The New York Sophist

Arguing is hard. Arguing is frustrating. And arguing is essential for our political health.

If you haven’t been running, or to the gym in a while, during that first workout or first run you want to quit. You are frustrated, exhausted, and suffering. You start to discount what you are doing as valuable. Does this really matter? At the end, when you see how many calories you burned, you might even consider it a total waste of time. 

But exercise benefits us in ways that are not direct exchanges, or changes, in our situation. Likewise, arguing with those who have different political positions than we do provides benefits to our mind and our beliefs that are not measurable, obvious changes. 

What engaging in argument does is good for all participants. It forces us to articulate our reasons for our beliefs, and hear them out loud, while looking at another person who does not see, agree, understand, or accept our belief. This requires us to adapt what we are saying as we say it. We see how they react and we guess what they are thinking, and we say things a bit differently, then a bit differently again. 

If we never have to state anything other than our beliefs, we start to think that beliefs are self-proving. We think of them as the worst definition of truth – that of the fact. Facts are misunderstood as incontrovertible truths, things that cannot change, exist, and it doesn’t matter if you agree with them or not. They are the way things are. 

The rhetorical understanding of a fact is that it is a building block of a larger reason for us to change our thoughts or actions in a particular situation. For example, the fact that a hurricane has much higher winds than any hurricane approaching our coast has ever had can support a reason that we should evacuate this time, even though in the past we have made it through hurricanes just fine. 

A better understanding of truth is a realization of what everyone involved should feel, or think, or do in a particular situation at a particular time. We get hung up on truth as a principle that applies to all people, all cultures, all times. We start to think that we should be consistent with our beliefs rather than the situation. We forget that truths must be supported, explained, and must change as information and situations change. What is true is important, and must be realized. This is a call for effective communication, persuasion, and yes, arguing with those who refuse to agree.

There is also the part of argumentation we don’t like to think about that often: What if we are wrong? Douglas Ehninger pointed this out in his brilliant essay Argument as Method from 1970. In that essay, he explains that argument is the highest form of respect one can give to another person, because it indicates that you are willing to change your mind about your beliefs based on explanations, reasons, and speech yourself. Otherwise, why would you engage that person with this kind of speech? What would be the point? 

Arguing with someone is respectful. It means you believe they have the capacity to judge, evaluate, and change their way of thinking. It means you respect them as a human being, someone who is an equal. Isn’t every argumentative appeal a recognition of commonality, of communion? Isn’t every claim in an argument equivalent to the statement, “These reasons moved me to this conclusion, so since we are both thinking beings, they should move you?” 

Tied directly to this respect is the fallibility of one’s position. It is natural, normal, and healthy to have moments where you try to change a mind, and your own is changed. The point of arguing is not to be right, but to find the right. The point of arguing is to figure out why and how we believe what is right. This belief is worth nothing if it can’t be changed through exchanging ideas with another person. 

When someone argues a point with us, one that we feel cannot be supported our initial response might be something like, “that is so stupid,” followed by a “here’s why.” If facts speak for themselves, and truth is apparent upon encounter, why do we feel we need to explain away ridiculous claims? Why not rely on the truth and the facts to do it for us? The reason we speak this way is that we realize that such things require a lot of help from human beings. They have to be framed, explained, contextualized, and applied to the situation, life, experiences, encounters, and doubts that appear around two people, on the street or in a cafe, arguing about politics, sports, whatever. Instead of seeing them as wasting their time, we should admire them as we do those who are engaged in healthy workouts, or those who are being respectful to one another. The start and continuation of an argument is recognition that beliefs must be cared for, fed, watered, and walked if they are to stay alive.

Daily argument about beliefs forces us to think about how other people think. Instead of relying on the belief to be “true” or to be “obvious,” we are forced to articulate it in ways that are uncomfortable to us, but comfortable to our opponent. This forces us to try to think like another person for a minute, often in ways that we would never think on our own. 

Daily argument about beliefs forces us to think about how other people think. Instead of relying on the belief to be “true” or to be “obvious,” we are forced to articulate it in ways that are uncomfortable to us, but comfortable to our opponent. This forces us to try to think like another person for a minute, often in ways that we would never think on our own. The alterations in our articulated reasons make us reconsider our own attachment to our belief. Reconsideration is healthy; it encourages us to find new ways to support what we think is right, and find new right things to support if we suddenly realize that what we thought was good is not that great at all.

