The Soul of our Nation is Made from Individual Souls
by Beth Ann Huber in The Zero Point
I performed an experiment over the weekend, and I suspect it’ll take me a bit to emotionally move past it.
Full disclosure: I hadn’t intended it as an experiment. I had actually intended it as a…let’s call it a gesture. My goal was to publicly say something nice –something I believed, something true — to a person with whom I fundamentally disagree. My thinking was this: If I’m going to write monthly about how the people of this country are being rhetorically manipulated to taking sides in some sort of ‘holy’ war (see A Theory of Outrage), I should be responsible enough to see if there were any exit ramps off this seemingly inevitable highway to hell.
First, some theory.
We must now learn to live in a world in which we begin with assent and in which the first question will therefore be “Why not?” — Wayne Booth, Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent; pg 92.
Wayne Booth was an American rhetorical theorist writing with the tumultuous 1960s firmly in memory. The United States, still in the frozen fear-grip of Russian-toppled-dominos, was in a state of civil unrest punctuated by the unwinnable political side-taking of the Vietnam War. Booth argues that this was a time where logic and reason no longer provided a pathway to consensually agreed-upon truth, and therefore persuasive language had been abandoned as “mere rhetoric” or manipulation. In this context, Booth said, the purpose of debate had instead become “the art of winning.”
Déjà vu amirite?
So, how does Booth advise us to move forward from that place? He first suggests that language is not just a means of communication but is, and must be, a signal of who we are as human beings, that language IS us. Our soul is written in language.
We are what we say.
Well, shit. I mean…ur…Awesomeness!
Booth asserts that, moving forward, rhetoric should become the “art of discovering good reasons” to believe things, and its purpose should be to “meet other minds in the best possible symbolic exchange — that is, to maintain or improve the “source” itself…” (142).
In other words, we need to become better people with better reasons for our beliefs, then learn how to find other good people with good reasons for their beliefs, then build community on the overlap of shared norms.
Oh. Okay. If you build it, they will come.
In the magnanimous spirit of using impactful language to be a superiorly-reasoned person, I took to the court of public speech to find like-minded souls to share my new found enlightenment.
Just kidding. I got on Twitter and wrote a positive comment on a Republican politician’s feed.
Now…I’ve got thick skin. I mean REALLY thick skin. Like reading-27-years-worth-of-student-evaluations thick. And there’s maybe three people in the world that have seen me full-on cry from hurt feelings. I mean, I’ll cry buckets when Boomer! escapes the explosion by jumping into the tunnel access closet (if you know, you know), but those are happy tears. 99.9999% of the personally hurtful things that happen to me get turned into private mental jokes almost immediately. I have a running “ba dum bum” in my head.
I’m not saying it’s necessarily healthy, but my emotions don’t tend to swing.
Furthermore, I try very hard not to be a mean person. Sarcastic? Absolutely. Snarky? Without a doubt. Do I sometimes roll my eyes so hard in my head that I know what the bottom side of my brain looks like? Yes ma’am. But mean? Intentionally hurtful? Cruel? No, siree.
Two minutes after posting my rainbow-unicorn-love-and-light, I was ugly crying and imbued with the fury of a thousand fire ants at the wrong end of a camper’s urine stream.
I’ll give you a moment with that image.
Some background: I joined Twitter in 2017, retweeted a few things, decided it was too impersonal, and proceeded to ignore it for three years. A pandemic-related desire for medical information sent me back into the fold.
Basically, I follow 500 people that can be categorized in three primary groups: Medical folks; Politicians and political journalists; and Academics (mostly rhetoricians and historians). Most of my activity on the site is retweeting interesting information that I want future access to. I’ve posted original content roughly a dozen times and have had five total people respond to those posts in two years. I’ve commented on posts written by people I don’t personally know maybe half a dozen times, and those have all been in the Academics group. In short, I’m not really a twit — ter.
Yet there I was, after the January 6 final July hearing, deciding that this was a good time to say something positive and supportive to a member of Congress with whom I disagree almost 100% of the time about a speech that urged us all to come together as patriotic Americans to reject what could easily become another civil war.
I mean, what could possibly go wrong with complimenting someone? Surely no one wants another civil war, right?
