This essay was originally published on Inside Higher Ed

“Violence has filled the void left by the failure of dialogue, but that void is not merely rhetorical. My years as a scholar of rhetoric, my experiences speaking with those who disagree with me vehemently, my time in civic-engagement initiatives and my work as an educator have led me to this conclusion: Dialogue does not matter to people convinced that they, themselves, don’t matter.”

This quote captures the crux of my argument in “A Year After Charlie Kirk, We are Still in a Crisis of Mattering” for Inside Higher Education. As a rhetorician, I know what is necessary to strengthen civil discourse: better listening skills, knowledge of rhetorical practice, adaptability, intellectual humility, etc. Those things are important, but I have come to believe they are all downstream from mattering.

I believe the quest for mattering is the real goal of many (not all) political arguments; arguments that seem political on the surface may involve at least one person trying to protect or acquire a sense of mattering, even to the point where the validity of their claims or those of their dissenters is irrelevant. Too often, mattering trumps the truth, mutual understanding, and effective deliberation.

We are in a crisis of mattering. If we do not recognize that, things may only get worse.

After Charlie Kirk’s assassination one year ago, I joined many others in condemning the shooting as abhorrent and antithetical to civil society. In an attempt to derive a lesson from this tragedy, I suggested focusing more on active listening skills, rhetorical techniques and intellectual humility. I still believe those things are important, but they only address part of the problem: Even people with those skills falter when trying to speak across differences.

Violence has filled the void left by the failure of dialogue, but that void is not merely rhetorical. My years as a scholar of rhetoric, my experiences speaking with those who disagree with me vehemently, my time in civic-engagement initiatives and my work as an educator have led me to this conclusion: Dialogue does not matter to people convinced that they, themselves, don’t matter.

We are in a crisis of mattering. Feelings of loneliness, political impotence and low self-regard seem to be growing. Those feelings may eclipse the mere possibility that one will feel heard, respected and endowed with a sense of mattering.

America’s crisis of political violence may be the result of a deeper crisis of mattering.

Social psychologists define mattering as the perception that we make a difference in the world around us. Generally, scholars agree that a sense of mattering is derived from one’s perceived ability to feel valued or add value. Those who neither feel valued nor think they can add value suffer from what psychologist Gordon Flett calls “anti-mattering”: the internalized conviction that one is invisible and insignificant. A person experiencing anti-mattering can come to believe they are not worth listening to.

Sadly, people in want of a sense of mattering often conclude that violence can provide a form of empowerment, even if it is counterfeit. In 2025, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue identified 74 violent attacks and disrupted plots for violence in the U.S., a 27 percent increase over the previous year. A year after Kirk’s assassination, a recent survey reports that, when asked to identify “the biggest threat to the safety of average Americans,” 33 percent chose “domestic terrorism” and 42 percent chose random acts of violence (e.g., mass shootings), while just 20 percent identified foreign threats. On the eve of the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11, those numbers are striking. Violence remains relatively rare, but a consequential minority considers it justifiable for some political objectives, a proportion that rose modestly from 2024 to 2025.

Loneliness and alienation, to be clear, do not necessarily make someone violent, but research on domestic radicalization suggests how they can become dangerous. Researchers have found that economic and social losses of significance predicted violence among perpetrators of ideologically motivated crimes. Significance-quest theory explains the intervening process: A personal need for significance encounters an ideological narrative that portrays violence as meaningful and a social network prepared to recognize and applaud the perpetrator’s actions. Violence then becomes a perverse method of adding value. Words can be ignored. Bullets, however, have a way of demanding our attention.

Mattering, then, should be a primary topic of conversation for those who want and believe in civil society. If violence offers alienated people a way to feel powerful, to feel like they matter, then civil discourse must offer something better. It must offer the power to act without dominating, to matter without making enemies and to be heard without making others disappear.

But how do we do that?