It’s hard to argue because we are never given time or teaching, practice or space to do it for its own sake. The stakes are always high when we have to argue. The way we treat argument is as if we never trained firefighters, assuming that when the building is on fire, running in there and wanting to save people will be enough. Although this is a natural inclination most people have, it’s not enough for the situation. This is the same with argumentation. We need to practice it at times other than when our core beliefs are being threatened, and we need to be able to speak about how to do it well, apart from whether we are right or wrong on an issue.

So practice! Try to argue with friends or colleagues about an issue and see how it feels. Consider it going on a jog together not for your cardio health or weight management, but for thought management and belief health. See how it feels. Make it a regular practice. We need our ways of belief and engagement healthy if we hope to keep our society healthy.

The summer always starts with this overwhelming, absolute feeling of potential, like there’s just tons of open space ready for development.

And so much less of it is needed for recovery as it used to be, when I was doing debate full time and when I was teaching high school all those years ago.

So what am I doing with it? There’s a lot of reading and writing to be done for sure. But there’s a lot on my mind in terms of the future.

Podcasting and Netcasting

I’ve always liked Leo Laporte’s advocacy for the term netcasting vs. podcasting (or broadcasting) as it captures the sense that the internet is a medium that both allows and forms/shapes the kind of things and audiences that will interact with them.

Podcasting – which is more bout a particular kind of offline device for listening to music – only captured a particular moment in time when mobile internet devices were expensive and failed regularly to maintain connection. It’s no longer the case that most people don’t have access to an always connected, cheap device for consuming content.

That being said, the principles of netcasting are pretty clear to me: Keep it short and engaging, low bandwidth and high quality. I restarted my old podcast In the Bin with this in mind and having a good time making it.

My other podcast, Republic of Sophistan I sort of stopped making and I’m not sure why. Now I’m figuring out what the relationship is between these two podcasts, if any. I think that most of the Republic stuff could be good YouTube content too, so that’s a problem. A good podcast is about 45 minutes; a good YouTube video less than 10. So that’s a bit of an issue.

YouTube for me will continue to be more riffing about my courses and direct instruction for online education. Sophistan should be more longer pieces of speculation or even “publication” in some way about rhetorical ideas. In the Bin can be about argumentation and debate. At least, that’s where I am at the start of July.

Public Speaking Trouble

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Public speaking is a joke pretty much everywhere it is taught because people who should know better teach it as an adjunct to good business practices. Instead of a deeply transformative experience, speech communication rhetoricians primarily use it as a way to roll their eyes at the concepts of the politically good that 18 year olds nervously offer in their assigned speeches. Public speaking is seen in terms of boring, alienated, irrelevant labor by the majority of speech communication professors, and students see it as a waste of money and time. We should be working to prove the students wrong, not right. We have to figure out a way to get people to teach public speaking in a way that matches their teaching of rhetoric in higher-level or graduate courses. Rhetoric cannot be a servile art for 1000 level courses, and the major force behind worldmaking in the graduate seminar. It should be the latter all the time.

Looking to writing composition is just embarrassing to me, where the people know better and show it. They don’t consider themselves superior to their students, but fellow travelers in the difficulty of getting feelings and thoughts into words. Still reading a bunch of this and really considering making a large case that public speaking should be in the hands of composition scholars. It’s just wasted in most NCA-oriented departments.

In addition to this is the continued thought experiment of “online public speaking” or “public speaking online” and which is appropriate. Do we want to teach a Chautauqua circuit style, city council, 19th century town hall model of public speaking and just put it online? Or do we want to teach public speaking using contemporary technology like GoPros and podcasts? Nobody really thinks about this stuff as much as they should. I have a stack of essays about online and oral teaching that I think could help me conceptualize this in some new ways across the board for my courses, but not sure what the big pay out will be.

Public speaking should be the course that others turn to for advice on how to model a Zoom class, or a class where the in person and the paper exam give way to the spoken and the addressed, but due to our failure as a field to do anything but think public speaking is a waste of our precious time publishing in Quarterly Journal of Speech so 10 people can glance at it, we have little, if anything to offer. The pandemic should be a time to reassess this.

Working with students on topics of vital political importance where the answers are not known, but good minds can distinguish between the convincing and the unconvincing, and the swapping of terms that resonate for different audiences should be the course. More to come on this, as I think through it.

