If there’s one thing I can’t abide it’s rhetoric. I’m only interested in what needs to get done.
—SILVIO BERLUSCONI
The word rhetoric has several senses in English. The more widely known usage is negative, as in “empty rhetoric.” Under this meaning, rhetoric is sweet talk, a crooked pack of verbal tricks that allow a shyster to turn a weak case into a strong one. It is “that glib and oily art” which Cordelia detects in her sisters’ false flattery of their father at the start of King Lear and which, she says, consists of speaking but purposing not—of a deliberate disconnect of language from reality. Suspicion of rhetoric defined like this runs deep in English-speaking culture and history. It seems to go with the famous no-nonsense empiricism and dislike of cant in which we take so much pride. As we shall see, though, it is more or less universal and has ancient precedents. But the word can also refer quite neutrally to the academic investigation of public language, and the art of teaching it and mastering it as a practical skill. By extension, it is also often used as a synonym for public language itself. I’ll use it like that in this book, unless the context makes clear that I intend one of the other meanings.
Rhetoric is a fact of life in all societies, but the more open the society, the more central rhetoric becomes. It is impossible to imagine a democracy without public debate and therefore competition in the mastery of public persuasion.
One can accept all this and still believe that rhetoric is unimportant, that what really matters is the substance of what is being discussed—evidence, arguments, political ideas, moral and cultural values. But the reality, especially in democracies, is that the substance and articulation of policy are always tangled up, and to claim otherwise is itself to make a classic move in the rhetorical game.
It’s what Mark Antony is up to when he says to the Roman crowd in Julius Caesar, “I am no orator, as Brutus is, / But (as you know me all) a plain blunt man,” in the middle of one of the most cunning displays of technical rhetoric, not only in Shakespeare but in the English language. Silvio Berlusconi strikes the same pose with his remark about rhetoric at the start of this chapter.
Donald Trump’s appeal as a presidential candidate depends significantly on the belief that he is a truth teller who will have nothing to do with the conventional language of politics: a September 2015 Fox News poll found that 44 percent of a sample of American voters and 62 percent of Republicans agreed with the statement, “He tells it like it is, and we need that now in a president.”
Of course, we shouldn’t confuse antirhetorical “truth telling” with actually telling the truth. One of the advantages of this positioning is that once listeners are convinced that you’re not trying to deceive them in the manner of a regular politician, they may switch off the critical faculties they usually apply to political speech and forgive you any amount of exaggeration, contradiction, or offensiveness. And if establishment rivals or the media criticize you, your supporters may dismiss that as spin. Here’s Florida voter Yolanda Esquivel, in November 2015, rejecting criticism of Donald Trump for his outspokenness: “I’m looking at what candidates can do, not the picky little things they say that people want to make a big deal of and make into drama.”1
Across the West, antipoliticians from outside the mainstream, and those mainstream politicians who hope to use some of the antipoliticians’ populist mojo to advance themselves within conventional political structures, are trying to strike this let’s-cut-through-the-rhetoric pose. But whether or not they and their supporters are aware of it, antirhetoric is itself rhetoric—indeed, in the right circumstances, it can be the most persuasive form of rhetoric of all.
Despite its often unsavory reputation, rhetoric performs a vital role in an open society—which is to provide a bridge between the professionals, the political leaders, the civil servants, and the experts, and the public. It is through an effective public language that citizens can both understand and contribute to important questions and issues of the state. It is for this reason that rhetoric was considered so important in both Greek and Roman cultures. Indeed, for the Romans rhetoric was regarded as the highest of all art forms, higher even than poetry and literature—something more or less incomprehensible to us today.
