My personal copies of Rhetoric and the Synoptic Problem came in the mail today.
Overall, it’s a handsome edition. I like that they used a relatively small font. The two big tables in Chapter 6 are not formatted as they were initially and after the galley stage, but what’s here is legible, at least. Anything to do with Greek or tables or tricky formatting is the first thing to get screwed up in academic publication, alas.
I found this brief essay today while sorting through old papers. I don’t remember writing it save in the vaguest possible way, but it announces its context well enough. The dates suggest I wrote it early on at UHD in 2009 or 2010.
I definitely reference that Asimov essay a lot; I wish I didn’t have to.
There’s an interesting exchange in the latest issue of RSQ (Rhetoric Society Quarterly) between LuMing Mao and Scott Stroud on how to conduct the enterprise of comparative rhetoric. I don’t think either one articulates the problem – which is historiographical in nature – well enough, so I’ll take a stab at it while it’s fresh in my mind.
Mao’s essay is in response to Stroud’s “Pragmatism and the Methodology of Comparative Rhetoric” in the Fall 2009 RSQ. As far as I can tell, he charges Stroud with creating a false dichotomy between “descriptive” or “historical” comparative rhetoric, where the main goal is to accurately describe and contextualize texts, and an “appropriative” or “reconstructive” approach where the texts are used primarily as fodder for contemporary theorizing. Mao opines these two approaches blend together dialogically; you can’t objectively do descriptive work without contemporary bias, and the text itself tends to restrict the limits of reconstruction. My apologies to Mao if this is oversimplified.
Stroud replies to Mao first by restating his arguments: 1) CR assumes a descriptive approach is best; 2) CR should allow both descriptive and reconstruction; 3) “there is no sense of accuracy above and beyond the general criterion of ‘usefulness’ relative to some contingent purpose.” He then charges Mao with further failing to define what “accuracy” or “responsibility” means in the textual criticism of CR, and notes that Mao’s objections themselves have a consistent descriptive bias. Over this apparent confusion, he prefers a “pragmatist” approach that eschews fealty to the text and champions using it for contemporary problems as well as increased attention to important texts. He repeatedly uses Pound’s Tang dynasty translations as an example of a pragmatist approach. He is less concerned with his research being “right” than being “useful: “I think this sort of pragmatic pluralism is much more flexible and non-exclusionary than relying heavily on vague notions of ‘responsibility’ and a ‘proper’ purpose animating work in CR” (74). Apologies, again, if this is oversimplified, particularly in the cultural sensitivity area.
Reading these two pieces reminds me of a problem that I heard Mike Leff once call “chasing the ur-text” – namely, a desire to determine more accurate versions of an ancient text can overshadow the usefulness of the text as received for provoking thought and addressing contemporary concerns. The particular text in question was Aristotle’s Rhetoric, but the problem also exists with any text for which we lack a great deal of original context or a solid philological footing.
My response to these ideas is twofold.
First, the problem here is not description vs. reconstruction. That’s a pointless debate. Mao is right about that. The problem as I see it, though, is a matter of ethical citation. If you are to cite a text as an authority in some fashion, there is an ethical charge to do so in a matter that is as less wrong as possible.
By “less wrong,” I refer to Isaac Asimov’s famous essay, “The Relativity of Wrong,” where he notes that the purpose of scientific inquiry is not to determine truth or to prove anything, but to, quite simply, be less wrong than previous solutions to a given problem. His central example is the curvature of the earth, once thought to be 0 (flat); early estimates of a spherical earth rendered a value of .000126 (the flat-earthers were “right” to three decimal places!); later accounts narrowed the value even further, and Asimov predicted that future measurements would get even closer to the “correct” value without ever quite getting to it. Perhaps, even, the very concept of curvature would have to be revised.