The early start time and truncated semester seem odd to me too, not sure how I’m going to adapt to that, but spending some daily time working on courses is a good way to address that question. Perhaps the only way. I’ve never taught the same class the same way more than once, and now I can’t even do it that comfortable way, as I must reimagine the whole approach. It takes time to offer an educational/learning experience, or teach, at least it does for me.

Writing and Studying

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I am trying to write more, but it’s hard to get motivated to write an academic article as I really just don’t feel an audience of less than 100 people is worth the effort. Scholarship has a place, but it should not be the entirety of what a field does. Nor should it only be accessible to other scholars. There should be multi-iterations in various spots for it. But this work is not recognized or rewarded.

I’m trying to put together a popular press book at the moment, and hope to have something done on it in a week or so and see if anyone wants it. I do miss walking around and jotting things in my various notebooks, but perhaps once the virus is handled that part of my life will come back.

That’s good for a general update. I’m trying to post a lot less on social media just because it’s becoming clear to me how self-serving and non-engaging those posts are, even if you are a “good person” and keep people from the “other side” on your friend’s list. Normalizing spending more than a minute reading about an idea is something that is never advocated on social media, as it undermines the form. So I anytime I want to post on social media, i try to write it down and post it here. I hope I start to actually put more time into it.

Just read the Financial Times piece “What the Rise of the Debating Champion Tells us about the World”

Sadly, it’s super locked down and paywalled, and not even my university can get me a good link to it. So if you click that link be warned – that’s all you are going to get unless you pay a lot of money to read a very poorly made case against debating. The case could be made much better, but this journalist decides a phone call with their ex about the WUDC round he was in is enough to make the point that debate might not be great.  Research is supposedly something debate is meant to teach, but sadly, I think we all realize that most national debate organizations have given up that educational objective many years ago.

Also, the FT is joining in a popular dog pile of debate tournaments, debate clubs, high school or college debating – all of it – as if this one voluntary club activity could explain what’s wrong with society. Spoiler alert: It can’t. It’s not even something the majority of people in the world are exposed to, let alone have a chance to participate in. So why all the distaste? I think the answer lies in the fact that we are wary of debate’s power to change our minds without our desire to do so, and quite often without our consent. After all, we don’t enter a debate about a political issue to lose or change our mind; we are there to stamp out ignorance! And secondly, we recognize there is real power in learning how to debate well. The issue is, debate is hardly ever taught anywhere. What’s taught instead is a sport.

Here’s the case that FT should have made I think: Debate is conducted and run by enthusiasts, worldwide. There are very few debating events that are run by, designed by, judged by, and supervised by scholars or educators of speech, oratory, argumentation, or the like. Compare that to other academic competitions such as math, engineering (robotics clubs), journalism competitions, or science competitions for students. There’s a dearth of experts. There are hardly any speech, argumentation, or other kinds of teachers at these events to try to ground it. Why is this?

In the U.K. debating has always been a club sport associated with class. That is, your interest in debate, and your ability to debate, came with you to university and was tested when you joined the union and went out for debating. The entirety of the education in debating you get in one of these clubs is tips and war stories from those who have been to the big contests and can help you with the nuance, tips, and suggestions on how to win tournament debates. 

In the U.S. debate has always been part of a grand social experiment in giving a lot of public money to universities and secondary schools to have debate teams, and to have them compete. But this history too is controlled by class. The first competitive debates, or at least the first shared model of intercollegiate debating we know of came from the first debates between Harvard and Yale, and moved westward as word of them – and how interesting they are – spread. Of course, those who come from means always have the advantage of better access to better reading materials, more chance to be given space and time to speak their minds to others, and those from poverty are disciplined into silence, treated like they have nothing valuable to say, and are not given time or access to higher-quality reading and other thoughtful materials for a bucket of reasons, most of which have nothing to do with their capacity or interest in such materials.

It is worth noting that this is very broad brush, and there’s a lot of recognition that this is indeed a bad situation. In both the U.K. and the U.S., debate organizations have emerged in the past 30 years that take competitive debate and repackage it for students who are from poverty and areas where there are little to no public funds for things like schooling. I know there are more organizations than this, but what comes to mind right away in the U.S. is the Urban Debate League, and in the U.K. I think predominantly about DebateMate. Both are really good ideas for overcoming this issue with class and means being the way into debate. 

