Islay McLeod’s Islay
Christine Logan
The Lady of the Isles – so named locally because Christine is the main tourist guide for Islay and Jura. ‘I’m driving to the Mull of Oa tonight – would you
like to come along?’ So we did and this photograph is the result.
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Winning the argument
Robin Downie
The term ‘rhetoric’ has a bad name in contemporary culture. It is often qualified with adjectives like ‘windy’. Yet rhetoric has been an academic subject with an ancient history, and it is still a subject today, although under another description which I’ll come to.
The Sophists in the Greek world were itinerant teachers of rhetoric, and did well out of it, because then as now success in public speaking was politically important. Nearer to our own time rhetoric was a central subject for the writers of the Scottish Enlightenment, including Adam Smith. Perhaps the most influential writer on rhetoric of that period was George Campbell (1719-96) who finished up as principal of Marischal College, now part of the University of Aberdeen. He argued in his book ‘The Philosophy of Rhetoric’ that the orator’s power is greater than that of the despot, for the despot enslaves only the body, whereas nothing is exempt from the dominion of the orator, ‘neither judgement nor affection, not even the inmost recesses, the most latent movements of the soul’.
To this day, at Glasgow University, and perhaps other Scottish universities, there is a chair of logic and rhetoric, the point being that arguments may be logically valid, but it still remains to convince people. Nowadays politicians speak about ‘winning the argument’; convincing the public is more a matter of rhetoric than of logic.
I said above that rhetoric is still taught today, although not in philosophy departments and not under the heading ‘rhetoric’. The current name is ‘communication skills’, and the subject is taught in medical and nursing faculties. If ‘communication skills’ are a matter of explaining clearly in non-technical language what the diagnosis is and what is to be done about it then this can only be a good thing. But too much emphasis on ‘communication skills’ can turn what should be spontaneous and natural into a technical pseudo-expertise. For example, the doctor will be told to have his/her chair at a certain angle to that of the patient, to make eye-contact, to echo back what the patient has said and so on. This is to professionalise what should be natural.
I guess that political leaders must also go on courses on communication skills, for ‘winning the argument’ is of the first importance. We can see the influences of communication skills courses in the constant repetition of certain phrases, such as ‘I want to make it absolutely clear …’, where what follows is ‘on message” (even if not ‘absolutely clear’).
Party conferences provide excellent illustrations of political rhetoric, because on these occasions the aim is to convince the faithful and the wider public, or to ‘win’ the argument. To be fair, it is obviously not possible to offer detailed arguments in speeches, and no politician would ‘win’ the argument if he tried to do so. But what we find instead of arguments are images which invite certain sorts of response. For example, in discussing ‘the Union’ David Cameron said, ‘We are stronger together’, and others (including Labour Party leaders) have used the same words.
Now ‘stronger together’ sounds very positive and is calculated to get applause. But is it always true? Strands of rope are stronger together, but whisky and water are certainly not stronger together. Indeed, certain chemicals together are explosive. Two people might be amicable, productive, or co-operative together – provided they go back to their own beds at night. Anyway, do we always want to be ‘stronger’? Perhaps we want to be self-sufficient or peaceful, or prosperous.
Nowadays political journalists use the word ‘narrative’ to refer to more elaborate forms of this method of getting us to see events in a certain way. The term ‘narrative’ is used in many different senses, but in politics it is often used to conceptualise the idea that political events can be understood rather like a specific unfolding story – for example, the story of catching terrorists. When that story seems to be heading for an unhappy ending then a politician will re-interpret the events in terms of another story- line – such as bringing democracy, or educating women.
This kind of political rhetoric exploits our innate desire to be told a story. The idea of the political narrative is not necessarily objectionable – perhaps it is unavoidable – but it easily degenerates into something which is objectionable: ‘spin’.
George Campbell, in his writings on rhetoric, did not approve of what we would call ‘spin’, but he was a minister and no doubt even his sermons would sometimes have a note saying, ‘Argument weak, thump the Bible’, or like David Cameron, thump the rostrum and shout, ‘It is just wrong’.
Robin Downie is emeritus professor of moral philosophy at
Glasgow University