RAIL

Anna Elizabeth Dickinson (1842-1932), the first woman to address the US Congress was by all accounts "a gifted orator".

Many in the field of rhetoric, I’ll wager, are happy to see an article about their discipline at all in a major newspaper like the Guardian.  Being a philosopher myself I sympathize with the sort of small-town-ish “Hey! They’re talking about US!!” feeling engendered by articles like Mary Beard’s What makes a great speech?

The article itself, however, is rather a letdown in terms of what it communicates to the reader about rhetoric.

Let me begin in fairness by noting that Mary Beard is a well-known classicist in the UK.  Thus it is not surprising that her treatment of rhetoric here focuses primarily on sources and examples drawn from Greco-Roman antiquity.  Be this as it may, she speaks in a general voice here about rhetoric and so her discussion is disturbingly incomplete. Rather than showing rhetoric as the very active and modern discipline that it is, her focus on the ancients gives the impression that the study of rhetoric ended with Cicero. She makes no mention at all of any figures in the history of rhetoric between antiquity and the present day. Not even foundational figures of contemporary rhetoric like Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, get a mention, to say nothing of figures lesser known outside rhetoric but equally if not more important within it like Burke, Richards, Toulmin, or Henry Johnstone Jr..  Though to her credit she avoids rehashing the standard Platonist objections to rhetoric, Beard’s presentation is rendered somewhat shallow by her lack of modern sources.  This deficit carries throughout the article, critically weakening a number of her claims.  Consider what is more or less the starting point of her critical remarks:

there is something problematic about the very notion of “great oratory”. For a start, it is an almost entirely male category. I doubt that there have been many, if any, “great” female orators, at least as “great oratory” has traditionally been defined. […] “Great oratory” even now has not shaken off its male, “willy-waving” origins.

While there is no doubt that the traditional idea of “great oratory” partook of patriarchy (it seems almost a tautology that any Western concept confined to it is roots in antiquity would do so), Beard would have done better to show how the patriarchal orientation of the idea blinded us to the presence of highly skilled woman orators. Sadly, it seems that Beard herself did not do much research into the history of women orators at all.  Her examples in the essay are limited primarily to Margaret Thatcher and Virginia Woolf.  As a result her charge doesn’t pack the punch it could. Certainly there are plenty of examples with which to make the point. Anna Elizabeth Dickinson (pictured above) was one such orator during the abolitionist period in the US.   Sojourner Truth–for all her apparent simplicity of presentation–might fairly be argued to be one as well.  Indeed, simply typing the phrase “great woman orators” into an internet search engine yielded this worthy (and lengthy) list of examples.  Some of the names on the list are household names, like Eleanor Roosevelt.  To overlook them makes the charge of sexism weaker than it could be and so invites the reader to take it less seriously, thus compounding the problem mentioned in the last paragraph.  It’s one thing to decry sexism in principle.  It’s quite another to show its presence in fact.

And it is important to do just that.  Appeals to illicit patriarchy in evaluative concepts like “great oratory” have become so common as to be numbing. Numbness notwithstanding, it goes without saying that very serious forms of injustice against women do remain with us (according to some, they are even on the rise).  This being the case, although academic denouncements of sexism like Beard’s are of course welcome I’d much rather see sexism confronted “on the ground” where the lives of actual women are affected.  I certainly don’t want to see–though I often do–self-satisfaction about the former congealing into inaction concerning the latter.  I’m not saying that Beard herself is insensitive to this sort of problem–I’ve no reason to think that she is and the charge would be unfair to make. Still, it would have been salutary to see Beard’s charge of sexism given a practical grounding of some sort. Without it, Beard’s charge comes off like the sort of thing one just expects an intellectual to say in a left-leaning newspaper these days, in short, like the sort of thing that can be safely ignored. The argument needs to be made that problems like a patriarchal bias in what is considered great isn’t just a problem for women but a problem for anyone concerned with what greatness, in any domain, really is.  That case just isn’t made here.