So let’s start at the top and listen for a moment to the statesman Pericles as the historian Thucydides imagines him describing the particular virtues of Athenian democratic culture:
Our people are interested in the private and public alike and, even among ordinary working people, you’ll find no lack of insight into matters of public policy … Unlike others, we Athenians decide public decisions collectively for ourselves, or at least try to arrive at a clear understanding of them. We don’t believe that debate gets in the way of action—it’s when you act without proper debate that you get bogged down.2
For the ancients, the concept of freedom evoked not our post-Enlightenment notions of personal liberty and freedom of expression but the ability of favored members of the population—citizens not slaves and, of course, men and not women—to take part in deliberations about affairs of state. It is rhetoric, the language of explanation and persuasion, that enables this collective decision making to take place. Someone who was unwilling or unable to engage in this way was considered an incomplete human being: achreios, “useless,” is Pericles’ word for him. Thucydides praises Pericles as the most important man of his time in words as well as deeds.3 Power comes from the mastery of public language.
Aristotle and Rhetoric
So what would the ancient Greeks have made of Sarah Palin’s death panel? A good place to start is the most systematic early account of public language, Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric. Like many classical philosophers, Aristotle was skeptical of the merits of demokratia, “people power” (literally, rule by the common citizenry), in part because he had seen how readily rhetoric could be misused and perverted into demagoguery. But his Rhetoric is chiefly concerned with understanding how public language works and how it may be categorized and learned.
The ancients distinguished between those statements and arguments which could proceed to secure conclusions—mathematical operations, for instance, and scientific observations—and those which dealt with probabilities and opinions. They used the word dialectic to describe the careful reasoning that allowed philosophers like Socrates to probe difficult questions where certainty is impossible. Sometimes the process led to a clear and convincing finding, but for Socrates there is a different purpose—systematically questioning an opponent’s argument in order to expose inconsistencies in it. The result is aporia, a healthy kind of bewilderment in which a bubble of complacency is pricked and the interlocutor is forced to admit that he knows much less than he thought he did. Often Socrates admits that he too is perplexed, though he at least has some idea of what he does not know and has, through his questioning, managed to share his own valuable sense of ignorance and uncertainty with his opponent. Dialectic may lack the epistemic authority of, say, arithmetic, but it is a valuable tool with which to explore the many subjects of human inquiry that cannot be resolved definitively.
So where does rhetoric fit into this scheme? In the very first words of his work, Aristotle defines rhetoric as an antistrophos, or “counterpart,” of dialectic. It too deals with probabilities rather than certainties, and does so in a manner that is intended to be comprehensible not just to scientists and other experts but also to everyone. It is obvious, however, that although both use evidence and argumentation, rhetoric lacks the intellectual rigor of dialectic. How, then, does it make up for this deficit in persuasive power? Aristotle’s answer is to introduce two further concepts: ethos and pathos.
Ethos is the broader impression that the speaker makes: it is the way he presents himself to us and what we know of his character and history. Pathos refers to the emotions of the audience, the mood in which the speaker finds them and which he responds to and attempts to shape and satisfy. But those flat English words don’t really do justice to what Aristotle means. In his 1920s lectures about Aristotle and rhetoric, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger translated pathos as Stimmung, a term for musical tuning as well as for generic “mood.” It is the ability or inability of a speaker to find and then sing in the same key as his or her listeners.
When I explain Pythagoras’ theory to you, your opinion of my character and your mood are unlikely to influence whether you find my exposition convincing. If we listen to two philosophers debating a moral point, character and mood may hold greater sway, but we are still likely to accord more weight to what we take to be the objective strengths and weaknesses of their arguments. Aristotle’s view is that in rhetoric, persuasive power is more evenly divided among pure argument (logos), the character and standing of the speaker (ethos), and how in tune the listening crowd is with both speaker and subject (pathos).
This account of how rhetoric works still feels compelling twenty-five hundred years later. If we watch newsreel footage on YouTube of speeches given three-quarters of a century ago by speakers as different as Franklin Roosevelt or Winston Churchill or Benito Mussolini, the gauzy veil of history hangs between us and them. The arguments seem feeble, the language overwrought; it is hard to believe that anyone could have been swayed by them. What is missing, what is almost impossible to bring back to life knowing what we now know, is the felt context of the moment. In particular, it is the sense of a shared musical key, a dynamic harmony between speaker and crowd, which explains how these remote figures were able to reduce thousands to tears or rage, or to instill calm and confidence in place of fear.
