37 Rhetoric is Cultural
Rhetoric does not belong to one particular culture, but instead has a rich history featuring different styles and approaches to the art of persuasion. Rather than thinking that one persuasive method is “right” and another is “wrong,” we need to recognize that persuasion depends on context, which involves cultural, historical, technological, and situational factors that determine successful arguments. Furthermore, the persuasive tools available to us today are very different from those used even in recent history. Think of the ways that social media has expanded our understanding of and connection other people living around the globe. The possible means of persuasion have expanded throughout history, which means that writers need to determine which tools can possibly help them in an argument.
One resource lies in an older set of tools for thinking about persuasion known as the five canons of rhetoric, which includes invention, memory, arrangement, delivery, and style.
Invention is the process of deciding what to write about. What topic do you want to learn more about? What process of inquiry will help you learn more about what you want to know?
Memory is the process of learning a topic so well that you can remember and share the information in everyday conversation or while speaking on the subject in more formal settings. What topics are so interesting to you that they might be easier to memorize? How will internalizing the information you are researching help you to share it with an audience more effectively?
Arrangement is about ordering what you write. What kind of structure will make your position more effective to your audience?
Delivery gets into the tactical details of conveying your message. For example, if it is in writing, would it be better delivered in a series of tweets, in a formal letter, or engraved into the side of a boulder? On the other hand, If you are speaking, is your message best conveyed as a strident improvisation, full of energetic physical gestures, or as a calm, or even boring, recitation?
Style is also very important, and is very connected to your intended audience. Do you think they would prefer a casual and friendly chat, or does the moment call for formality and fancy words?
In other words, the canons have always been closely connected to ideas about how people should be trained to communicate, and which skills are most important to their education as it relates to speaking and writing. The canons remain useful to us today in helping us to understand traditional rhetorical values, but why stop there? What other rhetorical skills and values should we learn about and develop? Perhaps looking at more than just the Classical Western tradition can help us with that.
We have received what we think of as the classical rhetorical tradition from the Greeks and Romans, but rhetoric is universal and at least as old as humanity itself. We can point to many examples of rhetoric around the world that may help us see beyond the classical Greco-Roman concepts. In Ancient Egypt, for example, silence seems to have been a powerful rhetorical tool. Silence was not only an indicator of good character (or ethos, as the Greeks would say), but also aligned the person who declined to speak too much with the order inherent in the universe itself. To be wisely quiet instead of foolishly gabby was to invite the presence of the goddess Ma’at, whose truth and order would work on one’s behalf (David Hutto’s work develops this in some detail).
Consider, also, a major moment in the organization of rhetoric in China: Chen Kui’s work Wen Ze (or The Rules of Writing) from 1170 CE. Kirkpatrick and Xu tell us a bit about Kui’s major contributions:
The rhetorical principles that The Rules of Writing promulgates include the importance of using clear and straightforward language, the primacy of meaning over form, and ways of arranging argument. These principles were, in large part, determined by the needs of the time… because The Rules of Writing was written at a time of great change in China. Two changes were of particular importance.
The first of China’s major changes was the advent of printing, which “made texts much more accessible and affordable than they had been before” (5). China’s second major societal change was the increasing number of people working for the government. As Kirkpatrick and Xu tell us, China’s hiring practices during this time shifted, which meant that people entered these civil service jobs through their own merit instead through inheritance or by privilege alone, which meant they needed to really have rhetorical skills to do the government’s work:
. . . The role of the civil service exams in ensuring only men of merit entered the civil service increased significantly… The Rules of Writing was written as a guide for men who wanted to enter a career in the civil service and who needed to pass the strict series of civil service exams in order to do so. (Kirkpatrick and Xu 5)
What we have received by way of the Greeks and Romans as rhetoric is just one version of a set of universal human activities related to thinking, talking, judging, writing, debating, and persuading each other. Every culture establishes expectations for communicating persuasively and appropriately. Traditions and cultural norms maintain expectations, but social change may disrupt these expectations or necessitate their evolution. For these reasons and more, the art of rhetoric is complex and fascinating to study.