WHY...?
WHY AM I SITTING HERE READING THIS?
Well...
Someone (a parent, a counselor) told you that you had to take this course.
OR
You’re planning to take College Board’s Advanced Placement™ Language & Composition® exam in May.
OR
You want to feel confident and skilled as a writer and a speaker.
OR
You want to be able to see how professional writers and media are trying to influence you.
OR
Your vocabulary seems “too low.”
OR
You need the extra grade point for your G.P.A.
OR
You don’t want to take the lower-level English course either because your friends aren’t in that class, or because you would feel bored or out of place, wasting your time with such low expectations.
OR
Some other reason? Share it with me.
Of the reasons listed above, the ones I care most about are #3 and #4, because those are lifelong abilities that will serve you no matter what career field you choose. The ones I care least about are #6 and #7.
Q. Did you actually write a book?
I did. But you know how textbooks are filled with busywork teachers can assign to you? You know: Read this passage and then answer the questions. Blech.
Or maybe you’re thinking it seems textbooks are written for teachers. I’m writing this for you, my student, based on my long experience teaching advanced English.
That doesn’t mean I’m going to dumb it down. You’re smart enough to understand what I’m explaining.
And you’re smart enough to mark questions you have in the margins instead of just skipping over the parts that seem confusing. That’s what low level readers do.
Q. Why did you write this?
I aim to make this the most important class you ever take.
Because I aim to empower you by teaching you how to evaluate an argument. I aim to teach you how to respond effectively. I aim to teach you how to convince and influence other people. I aim to show you how other people are convincing and influencing YOU.
As a human being living in a society with other human beings, there’s no greater power than the power of language.
Q. What should I pay attention to?
Pay attention to headings, and pay attention to terms given in this fun font I’ve used to make school even more fun, even though I know that you know that I know that you know that such text features amount to nothing more than meaningless, crass attempts at appealing to youth.
Look on the bright side.
At least I didn’t waste a Canadian hectare of taiga printing out a textbook twice as long because of decorative pictures that amount to nothing more than meaningless, crass attempts at appealing to youth.
Do you like pictures in your textbook?
If this were printed on paper, I would give you a nice place to draw your own nice picture:
Q. Why did you call this book Truth’s a Dog?
Because:
Truth's a dog must to kennel; he must be whipp'd out, when
Lady the brach may stand by th' fire and stink. — the Fool, Shakespeare’s King Lear (Act I Scene 4)
I love King Lear’s Fool. Not only does he seem remote and creepy as a character (at least to me, anyway), but he’s witty, he’s one of the only characters brave enough to boldly speak the truth, and he irreverently ignores any legitimacy bestowed by wealth or rank. In other words, he sees others for who they really are, and isn’t fooled by appearance. (See what I did there?)
O Irony. The Fool’s job is to entertain the King, but instead he functions tragically as one of the King’s only wise advisors, and he persists even though the King is an impulsive old fool who never listens to good advice. In other words, the king is the real fool.
In the passage above, The Fool is complaining about the king’s judgment, comparing the abstract ideal of “Truth” to a dog ordered away from a warm hearth to its cold kennel.
Basically what he’s saying, I believe, is:
Truth is like a dog ordered away from the hearth back to its kennel, and will not return easily, when at the same time / ______s (choose your favorite school-inappropriate epithet) are allowed to publicly tell lies.
Allow me to explain: a “brach” is a female dog that hunts by scent, and “Lady” is an aristocratic woman. Although on the one hand we’re surely seeing a great example of canonical misogyny, there’s more to it than that, since Lear has disinherited (“to kennel”) his wise and devoted daughter Cordelia, while at the same time investing her two older sisters Goneril and Regan, both evil, power-drunk equivocators. “He must be whipp’d out” isn’t clear to me. Does Shakespeare mean that Truth won’t come out willingly once it’s been banished or disregarded? The compound predicate “stand by th’ fire and stink” I read figuratively to mean, “tell lies in public.” So there you have it. Feel free to tell me if I’ve erred!
But... what’s King Lear’s Fool got to do with this book, the one you’re sitting here reading?
Glad you asked.
On the one hand I like giving the book a literary title, because like (almost) all devoted English teachers, I adore and revere literature and view its instruction as essential. Few writers have laid bare the many flaws and failings of humanity as brutally and poignantly as Shakespeare. To contemplate his work is to contemplate ourselves and our species. To become a writer in an environment devoid of literature is to become a writer of… instruction manuals? Cookbooks? Tweets?