Aristotle makes another timeless observation about public speakers. They exaggerate. Indeed, they have to exaggerate. No one goes to the funeral of a friend wanting to hear an objective list of her strengths and weaknesses, and no one complains if the speaker exaggerates the former and passes over the latter. No politician or prosecutor undersells their own case or gives their opponents the benefit of the doubt. Aristotle calls this tendency to heighten statements in rhetoric auxesis, or “amplification.”
Very occasionally one comes across people who are not prepared to indulge in amplification. Cordelia not only declines to join her two sisters in their false rhetoric of love for Lear; she refuses even to express her true feelings for her father, for fear of seeming to exaggerate for public effect or personal advantage.
Perhaps this is what saintliness looks like—certainly it’s something of which very few of us, and almost no politicians, have ever been capable. Aristotle is a realist and his Rhetoric is more than a treatise; it’s a practical manual for rhetors. He treats exaggeration not as a fault but as a fact of life and a reasonable weapon in the orator’s arsenal, at least if used within bounds. Exaggeration was ubiquitous in the public language of Aristotle’s day. You hardly need me to tell you that it’s every bit as ubiquitous today.
Aristotle also notices how useful maxims and fables are to rhetors. By maxims, he means familiar sayings that encapsulate some piece of received wisdom. In the case of fables, the nugget of insight is revealed through the telling of a folktale or fresh archetypal narrative. According to Aristotle, Aesop once saved a corrupt demagogue’s life on the island of Samos by convincing the jury that if they executed him, even more rapacious villains would replace him. He did it by telling them a story about a fox who refused to shake off the ticks on her back who had already fed on her blood, for fear of exchanging them for hungrier new ones. Fables, Aristotle says, are “comparatively easy to invent,” whereas historical precedents—earlier factual instances that are close enough to the present instance to be a good guide to the right verdict or the right policy—are hard to find. It’s no surprise, then, that rhetors often prefer to turn to imaginary stories, maxims, or stock sayings rather than real-world examples to back up their argument.
Margaret Thatcher was one of many contemporary politicians with a taste for the homespun common sense that a certain kind of traditional or fresh-baked saying evokes. It may be the cock that crows, but it is the hen that lays the eggs. Standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous; you get knocked down by traffic from both sides. You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it. Power is like being a lady—if you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.
Set down coldly on the page, this is infantile stuff. But politicians use maxims for a reason: in the right context and delivered at the right point in a speech, they can make a given line of argument appear not just obvious but somehow self-evident, part of the natural order of things. They reach out beyond the closed language of the policy maker and the political partisan to something that sounds like the everyday experience of their audience.
Only politicians from certain rhetorical traditions—that of China, for example, or the American South—can still get away with fables of the fox-and-ticks variety. But if we broaden the idea to include references to well-known narratives and stereotypical characters and situations, then fables too are pervasive in modern public language.
Aristotle associates short sayings with another breakthrough he makes in his investigation into rhetoric. Whereas philosophers may have all the time in the world to explore every branch of their argument in the interests of rigor and completeness, most rhetors are in a hurry. They want to get to the end of the trial, or to the vote in the Assembly; above all they do not want to bore and thereby lose the attention and approbation of their audience: “Rhetoric deals with the way we deliberate when we do it outside the formal rules of dialectic; and when we do it in the presence of an audience who will be unable to take an overarching view of a complex topic or to follow a lengthy chain of argument.”4
So rhetors tend to cut corners. Instead of stating arguments in full, they offer incomplete dialectic in the form of partial syllogisms, which Aristotle terms enthymemes, knowing that—as long as the rhetor has judged his audience correctly—the listeners will be able to fill in the gaps themselves. The etymology of the word enthymeme suggests “to the heart” or “to the mind,” perhaps with the suggestion that listeners are left with a missing piece of the argument to turn over in their hearts or heads. Aristotle tells us how this works in practice: “For example, if you want to prove that Dorieus was the victor in a competition at which the prize was a crown, you just have to say he won a victory at the Olympic Games—there’s no need to add that the prize was a crown because everyone knows that.”5
If you define them as I intend to do, not just as incomplete syllogisms, but as any kind of argument which for rhetorical convenience or effect leaves the listener with work to do, enthymemes have come a long way since Aristotle’s day and the question of crowns at the Olympics. The death panel, we recognize at once, is an enthymeme—the words might not mean much to a neutral observer, but they were all Sarah Palin’s attuned supporters needed to fill in the missing parts of the argument to construct a complete critique of Obamacare. But now let’s look at a more typical contemporary use of partial arguments, one that brings everything we’ve just discussed—exaggeration, the oblique use of well-known narratives, and the compressed dialectical shortcut—together in single rhetorical package.
