Our concern here is not to debunk Leo’s critique of the bishops. Our concern is to emphasize the extent to which the tone of Leo’s essay derives not from an “objective” awareness of a world independent of his perceptions of it, so much as it derives from the belief system through which he perceives that world. While Leo would doubtless find such a contention scandalous, a relativist canard, Fish would not. The differences in tone between the two writers, we would argue, is not a function of one being less objective than the other, but of one being more aware than the other that total objectivity is a will-o-the-wisp. In lieu of absolute truth and objectivity, Fish embraces something on the order of intersubjectivity. We are, in his view, united by “particular lived values” and share “the record of aspiration and accomplishment that makes up our collective understanding of what we live for.” Fish’s pragmatic view of truth as fallible and particular is reflected in his tone, a tone that rivals Leo’s in its briskness but is less judgmental, more cautious about the naming of things. At the heart of his essay, in fact, lies his rejection of reductive labeling, his concern to complicate soundbite versions of postmodernism, of relativism, and of terrorism. While Fish says he finds the reporter’s question about “the end of postmodern relativism” that begins his essay “bizarre,” he goes on to offer a thoughtful response to it, attributing the reporter’s misunderstanding of the term not to some moral lapse, but to the fact that it is part of “a rarefied form of academic talk” to which the reporter is not normally privy.
In announcing our own preference for Fish’s style, we are of course mostly reaffirming our general sympathy with his world view. But that preference in turn, is not merely “subjective” in the way that someone like Leo would use that term. Our sympathies with Fish’s point of view and his manner of expression are professional as well as personal. The ideas that he expresses and the way he expresses them are in greater harmony with our disciplinary imperatives than are Leo’s ideas and the manner of expression that his ideas give rise to. Fish’s thoughts and tone are, in our view, more likely to result in better thinking about the issue at hand than are Leo’s thoughts and tone. Whether one argument fares better than the other in the marketplace of ideas is another matter altogether. Such judgments are harder to make and more audience-specific than the judgment about the effects of the arguments on understanding of the issues. In order to better understand this complex, often misunderstood relationship between arguments that win the day with audiences and arguments that lead audiences to reexamine issues we turn now to a continuum of argument practices and the metric used to arrange arguments along that continuum.
Argument and “the purification of war”
The subheading for this section is taken from the Latin epigraph to Burke’s A Grammar of Motives—“Ad bellum purificandum.” It is at once a most modest sentiment—one would, after all, sooner see war ended altogether—and a most ambitious one—as war grows exponentially more savage in the new century, we long for anything that might mitigate its gruesome effects. It’s also an epigraph that could serve to introduce Burke’s entire oeuvre, as it captures neatly the primary goal of rhetoric as he imagines it—the transformation of destructive urges into creative and cooperative acts, enmity into identification, war into argument. As we noted earlier, Burke is enough of a realist to hold that this transformation can never be complete—in every argument there will remain a residual element of aggression and advantage-seeking no matter how noble the cause in whose name the argument is made. But Burke is also enough of an idealist to believe that interests other than those of the arguer are always served by argument. The only case in which the needs and beliefs of an audience may be ignored is when the arguer is confident that their cooperation will be secured by force if their argument fails and they deign to argue for pretty much the same reasons that dictators hold elections. Joseph Heller neatly captures the spirit of “might makes right” disguised as argument, a hegemonic practice all too familiar to twenty-first century audiences, in an exchange from the novel Catch-22. The exchange features the novel’s protagonist, Yossarian, confronting his nemesis, Milo Minderbinder, after Milo has pretended to offer an Italian thief some dates for a bedsheet and then refused to hand over the dates after the thief has given him his bedsheet.
“Why didn’t you just hit him over the head and take the bedsheet away from him?” Yossarian asked.
Pressing his lips together with dignity, Milo shook his head. “that would have been most unjust,” he scolded firmly. “Force is wrong and two wrongs never make a right. It was much better my way. When I held the dates out to him and reached for the bedsheet, he probably thought I was offering a trade.”
“What were you doing?”
“Actually, I was offering to trade, but since he doesn’t understand English, I can always deny it.”
“Suppose he gets angry and wants the dates?”
“Why, We’ll just hit him over the head and take them away from him,” Milo answered without hesitation. (68)
This then is what argument looks like at the far left end of the continuum where force looms menacingly behind every persuasive gambit. What sorts of argument practices does one find at this end of the continuum? Propaganda and advertising come immediately to mind. Parental arguments that end with that time-honored phrase that simultaneously announces victory and admits defeat—“Because I said so!”—surely falls somewhere toward the left end of things. Then as one moves to the right toward more “purified” forms of combat, one encounters the practice of law, labor negotiation and education. Finally, at the furthest remove from might makes right, we have those purest of persuasive practices that seem not to be persuasive at all; the example Burke uses is that of writing a book. We will take a closer look at the characteristics of these different practices shortly, but before we do, we need to articulate the principle used to distinguish among these various forms of persuasion, a principle that Burke refers to variously as “standoffishness” or “self interference.”
To understand this principle it is helpful to keep in mind one of Burke’s favorite metaphors for responsible persuasion, the practice of courtship, which is itself a “purified” version of considerably less seemly practices. If courtship reigns at the far right end of the continuum, one would expect to find the persuasive equivalent to something like sexual harassment at the left end of the continuum. Sexual harassment is a predatory relationship based on asymmetry whereby one party uses their power over the other to coerce affection. In the middle, the arts of seduction come into play, as the seducer pretends to be whatever their prey wishes them to be and tells their prey whatever they wish to hear in order to achieve their own gratification. At the right end of the continuum, meanwhile, a couple engages in courtship, a respectful relationship based on mutuality whose ends inevitably include sex along with a great many other aspirations. To be sure, each of the people in a courtship relationship will do what they can to make themselves desirable to the other person, to persuade them of their viability as a partner. Certainly sexual attraction will play a role in the relationship. But each is willing for the time being to delay gratification in the name of increasing their sense of identification with the other person, overcoming the estrangements of class, gender, nationality, religion or whatever categories of difference we might use to sort out the human race. Whereas in the earlier cases relationships were little more than a means to the end of sexual gratification by one of the two parties (in Martin Buber’s formulation, a classic “I-it” relationship), the courtship relationship is an end in itself (“I-Thou”) for both partners. If one were to extend the courtship metaphor beyond the left end of the continuum, one would find oneself in the murky realm of rape and sexual assault, while off the right end of the continuum, one would find oneself in the luminous realm of celibacy, as when a nun declares herself a bride of Christ. All practices that fall along the continuum, meanwhile, are some combination of self-interest and physical desire, and a willingness to interfere with one’s natural urges in