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3. Belief and Passionate Commitment
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58 3 belief and Passionate commitment According to Cicero, rhetoric has three goals: “the proof of our allegations, the winning of our hearers’ favor, and the rousing of their feelings to whatever impulse our case may require” (De Oratore II.115). This list of objectives , which were called the “offices” or “duties” of rhetoric by medieval and Renaissance rhetoricians, was interpreted by them to mean that the aims of rhetoric are to teach, to delight, and to move (Vickers 50). This formulation allowed rhetoric teachers to establish a hierarchy of preferred genres, with eloquence (movere) ranking as the highest rhetorical endeavor because it is the most demanding. But Cicero’s Latin in this passage may be read otherwise, to say that a rhetor must of course provide evidence to support her claims, but she must also insure that her audience respects her character and her argument. In addition, she must arouse whatever emotions are necessary to move an audience toward acceptance. Cicero suggests, then, that rhetorical effect is achieved by means of affect: the beliefs and behavior of audiences are altered not only by the provision of proofs but by establishment of ethical, evaluative, and emotional climates in which such changes can occur. This reading of the passage renders Cicero ’s advice distinctly out of step with liberal rhetorical theory, wherein emotion is configured as irrational and where values are irrelevant. On the other hand, it aligns Cicero’s advice with contemporary scholarship on the relation of affect to belief. belief ANd PAssiONAte cOmmitmeNt 59 Belief—which sophistic rhetoricians called doxa—can be paradoxical. People can hold contradictory beliefs; for example, in America super-patriots brook no dissent from obeisance to national policy despite the fact that free speech is an important American value. People can also subscribe to beliefs that have bad consequences for them: those who will never become capitalists nonetheless remain staunch supporters of capitalism; women cling to patriarchal values in the face of feminist analyses of the dangers posed to women by patriarchy. A liberal might say that more and better education would resolve these paradoxes: if people knew more about the ideologies to which they subscribe (that is, if they were better educated), they would remember that dissent is protected by the First Amendment, or they would realize that capitalism and patriarchy work against the interests of many. On the other hand, if one claims, alongside Slavoj Zizek, that people in fact know what they are doing but keep on doing it anyway, it follows that something other than knowledge or understanding motivates people when they accept claims that are contradictory to one another or are detrimental to their well-being (Sublime 31–33). While persuasion can of course be effected by means of reasoned argument , I posit that ideology, fantasy, and emotion are primary motivators of belief and action. Take, for example, George W. Bush’s characterization of Osama bin Laden as evil, a claim that was reportedly widely accepted by the American people during the months following September 11, 2001.1 On its face such a conclusion can reasonably be drawn from empirical evidence and testimony connecting bin Laden to the horrible events of that day—granted that “evil” is defined as a human capacity. However, the persuasive force of Bush’s claim is enhanced by its appeal to a racist ideology that Edward Said names “orientalism,” which calls up images of the “evil Arab” that stalked characters in old Disney cartoons. There is another persuasive layer at work here as well—the Christian imaginary in which evil is associated with the figure of Satan. Within this context, and for some believers, the word evil can excite a network of emotions habitually associated since childhood with the devil. In this context the claim that Osama bin Laden is evil can legitimate Bush’s desire to track him down and eradicate him. It has the further persuasive advantage of aligning Bush with the forces of good. The workings of all of these sources of motivation have their own logics —that is to say, the relations between and among the moments of belief, fantasy, and myth can be traced, and these relations can be shown to make a kind of sense that is not covered by the term reason. I borrow the term [18.205.114.205] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 03:22 GMT) 60 belief ANd PAssiONAte cOmmitmeNt moments from Ernst Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, who define them as “differential positions, insofar as...