In April 2013, Mick Philpott was convicted of manslaughter for killing six of his children in a fire at his house in Derby in the North of England in a botched attempt to wreak revenge on a former lover. Philpott had become well known even before this disturbing and tragic crime for having multiple partners and no fewer than seventeen children, and lived largely, if not entirely, courtesy of the UK’s welfare benefits system. After Philpott’s conviction, the Conservative chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, had this to say:
Philpott is responsible for these absolutely horrendous crimes and these are crimes that have shocked the nation. The courts are responsible for sentencing him. But I think there is a question for government and for society about the welfare state—and the taxpayers who pay for the welfare state—subsidising lifestyles like that, and I think that debate needs to be had.6
As is often the case, the enthymeme does not present itself declaratively, but it is there all the same, lurking in the words “subsidising lifestyles like that.” In what sense like that? What argument does this comparison point us to?
The chancellor is clearly inviting us to believe that the specific case of Mick Philpott has something to tell us that may inform the general debate about the welfare state, but what exactly is it? Is it (1) that paying people benefits is likely to cause them to kill their children and, if you reduce or eliminate the payments, fewer children would die? That’s the strongest possible argument the words “like that” might hint at, but it is manifestly absurd. Millions of Britons receive benefits every year without harming their children. This is an example of the fallacy of arguing from the particular to the general. So let’s try a weaker version of the argument: (2) that while Mick Philpott’s terrible crime is of course unique, the way the case revealed how the benefits system enabled—perhaps even encouraged—him to father so many children in so many failed relationships is a subject of legitimate debate and one that might cause the public and politicians alike to contemplate reforms to the system. Unlike (1), (2) points to a line of argument that is generally regarded as reasonable and responsible, even by those who disagree with it, across the main political parties.
But the chancellor’s apparently casual remark could also give rise to a whole range of arguments between (1) and (2). We could make this claim, for instance: (1.5) the welfare system and its free-and-easy payments encourage reckless behavior that is all too evident in the lifestyle of Mick Philpott. Of course, no one would argue that this recklessness will lead, except in the most extreme cases, to manslaughter, but that does not mean that other forms of antisocial and negative behavior—from abandoned children to substance abuse to minor criminality—will not often result. Argument (1.5) avoids the absurdity and fallacy of (1), but still manages to imply that welfare benefits in the wrong hands can all too easily lead to fecklessness and criminality and even hints at some connection, if only across a spectrum, between the child killer Philpott and other benefit recipients. This tactic is known as guilt by association.
To which of these variant arguments did George Osborne mean to gesture with the phrase “lifestyles like that”? His political opponents quickly supplied an answer—at least (1.5) and quite possibly (1). In fact, it is not clear which he meant, and it is perfectly possible that he never determined which. In quantum mechanics, particles are taken to exist simultaneously in all the locations they could theoretically occupy until such time as they are observed. An open-ended enthymeme enjoys a similar quality: all its possible completions can remain simultaneously valid to some degree, unless and until the speakers tell us which they had in mind. If they never tell us, or if it turns out that they never decided in the first place, then this strange state of rhetorical superposition persists indefinitely.7
But such modalities were not on the mind of George Osborne’s Labour opposite number, Ed Balls, when he responded to the chancellor’s remarks: “George Osborne’s calculated decision to use the shocking and vile crimes of Mick Philpott to advance a political argument is the cynical act of a desperate chancellor.” He made sure to add, however, that he too was in favor of “a proper debate about welfare reform.”8
This response also requires some unpacking. On the face of it, one politician criticizing another for advancing a “political argument” is like one carpenter accusing another of pursuing a cynical woodworking agenda. But here Ed Balls is using the word “political” as a term of art. He is making the case that there is a convention among responsible politicians that one should not attempt to make partisan capital out of a human tragedy and that, by saying what he did, George Osborne had broken this convention. This claim, we quickly realize, is also an enthymeme, in this instance shrunk to fit within a single adjective.
What is surprising about Ed Balls’s response is how close it is to George Osborne’s original statement. Both politicians take care to emphasize how shocked they are by Mick Philpott’s crimes: “horrendous” for Osborne, “shocking and vile” for Balls. Both also call for a debate about welfare reform. And simply by bringing it up in the context of the Mick Philpott case, Ed Balls acquiesces in George Osborne’s essential intention, which is to establish a link between the two.
So what is going on here? First we should recognize the unseen presence of two background political narratives. Neither is mentioned, but we can feel the way they pull and influence these two politicians’ words:
(A) Labour is soft on welfare and soft on scroungers like Mick Philpott. It’s high time we reformed the system and forced the Mick Philpotts of this world to get a job and make some sensible decisions about their lives. Only the Conservatives can be trusted to do this.
(B) The Tories are callous about the poor (and George Osborne is the most callous of the lot). Having failed utterly to turn the economy around, they are now trying to distract attention by demonizing benefit claimants and trying to insinuate that all claimants are like Mick Philpott. Yes, the system needs reforming, but the only party that can be trusted to balance toughness and compassion is Labour.
These two narratives go to the heart of each party’s characterization of the other, and though they might well deny it, it is reasonable to assume that the political objective of George Osborne’s and Ed Balls’s statements was to advance (and/or challenge) these narratives. But given the circumstances—above all, the heartbreaking death of the children—the narratives can be referred to only obliquely.
The closest George Osborne comes to (A) is saying “that debate needs to be had,” but that is enough for one of his own supporters (and perhaps, he might hope, a floating voter as well) to imagine how the parties would line up if such a debate actually happened: George Osborne and his fellow Tories making the case for cracking down on waste and abuse, Labour defending the system and the rights of claimants for tribal reasons.
In his brief response, Ed Balls attempts both to deflect (A) and to promote (B). First, he makes sure that everyone knows he is just as appalled by Philpott’s crimes as Osborne, thus protecting himself from the charge that taking a less strident view than the chancellor on welfare reform implies any sympathy or support for the child killer or scroungers like him (contra A). Second, he attacks George Osborne’s motives: Osborne’s statement is “calculated”—this is a premeditated language crime—and “cynical” (pro B). The immediate “cynicism” is Osborne’s use of the Philpott case as a diversion as the economy is going so badly, but the charge of cynicism is part of a wider and long-running critique of Osborne’s character by Balls. Osborne is a “political” chancellor, according to Balls, again in the special sense that Osborne puts party advantage above the national interest. Notice the underlying assumption—ubiquitous in modern British politics and increasingly notable on the other side of the Atlantic—that there is an inevitable tension between party interest and national interest, as if our political parties couldn’t care less about the country and were focused only on their own private agendas.
During his time as shadow chancellor, Balls used the words “calculated,” “cynical,” and “political” constantly when he referred to George Osborne to emphasize this line of attack. Often, as here, he found a natural, almost poetic rhythm with the stress falling firmly on the pejoratives: the “political argument is the cynical act of a desperate chancellor.” The use of the hostile adjectives in this instance means that, by the time he comes to agree with the chancellor that a debate on welfare reform is necessary, Balls has already cast it as a battle with a politician whose intentions cannot be trusted.