But this is too little in my view. Why is debate allowed to exist in this form at all? Why isn’t it curricularly rooted and bound to the same standards as other educational and university activity? Somewhere between a sport and a research project, debate teams exist in a weird space that can’t really be defined. If you tell someone you are on, or were on, the debate team, people will automatically respond with recognition – it means something right away to us. But if you ask people what the debate team is and what they do, you start to get a variety of weird responses the more you push on it. 

This article seems to suggest, like so many other journalistic pieces of the past year, that debate produces some of our worst politicians, some pretty egocentric people, and some real trouble. My response is that yes, absolutely it can. But it’s more likely that the way debate is structured and run – bring your own skills, show off, what can you do – attracts the sort of people who would find that kind of grind interesting and valuable. These are the people who seek attention, praise, and want to be told again and again how smart, clever, and brilliant they are. 

Now this isn’t everyone who participates in debating. And a well-structured team should work to chase these people away. I only had a few I can think of when I was running a debate team, and all of them caused serious problems if they stayed. Most seriously was the fact that they chased away people who could have really benefited, because those who don’t want to share their view all the time or say the thing that gets everyone slack jawed don’t want to hang out in a room full of these kind of people (even one is a bit too much for the more shy people out there).

I should have kicked them out more forcefully, but as a teacher i was stuck in a dilemma: These people need the humility that debate brings and I felt like I could teach them this if I gave them those experiences. It was very Obi Wan, well meaning, and rooted in a kind of optimism that I no longer have. I believed that they need it just as much as others need the confidence that debate brings to them through participating. In trying to run a program that was designed to serve rhetorical education, I made the wrong choice by being too big tent. If I had it to do over again, I would ban anyone with competitive high school experience from participating on the university team. The program should be for those who need it, not for those who need validation and congratulations from it. Like most things at the university, preference should be given to those who need to learn, not those who want to display learning.

The problem is not with debate teams or clubs per se, but how they are administered. In the UK, these are run primarily by undergraduates in the unions who are teaching and creating debate practices that are geared toward what they believe good debate to be. In the U.S. debate coaches – named without any sense of irony – are hired to conduct the team and coach it to victory.  There’s little, if any involvement of faculty of any kind in these debates, which I believe are a necessary part to the practice of debate. The trouble is one of diversity:  It’s very easy to come up with an argument you and your enthusiast friends like; something very different to come up with an argument for a subject matter expert, a taxi driver, or a preschool teacher. And often all three constitute the audience for public policy, social concern, or other issue worthy of debate. But the model flips this typical concern: Debate enthusiasts and coaches often choose topics that fit their idea of good debating, ignoring the more boring, or mundane issues that the public has decided are worthy of debate. What do the public know? They didn’t make it to quarterfinals last weekend. The idea that someone could know what arguments are worth having or not based on a weekend competition is very strange, but this is how debate organizations decide who should set most of the topics and who should judge them. The focus is on the purity of debate as the group conceives it, not the practice of debate as society does. I get it; it’s hard to keep track of what counts as good debate in society as the standards and value are continuously being re-written.

People who are interested in the work of reaching the broader audience of people out there who are interested in the topic and want to think about it usually head for the writing program, which is devoid of these kind of competitive, semifinal victory, fist pumping trappings. The writing program, and the writing center in the United States, is a much better model for connecting the joy, power, and promise of student interaction with rhetorical training around theories of audience, evidence, style, and timing. This is the idea of the audience of all reasonable people, or the “universal audience” as Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrects-Tyteca theorized it. They believed good argumentation is always aimed at an audience, in hopes to move that audience, and so the speaker can conceptualize the audience of reasonable people and speak toward them, as long as they pay close attention to the discourse surrounding this audience. In debate, the fidelity is to the community conception of good argument – whatever the participants in the competition feel or believe solid argumentation to be.

It’s not that debate made reprehensible political figures or opportunists, it’s that debate clubs and debate-as-sport attracts aggressive people who have no qualms about letting you know how right they are and how wrong you are. What is needed is less enthusiasts for sport in charge and more educators and faculty directing debate. The cost to society is grim. Think about all the people who could have participated in debate and used those tools to reshape the national conversation who, because of an experience like this, no longer see themselves as someone who belongs in a debate of any kind. Debate is too important to turn over to the enthusiasts, well meaning as they might be. What’s needed is educational grounding in oratory, rhetoric, and argumentation scholarship to guide what debate practice becomes. 

