didn’t you just hit him over the head and take the bedsheet away from him?” Yossarian asked.
Pressing his lips together with dignity, Milo shook his head. “that would have been most unjust,” he scolded firmly. “Force is wrong and two wrongs never make a right. It was much better my way. When I held the dates out to him and reached for the bedsheet, he probably thought I was offering a trade.”
“What were you doing?”
“Actually, I was offering to trade, but since he doesn’t understand English, I can always deny it.”
“Suppose he gets angry and wants the dates?”
“Why, We’ll just hit him over the head and take them away from him,” Milo answered without hesitation. (68)
This then is what argument looks like at the far left end of the continuum where force looms menacingly behind every persuasive gambit. What sorts of argument practices does one find at this end of the continuum? Propaganda and advertising come immediately to mind. Parental arguments that end with that time-honored phrase that simultaneously announces victory and admits defeat—“Because I said so!”—surely falls somewhere toward the left end of things. Then as one moves to the right toward more “purified” forms of combat, one encounters the practice of law, labor negotiation and education. Finally, at the furthest remove from might makes right, we have those purest of persuasive practices that seem not to be persuasive at all; the example Burke uses is that of writing a book. We will take a closer look at the characteristics of these different practices shortly, but before we do, we need to articulate the principle used to distinguish among these various forms of persuasion, a principle that Burke refers to variously as “standoffishness” or “self interference.”
To understand this principle it is helpful to keep in mind one of Burke’s favorite metaphors for responsible persuasion, the practice of courtship, which is itself a “purified” version of considerably less seemly practices. If courtship reigns at the far right end of the continuum, one would expect to find the persuasive equivalent to something like sexual harassment at the left end of the continuum. Sexual harassment is a predatory relationship based on asymmetry whereby one party uses their power over the other to coerce affection. In the middle, the arts of seduction come into play, as the seducer pretends to be whatever their prey wishes them to be and tells their prey whatever they wish to hear in order to achieve their own gratification. At the right end of the continuum, meanwhile, a couple engages in courtship, a respectful relationship based on mutuality whose ends inevitably include sex along with a great many other aspirations. To be sure, each of the people in a courtship relationship will do what they can to make themselves desirable to the other person, to persuade them of their viability as a partner. Certainly sexual attraction will play a role in the relationship. But each is willing for the time being to delay gratification in the name of increasing their sense of identification with the other person, overcoming the estrangements of class, gender, nationality, religion or whatever categories of difference we might use to sort out the human race. Whereas in the earlier cases relationships were little more than a means to the end of sexual gratification by one of the two parties (in Martin Buber’s formulation, a classic “I-it” relationship), the courtship relationship is an end in itself (“I-Thou”) for both partners. If one were to extend the courtship metaphor beyond the left end of the continuum, one would find oneself in the murky realm of rape and sexual assault, while off the right end of the continuum, one would find oneself in the luminous realm of celibacy, as when a nun declares herself a bride of Christ. All practices that fall along the continuum, meanwhile, are some combination of self-interest and physical desire, and a willingness to interfere with one’s natural urges in the name of other ends.
To return now to actual persuasive practices as they fall along the self-interference continuum, we begin with propaganda and advertising. These practices are, Burke maintains, very much “addressed” insofar as they are obsessively focused on audience. It is an asymmetric relationship with the advertiser or propagandist having at least some control, in the case of some propagandists, a virtual monopoly, over their audience’s access to information and understanding. While both propagandists and advertisers are quick in their public pronouncements to lavish praise on their audiences, particularly their intelligence, their own advice to each other about how to win over audiences manifests scant regard for the people they are pitching, particularly for their intelligence. Both groups spend a lot of time and extraordinary amounts of money exploring the psyches and emotional soft spots of their audiences. No other group among those who practice the arts of persuasion comes close to spending as much time as advertisers and propagandists figuring out ways to exploit their audience’s vulnerabilities. Hitler’s Mein Kampf, for example, is both a classic of propaganda theory and a thoroughgoing analysis of audience psychology. Noting Hitler’s skill at manipulation of his audience, Burke calls attention to the very calculated way “he gauges resistances and opportunities with the ‘rationality’ of a skilled advertising man planning a new sales campaign. Politics, he says, must be sold like soap—and soap is not sold in a trance” (Philosophy of Literary Form 216). Contemporary advertisers, meanwhile, are relentless in the pursuit of connections between demographic and psychographic information—there are sixty-four distinct groups of consumers arranged in a psychographic grid used by advertisers—and consumer buying habits. While old style behaviorist theories are out of favor with most academic psychologists these days, advertisers and propagandists are still in the business of manipulating stimuli to get the desired response. Like engineers who still rely on the old Newtonian paradigm to build bridges and skyscrapers, the propagandists and behaviorists seem to find that their outmoded mechanistic paradigm works just fine when it comes to selling soap and politics.
While all propaganda is by definition predatory in ways suggested above—we will consider recent uses of propaganda more extensively later in the book—advertising embraces a wider range of practices, some of which are fairly benign. Advertising is, for example, used to promote charitable contributions as well as soap. Indeed, within every category of persuasive practices one will find a range of practices that are to varying degrees advantage-seeking on the one hand or “standoffish” on the other. Some advertisements may do little more than feature positive references to their product by disinterested third parties. At times, even propaganda may serve an altruistic public policy goal; and instead of telling “the Big Lie” as Goebbels famously recommends, it may simply withhold information that would complicate its argument. But taken as a whole, these practices do not promote self interference in any serious way. Only to the extent that one alters one’s script in recognition that a different script is more likely to find favor with one’s audience does one interfere with one’s impulses. But this is more a matter of subordinating one form of gratification to another; in the end, one’s audience is always a means to one’s ends.
As one moves toward the center of the continuum, legal persuasive practices serve as our model. While there are many who would place lawyers’ arts farther to the left on our continuum, legal argument is considerably more constrained in its ability to seduce or dupe its audience than are propaganda and advertising. There is, moreover, considerably more parity between arguer and audience in the legal arena than there is in the political and consumer arenas. Withholding information, for example, which might be applauded as part of a virtuoso campaign to spin things in the realms of politics and advertising, can be a punishable offense in the realm of the law. Because of the adversarial nature of the legal system, the various lapses in one’s arguments are vulnerable to disclosure and exploitation. (Our political system is also nominally adversarial, but there are few rules or judges to control political discourse, and the public tolerance for fallacious reasoning and even outright mendacity does little to encourage self interference among politicians.) The law offers all sorts of formal constraints on the desire of lawyers to manipulate their audience. The closest lawyers can come to the use of demographic and psychographic information to gain some advantage for their point of view is restricted to the use of jury consultants who use elaborate schemes to select sympathetic juries. For all its flaws, legal reasoning imposes various forms of interference on participants in the legal
