in multiplicity will be considerably less belligerent than the tone adopted by their peers in dualism. They are not threatened by disagreement—after all, people inevitably see things differently; an argument for them is just a way to let people know “where they are coming from.” In truth, their claims are often difficult to disagree with. The more abstract the position they take, after all, the more difficult it is to dispute their basic premise that there is no real need to discriminate among positions. If the dualist tends toward an excessively belligerent tone, the multiplist tends toward an excessively bland one.
By way of helping students recognize the intellectual origins of tone and the limitations they face if they are unable to moderate their tone, it is helpful to analyze matters of tone in essays like those of Fish and Leo. Because these writers are considerably more sophisticated than most student writers, their tonal differences, though significant, are less stark than those we see in our classes. Underlying differences in tone between Fish and Leo’s essays are differences in outlook that we’ve already touched on. In particular, Fish’s tone can be traced back to his belief that truth must be rediscovered and renegotiated as contexts change, and that truth consists not of a correspondence between one’s vocabulary and a state of affairs in the world, but of the most persuasive justification among competing versions of the truth. Leo’s tone, meanwhile derives from his belief that there is one universal truth that is not altered by circumstances. Those who think straight, like Leo, possess absolute truth and good. Those, like the bishops, who think sloppily obscure our vision of truth and good and allow error and evil into the world. At the risk of overstating those differences, we would describe Fish’s tone as being closer to that of a mentor or guide, someone concerned simultaneously to clear up confusions and to complicate his readers’ understanding of things. It is an asymmetrical relationship to be sure, Fish is the teacher and we are his pupils, but insofar as he seems to believe we are capable of following a complex line of reasoning, it is not condescending. Leo’s tone, meanwhile seems closer to that of a gadfly or scold, brisk and judgmental. His concern is to clarify matters by simplifying them in order to facilitate sound moral judgment.
Leo’s tone is established in early his first sentence when, before telling us what the bishops’ statement actually says, he pronounces it “disgraceful;” and then, after offering two snippets from the statement, he proceeds to tell his readers what the bishops really mean, “[i]n plain English,” before concluding that it is “a moral mess.” Moral and linguistic clarity are of a piece for Leo. He gives short shrift, thus, to those who natter on about “root causes” and understanding acts “in context.” To set the record straight, he offers a “plain English” translation of this morally and linguistically sloppy talk, avowing that what the bishops really mean to say is that “reckless and imperial America brought the attacks on itself.” Throughout his critique, Leo offers scant evidence in support of his generalizations and few details that might help his audience identify the multiculturalists, moral relativists, and denizens of therapeutic culture in their midst. A single quote from “one upstate New York student” supports a broad generalization about lamentable educational practices common throughout American higher education, while the bishops’ statement is presented as “a minor example of what could be a major problem”—the inability of moral leaders “to say plainly that evil exists.”
If Leo’s characterization of the bishops’ statement is in fact accurate and fair-minded, the tonal aspects of his essay might be attributed more to legitimate moral outrage than to habits of mind congruent with his belief system. But even one sympathetic to Leo’s view would have problems squaring his summary of the bishops’ statement with the full text of that statement. It begins in fact by announcing “a new solidarity with those in other parts of the world for whom the evil forces of terrorism are a continuing fear and reality” (Bishops). To be sure Leo and the bishops do not appear to define evil in the same way, nor do the bishops seem content to let the epithet “evil” serve as their full explanation of the motivation for the terrorists’ act. But they do “say plainly that evil exists” and that terrorist acts like 9/11 qualify as evil acts.
Our concern here is not to debunk Leo’s critique of the bishops. Our concern is to emphasize the extent to which the tone of Leo’s essay derives not from an “objective” awareness of a world independent of his perceptions of it, so much as it derives from the belief system through which he perceives that world. While Leo would doubtless find such a contention scandalous, a relativist canard, Fish would not. The differences in tone between the two writers, we would argue, is not a function of one being less objective than the other, but of one being more aware than the other that total objectivity is a will-o-the-wisp. In lieu of absolute truth and objectivity, Fish embraces something on the order of intersubjectivity. We are, in his view, united by “particular lived values” and share “the record of aspiration and accomplishment that makes up our collective understanding of what we live for.” Fish’s pragmatic view of truth as fallible and particular is reflected in his tone, a tone that rivals Leo’s in its briskness but is less judgmental, more cautious about the naming of things. At the heart of his essay, in fact, lies his rejection of reductive labeling, his concern to complicate soundbite versions of postmodernism, of relativism, and of terrorism. While Fish says he finds the reporter’s question about “the end of postmodern relativism” that begins his essay “bizarre,” he goes on to offer a thoughtful response to it, attributing the reporter’s misunderstanding of the term not to some moral lapse, but to the fact that it is part of “a rarefied form of academic talk” to which the reporter is not normally privy.
In announcing our own preference for Fish’s style, we are of course mostly reaffirming our general sympathy with his world view. But that preference in turn, is not merely “subjective” in the way that someone like Leo would use that term. Our sympathies with Fish’s point of view and his manner of expression are professional as well as personal. The ideas that he expresses and the way he expresses them are in greater harmony with our disciplinary imperatives than are Leo’s ideas and the manner of expression that his ideas give rise to. Fish’s thoughts and tone are, in our view, more likely to result in better thinking about the issue at hand than are Leo’s thoughts and tone. Whether one argument fares better than the other in the marketplace of ideas is another matter altogether. Such judgments are harder to make and more audience-specific than the judgment about the effects of the arguments on understanding of the issues. In order to better understand this complex, often misunderstood relationship between arguments that win the day with audiences and arguments that lead audiences to reexamine issues we turn now to a continuum of argument practices and the metric used to arrange arguments along that continuum.
Argument and “the purification of war”
The subheading for this section is taken from the Latin epigraph to Burke’s A Grammar of Motives—“Ad bellum purificandum.” It is at once a most modest sentiment—one would, after all, sooner see war ended altogether—and a most ambitious one—as war grows exponentially more savage in the new century, we long for anything that might mitigate its gruesome effects. It’s also an epigraph that could serve to introduce Burke’s entire oeuvre, as it captures neatly the primary goal of rhetoric as he imagines it—the transformation of destructive urges into creative and cooperative acts, enmity into identification, war into argument. As we noted earlier, Burke is enough of a realist to hold that this transformation can never be complete—in every argument there will remain a residual element of aggression and advantage-seeking no matter how noble the cause in whose name the argument is made. But Burke is also enough of an idealist to believe that interests other than those of the arguer are always served by argument. The only case in which the needs and beliefs of an audience may be ignored is when the arguer is confident that their cooperation will be secured by force if their argument fails and they deign to argue for pretty much the same reasons that dictators hold elections. Joseph Heller neatly captures the spirit of “might makes right” disguised as argument, a hegemonic practice all too familiar to twenty-first century audiences, in an exchange from the novel Catch-22. The exchange features the novel’s protagonist, Yossarian, confronting his nemesis, Milo Minderbinder, after Milo has pretended to offer an Italian thief some dates for a bedsheet and then refused to hand over the dates
