Integrity in Motion

Rhetoric is not the key to controlling others that some believe it to be. Yes, it assists with subterfuge and it negotiates tight legal corners. But it lacks ambition. Its influence extends no further than the situation at hand. It captures ground like a bird in flight. If control is what you seek, fear works far better.

Rhetoric’s power stems from its structural integrity. Its fluidity guards against both opportunism and righteousness alike. Human communication is inventive, self-serving, and often fantastical, but the laws of physics still apply. Say anything to anyone and your own spin will topple you. Plant yourself in one place, refuse to budge, and you'll fall over from the slightest push. 

Rhetoric offers a plastic third option: maintain your axis; bend, turn from your core and move with integrity. It’s the only way to move in coordination with others without being carried away by external forces. It is also the only way to get anything done. Coordinated movement, for better or worse, drives social change, not sheer bravery. An ethical question illustrates:

Do you really serve your own values when you repeat arguments that you know will not compel others to change their minds? Uncompromising politics (which is different than caring about the fate of other living things) turns selfish when connection is no longer the goal. To be concerned above all else with where you stand is a form of moral narcissism. 

Consider, for instance, the argument against Arizona’s Tent City Jail made by the new sheriff of Maricopa County, Paul Penzone. Tent City first opened in the early 1990s. For almost thirty years it proved immune to the charge of cruel and inhumane treatment, perhaps because its supporters were not opposed to being cruel and inhumane to incarcerated people. Yet, less than a year after taking office, Sheriff Penzone succeeded in closing Tent City. His argument for closure?

"This facility is not a crime deterrent, it is not cost efficient, and it is not tough on criminals.”

Penzone characterized Tent City as a “circus” built for public amusement. "Starting today,” he said at a press conference announcing its closure, “that circus ends and these tents come down."

Opportunists underestimate the risk in borrowing other people's words: extend yourself too far and you will keel over. The righteous overvalue the familiar: stand firm and no one goes anywhere. Rhetoric’s third option invites you to keep moving.

File under "M" for Reagan International airport

A lesson in turning:

Irreverence is fun. Watch everyone exhaust themselves condemning you. Watch their outrage attract support for your claims. Stand back as everyone becomes entangled in their own arguments. Even when you lose, you win. After all, a statement must be true if so many people must spend so much time disputing it. Listing all the ways that Thomas Jefferson differed from Robert E. Lee is sure to raise more awkward questions than it answers.

Irreverence supposedly unmasks hypocrisy. Mostly it just repeats itself ad nauseam while our politics suffer from a serious lack of imagination. We have reduced the world to four categories—fact, fake, free speech, and fascism—and spend our days patrolling the borders of each on the look out for smugglers and itinerants. 

The question is, do we want open borders? More specifically, should Neo-Nazis have a political platform? We need a few more categories to answer that question, or at least some way of distinguishing between political organizations and organized murder.

For the record, no one excluded the Nazis from politics. They opted out all on their own. They used propaganda to aid their ascent and then they suspended the political process. In the social vacuum that they created, they got down to the business of murdering people. A political gathering in their name seems a strange tribute to that project. Like honoring Ronald Reagan by naming an airport after him. 

Hyperbole Shrugged

What makes mid-level villains like Ben Linus of Lost, or Shades of Luke Cage so captivating? They never resort to hyperbole. That alone makes them better role models, stylistically, than Glenn Greenwald.

Speech turns supervillain when people use hyperbole to express righteousness. An example is Greenwald describing Obama: “And now we have the spectacle of President Obama reciting paeans to the values of individual privacy and the pressing need for NSA safeguards with an impressively straight face.” Greenwald would demand that Batman take off the mask.

Peter Thiel is another fan of hyperbole. This is Thiel on higher education: “Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus.” But Thiel is a study in hyperbolic traps. He specializes in baiting progressives, like Greenwald, who speak with moral certitude. The traps work because, unlike Greenwald, Thiel still uses hyperbole as a form of irony.

Hyperbole attracts exaggeration and nothing is easier to shrug off than a un-ironic exaggeration. Just try matching Thiel's ridiculous tone. Accuse him of luring high school graduates to Silicon Valley and training them to confuse greed for innovation and ruthlessness for merit. Then watch while Thiel associates you with old-fashioned social panics and floats away on his airship. 

Hyperbole is comic sans with impunity. It vibrates in the register of cartoon villain. It turns facts to plaque. Complexity collapses under its bloat.

Sometimes events are catastrophic. Sometimes people are corrupt. Sometimes we need extreme language because the things about which we speak are extreme. The world generates plenty of real reason for outrage. But, as any mid-level villain will tell you at just the moment you think you have exposed him, “this time, you have it wrong. This time, no one had a plan. No one meant harm. No one derived pleasure from your pain. This time, it looks like misfortune because it is misfortune. And it’s a shame that you called the police and the newspapers to this dusty warehouse thinking that “kitten box” was code for something sinister because when I said it, I meant an actual box full of kittens. Here. Hold one. I guarantee it will make you feel better.”

exouthenismos and the Corrections

Political incorrectness is the logical end to the long American campaign against etiquette, a campaign that takes pride in ignorance of silverware. Announcing that you “don’t have time for political correctness” is like saying “I use whatever tool moves the food to my mouth.”

Premised on a warped sense of equality, the incorrect are confused over the difference between 'no etiquette' and 'new etiquette'. The dislike of etiquette stems from a Puritan desire to define the New World against the Old and all its royalty. That project has carried forward in the ordinary address we use for occupants of the nation’s highest office:

Mr. President.

America thought it could dispense with the elite’s stuffy rules when in fact it tasked itself with building the world’s most complicated system of manners. American etiquette, consequently, suffers from poor design.

Above all, Americans hate strict social codes. The notion of royal highnesses and supreme leaders clashes with the American psyche. We think no one else is any better than us. We take offense when others fail to address us as equals-who-pay-taxes. We disapprove of specialized language; we have a sixth sense for conceit.

That egalitarian ethos often turns to exouthenismos, or expressions of contempt. Living an ordinary gracious life is easy enough until being no better than anyone else means I don’t have to extend you simple courtesies. Then, through the tortured logic of incorrectness (always masked as brave frankness), we lend neighbors ladders to hang decorative lights while refusing to learn the names of holidays we don’t celebrate. Beer drinkers scoff at wine drinkers. The monosyllabic scorn those who propose more syllables.

The contempt goes in all directions. Corrections really happen. One-upmanship reduces ethics to grammatical rules.

If the incorrect confuse rudeness for equality, the offended fail to appreciate the difference between an offense and inexactness. (Is it always an offense? Or is it sometimes just an incomplete statement? And what would it accomplish to at last say everything?) Some feign inclusivity while ostracizing those who fail to speak properly. A 2018 survey of the American electorate by More in Common found that “political correctness” leaves many people feeling “bewildered” and beholden to rules they have “not learned to decode.”

The corrections are not reserved for the offensive. They also serve as purification among the like-minded. Watch a room full of otherwise inspiring people take turns correcting one another and see the bright designs of critical reflection turn to musty drapery.

The corrections forget, or deny, that choosing words carefully is about constructing livable spaces. We bend grammar, add syllables, turn Serena into a verb, and adjust our relationships with pronouns because the old language is uninhabitable. These modifications issue invitations to a shared expanse of open sky. They serve the same basic function as please and thank you. They recognize the occasion. They lay claim to a new world and to the next world that follows and to the one after that.