Rhetoric Past and Future

Rhetoric is a word with a great deal of history behind it. Even before it was something that people began to study, it was used. We have called it argument, or persuasion, or even the fundamental language of learning. During some parts of history, it was considered the noblest of pursuits. Today, the phrase ‘mere rhetoric’ implies that the use of persuasive words has become something unclean.

The twentieth century saw exercises in rhetoric on a global scale. World War II was defined, not by weapons and the bomb, but by the rhetoric of Roosevelt, Churchill, Hitler and Stalin. They led their peoples not by being individual soldiers, but by speaking. It was through words that Germany rose up, it was through words that the British resisted for so long. It was through words that Roosevelt was able to turn a shaken and frightened country into the juggernaut that finally ended that war.

But there were others, in the twentieth, and we should not forget them. Ghandi, whose only weapons were words. Einstein, who tried so hard to stop the building of the device he created, and who had so much to say on the nature of peace afterwords. And there was Mao, with his little red book full of words, persuading a people to turn their backs on three thousand years of cultural history.

And others. People we now call marketers, and advertising consultants. People who have learned how to use words to polarize, and divide. People who have learned how to make simple debate impossible by requiring shades of only black and white. Politicians and car salesmen, copy writers and philosophers, the death of journalism, and the coming of the Internet.

Science fiction writers have long summoned visions of what the future might be like. Rocket cars and food pills, and a thousand other treats of the imagination. What they did not see was the coming of the word to every desktop, to every home, to every person walking down the street. We now have access to each other, and to each other’s rhetoric. We cover the world in persuasion towards this point of philosophy or that. We have the ability to communicate, not nation to nation, or statesman to ambassador, but person to person.

Rhetoric is about to come back into its own, or it will be lost forever in a sea of trolls and flamewars. The ability to persuade is once again the greatest skill we can pursue. In order to be heard, we must be exceptional. In order to change the world, we must shout, but clearly and convincingly. Words are the currency of today, and they are both cheap and expensive.


Michael Sasser