuasively, produce something to say on any occasion, and make people like them when they spoke. After the ancient Greeks invented it, rhetoric helped create the world’s first democracy. It trained Roman orators like Marcus Tullius Cicero and statesmen like Julius Caesar. In Elizabethan England, it gave us the grandest translation of the Bible, and it inspired William Shakespeare, our greatest dramatist. Every one of America’s founders studied rhetoric, and they called on that knowledge when the time came to write the Constitution.
Yet rhetoric faded in academia during the 1800s, after social scientists began dismissing the belief that an individual could change the course of history, insisting instead that history was governed by inexorable forces. Who wants to teach leadership when academia has lost its belief in leaders?
A few remarkable people continued to study the art—in the early 1800s, Middlebury students formed a debating club called the Philomathesian Society, meeting weekly to argue the political issues of the day—but by the time I began borrowing rhetoric books at Dartmouth, most hadn’t been checked out for a century and more. This Ivy League university had so thoroughly forgotten rhetoric, a discipline which once rivaled poetry in the academic pantheon, that nearly all the volumes lacked international book numbers.
The librarians sighed whenever I came to the desk with a fresh lot. Nevertheless, you can still hear faint echoes of the art in modern-day discourse. The who-what-when-where-why of journalism comes straight from Cicero, who said that an orator should cover all those bases during the “narration” of a speech. Many medical terms—metastasis, antistasis, epitasis, metalepsis—come from figures of speech. In fact, a host of rhetorically rich words have broken loose from their etymological moorings, changing their meanings in ways that would make them unrecognizable to the ancients—liberal (“free”), candid (“open-minded”), heretic (“self-made philosopher”) hypocrisy (the act of delivering an argument), pathetic (creative use of an audience’s emotions). Their negative connotations speak volumes about our distrust of argument.
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The art’s demise would shock our forebears; they believed it impossible to govern a republic without rhetorically trained leaders. Everyone who attended the American Constitutional Convention had at least some grounding in it. Jefferson credited Marcus Tullius Cicero and Aristotle with helping inspire the Declaration of Independence—along with the philosopher John Locke, who occupied a chair of rhetoric at Oxford.
Back then, it seemed as though everyone wanted to play the part of Cicero, Rome’s greatest orator and rhetorician. Alexander Hamilton liked to sign his anonymous essays with Cicero’s nickname, “Tully.” Voltaire called Pennsylvania leader John Dickinson a Cicero. John Marshall called Washington a Cicero. Many people thought Patrick Henry, who spoke fluent Latin, to be a first-rate Cicero. Caustic, witty John Adams liked to consider himself the reincarnation of witty, caustic Tully. Adams even recited the silver-tongued Roman’s speeches as a sort of daily aerobic workout. “I find it a noble Exercise,” he told his diary. “It exercises my Lungs, raises my Spirits, opens my Porrs, quickens the Circulation, and so contributes much to [my] health.”
All that classical nostalgia had a serious purpose. The American system was more than an experiment in political theory; it also attempted the most ambitious do-over in world history. The Revolution would let history repeat itself, with some major improvements. The most important upgrade was an antidote for factionalism. What had killed democracy in ancient Athens and destroyed the republic in Rome, they believed, was conflict between economic and social classes. Tribal divisions frightened the Americans even more than kings. The Founders hedged their political bets and established a system of checks and balances. The Senate would represent the aristocracy, being chosen by state legislatures at first; the “plebes,” as the Romans called common citizens, would elect the House of Representatives. Together, the two groups would choose the President. Each faction would keep the other out of mischief.
Which begs the question: what with all that checking and balancing, how could anything get done? Their answer lay in rhetoric. The new system would “refine and enlarge” public opinion, Hamilton said, “by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens”—rhetorically trained citizens. The Founders assumed that this natural aristocracy would comprise those with the best liberal education. “Liberal” meant free from dependence on others, and the liberal arts—especially rhetoric—were those that prepared students for their place at the top of the merit system. These gentlemen rhetoricians would compose an informal corps of politically neutral umpires who would serve, Hamilton said, as a collective “impartial arbiter” among the classes. Rhetoricians would probably constitute a minority, but, being neutral by definition, they were bound to hold the swing votes.
The nation had no lack of rhetorically educated candidates. To enter Harvard in the 1700s, prospects had to prove their mastery of Cicero. John Jay read three of Cicero’s orations as a requirement of admission to King’s College (now Columbia). Before he led New Jersey’s delegation in Philadelphia, John Witherspoon was a professor of rhetoric; James Madison was among his pupils.