The solution is to strip away the sport model, and send the weekend tournament enthusiasts away. Follow a writing center model, and get students producing oratory for general audiences that is meant to move thought and hearts among them. Have their peers comment and critique. Publish this work. It’s very telling that intercollegiate debate, most of the time, forbids the video and audio recording of debates because they do not want their speeches public. Only the highest level debates – such as the World Championships – are filmed from time to time. The idea that what is being debated and said would have appeal for a general audience is baffling. In fact, many debaters will tell you that it’s dangerous to publish your work as people might hear what you say and form a bad opinion about you. And to think I thought all of this was the study of rhetoric, right down the middle.  How silly of me! Any model of teaching communication, oratory, or public address is bankrupt without some approach or method of publication. That can be a lot of things, and is worth thinking and talking about, but most debate organizations are not interested.

I can of course go on and on about this, but I’ll conclude with the idea that debate should be an experience that encourages thought, feeling, and development. I’m not sure in what areas these things should happen – it might be in a lot of them – but I would ground any debate practice in the ideas and theories of oratory and argumentation. Rhetoric, much maligned and oft misunderstood, often intentionally, is the field that would serve as a good first anchor for those practices. Rhetoric, simply put, is the study of audience and what moves them.  When we turn debate over to the enthusiasts, we get what excited and moved these former participants, not a study of what moves and excites various audiences we encounter. This is what needs to be practiced and studied, and perhaps the more unsavory elements of debating – the horrible politician types we loathe – will find some other club to join. There’s no doubt they will still be horrible and probably still in politics. Maybe a debate more oriented toward the audience and not the speaker could influence them in positive ways?

I know that I make a lot of promises on this blog for multi-part series of things, and I’ve left two of them incomplete, but today I have been trying to work through the definition question of what a protest is. Since I’m a rhetorician, my definitions start with two very basic explorations around the question: Are protests communication? There’s a lot more to say here, from many different angles, so I hope you add in your view in the comments or wherever you like to write and link the post to it. Then I’ll be able to see it and engage it in a productive way, hopefully.

Protests are a breakdown in communication, or are not communication.

We can take this definition of protests in two different ways. The first is the read that a protest is some kind of error, some problem, some breakdown in things. The error is a problem that needs to be repaired. The protest is the evidence that something has gone wrong with the normal way we should address and solve problems. 

This read normalizes the status quo – whatever the governmental system is for resolving the issue (in this case, police violence against and murder of black people in custody). It is a recognition that the status quo isn’t working, but not a recognition that the status quo should change. It focuses on the rhetoric of repair. The normalization of our current system of disputation, argument, discourse, problem-solving, you name it means that ideologically it appears to be “normal” or even “the best.” Neither of the terms in scare quotes need evidence or support in this case, because of the effects of normalizing how we “do things in this country.”

Articulations of this definition can come from any political view I think, and it can even have some wild variations, i.e. “If Donald Trump wasn’t in office this wouldn’t be happening!” Such wishful statements can be, rightfully in my view, critiqued as an incredibly narrow and selfish read of the protest, not providing the protest enough shared interpretive space with your understanding. Any interpretation of an event should be careful not to carve out more of the event than they present in order to make the interpretation palatable. 

We can go broader and say protests are not communicative; they represent the loss of communication. This interpretation is by far the most dangerous, as ideologically we assume one of the factors of being human is the ability and desire to communicate. Articulating that the protest is a loss of the protesters’ ability to communicate is a way to divide them from humanity, and indicate they are sub or non human. This is why police beatings of protesters are not reacted to with anger and horror by people – they might hold the view that the person being beaten isn’t a fellow human being, because what kind of people protest? 

The other way that the “not communicative” read is dangerous is that it places events outside of their interpretation to the point where they become unmalleable. This means that certain events fall outside of the realm of the interpretable – and if people try to make them make sense, they find it incredibly difficult. Their interlocutors laugh and respond with head shaking. They see the attempt to “explain” to be foolish in the face of “reality.” It is “obvious” what the protests are, etc. 