What we have here is the small change of modern political discourse: two articulate and experienced players generating enthymemes on the fly and using words of apparently general meaning in the context of a specialized political language. The indeterminate character of the language and its ability to summon up multiple possible interpretations is of particular political value. Is George Osborne using the Philpott case to criticize a multitude of other benefit recipients? The conservative wing of his own party and in the country might think so and might applaud him for it, but as we have seen, there are other, milder interpretations, so he retains deniability. Is Ed Balls perpetrating the very crime he accuses George Osborne of, using the terrible Philpott family tragedy to score tactical political points (for instance, in deploying the word “desperate” to attack Osborne for the poor performance of the economy)? Again, his supporters might think so and secretly cheer him on, but you would have a hard job proving it from the face value of his words.
A throwaway phrase that summons up an array of alternative arguments, each of subtly different political weight. Words that have a plain English sense but other latent meanings that only the politically initiated can fully understand. And a “proper debate,” which both parties say they want to see but which none of their remarks serves to elucidate or advance.
A member of the public listening to this would certainly sense a moment of rough jostling, with two champion wrestlers each seeking the hold that will floor his opponent while striving to avoid the same fate himself; when it is clear that neither one will hit the mat, the onlookers move on and the story passes out of the news cycle. The broad political context would probably also be clear to a nonspecialist: the parties agreeing on the need for welfare reform but divided on what shape that reform should take. Yet an answer to the substantive question—What, if anything at all, does this terrible case have to tell us about how the benefits system could be reformed?—is nowhere to be seen.
Two Types of Bewilderment
Aristotle and other ancient students of rhetoric provide us with many of the insights and critical tools we need to unpack the public language of our time. Along the way they also remind us how little the fundamentals of rhetoric have changed over the years. Aristotle’s picture of public language is so compelling because it is human shaped, grounded in anthropologically sound observations about how we try to persuade others and how we react when they try to persuade us.
But even as measured a thinker as Aristotle knew that public language could go wrong. And as we saw in the last chapter, other Greeks—they included the altogether more purist and suspicious philosopher Plato, as well as the historian Thucydides and the brilliant comic playwright Aristophanes—came to fear that it was indeed going catastrophically wrong, not just in the mouths of a handful of troublemakers but across public life. For them, the language on which good governance and the stability of society and the state relied was becoming scrambled, and citizens were finding it harder and harder to distinguish honest public discourse from the excesses of extremists and schemers.
In The Nicomachean Ethics,9 Aristotle warns us about two contrasting vices that can drive words and actions away from the golden mean of truth and virtue. The first is alazoneia, or “boastfulness,” and the second eironeia, which, though it gives us the English word “irony,” in this context means bogus self-deprecation or excessive understatement. The two words are associated with a pair of character types in the comic theater of fifth-century BCE Athens. The first character was the alazon, a brash fraud who struts about and brags about everything. Demagogues, soothsayers, priests, and ambassadors were all dubbed alazones in different comedies. The second character is the eiron. Unlike the talkative alazon, he says too little, and what he says is always crafty and not to be relied upon. He often gets the plot going, but you have to keep your eye on him. Sophists, the itinerant teachers of rhetoric and philosophy who were such a controversial feature of Athenian life, could find themselves being described both as alazones and eirones.
Aristotle also associated eironeia with Socrates himself, to describe his practice of affecting ignorance in order to draw his interlocutors out and demonstrate their own lack of knowledge. It’s not clear whether Aristotle’s negative characterization of it in his discussion of truthfulness was intended as a criticism of this Socratic habit, but Aristotle emphasizes that playing down the truth with eironeia is not as bad as replacing it with self-delusion or knowing falsehoods. He even concedes that, in moderation, eironeia can be rather chic.
