Why the Future Needs Rhetoric
Propriety vs. Efficiency
It is easy to think of rhetoric as an antiquated art. But there are resources in rhetoric that make it just the thing modern people need to recover, if they are to face the great challenges of today.
An Age of Efficiency
If there is one word that captures the spirit of the modern age, that word is efficiency. Humans have found ways to do more things in less time, to produce desired effects. That is what has made all the difference.
The benefits of the mindset of efficiency should not be cast lightly aside. Virtually everything around us, everything we cook with or travel on or work with, is the product of a massive increase in efficiency. Advances in medical science and engineering that have saved and improved human lives owe their existence to a human preoccupation with efficiency. It would be foolish to want to go back.
But nowadays many are becoming aware of the terrifying possibilities unleashed by efficiency. In the name of efficiency, humans have maximized their control over the world, but as German sociologist Hartmut Rosa points out in his brilliant little book, The Uncontrollability of the World, our quest to control the world, one another, and ourselves, seems destined to conclude in the monstrous return of uncontrollability. The fuels we use to control the temperature will make the temperature uncontrollable. The tools we use to monitor and measure our heartrates, in the hope of calming them, induce an irregular panic in our pulses. The bureaucracy we use to control and manage civic life ends up becoming a monster than devours us, especially the weakest of us. The technology that could give us infinite energy could also trigger infinite destruction.
Even as we recognize the dangers and volatilities that our efficiency mindset has brought us, we at the same time are standing at the threshold of a whole new level of mastery and control: near total efficiency. We can read genes and soon we will be able to revise them. A few delicate commands to a chatbot can create software that once took years to make. We can clone long dead species, revive the mammoths of old, and conjure new species. Nano tech may make any imaginable object available on demand. We can even make non-organic intelligences that will soon walk among us like dogs and cats, or gods and demons. The height of mastery coincides with the height of uncertainty. As agency peaks, so does the magnitude of the consequences of even the smallest misstep.
What has become disturbingly clear is that efficiency is not able to help us cope with the world that efficiency creates, this world where we have, through mastery, come to the brink of slavery. Modernity needs a mass conversion to a new mindset. Out of efficiency and into—what?
Rhetoric can tell us what, but first it is necessary to analyze efficiency to see where it goes wrong.
Efficiency Defined
Efficiency isolates certain effects, often measured as quantities, and bends all things to “maxing” those effects. We want to lose weight, or raise money, or increase test scores, or reduce rates of suicide, or boost levels of engagement. We want to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. So we plan and prototype and measure and repeat.
Efficiency has an overall aesthetic of focus, narrowness, or maybe the best word is fixation. One goal, one metric governs all activity, funnels all resources. The wider field of vision blurs around this focal point. The manifold, mutual system of reality is screened out, so that everything becomes background to the one thing on which we put the squeeze.
Think of modern buildings—not the few structures touched by some architect’s stylish love but the many cubes erected in suburbs and exurbs across the nation. These buildings are monuments to efficiency. They are built with the cheapest possible materials in the shortest possible time. As a result, the one metric that matters most, their profitability, rises. All the other standards of excellence fade. We have cheap, ugly, insecure buildings, all the same. It is better than having one castle surrounded by a thousand unique wooden lean-tos, but hardly ideal for human flourishing.
Rhetoric has not been immune to the modern obsession with efficiency. In fact, most people, mistakenly assuming a mechanical theory of persuasion, think that rhetoric just is the art of efficiently moving people with words. The isolated metric is “persuasion” or “communication” conceived as the delivery of “content” from one mind to another. This popular understanding has roots in some of the loftiest expressions of rhetorical thought. One thinks, for example, of George Campbell’s definition of eloquence as “discourse adapted to its end,” and his theory of persuasion as the clicking of several mental tumblers (attention, imagination, feeling, reason, will). Rhetorical books for general audiences generally follow suit. Almost every popular manual of communication on the shelves of Barnes and Noble will promise to make you into an “effective” speaker, that is, a speaker capable of producing desired effects which you isolate and maximize.
The problem with efficiency in rhetoric is the problem with efficiency in a million other fields of human endeavor: isolating a few metrics and maximizing them inevitably impoverishes and damages the whole system. It’s like mistaking protein intake for a healthy lifestyle. It’s like being king Midas, thrilled for moment at his ability to turn everything he touches into gold, then despairing at the discovery that mankind does not live on gold alone. If all you care about is persuasion, or weight-loss, or test scores, or thin notions of “intelligence,” or reduced rates of certain genetic “defects,” you will, as you pursue these isolated goals, ruin discourse, bodies, students, cultures, species, and planets. Reality can only tolerate so much efficiency before it comes undone or, per Rosa, bucks us off its back.
But down through the centuries, there has been a theme in rhetorical tradition that counteracts this efficiency mindset and suggests a more excellent way to think about our life in language—indeed, about life in general.
Propriety Defined
This theme most often goes by the name “propriety.” Other cognate terms include kairos, decorum, aptness, and fitness.
Where efficiency isolates certain measurable effects—votes, clicks, “engagements,” app usage, prevalence of one disease, and so on—propriety refuses to isolate any element from its broader situation. It sees how every thing interacts with and mutually constitutes every other thing. It asks not whether such-and-such a course of action will be effective in some narrow sense, but whether it will be fitting in the broadest sense imaginable.
Rhetorical history rings with hymns to propriety.
Here is a classic statement of the ideal, drawn from George Puttenham’s The Art of English Poesy. It is hard to read but worth the effort. Puttenham speaks of “comeliness,” or beauty, in rhetoric.