 It is incredibly important that in any interpretation of events we offer – or art or literature for that matter – that space in the interpretation is reserved for correction in case we get it wrong. I know, every interpretation is wrong, sure. But the goal of interpretation is not to be right. It is to provide insight. So every interpretation builds on every other one, and must allow for space for the corrective to find a handhold. Adversarial rhetoric might be what our courts are based on, and it *might* work well for them, but it doesn’t work well in things like interpretation. 

A very good example of this comes from military rhetoric where with great regularity we learn that a foreign government has been “sent a message” in the form of multiple cruise missiles impacting their military bases, airstrikes from fighter jets, or other ordinance. This conflation of material and physical violence with communication is a deliberate attempt to indicate that communication is not up for interpretation, that messages are clear when they are direct and forceful, and that the sender is serious and unwavering. This is not a model for communication at all, for many reasons, one of the most important being that there’s incredible difficulty in rolling back your message if you happen to be wrong, change your mind, or think differently about what you’d like your interlocutor to believe or do – in short, be human. 

The call for “direct action” also suffers from this same problem, placing communication outside of reality which requires no interpretation, is clear, obvious, direct, and requires symmetry in order for there to be justice. Both “direct action” and “protests are riots” are interpretations, no question. They are interpretations that try to expel (perhaps excommunicate is a better word here?) the idea that they could be refuted, could be incorrect, could change upon the arrival of additional information, facts, understanding, etc. The point here is that the desire to cut out the sometimes frustrating notion of interpretation cuts out the most powerful and useful parts of it, namely the addition of other ways of seeing which I believe is part of the central argument as to why democracy is important: Personal experiences are evidence, and personal experiences are in fact, interpretations of events delivered communicatively. No way out. No shortcuts, even if you mean well. It’s always best to have the handhold for response. Even “there isn’t time for a conversation” invites a response, so this isn’t that hard to do.

When people say that protests and protesters are “fed up with talk” or “the time for talk is over” we can understand this as saying “communication is a limited and narrow position to take versus reality” or the (better) way, “our political ways of enacting communication have failed and need to be replaced.” But once you are here, you are very far away from the understanding of “not communication.” You sort of have to abandon the idea that protests are not communicative once you argue that it’s a breakdown in the old methods.

Protests are a form of communication

This interpretation posits that the protests are done in order to communicate, to present an argument or a claim of some kind about whatever event sparked the protest. The power of this interpretation comes from the inability – not incapacity – of protests to “say what they are about.” The American media has great fun making fun of protesters, interviewing whoever will come over to the microphone to speak with them about the protest. Journalists, unaware of and probably uncaring about concerns of self-reporting, sample size, and the like, allow the people who are either crazy enough or weird enough to want to be on television during a protest to speak for the entire protest. The media generally strategically lay these interviews next to one another like you would the pieces of a puzzle for a child to show them that the pieces just don’t fit together, and perhaps something else should be tried. Presenting multiple protesters voluntary statements as to what the protest is about side by side to look for a rubric of “consistency” is not going to do anything but forward the interpretation to the viewer that the protests – composed of protesters – is as incoherent as they are. 

Instead, we can celebrate protests as communicative not through consistency, but through their symbolic power. What does it mean that thousands turned up without organization to march together? What does it mean that they all took the time and resources to make signs? What do the chants mean? 

We can go more deeper and more personal: Do I see myself as one of these people? Should I be out there? Is that my police department acting this way? I recognize that shop! I used to go there! (it looks so different now). 

We can go broader: Under what conditions would I march? What would it mean if they didn’t choose to do this? What does it mean that they did? Why now? Is this justified? Is it ever justified? Why don’t they just rely on their elected officials, and petition them? (that one is in memory of my grandmother’s chosen form of activism for literally anything that bothered her).

Protests, by their very existence, demand. They demand an interpretation, and depending on how threatened we are by their existence, we will articulate that demand in relation to our ideology. We won’t hesitate long enough at the point of encounter to really open up the idea of the protest as a communicator, where it is in conversation with us. But maybe that’s for a much later point in rhetorical theorizing about political action. We struggle a ton with the relationship between the individual and the group (all this conversation about apples as police officers) and cannot fathom the idea that a group, a belief, an ideological commitment can speak, and when it does it compels acquiescence before understanding, every time. To resist that is quite an effort, and often relies on an accidental combination of events or moments. Perhaps we can say that protests communicate a nexus of recognition that is so powerful, so overwhelming that it must be expressed and offered this way. After all, it is against the message of ideology, which has no articulation that can be responded to with reason, facts, or evidence.

