I tried to understand RSA – Rhetoric Society of America – but never could relate to the publications or digital spaces. (I did not mourn Blogora.) Kairos is the online space I did understand, sometimes, but it always seems to trail the world beyond academia. The challenge might be a different bias; I enjoy the science of decision making, especially behavioral economics. Classical rhetoric… not so much. It feels “out of touch” in this moment. Trying to apply classical rhetoric to contemporary issues raises questions about how much we have learned (or have not learned) over thousands of years.
If rhetoric hasn’t evolved beyond those ancient Greeks, yet most other things have, this troubles me. Why have we not evolved?
We should be asking how to best integrate scientific knowledge on decisions with classical theory. Because, at least in politics, logic isn’t winning and probably never did. Other fields accept that logic isn’t persuasive, yet many rhetoricians cling to the idealistic hope that we can teach logic and that’s how decisions will be made. That’s not true, not even for most rhetoricians.
We need to engage in far more cross-disciplinary research, especially with fields that study choices and how people arrive at choices — and then people work backwards to justify their choices.
I found myself more interested in the models of economists than the theories of rhetoricians. Quantitative studies appeal to me, with their predictive abilities. If models work to predict the outcomes of debates and political campaigns, we need to understand those models, whether they support classical rhetoric or call the classics into question.
I have been told that I belonged in economics and decision science. Probably. Even linguists seem much closer to actual models of persuasion than rhetoric does.
Rhetoric feels too much like a faith, and one of those associated with a retreat located away from society. Gathering at their conferences, the rhetoricians mourn the state of society, proclaiming that if only everyone had more appreciation for rhetoric then we might have better leaders and a better society.
I ask myself a basic question: What disciplines do politicians turn to when seeking consultants? It’s rarely rhetoric. It is linguistics, behavioral economics, psychology, and so on. It’s Big Data and decision science.
Rhetoricians watch from afar, while other disciplines are actively engaged in shaping and framing debates. We need to change that, as a discipline. We must be engaged, actively, and with other experts.