Victoriosa Loquacitas

My mentor at GWC is an intense and enthusiastic fellow named Shane Schulthies (rhymes with "pies"). He has a PhD in Exercise Science from BYU where he also taught for 13 years. He has degrees in Physical Therapy and Sports Medicine as well. (No, he hasn't met Yoko.) He's been influential in the home school movement in Utah and active in government and business. He and his wife have 10 kids, so the man has some experience. He left a tenured position at BYU and a prosperous business to pursue his interest in mentoring and teaching at George Wythe University. He has a way of asking penetrating questions.

At the beginning of a discussion of Hugh Nibley's work The Ancient State, a collection of essays on the influence of ancient life on us moderns, Shane asked, "What can we learn from the ancients?" Seems like a simple question. Keep it in mind.

Just to give you an idea, Nibley's essays carry titles like "The Arrow, the Hunter, and the State" - about how the marked arrow (e.g. marked with the hunter's personal symbol or colors) shows the hunter's possession of his prey and therefore became the basis for establishing empires (my arrow makes possible my conquest and marks my territory); "The Hierocentric State" (I know . . . look it up) - about the "dangerous heritage" of Western civilization, that is, the tendency to see itself as the center of a world empire, a global community; "The Unsolved Loyalty Problem" - about the causes of the fall of Rome in 410 A.D. and maybe of the West in 20-- A.D.

One of my favorites, about the fall of Greece and later Rome, was "Victoriosa Loquacitas" (I know - it sounds like some kind of Harry Potter counter curse; as I understand it, it means "the victory of empty talk"). The full title of Nibley's essay is "Victoriosa Loquacitas: The Rise of Rhetoric and the Decline of Everything Else." Let that sink in a minute.

What is rhetoric? Nibley says that "by far the most common ancient definition of rhetoric" is simply "the power or faculty or skill of persuading," that the "business of rhetoric is to move people, to make an impression," that the orator must know how to "make words ring with conviction" but also use words that will "convince."

In the beginning, the orator's rhetoric, his "learned dialectic," "cunning oratory," and "moving eloquence," combined with his virtuous life, was meant to lift and inspire his audience, but in short order these tools took a "philosophic" turn and became sophistry, that is, rhetoric turned from being a tool used in "the honest search for truth to the business of cultivating appearances"; the successful orator, the sophist, then, was one who "cultivated a new and wonderful art of finding success the easy way. He worked out a technique which enabled him to speak off-hand on any and all subjects, and to prove or disprove any point," to make "the worse appear the better reason," and to earn a great living in the process. In time, the ancient schools of philosophy were taken over by the sophists, and having "gained control of public education," they "completely captivated the public by substituting sweet sounds for ideas; issues gave way to personalities, the most popular speaker being the best entertainer." This turn "made a hash of all values, including . . . the moral order of society - itself."

Ask yourself if any of this sounds familiar. . . .

According to Nibley, the key to this "technique of persuasion is probability." The sophist can "turn any proposition into a probability, which he could in turn build into a certainty by high-powered emotional appeal . . . . the main thing was to establish the probability. The first Sophists showed the way to do this by breaking down the thing that made the Greeks uniquely great, the high moral wall between seeming and being" (remember a certain former U.S. president who said, in regards to a question about whether a certain statement was (is) true, "It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is' is . . . ." In case you hadn't noticed, that moral wall has been breaking down in the U.S. for a long time now). The "'less truth there is in an orator's cause,'" says Cicero (a famous Roman statesman), "'the better the job he must do from the probability angle.'" Clinton was big on probability.

Another key to the success of the sophist is a captive audience "eager to recognize even the feebliest signs of talent with "$50,000 grants for $100 ideas"(or a presidency) because they are bored (e.g. they want a change) and he saves them from boredom. The rhetor satisfies "the insatiable hunger of the people for entertainment." More importantly, the successful rhetor is able to find out what the people want and give it to them, whether it's good or right, or not (financial "rescue" programs, mortgage payments, auto industry bailouts, and a little redistribution of the wealth): "Everything must be accommodated to the common judgement and popular intelligence"; the rhetor must "pick out just those things that appeal to most listeners, and not only delight them, but entertain without ever tiring them." The audience is a mob who can "always count on finding orators that [will] never contradict them, society reserving its richest rewards for those who [can] justify, condone, and confirm its vices."

In ancient Greece and Rome, such rhetoricians included politicians who "'systematically debauched' the people for their votes." The people were supposed to be a check on the excesses of government then, as now, but after an "intensive campaign" from all sides, "debunking established values, confounding commonsense conclusions, and turning on a vast amount of charm, wit, and synthetic sincerety," the rhetoricians have "succeeded in breaking down the general sales resistance" and we have been brought to our current degraded state of society, the erosion of our freedoms, and even the potential loss of Western civilization as we know it (see future blog about The Clash of Civilizations).

What can we learn from the ancients? According to Nibley, rhetoric, or sophistry, was responsible for the fall of Greece and the fall of Rome, each the greatest civilization of its time.
But rhetoric only succeeds if the auditors aren't listening, if we accept that "learning the hard way" is just too hard, that War Craft is just way easier and much more fun than War and Peace, that others are better at doing the thinking, that "correct speech is more important than correct thought"; if we can't get over our insatiable appetite for entertainment and turn our time and industrious attention to enlightenment, to the pursuit of personal knowledge and understanding of the roots of our American order (see Russell Kirk's book The Roots of American Order) then we will get what the Greeks and Romans got - a place in history. And little Muslim children the world over will read in their whitewashed textbooks of the rise and fall of the decadent West.