If we take seriously that the protest is communication, we normalize it as a part of politics. It’s not opposed to, or the lack thereof, but a form of politics. This might reduce the power i ascribed to protesting in the last paragraph, but it also might provide protesting a powerful way to be seen on a spectrum with other political modes. Perhaps the automatic placing of it on a spectrum (which I just did and am not going to edit out) is the problem, because it immediately suggests good to bad, better to best. We don’t want that; we’d like voting and protest to be equally legitimate and equally available based on conditions and circumstances that we face in the political. But to do that, we have to say “protests are a form of communication.”

The symbolic factor of the protest is only available if protests are communicative. As we all know from our own lived experience, communication does not require a person, language, or even the presence of other people – we interpret the world around us communicatively, even when we do something as simple as take a walk (eg: “I wonder why that person parked that way?”) We are always seeking motives. If we find the idea “this is not communicative” we stop asking questions and stop engaging. The protest as a symbol is something that has a lot of play, and might be one of the best ways you can define a protest. It’s because of the immense possibilities of the point of the protest, not because it limits it or stabilizes it. The irony of “this is symbolic” is that it appears to be a reduction or refinement in meaning but it opens up a much larger area of interpretation and meaning that you could get with any other form of definition (even “communication”).

One of the first things that comes to mind is the notion that the protests are disruptive and destructive. They block traffic; they break things; they bring out the police in force; they hurt the ability for normal stuff to happen. This can be seen as a problem, or an attack on society. But as a symbol, this could be seen as the perspective that the protesters deal with daily. The disruption and destruction is their normal life. They present the world from their point of view to us through the act of protest.

Another way: The protest opens up space to reconsider by disrupting the regular and normal. People begin to reflect on the meaning of their daily tasks, and how much they like going out on particular nights, being able to drive here or there, or what have you. They see the protest as the symbol, in a backwards way, of something that is devastating to their normal lives. The protest stands symbolically for the thing that ruins the protesters’ lives. This disruption then becomes something that non-protesters must account for. Because of our ceaseless demand to chase after motives, we start to try to fill in the gap here, to name the disruption in a way that makes sense to both us and to the protesters, who are far too many to dismiss as un-united idiots, troublemakers, or what have you.

These are just two, but the work here is to prevent the symbolic from spinning out into interpretations that reinforce anti-communicative notions of protests. These are the biological or natural interpretations that are often essentialist, seeing the protest as an example of the failure of human society, eg “look at those idiots,” or the ever popular discounting the protest because it simply shows that we have no values in this country anymore. The hard work here is to get your opposition to accept that human minds are powerful and can make all sorts of judgments, and therefore can be changed. They chose to protest like this; it is not an animalistic reaction. They chose it because they think it means something. Now, let’s talk about what we think they might be trying to say here.

One of the commitments that I have that’s hard for me to shake is the idea that everyone can change their mind given the right amount of time, the right place, and the right conversation with the right person. There are so many factors involved here that it might be easier to just say, “It is rare for people to be able to change their mind,” or perhaps, “it is rare that people change.” This is the conventional wisdom, but I think it represents a very unhealthy way to think in society, a very fatalistic attitude, and it gives up the history and tradition of rhetoric and the persuasive arts to the very shallow enlightenment concept of a stable, objective reality that can be accessed and applied to all of us with the right set of refined epistemological tools. We lose people that way, and more importantly, we lose a foundational concept of democracy, that of it being about people deciding. The more people we exclude from it, the less like democracy it becomes.

What got me writing this post was the large amount of people on social media saying that the current situation in the U.S. is not the time to persuade or argue, that things are too dire, that it’s not time to change minds , that people have chosen their side and it’s time to go to battle. Although it certainly feels this way, and looks this way on the streets of America’s major cities, this isn’t right. It’s times like this that are perfect to engage others in mind-changing activities, or what we might call argumentation, persuasion, or debate. 

The best times to get engaged in persuasion or arguing with others is when people want to talk. Generally, if people are sharing their views on things – or sharing the same 20 memes or images of Martin Luther King, Jr. quotes – this means they are motivated to speak about what is going on, they want to talk, they want to engage others. I think there are two primary situations in which people really, really want to talk:

1. They have discovered something good, true, or right. They want to tell others about it and bring others on board with the cool new thing (well they think it’s the truth) that they have found. This is why I often say “Truth is the starting point, not finishing point, for rhetoric.” It is what motivates people to talk. Maybe it’s the thrill of discovery? More likely it’s the thrill one gets from exercising power over others and showing them how wrong they are (the dark side of rhetoric to be sure). 