We can’t know for sure if real-life braggarts and dissemblers contributed to the decline of public discourse in Athens and the ultimate collapse of its democracy. We do know that some of the greatest thinkers of the day thought that they did. We also know that the alazones and eirones, the blusterers and the dissemblers, the tellers of tall tales and of subtle untruths, are still all around us today. We will encounter many in this book.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president from 2005 to 2013, is only one of many bombastic Holocaust deniers spreading the politics of hate across the Middle East for reasons of their own. The response of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was to retaliate with the canard that the idea for the mass murder of European Jewry was given to Adolf Hitler by a Palestinian, the grand mufti of Jerusalem.
Some tall tales spring not from intercommunal hatred but from cold considerations of state, and not from the alazon’s braggartry but from the slipperiness of the eiron. When James Clapper, the United States’ director of national intelligence, was asked whether the National Security Agency collected “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans,” he replied no, a statement that the revelations of Edward Snowden showed to be, at least arithmetically, one of the greatest falsehoods in history. At first General Clapper patriotically defended his statement, then confided to an interviewer that it was the “least untruthful” thing he could have said. Maybe so, but when the true answer to a yes/no question is yes, your answer of no is not just the least untruthful but also the most untruthful it can be. In due course, the general would grudgingly describe his answer as “erroneous” and a “mistake.”
On matters of defense, diplomacy, and real or imagined national security, modern Western governments have regularly shown themselves to be “economical with the actualité” as the Conservative minister Alan Clark brazenly put it in the Matrix Churchill case in 1992.10 In general, however, public scrutiny in the form of parliamentary inquiry, whistle-blower leaks, and investigative journalism keeps the inclination to tell outright untruths within some kind of bounds. It’s a different story in societies where there is little history or expectation of openness and honesty in public language. Here is China’s president Xi Jinping on the eve of a 2015 visit to America:
The Chinese government does not engage in theft of commercial secrets in any form, nor does it encourage or support Chinese companies to engage in such practices in any way. Cybertheft of commercial secrets and hacking attacks against government networks are both illegal. Such acts are criminal offenses and should be punished according to law and relevant international conventions.11
This is mirror rhetoric: Everything that has a truth value of 1 on Planet Rhetoric has a truth value of 0 in reality, and vice versa. Here on Earth, the Chinese government takes part in hacking attacks on a monumental scale and doubtless also colludes in, and quite possibly controls, the extensive cybertheft operations that are conducted by Chinese companies, many of which are SOEs, state-owned enterprises.
In February 2015, the Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov told a conference in Munich that his country’s earlier invasion of Georgia and its annexation of Crimea were examples of international norms working well. “What happened in Crimea was the people invoking the right of self-determination,” he said. “You’ve got to read the UN Charter. Territorial integrity and sovereignty must be respected.” When these comments were greeted with open laughter, Mr. Lavrov was defiant. “You may find it funny,” he told the doubters. “I also found many things you said funny.”12
The whole world should laugh at Mr. Lavrov, but after all the compromises that America, Britain, and other Western countries have made with the truth, many people (especially those in the developing world) have come to believe that the West’s leaders are no better. It’s hardly fair—Western failings in the matter of public honesty are far more limited than those of the world’s repressive regimes—but when rhetorical moderation and self-restraint are in short supply, and exaggeration and mendacity are no longer outliers, it is probably inevitable that domestic and international audiences should struggle to distinguish between occasional and habitual offenders.
Early in this chapter, we came across aporia, that moment of acknowledgment that the lazy assumptions you have been harboring don’t stand up to scrutiny, that the apparently simple question is actually far harder to answer than you imagined, indeed that you don’t have an answer at all. All this, Socrates believed, could be unlocked by a positive kind of eironeia and was the start of wisdom.
Today the public faces a darker kind of bewilderment. It springs from distortions of public language that have been understood for thousands of years but that today, sped on digital wings, fly through our societies. In a world where you don’t know whom to believe, the braggart and the liar may be as persuasive as anyone else—unless you shake your head and turn away from the whole thing.
How did it happen? Over the past three decades, I’ve watched the current crisis unfold, and in the coming chapters, I’m going to use my own experiences and observations to tell my version of the story of how we got here.