That said, Stroud’s unconcern with “accuracy” to the text is somewhat ironic, as he charges Lao with misrepresenting his article’s argument, particularly his lit review of CR. It seems to me if he is really committed to pragmatism, he shouldn’t care, and should even applaud Lao for using his article for his own “useful” purposes. The problem with that, though, is that Stroud never really defines what “useful” is. Useful how? Useful to whom? How is “usefulness” measured? I suspect this term is no less slippery than Lao’s “accuracy.”
However, Stroud is on to something when he says Lao’s real concern is “moral” (71); he then charges Mao with failing to define what “responsibility” to the text is. I think Stroud is right, but his deconstruction of Mao’s position is somewhat unfair as it skips past a central debate/special topic of historiography: namely, the ethics inherent in writing history. Generally speaking, as Mao notes, separating “historical” from “reconstruction” ignores what history is; the telling of stories by humans. Implicit within that definition is the question of citation. History is myth without citation; it is only when we can attach texts to other texts and archeological evidence that they become history, which is itself a inherently biased account of other biased accounts. Citation is the only glue that keeps this mess together, and it is often not a particularly strong bond if applied poorly.
The pragmatist, then, without a sense of citation, is a teller of myths, not a scholar; they may indeed solve contemporary problems, but their solutions can’t be ethically cited and are thus ungrounded historically. The objection, then, becomes a question of false ethos; a pragmatist gets to put on a historian’s ethical cloak because he or she works with ancient texts, but they reject the very framework of that ethics. One can’t claim, ethically, to be an expert on, say, Erasmus, without being intimately familiar with his historical context, language, source critical issues, etc. If one simply “uses” Erasmus, then you are not an expert on Erasmus – you’re an expert on using Erasmus.
There is “something” to a text that remains after we subtract our situational bias. It is not a reflection of Plato’s forms, but it is something. Respect of this nebulous something is the cornerstone of interpretation. That “something,” in fact, is the only thing what allows us to judge either or not an interpretation is “less wrong” than another. The text allows multiple interpretations and uses, but it also constrains us. Apologies to Umberto Eco, who I am paraphrasing badly from memory – and yet, there is something there.
I don’t usually write two columns at once, but these topics seem closely related enough.
In the last few days, it’s become apparent that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, currently the most senior member of SCOTUS, has a legal conflict of interest in virtually any case he might hear in the future.
It’s not that we didn’t know he had one, mind you. It’s just that now he’s trapped between two rather damning syllogisms:
1.) He knew his wife was deeply involved in an effort to invalidate the 2020 presidential election with no legal basis, and did nothing, making him both complicit to an illegal act and ethically bankrupt for not recusing himself from a directly related SCOTUS case;
2.) He did not know that his wife was deeply involved in an effort to invalidate the 2020 presidential election, and therefore he is an oblivious idiot not to be trusted with anything.
Whether 1) or 2) reflects the actual reality of the situation, I suspect, will remain mostly fodder for SCOTUS historians. Either one is bad. The first bookend of his SCOTUS career was his damning confirmation hearing; now we’re just picking out the decor of the second.
My intention here, though, is not to condemn or bury Thomas. My intention is rather to draw some attention to who is drawing attention to his dilemma. Rhetoric is an act, and art, of selection; we chose what we want to talk about, and choose what we do not talk about, for effect.
The news cycle has been dominated by Ukraine lately, and for good reason, as Vlad Putin has unwittingly managed to do something that hasn’t happened since the 90s – unify the West – and Zelensky and Ukraine have turned my go-to wear of nondescript green shirts (and among many other things, the surprising utility of the average Ukraine tractor’s torque in hauling abandoned tanks) into a statement of principled defiance. It helps, of course, if you have a shoulder-fired anti-tank missile handy when you make such statements, but when your opponent has both the symbol and the signified, I sense driving a T-72 tank that was obsolescent in 1989 into Ukraine is not a strong career or life investment.
But where is a corrupt (or oblivious) SCOTUS justice in the news? Page 2, if that. I read multiple newspapers like a starving wolf that hasn’t eaten in days, and I learned about this on Reddit, which is the internet equivalent of a slightly upscale back alley with well-spoken hoodlums too busy sharing cat videos to mug you. Surely the papers can take a day off from Ukraine updates to notice the rot? A slight shift in coverage is not going to stop a nuclear exchange.