Organizations attempting to answer that question have emerged. Harvard University’s Mattering Initiative believes that when students have a strong sense of mattering, “they deepen connections, have a sense of meaning and purpose, and are less likely to experience loneliness, anxiety, and depression.” This initiative emerged in collaboration with the Mattering Movement, a nonprofit started by scholar Sarah Bennison and journalist Jennifer Wallace. Bennison has gone on to found Mattering in Action, which translates mattering research into actual curricula, teacher tool kits and campus initiatives, while Wallace has gone on to found the Mattering Institute, which offers leadership training and “mattering audits” for a variety of types of organizations. Zach Mercurio, author of The Power of Mattering, offers classes and workshops on instilling mattering into workplace culture.

The work of mattering is being done, but it has not yet been applied specifically to prevent political violence. This must change. We must see mattering as a civic and violence-prevention program. Organizations like Braver Angels and initiatives like the Beacon Project are adjacent; they seek to promote dialogue to prevent violence. But in order to promote dialogue, we need to promote mattering.

Mattering may not be a panacea. After all, no mattering initiative can prevent every violent act. Yet if our response to political violence consists only of condemning murder and teaching rhetorical skills, we leave a deeper problem untouched. When dialogue fails, the answer is not simply better speech—it is the creation of a civil society in which speech offers people a genuine sense of mattering. Civil discourse necessitates citizens who believe they matter. Helping people acquire that belief is the next step toward preventing tragedies like the killing of Charlie Kirk.

This piece was originally published in Summer 2026 issue of From the Academy, a journal of academic renewal from the Martin Center

Earlier this year, I wrote an essay about VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) and argued that we should stop seeing these conditions as aberrations and start seeing them as the norm. The world has always been VUCA to some degree, and pretending that we can achieve perfect stability, certainty, simplicity, and clarity will leave us less prepared for reality than we’d be otherwise. The smart response to a VUCA world is to develop critical thinking, adaptability, and confidence needed to work within it.

My new essay for From the Academy, turns that argument into a proposal for higher education. It is time to move from theory to practice.

College preparedness usually denotes preparing students to enter college. That said, universities should also prepare students to leave college and enter workplaces, communities, and civic life in which “wicked problems” are commonplace. Subject matter expertise is important and always will be, but knowledge alone won’t cut it. Graduates also need intellectual ambiguity, adaptability, and the rhetorical skills to deliberate across differences.

Lest you think this is an argument for abandoning rigor, I want to make clear that I am arguing for understanding rigor more fully. Education must be rigorous in order to teach students how to make sound decisions and conclusions but also how to respond to the world when certainty is unavailable, circumstances change, or our tried-and-true methodologies fall flat.

In “Universities Should Prepare Student for a VUCA World,” I outline practical ways institutions of higher education can make VUCA preparation a more explicit goal and outcome for a more holistic education. If colleges and universities are supposed to prepare students for the world they will actually inhabit, helping them navigate VUCA should be central to higher education.

American universities are showing renewed interest in civic education. Some states have established civics institutes (e.g., Ohio and South Carolina) while others have strengthened requirements in American history, constitutional government, or political thought. These reforms address a genuine problem: Many students are not being prepared to understand the institutions with which they will interact post-college. But institutional knowledge is only one component of civic preparedness. Citizens must also be able to think critically and communicate effectively even in circumstances that prove challenging to navigate, which is often the case in a civil and pluralistic society.

“VUCA” stands for “volatility,” “uncertainty,” “complexity,” and “ambiguity.” Although the term is frequently associated with military planning and organizational leadership in general, it also describes life in a free and pluralistic society. Political conditions change, citizens disagree about values, and public problems involve competing interests and unpredictable consequences. Even well-informed people interpret the same evidence differently.

As uncomfortable as it sounds, I don’t believe this to be a defect of our society. VUCA is bound to be the condition of a society where people can think, speak, and associate freely as they pursue their versions of life, liberty, and happiness. Attempts to eliminate ambiguity and complexity can easily become attempts to eliminate dissent, a move that is a hallmark of illiberalism. That is not something we should want. Thus, the problem is not VUCA; it’s our inability to work with and within VUCA. Unfortunately, many college students are not acquiring this ability, meaning that they enter a VUCA world with little to no VUCA training.

VUCA is bound to be the condition of a society where people can think, speak, and associate freely as they pursue their versions of life, liberty, and happiness.

