Brief recap: earlier, I offered several contentions regarding Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Rhetoric. First, Booth seems to me to be considerably more interested in the motives of the rhetor and the content of the rhetoric than in the character of the rhetor and the style of the rhetoric. Second, concerning motives, Booth feels very strongly that the rhetor have capital-g Good ethical reasons for using the rhetoric she chooses, and that said rhetoric be used in a capital-g Good way; the alternative to that use being what Booth calls “Rhetrickery: The whole range of shoddy, dishonest communicative arts producing misunderstanding — along with other harmful results” (11). For Booth, the ethics of rhetoric reside not in what you are but in what you do. Which makes it strange that Booth chooses a quotation from Quintilian — who famously borrowed the formulation of the ideal orator as “a good man speaking well” from Cato the Elder, and had a deep and abiding concern with the character of the rhetor — as an epigraph for the chapter in his book centrally concerned with ethics. (Acknowledgment: I admit it’s a little unfair of me to describe Booth as completely unconcerned with character, when he writes on page 99 of “The neglect of ethos, of character” — but I think the being/doing split is, for the most part, applicable.)
So: on to today’s topics. The second half of Booth’s definition of “Rhetrickery” — “The arts of making the worse seem the better cause” (11) — is familiar from Aristotle’s characterization of the rhetor Protagoras (and also from Aristophanes and Milton), and that fact, taken in conjunction with the aforementioned reference to Quintilian and the other references to Greek and Roman rhetoricians throughout Booth’s book, ought to indicate to us how much of a debt the book owes to antiquity. I know this is obvious to those of us in the field, but the book itself seems to be aimed at a lay audience, and besides which, I’m going to use that debt to antiquity as a foundation for what I say, as well.
I’m wondering if it’s possible that the Romans — especially Quintilian, but there’s a little of it in Cicero — were so concerned with the character of the rhetor because they’d seen (first in Sulla, and then in the Caesars) the perilous effects of concentrated power in a way that the Greeks, with their radical democracy, had seen very little of. (Consider that Demosthenes, a Greek whose rhetoric was deeply concerned with issues of character, was speaking directly about issues of power and domination.) Quintilian, who came to Rome in the entourage of the emperor who directly succeeded the scandalously depraved and brutal autocrat Nero, asserts that “Children have to be moral in order to be orators” and repeatedly re-emphasizes the importance of learning “not only what is eloquent, but, still more, what is morally good.” (I can’t find what I did with the cite for those two quotations, but I remember they’re early in the Insitutio, like within the first two books — anybody recall where?) Michael Winterbottom, in “Quintilian and the Vir Bonus” (Journal of Roman Studies 54 [1964]: 90-97) offers some possible reasons for Quintilian’s concerns with character in his discussion of Quintilian’s relationship to the delatores. The delatores were professional accusers who brought suit against other citizens for maiestas, or treason (the definition of which had been expanded, by Quintilian’s time, to include any talk against the emperor), and then stood to gain a significant portion of the estate of the accused, should the accused be convicted. (I’m thinking here of Booth’s consistent use of recent examples of “rhetrickery”, and the Swift Boat Veterans thing comes immediately to mind.) According to Winterbottom, “the outstanding fact about first-century oratory is that the only orators to achieve any prominence or influence by means of their oratory are the delatores” (90), and we see in relief Quintilian’s necessity for the moral orator in the characteristics Winterbottom describes as common to many of the delatores: “contempt for rhetorical rules, violence of language, increasing political influence, moral failings of the first order” (94). This was perhaps amplified by the problems brought about by rhetoric’s atrophy in the declamation rooms, whereby Quintilian had to work against the common conviction “that rhetoric was a mere knack, [. . .] a matter of ingenium schooled only by practice” (Winterbottom 96). Ultimately, in Winterbottom’s words, “Quintilian was [. . .] led to a moralistic view of the function of rhetoric by what he saw going on around him. He found himself disgusted by the way rhetoric was being misapplied” (96). Hence Quintilian’s focus on character, and his ideal of the rhetor as a morally good man, who speaks well so that he might better guide the state’s affairs.
Unfortunately, there are some problems with this.
First: by Quintilian’s time, the senate was a joke, the role of public deliberative and forensic oratory was hugely reduced, and political rhetoric was — for all intents and purposes — completely impotent. Rhetoric, as we understand from Seneca the Elder, was reduced to declamation, a parlor game for parties, with no real-world effects. Second, there are the problems of the delatores described above, of whom Tacitus has his character Maternus (in the Dialogus de Oratoribus) remark, “The gain-getting rhetoric now in vogue, greedy for human blood, is a modern invention, the product of a depraved condition of society” (1.12). So while Quintilian’s ideal is moral and good, that ideal is motivated by the overwhelming reality of its opposite. (To be fair to Quintilian, he does explicitly condemn the practices of the delatores in II.20, acknowledging that “there have been many and there are still some who have devoted their powers of speaking to the destruction of their fellow men” and later suggesting that “to devote one’s life to the task of accusation, and to be tempted by the hope of reward to bring the guilty to trial is little better than making one’s living by highway robbery [latrocinio].”) Third, there is the difficulty of Quintilian’s fawning and adulatory praise of the brutal despot Domitian (10.1 and elsewhere as well, IIRC). Fourth, Quintilian names as his hero and idol Domitius Afer (both to Pliny and in XII.11, where he is called “the greatest”), who was one of Rome’s most notorious delatores: Tacitus describes Afer as “a man of but moderate position and eager to become notorious by any sort of deed” who “enjoyed the fame of eloquence rather than of virtue” (Annales IV.52), and Cassius Dio offers a similarly sycophantic and amoral portrait. (One saying of Afer reported by Quintilian in V.10 — “I accused, you condemned” — sounds like a chilling antecedent to Fox News’s “We report, you decide.” The penalty for maiestas was death.) These four circumstances seem to me to deeply problematize Quintilian’s famous privileging of the high moral character of the ideal orator.
But what does all this have to do with Wayne Booth’s book? Well, first, let me point out that I’m most definitely not simply arguing, “Look, we’re like Rome!”: that would be foolish and facile. Certainly, there are some parallels: consider the ways in which the concerns I offer above might intersect with Booth’s characterization of “a world where win-rhetoric of the thoughtless or vicious kind seems to triumph more and more, from top politicians and CEOs down to the talk shows, and where too much LR produces nothing better than self-censorship” (54). But I also want to argue that understanding how rhetoric worked in relation to power in Rome can help us broaden and complicate some of the assertions Booth makes about how rhetoric works today. Booth, I think, offers his lay audience a somewhat incomplete picture (and I know this is an obnoxious quibble to make — “He didn’t talk about what I wanted him to talk about!” — which Booth anticipates on page xv, noting that “Every professional rhetorician will feel some exasperation here about my neglect of this or that major rhetorical issue,” and offering a response which I wholeheartedly approve of), and working through the stuff he doesn’t talk about much — style and character — and connecting it to the ways he talks about the contemporary relation of rhetoric to power might push us (well, OK, me, since I’m not gonna assume everybody shares my ignorance) towards some new understandings about the ethical uses of rhetoric. On which topic I think it’s repeating my earlier quote from Booth, since I’ll try to lead off with its concern when I next pick up thinking about the book.
It is ethically wrong to pursue or rely on or deliberately produce misunderstanding, while it is right to pursue understanding. To pursue deception creates non-communities in which winner-takes-all. To pursue mutual understanding creates communities in which everyone needs and deserves attention. (Booth 40)
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