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Every now and then, I catch my more senior colleagues casting longing glances back to the public life of the Sixties, which, for all its asperities, exhibited more vibrancy than contemporary rhetorical culture. Several years ago, I began teaching at a small Midwestern liberal arts college, and I recall vividly when one of my new colleagues showed me, with no little chagrin, a program of student papers for an annual academic fair on our campus. Despite our school's legacy of neo-Calvinist transformationalism, which in the late Sixties was almost indistinguishable from a neo-Marxist social critique, most of these essays in the program represented politically conservative commitments. On another occasion, I heard a peer confess feeling disoriented upon seeing student residences dotted with Bush/Cheney signs on a campus that witnessed, thirty years back, Nixon burned in effigy.
When I ask students why they do protest so little, they reassure me that they write a lot of e-mail. Oh, and they cultivate blog presence, too. But it's hard to be impressed with point-and-click activism. Thirty years ago, in protest of an administrative decision to scuttle the college's adherence to a particular brand of neo-Calvinist thought, students from our school joined professors for a sit-in. When I told my students this story, one asked, "What's a sit-in?"
I sound nostalgic and more than a little censorious. But I'm not trying to resuscitate protest rhetoric. A picket line in our cafeteria today would be as odd as those red-faced street preachers who used to point their bibles at our windshields. I am curious, though, about what this change means.
One place to start looking for an answer is a series of Notre Dame lectures by the late Wayne Booth, published in 1974 as Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent.1 Booth's death this past October prompts a reexamination of his depiction of the rhetorical culture of the Sixties and his intuition that student rhetoric anticipates the discourse of the broader culture.
As a University of Chicago dean at the height of that turbulent decade, Booth stood between administrative rationalists and student ranters. These opposing sides, he argued, shared an essentially religious commitment to the segregation of fact from value. He could find no more articulate advocate for this divide than the public intellectual Bertrand Russell, "perhaps the last and greatest modernist to embody both extremes of the creed." Russell, in other words, managed to speak for both sides of the divide—the champions of "fact" and the champions of "value"—because both were willing to defer to his faith in critical doubt—i.e., his insistence that mind, world, and knowledge can be reduced to what can be known by science. Buy into Russell's dogma that we only know for sure what we can't doubt, and here's the insight you're left with, Booth concluded: "I can only trick you, or force you, or blackmail you, or shoot you—and thus change your mind permanently."
Booth's counter was to doubt the doubters—in hopes, perhaps, that two negatives would undo a positivist. Watch, for instance, how he (Q) jabbed questions into a passage from Russell's What I Believe (R):
R: "Man is a part of Nature, not something contrasted with Nature."
Q: I agree, but this seems to me to be precisely what you deny when you choose to rule out all of man's values as irrelevant to Nature.
R: "His thoughts and his bodily movements follow the same laws that describe the motion of stars and atoms."
Q: Why? What kind of laws? The laws—no doubt extremely general—of Supreme Being? You have rejected those. The law of gravity? Of chemical combination? You have made a huge leap here. …
R: "Of this physical world, uninteresting in itself, Man is a part."
Q: The original proposition reasserted and still unproved.
R: "His body, like other matter, is composed of electrons and protons, which, so far as we know, obey the same laws as those now forming part of animals or plants."
Q: So far as we know, in your sense, we can also say that they don't.
R: "There are some who maintain that physiology can never be reduced to physics, but their arguments are not very convincing."
Q: Why? Let's see one. And what about psychology and politics and ethics?
R: "And it seems prudent to suppose that they are mistaken."
Q: Why? What a curious inversion of Pascal we have here!
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