The steady normalization of corruption would seem to be the answer. Of course Thomas is corrupt. Did anyone think he wasn’t corrupt, save perhaps Virginia Thomas, who once dialed up Anita Hill and demanded that she apologize? Corruption is the norm. Corruption is a feature.
Perhaps it’s only the absence of corruption that makes a story now, which is why the West has reacted so positively to Ukraine’s position. As corrupt as Ukraine has been over the years, the existential threat of invasion has given them (and the West) an interesting chance at a reset back to immediate post-WWII moral clarity. Yes, Russia, like many other autocrat-run countries, does not have our best interests in mind. Maybe it wasn’t a bad idea to keep a few armored divisions and a shitload of planes and submarines placed exactly where force can deter Soviet ambition.
But if America has a monoculture, it is one of weariness. We are all exhausted. If not from work, from Covid, corruption, racism, or rank stupidity. Surely yet another unqualified, powerful elite figure texting their wishes to other unqualified, powerful elite figures is not news. It is expected. And it is expected of us, too, to be corrupt.
As the astute political philosophers collectively known as Lynyrd Skynyrd once pointed out, “Does your conscience bother you? Tell the truth.” Why, fellow Southerners, you’ve probably also broken the law to smear your political opponents with the purpose of holding onto the Presidency of the United States! Haven’t you? Tell the truth.
I am not a particularly good or pleasant person, and there are some things I regret, but no. I have yet to do that or anything remotely similar, nothing that would land me in jail or prison via any twist of reasoning. I won’t even cheat in a board game. I am sensitive to false guilt-projection; just because a SCOTUS justice is corrupt (or oblivious) doesn’t meant that I am corrupt (or oblivious), or I would make a similar corrupt (or oblivious) choice in similar circumstances – or, for that matter, that anyone else would automatically descend into an oozy pile of sleaze, a position largely filled solo by Ted Cruz most days.
But that’s the trick. To get a SCOTUS seat, you have to accept a certain degree of corruption. It is a political position, Democrat or Republican. America largely accepts this. We call them “judges” and Chief Justice Roberts calls them “umpires” but they are closer to the political officers that the Soviets used to enforce correct thinking in military units – our big American innovation is to pit them against each other instead of the rank and file. They could only be “judges” if there was general agreement in America about most core values, and as there is not, they can’t be judges. They can only enforce this or that value and mask it with arbitrary “legal” reasoning.
Perhaps the only sin of Clarence Thomas, then, is that he got caught, and there is no possible coherent defense. But it is hard to defend, much less want to preserve, a society where the crime is not a sin, but being caught is the sin, and where the more elite you are, the less accountable you are. Perhaps his fan-base should dwell upon that, if they can stop wanting to be him long enough, but the Gingrich-Clinton-Trump era has largely deadened our national sensitivity to corruption. We can barely feel the ache that signals the cavity, and thus, we don’t bother to brush. But the absence of pain is not contentment. It is only a lack of signal.
Indeed, this notion is the going theory on why Putin miscalculated so badly in invading Ukraine; he literally didn’t know his armed forces were in piss-poor readiness, through a combination of rank corruption and relying on yes-men. The bulk numbers should have told him something, of course. Readers may recall that in the first real-time CNN-broadcast full-scale conventional war on the planet Earth, and in the first (and last) use of the Powell doctrine, a U.S.-led coalition put together a force of over a half-million personnel and nearly the full power of its air assets to retake tiny Kuwait in 1991, and Russia couldn’t muster half that for a huge county like Ukraine or enough aircraft to get air superiority on Day 1.
Throw in a total defeat on the public relations side and the implosion of the Russian economy, and the syllogism remains. If Putin knew the invasion was doomed, he’s quite complicit in not just its launch, but its failure; if he didn’t know the invasion was doomed, well, this column is turning into an Mad Libs exercise, isn’t it?