Notre Dame Rhetoric about Rhetoric: The Why and When of Loving Persuasion

Last week (5/7/12), at the Wesley Theological Seminary Commencement, Notre Dame President John Jenkins gave a speech in which he argued:

And if we are determined to keep our convictions free of malice, then I propose that we strive to meet one simple test for public discourse: Our attempts to express our convictions should take the form of an effort to persuade.

If I am confident in my beliefs, and I have love and good will for the other side, then it would be my duty to try to persuade them. And if I want to persuade them, then how can I vilify them? People are not persuaded by those who attack their character.

But if I don’t try to persuade them, but only condemn them, then I am not showing the respect that love demands. To stand apart, proclaim my position, and refuse to talk except to judge does not reduce hatred or promote love. And if it does neither, how can it be inspired by God?

The moment I venture into tone and language that is unlikely to persuade, it can be a signal that I have left the sphere of respectful discourse. Once I do that, my odds plunge of winning over another...

I don't find the speech a particularly striking example of rhetoric per se, but criticism can be postponed (indefinitely). As a composition instructor at ND, I tried to inculcate this very idea in my students, and try to live it myself: to love is to engage in (the right kind of) rhetoric.

Here is how I presented it to my classes: It is not loving to attack another, not to listen to them. But neither is it loving to fail to tell them something good or true that may benefit them. It's not loving to them, because you're depriving them of some good; it's not loving to you, since you're implicitly denying the goodness of something you hold good, i.e. acting hypocritically; and ultimately it's not loving to God, who gave us language and finite yet real apprehension of the good and the true, which means we have to collaborate and discuss to come to a fuller awareness of both.

So why do we so often fail to be persuasive, or to even try to persuade? (By "we" I mean God-fearers in general, Christians more specifically, Catholics in particular.) The answer is left as an exercise to the reader.

Sed Contra...

All of the above holds only if the other party is also interested in persuasive, collaborative dialogue. But what if they aren't? If they are trying to kill you, or to force you to act against your conscience, or to scream their beliefs at you and drown you out?

As critics of Rogerian Rhetoric have pointed out, such rhetoric only works if there's no power inequalities. Does it do any good to speak truth to power, if Power knows the truth and chooses to ignore it? Then a fortiori it's no good to try to engage in a persuasive dialogue with those who a) aren't interested, and b) have no incentive to engage in it. What the solution might be is, again, left as an exercise to the reader.

Respondeo...

I don't propose easy answers. I do wish I could teach a freshman comp class on this theme—no doubt the students would have some excellent discussions and insight! So I leave you with the following nugget of wisdom from a man with far more nuggets than yours truly:

"In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity." — St. Augustine