There is another problem with they way she makes this charge and it is that, in connection with her omission of any mention of contemporary rhetoric and by speaking in a general mode, Beard risks the commission of a genetic fallacy that would damn the contemporary study of rhetoric by dint of its patriarchal lineage in the ancient world.  A perusal of the extant literature would show that contemporary rhetoric has advanced in a great many ways beyond its origins (more on this below).  It’s departure from patriarchal archetypes surely is one of them–indeed there is and has been for some time a significant strain of rhetoric influenced by feminist tenets. It would have been good of Beard to recognize this, but instead she moves on, rather predictably passing from the charge of gender bias to more general questioning of the central concept at issue:

Next comes the question of how we are to judge the star oratory of past generations. Would we ourselves be swayed by Demosthenes and Cicero, or by Fox and Burke, if we could actually hear them in full flow? Or would they leave us cold, if not bored and slightly baffled? Here we find conflicting signals. On the one hand, the fact that Obama’s speeches are built on principles of oratory established more than 2,000 years ago implies that the rhetorical tricks that worked then still work now. A good speech is a good speech, no matter when or where it is given. But take a look at any of those 19th-century newspaper verbatim reports of speeches where the audience reaction is recorded at key points (“applause”, “laughter”, “hearty laughter”). More than likely you will be completely puzzled. Why on earth did they applaud that?

Beard’s intent seems to be to foster skepticism about the idea of the “great speech” by suggesting that whatever criteria there might be are temporally and culturally bound. Certainly context matters in such evaluations, and it is critical to attend to such features when thinking about any speech act.  Nevertheless, Beard stacks the deck in her favor by omitting mention of the powerful analytical concepts and methods developed contemporary rhetoricians like Perelman, Black, Bitzer, and to a lesser extent Dewey, among others for understanding audiences and their relationships to speakers.  For this reason, here again Beard’s argument is weaker than it could be.  There is the additional point that her phrase “rhetorical tricks” might be thought unfairly demeaning by some in the field (and not without at least some justice).  But other problems here are potentially more serious than such minor infelicities. Beard goes on to say that:

Part of the problem is that for all the classic pieces of oratory before the early 20th century we have only a written version. Sometimes, thanks to the valiant stenographers of Hansard, there is a good chance that this reflects, more or less accurately, the words as spoken. But often it doesn’t. Virginia Woolf entirely rewrote her Cambridge speech before it was published.

We can take Beard’s point that we cannot reliably evaluate a speech performance on the strength of a written transcript of what the speaker said.  That said, there is a difference between the composition of a speech and the performance of a speech that we should be careful not to conflate.  This is not unlike the difference between a play or a piece of music’s being great and a particular performance of it being great.  The greatness of Death of a Salesman, for example, is in no way dependent upon the ability of the members of any given theater company to pull it off.  One might rightly cringe at the thought of being subjected to an elementary school band’s full-length rendition of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, but this should change nothing about our aesthetic evaluations of the symphony itself.  We can make evaluations along both axes, so long as we are careful to acknowledge what it is that we are evaluating.  Hence the case for skepticism about “oratorical greatness” is further weakened.

Come to think of it, why should we think of rhetoric and its evaluative concepts as bound to spoken oratory in the first place?

The contemporary study of rhetoric–at least as I see it–isn’t about speaking so much as it is about communication, regardless of medium.  Certainly speeches are still studied and no one would deny that the study of oratory was and is in many ways foundational. Nevertheless, contemporary rhetoric takes as its matter sources as diverse as advertisements, political tracts like “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, and even images accompanied by no words at all.  One need not even take sides within the discipline of rhetoric as to the nature and purpose of the various aspects of communication it studies to see that Beard’s musings here need enlargement by and clarification from the contemporary history of rhetoric.  Without such clarification, her remarks could contribute to the mistaken popular notion that rhetoric is something that belongs only to the past, or that it serves no purpose outside of the slick talk of politicians or high school debating societies.  In fact, it’s not even clear (at least to me) that her focus on the concept of “great oratory” would have any purchase at all with contemporary rhetoricians.  The ancients may have debated it, but as far as contemporary rhetoric is concerned the principle concepts of analysis seem to be quite different–one wants to say a good deal more sophisticated.