Now because this comeliness resteth in the good conformity of many things and their sundry circumstances with respect one to another, so as there be found a just correspondence between them by this or that relation, the Greeks call it analogy or a convenient proportion. This lovely conformity, or proportion, or conveniency between the sense and the sensible hath nature herself first most carefully observed in all her own works, then also by kind grafted it in the appetites of every creature working by intelligence to covet and desire, and in their actions to imitate and perform, and of man chiefly before any other creature as well in his speeches as in every other part of his behavior. And this in generality and by an usual term is that which the Latins call decorum. - III.23.
This complex passage defies efficient reading, and thus leads the reader to cultivate a feeling for decorum, or propriety, even as it defines the concept. Let’s take it slow. My argument is that the mindset of propriety is better suited to facing the challenges created by the efficiency mindset. Note:
First, propriety rests in the “good conformity of many things and their sundry circumstances.” That is, all the elements of a situation, poem or biome, building or book, seek a “just correspondence” and “convenient proportion” among one another. The emphasis on relations precludes the isolation of effects that is characteristic of efficiency. Propriety sees how everything works together, everything is in conversation with everything else. Gene within genome, gecko within ecosystem, day within year within century, line within poem, line within painting. Only a configuration of elements that maintains this “just correspondence,” where everything gets its due, and this “convenient proportion,” where the whole and the parts are held in good harmony, is properly called proper.
Second, Puttenham says that there is something in the “appetites of every creature working by intelligence” that longs for propriety, to see the whole system glowing happy with symphonic joy. Humans most of all are enamored with this “conveniency between the sense and the sensible.” Their love of it, desire for it, is what inspires them to make art, make machines, and so on. Human happiness rests in propriety, not efficiency. Efficiency creates an imbalance in the system humans inhabit. Propriety restores this dynamic balance.
We should note that Puttenham’s ideas about propriety do not encourage a hands-off approach to things, as though Nature would right itself if only we let it be. Certainly there are kinds of human involvement that are worse than human absence, but the real takeaway is not to separate humans from the rest of the world. Human intelligence and activity are part of the assemblage of elements that make things what they are. There is no nature but the one we help constitute. Absence, short of human extinction, is in a very real sense impossible. And anyway it would not be preferable. A world without humans would not be a better world. It would be like a rainbow without a violet bar, or a scale without a high note. The point of propriety is not quietist disengagement, letting things go, but engagement imbued with an awareness of the complexity and immensity of the whole.
The third thing to note about propriety, though it isn’t stated in Puttenham’s quote, is that rhetoric is the art that teaches propriety. If grammar isolates correctness of sentences, and logic isolates the soundness and validity of arguments, rhetoric considers correctness, soundness, and validity altogether, and how these things relate to the social scene of the sentences and arguments in question, and how they relate to time, space, subject matter, and any number of other factors. Rhetoric requires practitioners to cultivate a consciousness with the widest possible radius, to fashion speeches that fit in the four-dimensional (five-dimensional? Six?) puzzle of shared life.
A prime evidence of this is that many of the most beloved texts in rhetorical tradition—Cicero’s Philippics, say—failed to produce an effect in the moment. They were, in a common sense reading of the term, unpersuasive and inefficient. But these texts were saved and studied because they seemed to satisfy a standard that transcended the narrow circumstances that called them into being. Such texts speak not to the issue of the day but to the basic and enduring questions of human existence. And every student of rhetoric is encouraged to wish that he or she could write a thing so unsuccessful.
A New Age of Propriety
What would a world ruled by propriety look like? One thing is clear, at least. Value would be much more plural. Efficiency, remember, is about thinning out the kinds of things we value, so what remains can be maximized. So beauty and ethics wither as return-on-investment flourishes. Propriety would restore order to the values that inform our actions. A building’s beauty, the ethics of where it sourced its materials, the humanity of the labor process that brought it into being, would have a just weight in the decision-making of the builders.
This is incredibly necessary in fields such as gene-editing, where it is all too tempting to say, “this is the gene that causes X, so we should just cut it,” without reckoning with the way gene colludes with gene to inform an organism. The same applies to ecological challenges, where it is, again, all too tempting to say, “There aren’t enough pandas, so we better do everything we can to boost the panda numbers,” without seeing how pandas (and humans) participate in an ecology.
The same could be said about education, where a fixation on IQ has vitiated our vision of student development and produced a so-called meritocracy that elevates eggheads and demotes young people of substance, burdened with memories and lessons of suffering and service.
Technologists also need this. The phrase “usage maxing,” which describes a design philosophy that makes hours of app or device usage the ultimate measure of success, has started to become derogatory among technologists—and thank God—but the practice enjoys considerably more prestige than the phrase. What if you made propriety the standard of design? What if you asked how the app or device you’re making would fit within the whole system of the lives of users and non-users? No more “move fast and break things.” Try creating a “just correspondence” between device and user, user and world.
Another very salutary implication of propriety is that it checks the impulse to do whatever we can, just because we can. It places a pause between, “we can do it,” and “we should do it.” It does not enable the cerebral lust of human innovation, which the wisest among us are lamenting and fearing.
Rhetoric, as I said, is the tradition that has most abundantly and consistently praised and inculcated a love of propriety. It just so happens, however, that the demise of rhetoric’s esteem in Western education coincides with the rise of the efficiency mindset. As rhetorical education got shunted from the center of student development, efficiency became the reigning rubric of excellence in the Western world. The implication is as clear as day: if we want to escape the efficiency paradigm, we need to restore rhetoric. If everyone spent their young-adult years learning rhetoric, they would bring the propriety paradigm to their various industries. They would share an aesthetic of proportion and ethic of just correspondence. They would wield the mighty tools of the future with care.
They would make a many-splendored world.
