The value of a rhetorician

I ended the last post with a key question (for me): "Why should I/we want to teach kids to be rhetoricians if rhetoricians often muck up conversation by asking pesky questions that can make discussion impossible?"

The best answer I've read so far comes from Deborah Tannen's book, The Argument Culture.  Tannen subtitles her book, "Stopping America's War of Words," a war that has come to dominate much of our public discourse and is best illustrated by the "debates" held daily in the halls of government.  Tannen points out how all too often public discourse takes the form of a pitched battle, one side trying to defeat the other, and, as a rhetorician herself, Tannen points to the way we frame such discussions as the root of the problem.

For example...

Once we frame the discussion of gun violence in America as a question of gun rights v. gun control, we all lose.  It's stalemate (as it is right now in Congress) because the very framing of the question necessitates a winner and a loser.  Remember what I said in my last post about the power of the question?  Well, if the question is, "Would we be safer if we had more guns or fewer guns?" we're stuck.  There is no final answer here, no truth to be had.  Stalemate.

[I will deal directly with the rhetorical situation that has produced the current debates on gun violence in an upcoming post.]

Compromise isn't really the answer--nor, I suspect, is it really possible.  "We need to have lots of guns but then again not too many"???  The rhetorician knows that once the question has been posed, once the frame has been established, there's no (new) way out.  The question most often determines the possible outcomes, just as the flow of the Gulf Stream determines possible weather outcomes.

And so (Tannen argues) we need to learn how to change the question.  We need to realize the limitations of how we've framed the discussion--through the language we've used--and then try again from another angle.

This is what a rhetorician does best: sees how our choice of questions--of words--limits what we can see and understand and consider and act upon.  A rhetorician can hold the key to moving beyond stultifying stalemates.

And is there any doubt that the arteries of our public conversations have become congested by these stalemates?  that traditional ways of thinking about public problems no longer move us forward?  As a country we seem unable to move forward in our discussions of (for example) gun violence, global warning, education reform, capital punishment, drug use, unemployment, health care, and the economy.

We need new thinking, and for this, we need rhetoricians to help us see how we might find ways out of these impasses.

[And if you think that this job is far too monumental for a gaggle of language nerds, recall that in Ancient Greece, all Greek children were instructed in the rhetoric and that the Rhetoricians--the Sophists--were afforded a special place in Greek society.  The advance of Empire depended upon these men.]

And THIS is why we need to train students in the rhetorical arts.