And yet this textbook is not about literature. It’s about another kind of “Language Arts” class as ancient as it is modern: a study of rhetoric, or the ways in which people attempt to influence other people through words both written and spoken, with varying degrees of success.
Great literature ultimately wields great influence. Rhetoric’s influence is more immediate and more universal. When you buy a product, when you vote, when someone asks you for something, you’re being influenced by rhetoric.
An educated man in the Classical world (ancient Greece and Rome) was trained in rhetoric. Yes indeed, it would have been a man and he would have been rich. He would have needed money in order to hire a tutor, because there were no public schools, and he would have needed the ability to speak persuasively on his own behalf in front of a jury, because there weren’t any lawyers, either.
An educated woman or man in the modern world ought to be educated similarly. Sadly… most aren’t.
If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve noticed newspaper columnists, cable news pundits, and Facebook polemicists fretting about a notorious electronic super-villain known as social media. They claim social media is to blame for many of society’s ills: the proliferation of “fake news,” the polarization of politics, the “dumbing down” of discourse, and so on. I find these arguments lazy and tiresome. Although it’s true social media amplifies these problems, there’s nothing new about the problems themselves.
Fake news isn’t new. Tabloids such as National Enquirer, Globe, and Sun have been freely available on supermarket checkout stands for a lot longer than I’ve been alive.
American politics have been nastier and more polarized than they are now: remember the American Civil War? Five years before that, on May 22, 1856, U.S. Representative Preston Brooks (D-SC) attacked Senator Charles Sumner (R-MA) with a cane on the floor of the U.S. Senate, beating him almost to death, after the abolitionist firebrand Sumner impugned Brooks’s slave-owning second cousin, Senator Andrew Butler (D-SC).
Now that’s polarization.
People have always been mean, and vulgar discourse has always been one of the warts of a free society. We tolerate it because we respect the First Amendment. What’s changed is that today, anyone can spew vulgar discourse out into cyberspace, and so it should come as no surprise that the Internet is choked with it. But that’s not the Internet’s fault.
The more important question is, what causes extreme politicization and vulgar discourse in the first place?
The cause is not that human beings are inherently bad. As a teacher who’s gotten to know tens of thousands of beautiful young adults, I can tell you that more than 9 out of 10—more than 19 out of 20— are genuinely good people. I’ve learned that, we who are not sociopaths, we who are not blinded by fear or greed, we who are the majority—we all want basically the same things. We want security and tranquility in our lives. We want to love, and to be loved. We want to laugh. We want to be appreciated and rewarded for our hard work. We want to leave the world better than we found it. Sure, we want money too, and we understand that financial stress makes life especially difficult, but assuming we’re reasonably comfortable, we want love and laughter more than we want wealth.
“We who are the majority—we all want basically the same things. We want security and tranquility in our lives. ”
So the cause of extreme politicization and of vulgar discourse, on the part of people who are mostly good at heart, must be that too many Americans lack the ability to distinguish a good argument from a faulty one. The result of that inability isn’t a lack of rhetoric. The result is bad rhetoric. And good people ought to revile the grotesquely illogical discourse reverberating throughout our increasingly charged political landscape, rather than wallowing in it and legitimizing it.
The aspect of all this noise I find particularly pernicious is the growing intolerance of and disrespect for education and experts. Being smart, apparently, is out of fashion in the twenty-first century. Though such nonsense is neither new nor surprising coming from uneducated adults, it’s dangerous coming from successful, highly trained American intellectuals, professionals, and executives who somehow think they can pick and choose which fields of science they’re going to “believe.”
What should you “believe”? A theoretical physicist’s argument for the existence of black holes? An oncologist’s diagnosis of cancer? An auto mechanic’s opinion on the reason why your car won’t start? An economist’s opinion on the likely effects of tax reform? An immunologist’s essay on the necessity of vaccinations? A climate scientist’s claim that sea levels are rising due to human activity?
What should you believe?
Well it’s not about “belief”! Experts do not ask you to “believe” them based on faith, or based on your politics.
Charlatans do.
Experts ask you to consider the merits of the arguments they’re making. The veracity of peer-reviewed science should not be mischaracterized as a question of party loyalty or dismissed as a matter of opinion. But neither should expert opinions be accepted without question. You ought to approach every argument with some skepticism, just as you ought to recognize when experts disagree. They no longer disagree that that the earth is spherical, nor that its mass is responsible for a force called gravity, nor that the seas are rising due to melting cap ice.
