If the “godless” do “rise” as a political force, then the “culture wars” may well burn brighter. It’s an interesting thought experiment to work through causes and ends for our body politic. To follow up on a previous sentiment, I’ll blame Immanuel Kant.
Kant put “freedom” at the heart of his pursuit of knowledge. But to what end? I have argued that the project of grounding existence in the “autonomous individual” is an enterprise fundamentally unresponsive to the fulfillment of human need and desire. I also think that the modernity begun with Kant, the umbrella from which we cannot easily escape, is a rejection of productive argument about many divisive topics. I like to think of rhetoric as that which creates an informed appetite for the “good,” which moves the “soul” with a movement which cannot finally be justified logically. This can only be valued analogically with reference a supreme image.
There is, then, a hierarchical order leading to the “ultimate good,” and all terms of a rhetorical vocabulary are like links in a chain stretching up to some master link which transmits its influence down. (Following Richard Weaver and some Catholic writers like Mary Ann Glendon). It is thus impossible to talk about rhetoric or persuasion as “effective expression” without having a term giving intelligibility to the whole discourse, that is, the Good. We should all be concerned with cultural crisis engendered by science, big government, industrial capitalism, and “mass” education and communication and many other “masses.”
If “language is sermonic,” as he insists, it would be beneficial to spurn the social-scientific, journalistic, and general semantics view that humans may utilize neutral, objective, and scientific communication. Instead, I think that all acts of communication take a point of view and attempt to persuade. Dialectic, Weaver has written, is “abstract reasoning on the basis of propositions; rhetoric is the relation of the terms of these to the external world in which facts are regarded with sympathy and are treated with that kind of historical understanding and appreciation which lie outside the dialectical process.” The perennial appeal of the anti-modernist view we should embrace is its assertion that the autonomous self is prone to loneliness. We are social creatures created for communion. In seeking to restore the values of region, family, and community to public life, this rejection of the “autonomous liberal self” is a return to a language of natural law displaced by the liberal writers of Enlightenment who insisted that people could know, without a community united through sacred texts, rituals, and oratory, what morality requires.
The insistence upon the availability of a non-perspectival truth and on the need for an organic community extending from the family is not a particularly popular stance in our or any liberal culture, but similar arguments have influenced a variety of writers uncertain of the focus on autonomy and open to the notion that rhetoric in its truest sense is a clarifying vision, a means by which the impulses of the person and community can find some form of redemption. And so a “rejection” of rhetoric is in the elevation of personal autonomy and individual choice: the art of rhetoric is dangerous to the freedoms and rationalizations of the autonomous, and the power of oratory derailing to the prospects of knowledge.
The rejection of rhetoric is both implicit and explicit in the writings of Immanuel Kant, perhaps the most influential theorist of liberalism in the Western democracies. The very philosophy of liberal democracy itself was based on a fundamental distrust of persuasion, of back and forth argument of difficult issues, and once the autonomous individual rather than the family or community became the fundamental building block of politics, any effort to subvert that autonomy, whether through rhetoric or violence, came to be viewed by Kant’s many and varied followers as an unwelcomed imposition.
Let us turn away from this, by embracing our families and our local communities, and by actively listening to, respecting, and seeking clarification in our discussions. We are not autonomous individuals. Our opinions are not terribly important – but our relationships are. We are products of a social world called to full communion with each other and with Christ.
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