2. They have discovered the principles upon which they base a lot of their navigation through daily life have become unglued, unsticky, are developing cracks, or seem to be rusting. This is more of a panicked reinforcement of principle and belief and a look for reassurance. They want to engage others to say “this isn’t right!” “This should not be happening!” etc. 

Sometimes you get both happening at once, i.e. “Things are a mess but I know what we need to do!” I think that best qualifies as the description of where we are now with the protests happening across the U.S.

When things become controversial, when things go off the rails, things get cloudy and our first impulse is to fan the dust away, vacuum it up, clean it all off, and get a clear picture again. Our initial response is to cut through the dust and fog and find clarity and certainty for ourselves and our fellow citizens, friends, and people. This speaks to the power of the utterance and the rhetorical precept to provide a navigable path through the polarized and unstable world for us. Just think about how confident submarine captains and navigators are when the sonar is working properly. That’s us! Just sound, sound alone is what gives them the confidence to say “Turn here,” or “dive 100 meters” or whatever they do. But if we were there we would be a bit claustrophobic. 

When the sonar goes out, everyone is in real trouble, and we really can’t move, we can’t act, we can’t operate. We need that sounding board. We need those precepts and preconceptions about what to do; what to bounce our decisions off of. We start to ping a lot when there’s confusion, uncertainty, newness, or a crazy web of discovery. We start to talk and reassert our presence and our pathways by re-articulating the things that we stand for and believe. 

In times when there is not a lot of dust kicked up, when there’s not much cloudiness or fog at all we don’t articulate our supporting principles or positions because, well, it’s obvious where to go and obvious what to do. Things are clear, we don’t need to ping as much. We might do a bit of it if we meet up with a friend, but again, the stakes are not high if we disagree, we are just talking, and things are pretty good. 

The opportune situation for persuasion is when the rhetorical dust is everywhere, and we are very constantly and very repetitively saying the things that used to be helpful in guiding us. This repetitive nature of speech (or social media posting, as I have experienced) is a cry for a stable field, for agreement, and for consideration. It’s the cry to engage, and it’s the characteristic invitation to persuasion. “This is what I think” is the natural moment for the engagement with others, for the asking of questions and developing new ones. It’s the invitation for exchange – signal back! Help me get some footing here? Or perhaps more relevant, share my footing with me! For it’s rare that we doubt our own footing on matters of culture, society, race, policy, and governance. 

So the right time, the right situation for persuasion is when there’s smoke in the air and disruption in the streets. The person who is angry about the traffic jams that protesters have been causing is speaking exactly to my point: Why won’t this familiar pathway provide me what I want? And the response to that question is to start asking others, to start engaging and seeing how and where they go. When people are willfully expressing their underlying beliefs about how things should be, that’s a great time to move the conversation toward those things.

It’s much more difficult to get to the principles or underlying beliefs without the rhetorical dust all around, clouding things up. But with that there, we can start to look at the why question, and start to look at the supports and the foundation of things. This is a great opportunity, and one that most rhetors, when they want to persuade, have to construct very carefully. Most of us don’t want to lay bare our beliefs all the time. Often times we can’t. 

Ok so that’s probably good for one night. A lot of my beliefs here are pretty weird, I accept that. But they are motivated by improving the quality of political engagement and supporting a democracy that puts people first, above conceptions of facts, truth, right-ways-of-doing, or anything like that. Democracy requires us to be able to share our opinions in ways that make sense to as many other people as possible, then requires us to engage those shared opinions with our own thoughts and experiences. It doesn’t require the truth, or rightness, or any of that other nonsense that we think we know and put way ahead of the thoughts of other people. 

I’m going to write a bit more about this. For now, just consider the idea that times when things are unclear encourage people to say more – they say a lot more, both in words and in depth. They start to draw out their fundamental principles. And with those out and people willing to share them, there’s no better time to inquire after them in the spirit of improving thought, improving questioning, and improving the construction and co-construction of the narrative we call reality. This is one of the best times to try to persuade others. I really don’t understand why we wouldn’t want to when there’s so much discursive dust in the air.