Some experts you will find more convincing, and others you will find less convincing, particularly when they disagree. The degree to which you accept an argument ought to depend on the quality of the argument. The quality of the argument ought to depend on the evidence and reasoning used to support it.
But what we see going on in the first half of the twenty-first century, with alarming regularity among educated Americans, is the troubling habit of refusing to consider an argument at all. This refusal by educated folks even to listen is the hallmark of a weak-minded person easily deceived. I’m not saying educated people ought to agree with each other. I’m not saying educated people aren’t political, or biased. I’m not saying educated people ought to like each other. This isn’t about being Nice. What I’m saying is that educated people ought to be able to recognize the difference between a bad argument and a good one—regardless of whether or not they want to agree with it.
“Educated people ought to be able to recognize the difference between a bad argument and a good one—regardless of whether or not they want to agree with it.”
The loudest person shouldn’t be the most convincing. The nastiest person shouldn’t be the most convincing. The prettiest person shouldn’t be the most convincing. Sometimes they win anyway. None of that is new—Aristotle recognized in the fourth century BCE that oversimplification and emotion could be used to woo the less educated among us.
But when highly educated people: liberals, conservatives, and centrists alike, dismiss science and logic in favor of equivocation and emotion, when they think they understand an issue or an argument after reading a salacious headline, or when they can no longer articulate, accurately, an opponent’s position, all our freedoms become jeopardized.
Everywhere in the world democracies now find themselves imperiled by corruption and autocratic impulses, the same democracies that flourished for decades after fighting and winning World War II, a horrific conflict perpetrated by autocratic governments, a war the like of which few Americans can conceive. Many of us lost a great-grandfather or a great-great-grandfather overseas in that war. These men fought and died to preserve constitutional freedoms our society now disrespects with increasing regularity.
And so I believe that if corrupt individuals who care nothing for civil liberties win fair elections, it is for one reason and one reason only: the voting public’s ignorance of, and disinterest in, the extraordinary power of language to influence people. Fear of terrorism, or of economic instability, or of anything at all—these fears are intensified, not assuaged, by charlatans. How? Through the extraordinary power of language.
Truth’s a dog must to kennel, while showmen may stand in front of the television cameras and lie with impunity.
Your views may be conservative. Your views may be liberal. Your views may depend on the issue. What binds us as Americans, through all our disagreements and triumphs and tragedies over the past three centuries, is our core reverence for the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Our core belief that citizens are all equal under the law. And, our core belief that elected officials must not be permitted to abuse their powers by jailing their opponents and enriching themselves and their friends at the expense of the rest of us.
And so I treat this course as the most important course you’ll ever take. I aim to empower you, by showing you that language is political, that how you say something matters as much—oftentimes even more—than what you say, not because there’s a “right” way and a “wrong” way to talk. By all means, say what you want out on the street corner. It’s a free country. But if you want to convince people, then the way you communicate your content to a particular audience on a particular occasion matters.
Imagine a kid walking into the kitchen and announcing to his parents in an aggressive tone, “Gimme the car keys.”
What’s the answer likely to be?
Is there a better way for the kid to get what he wants?
See, you already have some familiarity with rhetorical strategies. But what about when you need to be convincing and you’re attempting to implore someone with whom you do not have a personal relationship?
Ignorant of the full power of language, you may count yourself among the powerless and the manipulated. Armed with the full power of language, you may enjoy virtuous and lucrative possibilities as an educated citizen. You might work in sales. You might become a lawyer winning a closing argument. You might find success in an advertising agency or a public relations firm. You might even run for office someday. It’s difficult to come up with a well-paid or highly revered career option in which superior command of the English language is not one of your most powerful assets.
But it’s easy to come up with less lucrative or even moribund career options in which superior command of the English language is not a prerequisite, but don’t misunderstand—I would never claim any of those to be ignoble or unrewarding pursuits.
Aren’t you taking advanced English because you intend to find yourself working in a career that requires a college degree?
Probably.
It’s your future I care about as your teacher. I know of no better course to help get you where you want to go.
Maybe you’re reading this a hundred years hence—it’s the 22nd century and everything’s changed.
I would love to comment on those changes, but I can’t. Because I’m dead.
Hopefully everything turned out okay in the end.
Sincerely,
Me
J. A. Stanford, Jr.
Palm Springs, California
28 April 2017
7 August 2018