THE ANCIENT ART OF THINKING FOR YOURSELF: The Power of Rhetoric in Polarized Times, by Robin Reames
Robin Reames, an English professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, was frustrated by the intractability of the political arguments she had with her Bible Belt, Fox News-fan father as she took on liberal views in college. She is now similarly frustrated, like so many, by the vast, glum cleft between leftist and rightist ideals, and “The Ancient Art of Thinking for Yourself” joins a recent spate of books seeking to help us to communicate, in the current phrase, “across the divide.”
Reames, a specialist in rhetoric, sees us as unsuitably numb to the fact that our opinions are conditioned by what we already believe rather than springing from incontrovertible truth. She hopes that we can learn from the consciously honed rhetorical techniques of the ancient Greeks and Romans, among whom the art of argument was elevated in political discourse to an extent that seems almost unthinkable today.
The Greeks and Romans expected political speeches to be lengthy, careful, thorough examinations of a case, crafted to persuade on the basis of logic rather than charisma. “If ancient rhetoricians listened to some of our public disputes these days, they would think we had lost our minds,” Reames writes, noting that “when we cling like hell to our hermeneutic circle” — our basic predispositions and predilections — “it forces us to hide from ourselves the places where our perceptions might just be wrong.”
Reames’s conceit for the book is intriguing. The ancients’ studious cultivation of persuasive techniques was a high point of cultures barbaric by modern standards with respect to slavery, sexism, classism and institutionalized violence. The Greeks classified rhetoric by kind: the judicial and the deliberative were designed to make a point, while the epideictic was intended merely to entertain — to diss or give props to someone.
There were no political parties; a speaker was expected not to rally the base with boilerplate speech but to create a new, self-standing argument each time he addressed the assembly. In our era of Fox News and chants of “from the river to the sea,” it is difficult not to gaze in admiration upon a people so committed to soberly debating ideas rather than settling for sloganeering.
Yet Reames never quite succeeds in showing how these ancient techniques will be of much aid today. The description of bygone oratorical tradition is always diverting, and her account of the Sophists Gorgias and Alcibiades self-consciously using language to make logically convincing but false arguments for the Athenians’ disastrous invasion of Sicily is no exception.
Some will see modern-day sophists in contemporary politicians arguing without evidence for policies like trickle-down economics, or in Fox News pundits who promulgated the fiction that the 2020 election was stolen. But it’s unclear that warning us against sophistry is helpful to Reames’s goal. These days people seem, if anything, overly sensitized to the idea that their political opponents are simply lying.
Sophistry per se is not the main problem in those Thanksgiving debates with your uncle that Reames is concerned about. Few suppose that their antagonists in such arguments are knowingly spinning out elaborately constructed obfuscations. We might say that Reames’s conservative, Fox-watching father was misled by sophist commentators, but this reinforced not his own sophistry but, rather, sincere commitments that seemed, to him, coherent. Reames wants us to be able to communicate with people like her dad, not Tucker Carlson.
What often shipwrecks our arguments now is less that we don’t share concerns but that we rank them differently. Reames cites the debate in France over whether Muslim women should be permitted to wear hijabs in schools, where one’s opinion depends on whether one ranks laïcité (secularism) above or below religious commitment. She also cites her father, who, despite being in dire financial straits, spent hundreds of dollars stocking incandescent lightbulbs, which were being discontinued in the name of energy efficiency, ranking his conception of freedom from government overreach above that of thrift.
The rub is when people see their priority rankings as morally inviolable. The problem is not that we “cling” to our assumptions but that we assume them as a kind of natural law. Today’s leftist identitarians consider battling whiteness and cis-heteronormativity as urgently central to human endeavor. Even if they are aware that others do not rank this battle as highly as they do, they may insist that on this issue morality allows no diversity of prioritizations, any more than does support for pedophilia or slavery.
Where conflict reaches this point — and it’s often these days — I’m not sure Plato has much that is useful to tell us. Reames notes that the Greeks allowed for conflicting views to coexist in agonism (productive tension). But it’s difficult to grasp what this would mean with respect to, say, conflicting opinions over the war in Gaza. Any agonism here will be reluctant and fragile at best.
Elsewhere, Reames analyzes the debate over police killings of Black people. She represents the “conservative” side by citing the commentator Candace Owens, who viewed the murder of George Floyd as a rare incident befalling a man of questionable character. However, the example of Owens offers only a facile set of “prioritizations,” easily dismissed rather than grappled with. The implication is that the bien-pensant take on Floyd — his murder was an outrageous abuse of police power — is reasoned while other opinions are understandable but poorly considered.
Reading Reames’s analysis, I wondered whether she is aware of richer contrarian views of Floyd’s murder, and police killings in general, consideration of which, in my experience, yields not enlightened agonism but the most implacably grim stalemate in all discussion about race.
Reames’s book is intelligent and well intended but likely to be of only fitful value as a path through our polarized discourse. I’d be happy if Cicero could have helped us out, but I suspect he got off lucky by not living long enough to be asked to.
THE ANCIENT ART OF THINKING FOR YOURSELF: The Power of Rhetoric in Polarized Times | By Robin Reames | Basic Books | 297 pp. | $30