Alas, the Founders’ classical education failed to prepare them for an enormous political irony: those same leaders who intended to prevent political parties—the enlightened, disinterested few—wound up founding them. Each party, Federalist and Republican, rose to prevent the rise of the other. Each claimed not to be a faction at all; each vowed to oppose faction. Hamilton thought he was defending the rhetorical republic against the democratically inclined Jeffersonians, who, he believed, would encourage factionalism and prevent the election of a liberally educated aristocracy. The Jeffersonians defended the agrarian culture that the ancients had considered essential to personal independence.
In fighting what they considered threats to disinterested government—democracy, commercialism—the two coalitions became permanently competing interests.
Hamilton originally thought of the American republic as an experiment that would prove whether people were capable of “establishing a good government from reflection and choice,” or whether they were doomed to depend on “accident and force.” By 1807, as the nation slipped further into factionalism, he had concluded that the experiment was a failure.
Political division brought a shocking collapse of civility. Newspapers of the early 1800s bristled with violent personal attacks and politically motivated allegations of sexual misconduct. Editorialists even went after saints like Benjamin Franklin and George Washington. Hamilton’s dreaded “accident and force” replaced deliberation. Political life became mired in a national division—not between social classes, as in Rome, but between sets of deeply held beliefs and values.
The modern politician would have felt right at home.
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Throughout this country’s history, “values” have fostered periodic breakdowns in political debate, with citizens taking sides around their ideals and forming irreconcilable tribes. When the abolition of slavery competed with states’ rights, the result was civil war. While the current division in values is not nearly so severe, tribes are forming nonetheless. In 2005, an Austin American-Statesman reporter found that the number of “landslide counties”—where more than 60 percent of residents regularly voted for one party in presidential elections—had doubled since 1976.
A majority of Americans now occupy these ideological bubbles. A tribal mindset has almost ruined what little faith we had in deliberative debate. We think so little of argument that we delegate disagreement to professionals, handing off our arguments to lawyers, radio hosts, public affairs departments, and party hacks. And in the wake of political factionalism, dogmatism, and extremism, a sociopathic incivility smolders all around us: in the aisles of our supermarkets, in the ways employers treat employees, on radio, on television, and, increasingly, on Capitol Hill.
But we make a mistake when we apply the label of “argument” to each nasty exchange. Invective betrays a lack of argument—a collapse of faith in persuasion and consensus. It is no coincidence that red and blue America split apart just when moral issues began to dominate campaigns—not because one side has morals and the other lacks them, but because such values cannot be the focus of deliberative argument. Political issues such as stem cell research, abortion, and gay marriage deal with the black-and-white of Truth, not argument’s gray. When politicians politicize morals and moralize politics, you have no argument. You have tribes. End of discussion.
And so it is time to revive the Founders’ original republican experiment and create a new corps of rhetorically educated citizens. The study of rhetoric would give students a solid grounding in the essential skills of persuasion—how to construct an argument using Cicero’s five canons (invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery); devices for finding instant wit under pressure; modern theories of persuasion; and one-to-one spontaneous forms of argument.
One way to inject a spirit of currency into rhetoric is to dust off some of the old student exercises. As a mere amateur of the art, I don’t presume to dictate how rhetoric should be taught. But I imagine that my son George would enjoy the ancient practice of ethopoeia, an educated form of mimicry. A centerpiece of rhetorical training up through Shakespeare’s time, the exercise had students act as historical and living characters, playing them in debates with other history-channeling students. A modern exercise might have a virtual Martin Luther King debate an Abraham Lincoln over the legitimacy of presidential war powers, or Shakespeare v. Tarantino on dramatic violence. The students would have to do thorough research and develop their personae, even studying available film or tape in order to imitate their characters more convincingly. The ancients thought that such mimicry helped instill good moral values, but ethopoiea serves a more valuable academic purpose. It forces the student to take his new-found knowledge public, throughout his rhetorical education. The right kind of scholar—one who loves knowledge for its own sake but loves it even more when he can find a practical use for it—would thrive under this sort of instruction.
When rhetoricians first attempted to teach the subject during the 1970s, opponents protested that the art lacked “rigor.” You rarely hear that charge anymore: some of the most brilliant works of the twentieth century came from rhetoricians like Chaim Perelman and Kenneth Burke, and the serious study of rhetoric has its place along the leading edge of the humanities. American universities awarded some 400 Ph.D.s in rhetoric last year, up from a few dozen in the 1980s. It’s even a component of the AP English exam, the closest a subject can come to canonization.
But my personal reason for promoting the art is an old-fashioned one. I want college to make George a worthy participant in society—knowledgeable, eloquent, fast on his feet, and able to hold his own, even with wine-soaked Italians. In other words, I want him to become an orator— “a good man,” as the ancient rhetorician Quintilian put it, “speaking well.” Surely any parent would find such an outcome worth the tuition: a good citizen, speaking well. Our country has never needed this more.
Jay Heinrichs ’77 is the author of Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln and Homer Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion.