Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Rob Goodman on Risk and Rhetoric (Episode 46)
617 Plays1 year ago
Want to become more Stoic? Join us and other Stoics this October: Stoicism Applied by Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay on Maven
This conversation will help you think more deeply about the nature of rhetoric.
Caleb Ontiveros speaks with the political scientist Rob Goodman. You may recognize his name from the book Rome’s Last Citizen, which he wrote with past Stoa Conversations guest, Jimmy Soni. He's also the author of Words on Fire: Eloquence and Its Conditions.
We discuss ancient Romans, current politics, risk, and rhetoric.
(02:03) Introduction
(03:56) Who was Cicero?
(07:00) Cicero & Cato the Younger
(19:53) Rhetoric
(29:50) Responsibilities of the Audience
(32:57) Politics as Spectators
(36:43) Politics as Conflict
(39:13) Why Rome?
***
Subscribe to The Stoa Letter for weekly meditations, actions, and links to the best Stoic resources: www.stoaletter.com/subscribe
Download the Stoa app (it’s a free download): stoameditation.com/pod
Listen to more episodes and learn more here: https://stoameditation.com/blog/stoa-conversations/
Thanks to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations: https://ancientlyre.com/
Recommended
Transcript
Timeless Appeal of Stoicism
00:00:00
Speaker
Part of the reason that I think stoicism appeals to people like Cicero and Cato in their time and place, and has appealed to lots of people, lots of times and places, is because at the heart of it is this idea of responding to uncertainty, this idea of when what we're going to get from the world is so insecure, whether it's our happiness or the health and safety of people we love or our own health and safety or our own material success, you know, things that can be taken away from us in an instant. When that's the case,
00:00:28
Speaker
Stoicism, I think, has looked like a real refuge to people. There's a part of ourselves that is always under our
Podcast Introduction
00:00:34
Speaker
control. Welcome to Stoic Conversations. In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of stoicism. Each week, we'll share two conversations. One between the two of us, and another will be an in-depth conversation with an expert.
00:00:53
Speaker
In this conversation, I speak with political scientist, Rob Goodman. You may recognize his name from the book, Rome's Last Citizen, which he wrote with the past Stowe Conversations guest, Jimmy Sony.
Cicero and Cato in Modern Politics
00:01:08
Speaker
We discuss ancient Rome and Romans, the legends Cicero, Cato the Younger, and what their examples mean for our politics and rhetoric today.
00:01:20
Speaker
This conversation helped me think more deeply about rhetoric and its relationship to risk. I think it can do the same for you too. Here is our conversation.
00:01:34
Speaker
Welcome to Stoa Conversations. My name is Caleb Ontiveros, and today I am speaking with Rob Goodman.
Rob Goodman's Background
00:01:43
Speaker
Rob is the Assistant Professor of Politics and Public Administration at Toronto Metropolitan University, and he is the author of Rome's Last Citizen with Jimmy Sony, Words on Fire, and also the book Not Here.
00:01:59
Speaker
Thanks for coming. Thanks so much for having me on. Well, let's start with this question. What's your story? So as you mentioned, I'm a professor here in Toronto. My teach class is on things like ancient political thought, and history of political thought, and imperial political theory. But before I got into academia, I was a speechwriter. So I worked on Capitol Hill in DC, in both the House and the Senate, writing speeches for democratic leaders.
00:02:23
Speaker
for about five years altogether. So after that, I went backpacking in New Zealand for a while with my wife. And after that, I went to grad school. When I started thinking about what I'd like to study on the way to being a political scientist, I thought about something that could combine my interests both in ancient politics, especially the Roman Republic, and in the study of speech writing and eloquence. So I decided to make that my focus and work on rhetoric and history of political thought and the idea of eloquence and political theory.
00:02:50
Speaker
So when I sat down to write my most recent book, minus one, I've got one coming out of Canada in just a little bit, the next summer, actually. But my most recent one grew on my dissertation work. When I started thinking about the idea of eloquence and why it's so important to thinkers like Cicero and why it's such an important concept, not just in the ancient world, but for much of our political history that we inherit.
00:03:12
Speaker
and why it seems less important today and what's happened to change or understanding of what eloquence does and what it means and why it matters or doesn't matter. And that's really been a pleasure to me to combine my professional interest in speech writing and rhetoric with my interest in the history of political thought and how ideas, especially political ideas combine and change and then go through better morphs over time. So I led my book Words on Fire. It's called Words on Fire, Eloquence and its Conditions.
00:03:37
Speaker
And it's about that idea of eloquence, what it meant in the ancient world and what it might be in a world that still looks at people like Cicero for political inspiration and models of time, but of course has some really different political institutions. Does his idea of eloquence still matter to us? And if not, maybe what do we lose as a result of that?
Cicero: Politician and Philosopher
00:03:56
Speaker
Yeah. Who was Cicero?
00:03:58
Speaker
Well, Cicero is probably most people's go-to figure if they were to think about the most influential and most important orator, not just in the Roman world, but at all times, sort of everyone's model for eloquence. So that's how he appears sort of as a marble statue. But I think the really interesting thing is that Cicero was also someone who was an active politician and a lawyer. He was someone who was deeply involved.
00:04:22
Speaker
in Roman politics. I had a time of, of course, crisis and transition, political breakdown, constitutional crisis. I had an atomic civil war at Cicero in the last generation in the Roman Republic. I had a hand in all of that. So not only was he an active politician who was actively engaged
00:04:38
Speaker
in giving speeches in the Senate and to meetings with the Roman people and to representing clients in political trials in the Roman law courts. He was also one who gave a lot of thought to what eloquence means, why it matters, how it changed over time, and what it means at a time of political crisis. That's one reason he appeals to me. Obviously, he's in another league compared to anyone I know, but there's something there that appeals to me about the idea of combining theory and practice. A person who was both practicing
00:05:05
Speaker
oratory as significantly as it's ever been practiced, but also in the time when he wasn't pursuing active politics, sitting down to think about its theory and how it fits into an account of what a republic means and what republican politics mean in general. So not a lot of people in history give us that, the ability both to practice public speech at that high level, but also to spend a lot of time writing theoretical reflections on it that has took the time.
00:05:31
Speaker
Right. Yeah. He does. He is possibly one of the most impressive combinations of theory and practice. I suppose on the theory side, he has, of course, that there's a theory of oratory, but also quite a lot of philosophy on different philosophies of life to accounts of, you know, what is a just war and how to grieve. And then we also have in terms of his life, he went through the fall of the Roman Republic.
00:05:59
Speaker
basically. Arguably he saved it first, saw it perish, and then started to see the new Roman Empire start to rise. So that is quite a life. It is. And I think living a political life at a time of crisis like that is probably not very pleasant to someone who has to go through it. And a lot of Cicero's letters and his communications with people that he lived with sort of testify to that. And that's one of the really neat things about Cicero is we don't just have his academic works and copy of the speeches.
00:06:29
Speaker
He did a really deliberate job, and he had also the people he enslaved who were his secretaries, did a really deliberate job of preserving his letters to other Roman elite figures that were then chronicling what it was like to live through this period of tremendous upheaval and uncertainty. And I think the more that the time we live in looked like that sort of time. The more we, I think, can identify with what it might've been like for Cicero, who was in the middle of it virtually from his twenties to the untimely end of his life when he died in political violence or was assassinated.
Cato: Stoic and Political Integrity
00:07:00
Speaker
Yup. Yeah, absolutely. So the other figure you've thought a lot about is Cato the Younger. So how would you contrast their two lives, if you will? You have Cicero in politics and Cato. What do you think are the most important details to know about these two Roman figures?
00:07:19
Speaker
Yeah, so as you mentioned with my co-author Jimmy Sony, I wrote a book called Rome's Last Citizen about Cato. And that title was a little bit provocative because of course he wasn't any kind of legal citizen of the last citizen. But in a lot of ways he represented the people, including Cicero, this dying idea of a Roman Republic that looked like it was on the way out over the course of his life. So I think the contrast that I'd point to is that although they both placed a really high value on what it meant
00:07:47
Speaker
to be a free and self-governing republic, what it meant to have Republican institutions, what it meant to have a Senate, what it meant to have elected magistrates and so on, all these things that are associated with the traditions of Roman freedom. Cicero in many ways was an outsider. He sought power. He played the game. He made alliances. They weren't always smart. Of course, it didn't always work out for him in the end, but he was someone who very much rose from position of an outsider, from the position of someone who
00:08:11
Speaker
you know, was a so-called novulus sahomo, a new man, someone without illustrious ancestors in politics, and rose to the absolute top of this consulship and was exceptionally good for Milton's life and playing the political game on the strength of his oratory and the strength of his just native politics skills.
00:08:29
Speaker
Cato, like Cicero, is another member of the elite, but there's some important differences. One, he's descended from a very illustrious family. Part of the reason we call him Cato the Younger is because Cato the Elder, his famous ancestor, was well known as being the most famous Roman censor. He used sort of this enforcer of ancient Roman morals and ancient Republican ideals, and is famous for popularizing the saying, Cartago de Linde asks, Carthage must be destroyed, which sort of speaks to his vengefulness.
00:08:55
Speaker
in foreign policy. So his descendant, Cato the Younger, inherits a lot of those qualities and those qualities of sort of inflexibility and unbendingness and traditional morality. So whereas Cicero really prioritized, I think, climbing through the political system, Cato, although he pursued a life in politics,
00:09:14
Speaker
also was not really unwilling to tell people to go screw themselves. If seeking political office or seeking popularity compromised what he saw as his ideals and the republic's ideals. So he goes out in history as a much more uncompromising figure and the thing that he's probably most famous for
00:09:31
Speaker
He's resisting Julius Caesar, the dictator who is a prime mover of the fall of the Republic, resisting in the Civil War. And then once it's clear the war is over and that Caesar is won, Cato famously kills himself or that live under Caesar, Caesar's dictatorial rule, even though Caesar had made a big point of saying that he would have pardoned him to demonstrate his mercy. So Cicero, I think, is really famous for
00:09:57
Speaker
She was laying down political theories of republicanism and eloquence and oratory that explained what the republic was, even as it was passing out of history, that people turned to in later years for inspiration. I think Cato is more famous as someone who never quite wields the degree of political power that Cicero does, but wields a significantly higher degree of moral power because of the forced example, because he was not willing to
Cato vs. Cicero: Political Strategies
00:10:22
Speaker
compromise. You're right up to the end.
00:10:24
Speaker
winning that chooses to end his life rather than submit it. But even before that, he was someone who probably could have had a more successful political career if he had reached the right poems and said the right things in public. But part of his self-image and part of what he really valued about what he wanted to project for himself to the public was the idea that Cader was someone who only listens to himself. He only listens to his own sense of principle and never makes political compromise. So in a lot of ways, they both end up watching their political projects go by the wayside.
00:10:53
Speaker
They're both innocent political failures because they're their project of preserving a certain form of government, of course, doesn't work out for either of them, but maybe for different reasons. I think one of the judgments that Jimmy and I make in the book is that Cato might've been more politically successful if he'd been a little shooter and more willing to make appropriate political alliances.
00:11:13
Speaker
Whereas a lot of times the knock on Cicero historically has been that he was too willing to do so. That despite the fact that he has a set of political theoretical beliefs, he was also willing to do what it took to form alliances and to keep and maintain power. And what we propose in the book is that these are people with very compatible goals who had a similar vision of what they wanted the role of the public to look like.
00:11:37
Speaker
But sort of their fatal weakness on both counts was that they couldn't find a way towards really forming a stable kind of alliance towards cooperating with one another, towards bending, towards blending Cicero's oratorical skill and sense of the inside game of politics and Cato's really inspiring defense of public and principles. I think that as a more, of course, they were friendly, but we described them more as frenemies because they couldn't always agree on a strategy.
00:12:03
Speaker
And we think that with a more flexible approach and with a greater willingness to make common cause, history might've been at least a little bit different, at least in the short term. But of course, that's what if history is great, what ifs as far as we're concerned. Right, right. Yeah, I suppose if you wanted to describe
00:12:20
Speaker
Cato the Younger, well or admirably, he would say he's exceptionally principled, but of course you could also describe him as perhaps ignorant or even delusional about the nature of politics. And then you have Cicero, much more crafty, willing to compromise, but perhaps too willing to compromise, not so keen to die for what he saw the Republic.
00:12:44
Speaker
Yeah, although I will say Cicero does end up dying for it, just like Cato does. The difference being that I think Cicero was trying to escape when he was caught up to by the troops of Marcus Antonius, who was Cicero's big enemy at the time. Cato, I think, was the kind of guy who was very happy and proud to die for his political beliefs. I think Cicero, although by all accounts he faces it very bravely in a way that so it's probably admire, I think much would have preferred to live to fight another day. So I think that's another difference there.
00:13:15
Speaker
Absolutely. What do you personally find most admirable about Cato the Younger? What do I personally find most admirable? I think one of the things that's interesting is that, I think this goes to Stoicism, which I know is a theme of your podcast, which is part of Cato's imperviousness to other people's opinions is connected to his Stoicism. I think it's both that Stoicism, as he learned it from his Greek teachers and tutors,
00:13:41
Speaker
taught him that idea of self-sufficiency, of the idea that one's own virtue is something that can't be compromised by other people or by how things out there in the world go, that you are always in control of your reactions and maintaining your virtue in that sense. So I think that that's something he learned from Stoicism. But the other interesting thing is that in a lot of ways, Cato was willing to publicly identify himself
00:14:04
Speaker
as a Stoic and publicly embraced Stoic beliefs at a time when that would have been a really odd position. That would have been a really, made him an outlier among Romans. And a lot of Romans in the senatorial class, you know, people like Cicero, you know, gave him no little amount of political flack for these really strange beliefs that he was reputed to have.
00:14:21
Speaker
So, you know, whereas I think a lot of us think about people like, you know, later stoics like Sinek and Marcus Raylius and think about stoics at the center of power as being just sort of synonymous with what it means to be Roman. That was by no means the case in Cato's time. To be stoic in a lot of ways was to be un-Roman. It was sort of to be Greek. It was this imported philosophy that was gaining a toehold as a result of people like Cato. So to be able to scorn public opinion in the way that he did.
00:14:48
Speaker
and also to be able to adopt and import a philosophy that struck a lot of people as odd, but struck Cato as very much worth living and dying for, that's the admiral and principled side of his character. I think that's the flip side of his inability to compromise, is he was also unable to compromise when it was a matter of his personal beliefs and his personal integrity. That's why we enjoyed writing about him, because he's such a
00:15:11
Speaker
He's such a puzzle, I think, because the biographers, I think, love people like him in the sense that his admirable character, his admirable quality was also the complete flip side of his less than admirable quality. They're the very thing that made Cato such an inspiring and transformative figure in the history of stoicism and in the history of Rome. It was also the thing that sort of doomed him. Yeah, that's right. As you go through his life, you see, oh, this is the fruits of his principledness.
00:15:38
Speaker
You see him as a virtuous character. Then as things go on and on, he's faced with these different political choices. Say an alliance with Pompey the Great, one of his enemies, someone who he fears is going to threaten the Republic. He just throws out any olive branches Pompey might offer him. And you wish, oh, well, at this point, maybe you could have been, if not a little bit less principled, at least more savvy with what you
00:16:05
Speaker
we're doing with the source of political decisions perhaps. That's a sense you get where initially you're very excited about his character and then you see this is the sort of thing that can get one and all sorts of problems in the political realm. That's an accurate description. Yeah, what about that same question for
Cicero's Eloquence and Rhetoric
00:16:25
Speaker
Cicero? I'm curious. When you think about the Admiral traits about, what do you personally find most Admiral on Cicero's side?
00:16:32
Speaker
I think for Cicero, what's really admirable for me is the way that he is able to both be an active participant in this political race, as we've been talking about, but also someone who's able, in his moments of enforced exile or his moments of not being active in politics, to step back and think about what it all means. That's why he's important, not just in the political history of the Republic, but in the political theory that comes out of it and the eloquence that comes out of it.
00:16:56
Speaker
And I just think about what it was like to live through our recent upheavals, just living through code, for instance. It's one thing to just put your head down and get through the day to day, but I think the people I've really admired in that and people who've been able to give us a sense of where it's all going and how this might be changing our world as it's happening. And in a very different way, that's what Cicero did. I think the really interesting thing in my recent book about eloquence I write about.
00:17:18
Speaker
is how Cicero starts from this fact of a political crisis and turmoil. The idea that an orator, a public figure like him, can no longer expect to dominate the political scene just on the force's words because it's a time where words are giving way to violence. So if that's the case, and Cicero sees it happening all around him, he has to start thinking about why does eloquence matter or does eloquence matter in a world where people are settling things with their fists or with swords. And he comes up with a really interesting and innovative answer that I think has been really influential, which is that
00:17:49
Speaker
Eloquences is no longer for Cicero about necessarily winning or dominating audiences, dominating the other speaker. Those things are nice, but that's not the gist. The real kernel of it for Cicero is this ability to endure risk, this ability to say, in a moment of political crisis, when a public speaker goes out to confront an audience, when an orator goes out to confront the role of public or the Senate or a jury at trial,
00:18:11
Speaker
The orator shows courage and bravery and virtus, this quality of Rome is associated with courage and manliness, not necessarily by winning and dominating opponents, but by enduring, by dealing with this enormously high risk situation.
00:18:26
Speaker
by dealing with the fact that everything could go wrong and he could lose face, which for someone like Cicero was worth everything, including his life itself. If the performance goes wrong, if he screws up and that this is the real source of eloquence, not necessarily the particular order of words you put them in, but what happens in the process of a speaker confronting public risk, a speaker confronting an audience with the power to make things go very badly for him if he screws up.
00:18:52
Speaker
And in the moments where he doesn't screw up, in the moments where he's able to endure that possibility and still string together some remarkable words, that's really the moment where eloquence is born. So for Cicero, what I get from this is the idea that faced with this political crisis and faced with this change in
00:19:13
Speaker
this practice of oratory he dedicated much of his life to, he wasn't a traditionalist. He wasn't someone who just blindly clung to the old way of doing things because that's always how they've been done. He was someone who really, I think, sat down for a rethink and said, how can we reimagine what oratory means, what public speech means, what my calling and my profession means at a time when everything is up in the air, at a time of just un-political upheaval?
00:19:40
Speaker
And that, I think, is what's been really enduring about his work. And of course, it's enduring enough that some 2,000 years later, some guy in Canada is still thinking about Cicero and thinking with him and writing books about him. And not all of us get to say that, of course.
00:19:53
Speaker
That's really quite incredible that so many of his works were done as a result of exile or some amount of force downtime. And that's the sort of thing we end up finding exceptionally philosophically politically useful. So initially we have this model of rhetoric that comes down to us. And if we wanted to caricature it, we could say like, well, rhetoric, that's the sort of thing one does to persuade or perhaps even manipulate a group of people. Whereas I think that's not, as you just suggested now, that's not Cicero's picture.
00:20:23
Speaker
of rhetoric, let alone eloquence.
00:20:28
Speaker
No, I think that that's fair. And I think definitely this is something that people who study rhetoric struggle with. I talk to my students about this, too, when we study public speaking and political rhetoric. Rhetoric definitely can be manipulative. It's manipulative a lot of the time. But I guess where I get off that train is the idea that it's not inherently manipulative. I think people use rhetoric as a really dirty word to stand in for and to mean manipulative speech. When there's a lot more, it can be. Some of the things it can be
00:20:57
Speaker
For Cicero, for instance, there's this idea of enduring risk, confronting the public, bearing some kind of vulnerability on the part of an elite member of the political class who normally wouldn't have that vulnerability. That's one thing. I think there's also a lot in Aristotle's view of rhetoric that Cicero studied and was aware of. When Aristotle talks about rhetoric isn't the art of persuading people, it's the art of seeing the available means of persuasion.
00:21:23
Speaker
And that's really interesting because just like Cicero, Aristotle isn't really situating what rhetoric means in the ability to win people over. He's situated in this sort of art of perception, of seeing a situation, of exercising collective judgment together, of understanding things. So I think of rhetoric as a way of, as a kind of perception. It's an understanding of the situation you're in. It's an understanding of where the issue at hand. It's an understanding of the audience you confront and what they need and what matters to them and how they think and how they feel.
00:21:50
Speaker
And out of all these things, rhetoric is a way of coming to collective judgments, of thinking through difficult questions that concern the public under conditions of uncertainty. And this is important to Aristotle. It's important for Cicero. It's important in the history of thinking about rhetoric. And part of the reason I think why I resent the idea of rhetoric as inherently manipulative is that I think it neglects
00:22:17
Speaker
how much history goes into thinking about what else rhetoric can be and the other kinds of values that doesn't mean it's always good. Of course, it's not. Of course, there's manipulative rhetoric, there's pandering rhetoric, there's demagogic rhetoric, there's all sorts of ugly facets of it. But I think that would be easy. It would be looking at the absolute worst aspect of anything and associating that with a whole. Whereas I think that a more
00:22:41
Speaker
intensive study of what it means. And a more intensive study of what it means to people who practice that at a high level and how it has mattered to them and how it's mattered to their societies, it shows you how rhetoric and political freedom go together too. So it's not either good or bad. It's just really interesting. And of course, that makes a great thing to study.
00:22:58
Speaker
Yeah, I suppose on the manipulation model, if you will, you have this idea that, oh, you have this some set of policies or some ideas that you want to transmit to whatever the audience is. But on the model, you're sketching out the model, Cicero's sketches out. You're not just trying to transfer ideas to some other people. You're also learning from them, engaging from them in a much more democratic
00:23:25
Speaker
in a way that involves uncertainty and involves some amount of risks of the sorts of things you transmit are the sorts of things that don't land so well. Yeah. What I would say is that it's very much a two-way street. If you're practicing rhetoric as a monologue or as a one-way street, just telling people what you need to tell them, you're not going to be that successful. Of course, part of the essence of it is this idea of
00:23:49
Speaker
learning and speaking at the same time. It's not like formally a dialogue, but in a lot of ways it has this sort of dialogue properties that what makes it go over well is a product of how well one knows the audience and how well one anticipates their reactions to anything from a figure of speech or the rhythm of your speaking to the broader argument, the broader case that you're making.
00:24:10
Speaker
And I think one of the resources we get from people like Cicero is how to think of ways to make rhetoric more like a dialogue and less like a monologue. The point of view that I take, and I talk about this in the book, and to my general point of view, is that political societies have to make
00:24:27
Speaker
collective judgments or democratic judgments or judgments among the public are always going to have rhetoric. They're always going to have some kind of form of this. The question is, does it look more like members of the elite talking down to people who they don't really engage with, or does it look like a more risky or dangerous activity where they put something at stake and where there's a possibility of it going badly and a possibility of losing out?
00:24:49
Speaker
You know, these are all aspects of rhetoric that I think Cicero really brings to the fore. And I think by drawing on those, we can make rhetoric a little more democratic in our time. What's sort of a model of rhetoric used well for Cicero?
The Power of Rhetoric: Antonius' Trial
00:25:05
Speaker
I have a really interesting example that I talk about. There's a moment when one of his interlocutors, the people who were speaking for him in his dialogue on Oratory, talks about a successful trial that he had. The orator's named Antonius, and he's defending this guy who's a Roman general who is brought up on corruption charges. It's not clear whether or not he did it. Let's just assume these people are attorneys defending their clients. He wants to give the best possible defense he can get.
00:25:31
Speaker
And Antonius describes what he does at the end of the speech, which is sort of dramatically ripping off his client's toga and revealing his battle scars underneath, which was perceived as very inspirational and perceived as demonstrating what he had sacrificed in his fight for the public that he wasn't just someone who sort of sat behind the front lines, but actually was stabbed and scarred and suffered for his people's political independence.
00:25:58
Speaker
This is really, for Cicero, really a model for a lot of reasons. So one, it's a dramatic gesture. Cicero's oratory is full of dramatic gestures. It's full of what later people would call the sublime or this invocation of really big, swirling, dangerous emotions, not just in speech, but also in gesture. I think there's a drama kind of Roman rhetoric that Cicero talks about that I think is missing from a lot of our political speech.
00:26:25
Speaker
But there's also the sense that it's a sense of risk. It's an odd and dangerous gesture to script someone partially naked in public. That's the thing that sort of inherently goes against a lot of our norms around things like clothing and things like propriety and what it means to be a general, what it means to be a Roman or it means to be an older man. But knowing when the moment is right to do that.
00:26:48
Speaker
And knowing or at least anticipating how this is going to go over is what makes this gesture that Cicero talks about such a depressive gesture. A gesture performed with really high stakes, with a high risk of it going wrongly, but nevertheless finding out in the moment that it's the correct gesture for the time. That's the sort of thing that he celebrates and I make a good bit of in the book.
00:27:09
Speaker
So as you're speaking or thinking about evaluating others who are speaking, what sorts of responsibilities does one have to practice rhetoric well?
00:27:20
Speaker
Well, I think the main responsibility I talk about is this responsibility to embrace risk. This idea that what makes rhetoric interesting and then worthwhile in a test of what Cicero would have called virtus is the ability to do things that endanger one's standing that are important, but also risky and threatening to one. I think the other side of this is that I think when speakers take these sorts of risks and say things that are dangerous and say things that are out of the box and say things that aren't on protest and predicted,
00:27:49
Speaker
There's also a burden on the audience to sort of rise for the challenge, to rise to the challenge of demonstrating a similar willingness to risk themselves and risk their beliefs, their convictions, their understandings themselves to risk a rethink of what's important to them. But I think the responsibility is on both sides.
00:28:05
Speaker
And one of the things I complain about the book is the way in which I think a lot of modern politics is a departure from those responsibilities. There are a lot of tools that politicians of all political persuasions can use to make their attempts to persuade the public a lot more predictable, a lot more tested, a lot more reliable, a lot more, you know, a lot safer.
00:28:26
Speaker
these techniques are really sophisticated. They're everything from data mining people's social media profiles to using cognitive psychology or polling or focus grouping to test messages. So these techniques have gotten better, but at the same time, it's not like they're alien to the ancient world. Cicero lived at a time
00:28:43
Speaker
When it was really easy to buy rhetorical handbooks that purported to give you the sort of solutions as to what kind of appeal to make and what kind of situation, what kind of argument works when, people have always been trying to make rhetoric more predictable, more reliable, safer for the people who practice it. So the thing that I get from his example is not that we're living through a big technological change that's ruined everything, but that you really need a culture of valuing oratory and valuing risk to get political actors the wherewithal
00:29:11
Speaker
and the interest in saying no to some of these things, in saying that when one sets out to try to persuade a public, there are things that matter as much as success, if not more than success, that there's a kind of virtue in doing it well, regardless of the outcome. And I think that there aren't a lot of politicians in 2023 who would identify with this. This is one of the things I think we can get for the Roman example, that other things matter in addition to success.
00:29:37
Speaker
Yeah, there's this idea of craft that's, I think, poured into the many practices, but rhetoric being one of them, and to be good at a given craft, you don't always need to get the desired outcome. Yeah. I am curious if there are other responsibilities on the audience's side that we have when we listen to people giving particular messages. So, you know, one is responding, I suppose, appropriately, but just to be a little bit more precise, I suppose it's responding with
00:30:07
Speaker
our own convictions or managing when the speaker maybe challenges the audience or says something slightly out of the box appropriately. But what else would you add to that? Or maybe could you detail that a little bit more than I just... Well, I think the audience's responsibility, as I see it, is all about this willingness to be changed by what we hear. I think what we believe and how we orient ourselves in politics, now we think about what matters.
00:30:34
Speaker
is a really deep part of who we are. It's really central to our identities. If you ask people who they are, one of the first things they'll tell you, and maybe not in every conversation, but as you get to know someone, you'll learn about their political convictions. You'll learn maybe about what party they support. You'll learn about how they came to believe what they believe. You'll learn about their philosophy. These things are constituent parts of who we are. They really matter to us. But really,
00:30:57
Speaker
powerful, challenging rhetoric can change our convictions and change our beliefs. And that means it can change who we are. And that's a really scary and dangerous thing. And not everyone is willing at all times to be open to that, nor should they. I think there's a reason that we try to protect ourselves.
00:31:12
Speaker
from these sorts of deep down challenges to what we believe and who we are. That's why people seek out information they already agree with. That's why the parts of their brain that are associated with making arguments light up when you present people with a political document that
00:31:27
Speaker
goes against whatever they happen to believe. So there's a reason people protect themselves from these things. But I think what it really takes to be a good democratic citizen is that real deep down willingness to listen and to be changed by what you hear. But what I suggest in my writing is that I don't want to blame people, ordinary people, people who listen, people like me, not people who are speaking to audiences of millions, but people like me and you, or you have a podcast, so there are a lot of ways you're both camps. But people like me who listen and are democratic citizens,
00:31:57
Speaker
I don't want to blame ordinary people because I think the situation we find ourselves in, in which a lot of people avoid having their minds changed, which a lot of our political associations are sort of tribal and just sort of need your reflexes, a lot of that comes from, I think, the sort of degraded environment we live in, which we don't see our political leaders, our political elites taking those kinds of risks.
Rhetoric: Shared Risks and Responsibilities
00:32:16
Speaker
So I talk about rhetoric as risk sharing or mutual risk taking or mutual vulnerability. But I also think that, as Spiderman says, with great power comes great responsibility.
00:32:26
Speaker
I think a lot of the responsibility for changing the place we find ourselves in comes from the top, comes from the elite. I think it's reasonable to shut our ears and not be persuaded if we don't hear from the elite a willingness to risk themselves, a willingness to speak more spontaneously, a willingness to have things go very badly because they're embracing it to be a spontaneity. And I think unless and until that happens, I think it's also reasonable on the side of the public, maybe not to listen as well as we ought to.
00:32:57
Speaker
Yeah, right. Yeah, I suppose so much political activity seems either like performance, you know, there's a model of legislative bodies as bodies are supposed to be deliberating towards different ends, but by and large, it seems like what most legislative bodies do in the state setting rate involves more a matter of performance rather than deliberation.
00:33:14
Speaker
Or you have, on the listener's side, a matter of consuming those performances. It's more of a consumptive thing rather than something that could threaten a change of opinion, which is less than ideal in many ways.
00:33:29
Speaker
But yeah, I think it's even many things that I would find myself listening to that might be challenging or that I might think, oh, this is causing me to think about a particular thing, whether it's a different podcast or lecture, what have you. If I sit back and think about what I'm really doing, when I do those activities, it's much more of a consumptive one rather than one where I'm willing to change or update a given belief. I think that's true across the board.
00:33:52
Speaker
Yeah, I think you're right. I think that there's a lot of interesting stuff written about this. Jeffrey Green wrote a book that I teach my students a lot called The Eyes of the People. It's about kind of coming to terms with the fact that most of us perceive politics. We relate to politics as spectators. We are consuming, we're watching, maybe we're doing kind of small things like occasionally you vote or occasionally you can click like on social media.
00:34:13
Speaker
But for the most part, we don't relate to politics as the sort of active decision makers. We relate to politics as spectators. And I think that's not necessarily the end of the world, but it does sort of change the equation for what can be expected of regular people in politics. So I think one way of reacting to this is we should strive to make politics more democratic. We need more power and more rules for ordinary people. And I agree, and I think that's great.
00:34:36
Speaker
But as long as we relate to politics as spectators, I think that also means we need to think about the quality of our spectating, and now that's shaped by the quality of what we hear from political elites.
00:34:46
Speaker
Right, right. So without making more sympathetic to moving political decisions to the local domain or trying to make things more democratic that way, given that it seems like it's such a large scale of democratic decision making at the national level, even a state level, it's very easy for an experience to turn into a consumptive one, given that a given decision maker isn't going to have that much actual power if they're simply voting along with
00:35:15
Speaker
a few hundred thousand other people. Yeah, I think about this a lot. I think there's a lot to be said for that, for the idea that
00:35:24
Speaker
When I think about what's important and then traditionally think about eloquence, there's this immediacy. There's a sense of being in the room where a decision is being made and reacting to the words that are being said while you're there and being able to listen and participate and react in the moment. And I know that these sort of town meetings or city council sessions or school board sessions can get really heated and ugly. And oftentimes there's a lot of wasted time. There's a lot of vitriol and hurt feelings.
00:35:49
Speaker
But they can also be really powerful. I mean, I've been in both. I've been in these sort of moments on small scale, whether they're sort of union organizing or arguments among people in my profession at professional conferences or local level meetings where the relevant decision makers are in the room trying to figure out something together. And it can be, it can bore you to tears, but at moments it can also be really powerful and transcendent. This idea that no one's responsible for this but us. You know, of course the difficulty I think is taking that and figuring out how to solve large scale problems of the kind that we have to deal with.
00:36:18
Speaker
on a human-sized, meaningful scale. And that's really, really hard. And I don't have a answer to that. I think a lot of smarter people struggle with that. But one thing that I think appeals to me is the idea that when we figure out political decisions, part of what's relevant is not just what we should decide, but at what level should something be decided? Can we decide things at the most local possible level for any given issue? And I think that's an important principle to keep in mind.
00:36:44
Speaker
Yeah, that's useful. So I suppose one alternative model to rhetoric is more conflict oriented, where instead of thinking about trying to determine the truth of a given matter or being open to being persuaded about another matter, it's much more coalitional
00:37:04
Speaker
You have your point of view and the other side has their point of view. There's no willingness on the other side to be vulnerable or submit themselves to any kind of change. And this, so we get a picture of political engagement that's simply a conflict oriented and trying to win. What do you say to people who on, you know, whatever position have that sort of
00:37:31
Speaker
view where they think, look, the discussion's over. It's been over four decades. Let's try to win now.
00:37:39
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I think that's always part of it. A rhetoric wouldn't have any sort of thing motivating people to do it if the state weren't high. And one thing that I get from Cicero is this idea that settling things with words is so valuable because the only other alternative is settling things with fists or weapons. I think about all these great moments that he narrates in his dialogue in which people like him and his mentors are trying to keep the peace and failing and things are breaking down into civil war. So this idea that
00:38:05
Speaker
Being able to settle these major questions simply through talking in a lot of ways is just magical. But of course, we have to accept that we can do that. We have to accept that the stakes matter. We have to accept that there's something at stake, and people have to be motivated by winning and losing. I think that's completely part of the process, valid. I guess all I'm trying to say is that that's not all there is to the process, that what also matters
00:38:27
Speaker
not just sort of the personal character and the personal virtue or ethics of the person speaking, but also how the ways we negotiate these things, the way we do powerful solving in public, the way we do collective judging in public.
00:38:42
Speaker
how these ways shape the kind of society we're in. So just as I think we want to be a society that settles things with words rather than fighting, I think we'd also want to be a society that settles things with particular kinds of words, with not special words per se, but with models of what public speech should look like, models that involve give and take, models that involve dialogue, rep and monologue, and models that leads down to size a little bit in a democratic passion.
00:39:09
Speaker
these things are all, I think all part of the equation as well as far as I'm concerned. Right.