Rep. Kinzinger, I‘ll be teaching your closing speech to my university political rhetoric undergrads this fall. It was amazing. Thank you. — Beth Ann Huber, apparently-idiot-professor
First of all, I believed this, and still do. The speech was amazing, and I most definitely was thankful for it. If you haven’t had the chance to watch it, I’ll link to it in the Works Cited listing below.
It was a master-class in rhetorical practice, using the best language tools of the greats such as Aristotle, Cicero, and Burke. Any political rhetoric class relies on great speeches to teach these tools, and I like to balance my choices between parties and even countries. Hell, I even teach a speech by George W. Bush as an example of the rhetorically perfect speech, and that guy was most definitely not our country’s greatest wordsmith.
Most average folks either don’t know this or refuse to believe it, but we professors can have our personal political views without those views invading the classroom. My gratitude post for Rep. Kinzinger’s speech held no clue that revealed my personal politics. The people who would read the post (which I thought would be very few if any) wouldn’t know whether I was a D or an R because it shouldn’t matter. I posted and moved on to my nightly perusal of pandemic statistics.
And then the fires of hell rained down.
Upon reflection, I think my choice to not identify my political stance may have been one cause for the abundance of attacks. No responder felt safe in their own bubble, so everyone who was predisposed to attack, did.
Some folks attacked me because they assumed I was a Republican and shouldn’t be praising another Republican.
Some took out after me because they assumed I was a Democrat.
More than a few took out their personal political bias against educators and decided to equate teaching with indoctrination, never-minding whether or not I would be “indoctrinating” to their preference.
Some just made it personal because, I assume, personal attacks are designed to wound more deeply.
And then there’s this guy…who I’ll quote because of the running “ba dum bum” in my head:
While I am now able to chuckle, that night was very dark for me. The attackers came in hot and fast. They were, by and large, the first to respond, leaving me feeling wounded and bloody. I did not respond to any of them. Instead, in the midst of my personal pity party, I mourned humanity and almost deleted all of my social media accounts. But I did not attack back.
Instead, I posted the following to my personal wall, unattached to the offending post:
“Twitter makes people mean. People with genuine desires to communicate should stay away. I’m not sure it’s worth the ugliness. I think it makes some people feel better to try to hurt someone else. It’s a microcosm of our political system, I guess. I’ll not participate in cruelty.”
190 people read it. Only four people liked it. Guess it wasn’t nice enough.
Did people attack because I was kind and they sensed weakness? Did they attack because I was a teacher, a member of the elite who needed to be brought down a peg? Did they attack because they were programmed by a foreign body to do so? Did they attack because that’s just what people do now?
Or did they attack because they’re scared to death and tired of feeling constantly powerless?
We’ve been brainwashed to believe that our fellow travelers during this dangerous time are, instead, adversaries. That the human being behind the screen is not really just a soul who is on their own in this terrifying hell-scape of a world. The all-encompassing propaganda tells us to attack because that may be the only thing that protects us against what is surely the marauding horde.
Communication — one person talking and listening to another — may well be the only thing that saves us. But we have to step away from the fear-response. We have to risk being hurt. The gains are worth a bloody nose.
The soul of our nation is made from individual souls. When you wound one soul, you wound the whole. We’ll never be able to protect our world, much less our democracy, until we believe this and find good people with whom to communicate our good reasons in good faith.
Three days later, it pleases me to report that 2,847 other individual souls liked my original tweet complimenting this speech, far out-weighing the attacks.
Works Cited
Booth, Wayne. Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent. Notre Dame U. 1974.
@DesertguySteve. “Twitter message.” Twitter. 22, July, 2022.
@Hongkonger66. “Twitter message.” Twitter. 22, July, 2022.
@JROCK95105022. “Twitter message.” Twitter. 22, July, 2022.
Kinzinger, Adam. “Closing Remarks on July 21st, 2022, January 6 Hearing.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FmOUPFOEZk
@MrsBatesKing. “Twitter message.” Twitter. 22, July, 2022.
@MrsDevine15. “Twitter message.” Twitter. 22, July, 2022.
@sparks_roman. “Twitter message.” Twitter. 23, July, 2022.
@TerrySm94714568. “Twitter message.” Twitter. 22, July, 2022.
