The Politics of Sacred Rhetoric: Absolutist Appeals and Political Persuasion

Conclusion: "A Cure for Thought and the Diseases It Breeds"

Conclusion “A Cure for Thought and the Diseases It Breeds” Why do I spend my time with fools when I could easily invent a cure for thought and the diseases it breeds? —Christopher Kennedy, Trouble with the Machine Whether sacred rhetoric is a disease depends on your view of the groups who are gaining its political advantages, as well as your view of what constitutes a healthy democracy. One can easily come to a negative view, as sacred appeals increase discord and decrease deliberation. But this may be a limited conclusion. If democratic politics should turn on the concerns of democratic citizens, then the first threshold is that citizens care at all. Often in American politics this threshold is not met. About most issues most of the time citizens know little and care marginally, trusting in political elites to manage things for them. Sacred rhetoric increases citizen engagement, emboldening our absentee democracy. Not all political appeals activate citizens’ own values and limits, bringing them into the democratic process. Sacred rhetoric increases the democratic good of participation even as it lowers the positive benefits of deliberation. In this sense our assessment of sacred rhetoric depends on which of the competing theories of democracy we find most persuasive. For sacredness there is no cure, only an appreciation of its contradictions and possibilities. The psychological effects of sacred rhetoric are distinctive, powerful, and in a sense contradictory, with equally complex influences on the state of our democracy. The persuasive effects are distinctive because they represent a form of persuasion centered on process rather than outcome, an 209 210 g The Politics of Sacred Rhetoric aspect of persuasion that has not been fully recognized by political psychologists . The initial empirical evidence indicates that the effects are strong, suggesting that sacred rhetoric is a powerful tool of the political groups that employ it. But the democratic influence is a contradiction, advantaging one aspect of democracy while disadvantaging another. Moreover, because the use of sacred rhetoric is not equally distributed among parties and interests, understanding its effects is a partisan concern as well as a normative quandary . This conclusion offers a final thought about each of these aspects of the study—the psychology of sacred rhetoric, its democratic consequences, and its influence on political power. The Psychology of Sacred Rhetoric “The formation of political preferences ought to be one of the major subjects of political science . . . Preferences in regard to political objects are not external to political life; on the contrary, they constitute the very internal essence, the quintessence of politics: the construction and reconstruction of our lives together.”1 —Aaron Wildavsky Persuasion is one of the earliest and most enduring interests of students of democratic politics. Is it possible to move others to our cause, and how can this best be done? The avenue examined here is not a panacea for persuasion , but rather a particular mechanism for changes in reasoning and motivation . These two effects are grounded in the psychology of the sacred, or the urge to protect what we have set aside for special reverence. The sacred shift engendered by absolutist appeals results in these particular forms of persuasion, though it gives no advantage in other significant aspects. Of the several facets of persuasion, the most obvious is attitude change, or a simple shift of opinion. In this sense sacred rhetoric is no more persuasive than its negotiable or consequentialist counterparts. Nonsacred appeals can be quite persuasive, and sacredness does not seem to change minds more effectively than reasoned consequences. But in other ways sacredness provides a powerful distinction. About the sacred we think differently and care more. The first of these aspects of sacredness leads to the reasoning effect, or a shift toward more absolutist thinking and justification. The experimental evidence demonstrates that exposure to sacred rhetoric leads directly to an increase in absolutist justifications, concentrating on nonnegotiable and nonconsequentialist arguments, the citation of appropriate boundaries and respected authorities, and expressions of moral outrage. The value in question becomes protected, inviolable, not to be sullied by the cheap trading or Conclusion f 211 power bargaining of mundane politics. This effect influences the way citizens reason and justify themselves. It is not an effect on the outcome of their opinion, but instead on the process of their thinking. This sort of process effect has been underappreciated in studies of political psychology and political communication, perhaps because it is less visible. The...