I don't honestly expect too many people to know about Wayne C Booth. That is unless you have a background in either fiction writing and or the study of argumentation and rhetoric.
Interestingly enough, I have a little bit of both but mainly the rhetoric part.
Years back, in my early days of studying rhetoric, I was exposed, in large part due to a class I was taking with one of my favorite professors, Dr. Rocky Colavito, to Booth’s The Rhetoric of RHETORIC: The Quest for Effective Communication.
![The Rhetoric of RHETORIC: The Quest for Effective Communication [Book]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Lzbp!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6c9a1608-e592-4d57-be72-7b025c6e20c2_210x210.jpeg "The Rhetoric of RHETORIC: The Quest for Effective Communication [Book]")
So, for my Substack today I'd like to indulge in a particular section of this book that I find very fascinating and it's one of those areas I don't think we always think about: how does rhetoric make reality?
The Terminology
In the opening of the book, Booth lays down some terms early on that I think are always fun to return to, Rhetorical terms that he claims can be “so ambiguous” and therefore he gives us a short list.
Obviously, he starts with the rhetoric itself, which a few pages earlier he laid out all the many different ones that have been presented throughout the centuries.
For Booth, rhetoric is “the whole range of arts not only of persuasion but also producing or reducing misunderstanding.”
I'm not going to lie; I like this one a lot but it also takes into account that he holds rhetoric within a very specific and positive connotation.
The negative has a different term, Booth calls it: Rhetrickery.
Rhetrickery is defined as “The whole range of shoddy, dishonest communicative arts producing misunderstanding – along with other harmful results. The arts of making the worse seem the better cause.”
He does of course give us several other terms as well:
Listening-rhetoric (LR): “the whole range of communicative arts for reducing misunderstanding by paying full attention to opposing views.”
Rhetorology: “the deepest form of LR: the systematic probing for ‘common ground’.”
Rhetor: “The communicator, the persuader or understander.”
Rhetorician: “the student of such communication.”
Rhetorologist: “the rhetorician who practices rhetorology, pursuing common ground on the assumption – often disappointed - that disputants can be led into mutual understanding.”
At some point in the future it might be fun to return and investigate these with some more vigor, if not they might definitely appear on the podcast I do with Dr. Kristen: Not Funny Guys Presents Thinking About Thinking, check it out.
Different Forms of Rhetoric
So, this is where the fun starts.
Booth writes that “Reality was [can be] change not just by the fact that your roof leaked in the rainstorm last night but by the way you and your spouse discussed what to do about it and whether you are now cheerful or gloomy.”
In other words, how we discuss and react to events has as much of an impact on them after the fact than the event themselves.
In some ways it's an admission that we have a power to influence our own reality to a degree and up to a certain level. Booth seeks to highlight three such realities.
“Reality One: Permanent, Unchangeable, Non-Contingent Truth”
Is important to note here that when viewing reality itself, Booth notes that not all are “made by rhetoric” but they are “Reflected by it and too often distorted by it.”
Before I note his examples, just look at the world around us today.
Do you really know what's going on in Los Angeles right now where Trump is sending an ICE agents to try and forcibly remove immigrants in a blue state like California?
What about the very language I used above and how I phrase the situation?
The reality here is that there is a real situation but how I choose to frame it and how others choose to frame it does have an impact on those who take in this information from us.
What I am describing above arc the ways that rhetoric can reflect and/or distort real reality.
Booth goes on to discuss Plato and Platonic thinking of philosophers on the idea of what defines reality and truth, most of those things are contained within science and other means of facts and information. This is part of that permanent truth, that permanent reality.
In many ways it's as close as we get to anything objective, you can deny it, but that doesn't make it stop existing.
Booth highlights this when he notes that “Rhetoric did make the reality of our discovery, but it did not make the ethical truth itself.”
Rhetoric can and does help uncover things that are there or perhaps out of sight, but it does not mean that it can rewrite the existence that was already there.
Interestingly enough though, rhetoric does have the power to create “many temporary realities” because though rhetoric can discover reality it “does not make Reality One, Unchangeable Truth. It aids us in discovering them, as it makes and remakes our circumstances and beliefs – our temporary realities – along the way.”
“Reality Two: Realties Changeable but Still Not Created by Rhetoric: The History of How Nature Moves from Contingency to Contingency”
If you want to sum this one up, it looks a little bit like the idea that the universe is big and full of things happening all at once and all the time and forever.
Another way is how Booth writes it:
“The cosmos changes its contingent facts every moment: it was a hard reality yesterday that Mountain X had a peak of 10,303 feet above sea level; But this morning the reality is that its peak has been nipped off by a volcano blast, reducing the elevation to 9,702 feet, While the facts about the valley below are being transformed as the lava flows. The tornado that struck last night changed the reality of the village it destroyed, though the hard truths (Reality One) about what makes a tornado we're overseeing the whole shifting show.”
So the universe decided to throw a curveball at you, and the situation around you changed, but the underlying truths remained.
Not necessarily super exciting, that's nature, but not rhetoric.
“Reality Three: Contingent Realities about Our Lives: Created Realities that are then Subject to Further Change”
Daily life, and daily reality is subject to change according to the influence of rhetoric.
This does not apply to things like gravity or nature, those can be impacted by one engaging with them. But the place that rhetoric comes into play is how I respond to those impacts and how people around me engage with me pertaining them.
Booth uses the example of someone slipping on ice and breaking a rib. This is the force of nature and not of rhetoric, but he says that rhetoric does become a factor through “the way [his] wife and doctor talked with [him] about it changed the reality of how [he] felt and acted. Our lives are often overwhelmed by such rhetorical changes of reality.”
In other words, how we communicate and engage with each other about the events in our lives have impact.
Booth provides many examples of such events and ideas:
Hitler’s rhetoric – “along with the rhetoric of many others – made, or created, World War II.”
He notes the same for President Bush, Prime Mister Tony Blair , and Saddam Hussein making the Iraq War.
I could easily say the same thing about the rhetoric of President Donald Trump is making the world less safe, crueler, and less responsive to shame. Debate me on it.
Booth goes on to note the rhetoric of other leaders like Winston Churchill compared to Neville Chamberlain as having Different outcomes for the British people early in World War 2.
President Kennedy’s rhetoric both before and during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
He lists many more but the point is clear, from leaders all the way down to individuals, the rhetoric we use and how we engage with others can and does have a profound impact on their responses and their temporary realities whatever they might be.
In the age of social media, this only grows in its truth.
Booth does write that “We may not want to call the realities made by rhetoric ‘objective,’ because we always have our ‘subjective’ picture of them…”
I would say in rhetoric makes subjective as well as intersubjective realities (realities that arise through collective agreement and shared beliefs of a group, things like money, nations, etc.).
Yuval Noah Harari speaks more about these HERE.
See, managed to get it back to Harari, again!
Thank you for participating in my indulgence.