This isn’t to say that there are no points of contact between Beard’s article and the concerns of contemporary rhetoric though.

there is a moral question too. How far do we think that “great” oratory should also be, politically and morally, “good” oratory? How far can it be counted “great” if it fails to bring about a worthy end, or if it aims at a positively bad one? Ancient writers debated exactly this question. The comic playwright Aristophanes in the 5th century BC pointed the finger at those clever rhetoricians whose weasel, winning words made what was in fact bad seem good, and vice versa. […] For oratory to be really powerful, it has to be about something that matters, and it has to be the real words of the person making the speech. […] It is not true for almost every major political speech in the west over the last 40 years or so. These have neither promised any real political difference (“education, education, education” turned out to be as vacuous as it sounded, despite the emphatic tricolon), nor for the most part have they actually been written by those delivering them.

Here, I think, many students of rhetoric would agree. One thing that many people both inside the academy and outside of it assume about rhetoric is that it is only about “winning”; that the only thing that matters to a rhetorician is being the voice that carries the day.  I have to admit that for a long time I shared this bias.  It wasn’t until I started spending time around contemporary rhetoricians and working with and learning from them that I saw how completely misguided this opinion is.  For this reason Beard’s question about the connection between oratory greatness and the moral effects of one’s speech is one that I think would hit home with many students of rhetoric today. For example, Keith and Lundberg, in their highly concise Essential Guide to Rhetoric don’t just exhort but actually marshal arguments against the unethical use of rhetoric.  They urge the student of rhetoric to be aware of the power that persuasive speech conveys, and to avoid abusing that power through (among other things) deception, dogmatic insistence on one’s own point of view, irresponsible treatment of the audience. Keith and Lundberg conclude their section on ethical communication with the idea of accountability:

[S]peakers must recognize that they are accountable for the kinds of audiences or publics they produce. Simply manipulating an audience to get what you want in the short term may create bigger problems in the long term. Though rhetorical study may not always show the most ethical way to relate to an audience or public, it does create a significant responsibility: the audience that you evoke and the public opinion that you encourage today are the ones you will have to live with tomorrow.

Though they agree in a broad sense there is perhaps an important difference between the way Beard introduces moral criteria for evaluating speeches and the way that Keith and Lundberg introduce the ethical constraints on the usage of rhetoric.  Beard seems to be saying that we evaluate instances (communicative “products”) in moral terms, whereas Keith and Lundberg seem to think more in terms of practices, or perhaps in terms of how one might use one’s knowledge of rhetoric in an ethical way.  Great differences follow from such a distinction.  That said, it is hard to disagree with the notion that both our evaluative concepts and practices are inevitably bound up with our own time and place, and this brings us to Beard’s conclusion:

The Romans saw exactly this problem almost two millennia ago. The historian and political analyst, Tacitus, writing at the beginning of the 2nd century AD, reflected on why the quality of oratory in his day seemed to have waned. The answer was obvious: oratory only thrived in a free state where there were real issues to be decided and debated; one-man rule (or, in our case, centrist, corporate, pseudo-democracy) had made the power of persuasive speech redundant.

Beard seems to be extending the Roman critique to our age, but I disagree.  Contrary to what she says here, I would argue that far from making the power of persuasive speech redundant, it would seem that “one-man rule” or “centrist, corporate, pseudo-democracy” make persuasive speech more important than ever.  Certainly the examples of the recent uprisings in the Middle East would suggest that “a free state where there [are] real issues to be decided and debated” is not a precondition for rhetoric, but rather something that has to be partially constructed and maintained by it.  Of course another lesson we learn from these events is that, just as contemporary rhetoric would show us that persuasive communication make take forms other than the classical oration, it also shows us that the means of communication have to be taken into account.  Classical oration may indeed have waned, but the practices of persuasive communication have not.  Where “centrist, corporate” forces have monopolized means of mass communication like radio and television, more genuine forms of communication have gone underground to have a life of their own in tweets, texts, status updates, blog posts, and the like. It’s fair to say at this point than they are far more powerful than anyone thought.

That Beard’s arguments aren’t convincing doesn’t settle the question of whether there is anything to the idea of the great speech.  There might be, but if we learn anything from Beard’s article it is that we can’t depend on the ancients to tell us the whole story about what it might mean.  We’ll need the help of contemporary rhetoric too. It is a shame that we don’t learn more about it here.