Jiakai Jeremy Chua
Empty tin cans make the loudest noise
An empty tin trundles down the city, its rattling noise invoking even the most perfunctory of curious onlookers. A few strange stares, whispers of “how peculiar” follow, as if the music of friction between metal and tarmacadam could promise opera. With glee, a child chases after the tin can as it continues rolling across pavements and sidewalks. Another, then another footstep of another ring out behind. Soon enough, a flock forms, enchanted by the spell of the whirling metal cylinder as it spins towards the river, bringing the crowd along with it. In this scenario, the perils of rhetoric stand before us.
Accordingly, Plato had misgivings about rhetoric, quite certain that it was an obstreperous instrument of manipulation. “In my opinion then, Gorgias, the whole of which rhetoric is a part is not an art at all, but the habit of a bold and ready wit, which knows how to manage mankind. This habit I sum up under one word: flattery.” In Plato’s worldview, rhetors were severely unqualified. They may raise their voices, and listeners may heed, but the point from which they come is hollow. Without proper knowledge of the subject at hand, rhetors were playing a rude game of bluff with their audience. Comparing it to cookery, Plato suggested that rhetoric “gives the appearance of health, but not the reality.” Speakers were no more a physician, than a quack. Yet in Athens, long observed as the cradle of Western civilization, “it was a truism of later antiquity that rhetoric and democracy were coeval” – as Hugh Lawson-Tancreed asserts. While there are certainly and often tensions even today in attempting to reconcile what Plato calls the “ghost or counterfeit of a part of politics” with a positive corollary, the modern democracy is nonetheless hinged on speech – an essential ingredient, without which the system is naught.
In Book I of Rhetoric, Aristotle outlines the four possible forms of government, namely democracy, oligarchy, aristocracy, and monarchy. Additionally, he is careful to note “the ends which the various forms of government pursue, since people choose in practice such actions as will lead to the realization of their ends.” If the terminus of democracy is freedom as Aristotle proposes, rhetoric must then serve as the means to such an aspiration. After all, Aristotle diverges from Plato in framing rhetoric. To him, rhetoric is only a neutral good: it is in the moral actor, who is and must be solely responsible for its utility. As such, the moral actor must demonstrate positive ethos, or goodwill of character, in compelling his audience to the political ends of freedom within a democratic construction. This is not unlike the central argument in the Phaedrus, where Plato concedes that rhetoric could potentially be useful when the lover has the welfare of the beloved at heart. As long as rhetoric did not collapse into sophistry which begs only pretension, rhetoric is formidable in not only engendering a general persuasion within its intended political function, but also producing some sort of trajectory in truth.
Nevertheless, the notion of truth is a slippery fish. How do we identify truth? Can we be sure that what we perceive as truth is not actually false? In the subjective conception of things and between people, truth is a complicated affair. John Stuart Mill provides some answers to the conundrum in On Liberty, his ideas on rhetoric largely predicated on leftover threads from Aristotle. For Mill, rhetoric is imperative for the progress of a democratic society, because it has a natural tendency to keep striving for truth, providing a constant stay against “dead doctrine”. Therefore, the freedom of speech serves in part as the regulation of veracity, and which should never be interposed. When citizens put forth their opinions arising from their “conscientious convictions”, they are impugning on what has been established as truth. Rhetoric elicits the better argument of two sides in disputation, which should have a lower probability of fraudulence. Moreover, the freedom of speech defies the infallibility of the government, allowing for a proliferation of liberty of the individual conscience necessary to sustain and meet its initial political function, which is general freedom in the government of the people by the people. Nevertheless, the problem with democracy is that it is not invulnerable to the “tyranny of the majority”. This occurs when opinion is subsumed by the greater preponderance, to which the only solutions as Mill proposes, are “more democracy” and the non-persecution of speech regardless of content and convention.
While the freedom of speech is itself a remedy the pitfalls of democracy, the extant of democracy’s weaknesses also implies that rhetoric has never quite left the realm of flattery and sophistry. However, in democracy, rhetoric is also the singular basis by which people are able to operate with one another with the largest extent of freedom, often not accorded to other categories of government. It is difficult to let rhetoric run rampant and unbridled, but it seems even more difficult to justify restraining rhetoric on fear of its drawbacks. Ergo, to defend ourselves from what Plato feared as false flattery, we must arm ourselves to think critically. Yet, as Alasdair MacIntyre suggests, “it is a familiar truth that one can only think by oneself if one does not think by oneself.” Even though the MacIntyre model of a universal educated public is a distant one, there must otherwise be an active, unrelenting, continuous culture to show for our own opinions, with rhetoric nonetheless. Only so, can we truly call on democracy for its namesake. The empty tin may still have a powerful hold over its followers, but it is not the only thing that can make a sound.
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Photo courtesy of ECO Street.