Roman Politics vs. Modern States
00:39:14
Speaker
One question I wanted to ask is about Rome generally. So of course there's always a question, are we Rome that many Western countries tend to ask themselves? And they're often looking at, though not always, they're often looking at the late Republic. How useful of a political analogy do you think the late Republic of Rome is for states like Canada or the US today?
00:39:39
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, that's a hard question. That's a question that comes up a lot. In some ways it isn't, in some ways it isn't. So I think one way that it is, is that what the Roman Republic looked like was a system that had a lot of Republican commitments, commitments to competitive politics, even though it was among an elite.
00:40:03
Speaker
public contestation, public voting, elections, things that are not quite democratic in our sense, but have a large role for the people to play and have a large role to bring the people into contestation with the elite. Things that we'd recognize as values that are not that different than our own. And then also dealing with the fact that the
00:40:22
Speaker
society that has those institutions is also a society that is a world hegemon, is a world power, is a cumulated empire. And in a lot of ways that people have looked at the analogy between the American empire, between American world hegemony and power.
00:40:36
Speaker
and Roman world hegemony and power as its own smaller Mediterranean world. This idea of this very old conflict between wanting to be a power abroad, but also wanting Republican freedom and liberty government at home. Is there a blowback? Do these ends come into conflict? These are a lot of the ways that I think people have looked to Rome
00:40:59
Speaker
For example, I think another way that is such a powerful example is looking at what constitutional crisis looks like. You know, of course, it's not the only constitutional crisis in history, but it's sort of the foundational one when the American founders look back, you know, even with people as early as Machiavelli look back.
00:41:14
Speaker
and think about what happens when a republic falls into dictatorship and one-man rule, Rome is the go-to example. In that way, it's a cautionary tale, even if it's not a perfect parallel. When George Lucas is trying to think about what he's going to put in the Star Wars prequel, and he's talking about a galactic republic turning into an empire, that whole thing is patterned on the model of Rome. It's really deep in our cultural memory in a lot of ways. That's one thing. Some of the ways in which I think it's not
00:41:43
Speaker
entirely parallel or it's a different economic system, a system that's based on slavery, a system, of course, in which the only political power are men, a system in which politics has to be done on the face-to-face level and not mediated in any area that politics is essentially just a face-to-face affair. Things like rumor and word of mouth matter because there's no mass media to speak of.
00:42:08
Speaker
So, these are details, but they're details that matter because I think sometimes people, maybe even me sometimes, look a little too uncritically at like, oh, it's a Republican government that's also running an empire and has a constitutional crisis and think, boom, just like us. Well, yeah, maybe in some ways, but in some ways I think the details and the differences matter just as much.
00:42:27
Speaker
Well, is there anything you'd like to say about stoicism while I have you?
Stoicism's Modern Relevance
00:42:33
Speaker
Any quick takes or reflections on how stoicism has developed? How you've changed your mind about stoicism, if at all, as a result of doing these projects?
00:42:43
Speaker
Yeah. So I think one thing that really interests me is the ways in which these two figures I spent a lot of time with, you know, Cato and Cicero are both associated with Stoicism. You know, Cato a little bit more than Cicero. Cato's sort of famous as the Roman Stoic, the person who sets the model for what Stoicism means. Cicero has some nice things to say about Stoicism, but he's also sort of willing to make fun of it and dissociate himself from it.
00:43:06
Speaker
which is not surprising. But I guess part of the reason that I think Stoicism appeals to people like Cicero and Cato in their time and place, and has appealed to lots of people in lots of times and places, is because I think sort of at the heart of it, as far as I understand it, and I'm no sort of specialist on it, but I think at the heart of it is this idea of responding to uncertainty, this idea of
00:43:27
Speaker
When what we're going to get from the world is so insecure, whether it's our happiness or the health and safety of people we love or our own health and safety or our own material success, you know, things that can be taken away from us in an instant. When that's the case.
00:43:42
Speaker
Stoicism, I think, has looked like a real refuge to people, that there's a part of ourselves that is always under our control. There are things that we can draw on to fortify ourselves against these things. And I think there are critiques of that approach as well. But as far as I'm concerned, at least I can say that I both see why it's so appealing to people situated like Cato and Cicero are situated, and also appealing to people who are situated now in a time that maybe is not quite
00:44:11
Speaker
fall the Roman Republic levels of upheaval, but sometimes look as if it might be in which we're living through an extremely turbulent time that looks to get more turbulent. And I think stoicism both gives people sort of an armor against that, but also gives them the means and wherewithal not to withdraw from society, but to be active participants in it, even as they recognize that there are some things that can't be touched by what goes wrong. Excellent. Well, is there anything else you'd like to add? No, that's great. It's been a pleasure talking about this stuff with you.
00:44:41
Speaker
Thanks for listening to Stoic Conversations. If you found this conversation useful, please give us a rating on Apple, Spotify, or whatever podcast platform you use, and share it with a friend. We are just starting this podcast, so every bit of help goes a long way.
00:44:57
Speaker
And I'd like to thank Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music. Do check out his work at ancientliar.com and please get in touch with us at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback or questions. Until next time.