Leaders in higher education (university faculty, administrators, trustees, lawmakers) should promote the incorporation of VUCA navigation skills into the curriculum and learning programs. Lest you think I am trying to reinvent the wheel, creating new courses will not be necessary. Students can acquire particular civic competencies through current courses in rhetoric, communication, political science, philosophy, and many, many more. Those competencies should correspond to the four dimensions of VUCA.

To navigate volatility, students should become adept at adaptation, e.g., revising an argument or observation when circumstances change or new and influential information is gathered. This goes further than pre-established talking points; civic judgment cannot consist of such things unless one is able to revise them when the situation calls for it. Thus, students should develop the ability to respond extemporaneously, and must also be able to tell the difference between enduring principles and contingent strategies.

To navigate uncertainty, students should learn to reason without pretending to know more than they do. They should be able to distinguish facts from interpretations, arguments from opinion, probability over certainty, critical inquiry from verbal attack, and other civically detrimental dichotomies. They should also be able to acknowledge empirical limitations and explain why available evidence leads to a particular conclusion.

To navigate complexity, students should learn that societal phenomena result from multiple causes and multiple agents quite often. They should be able to examine the relevant stakeholders, their incentives, and the institutions in which they function. And, of course, students must examine and analyze the unintended consequences of actions to better direct their inquiries and conclusions. The idea that every political struggle consists of the good guy vs. the bad guys is unrealistic and not indicative of humanity’s complexity. Students should be comfortable with nuance and trained to look for it in their societal endeavors. “Either/Or” thinking is a significant deterrent to critical thinking.

To navigate ambiguity, students must develop an appreciation of nuance and learn to identify others’ positions fairly. Students must also understand the concept of an ideograph—a rhetorical term denoting a word or concept so ambiguously as to cause confusion. For example, reasonable people can hold differing definitions of a single word if it is vague enough. Terms like justice, equality, freedom, safety, democracy, and harm often carry multiple meanings. Thus, students should be able to define terms, consider other definitions of these terms, and restate an opponent’s argument in a way the opponent would recognize and approve.

To navigate ambiguity, students must develop an appreciation of nuance and learn to identify others’ positions fairly.

Fundamentally, these are rhetorical skills. Traditionally, rhetoric has emphasized the concept of Kairos. This encompassing term in rhetorical theory and practice reflects a more intricate understanding of rhetorical context in that it denotes the confluence of audience, purpose, time, and location when considering ways to convey an argument. Because Kairos can change if just one of its components changes, those who aspire toward rhetorical effectiveness need what Peter Ramus called Copia: the abundance of arguments, expressions, examples, and strategies from which to choose in a given Kairos. When it comes to rhetoric, one size does not fit all.

Educational institutions can assess these skills both easily and practically by having students participate in one or more activities like the following:

• Participate in deliberative forums and formal debates;

• Analyze a controversy, public or private, from several viewpoints;

• Defend a position orally;

• Revise an argument upon finding contrary information;

• Negotiate a proposal with classmates with conflicting interests. (These conflicting interests may be pre-assigned for didactic reasons.)

Educators should focus on assessing intellectual performance. They must ask if the student can identify uncertainty, represent opposing viewpoints fairly, adapt to new evidence, and distinguish principle from preference. Of course, students should be assessed irrespective of which political faction their conclusions seem to favor.

To do this well, some safeguards are necessary. Though I am not promoting government overreach in public education, if governing boards and legislatures feel the need to intervene, they should establish broad civic competences. That said, these governing bodies must not dictate curricula; that should be the purview of the faculty. Professors, primarily, should retain discretion over how skills are taught, and institutions should publish their learning outcomes and evaluation methods. This would allow scholars to retain academic freedom while allowing trustees and the public to have a say in whether or not civil programs are cultivating genuine rhetorical ability rather than ideological conformity.

By extension, educational institutions should resist turning VUCA education into another administrative initiative.

By extension, educational institutions should resist turning VUCA education into another administrative initiative.This means no new offices or ideological certifications are necessary. To initiate a VUCA education, governing boards should investigate where current students learn to reason their way through volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. If an institution cannot provide this information, it should be required to develop a plan for instilling the learning of relevant competencies into general education. Civic education should teach students how institutions work, especially constitutional ones, but citizens must also acquire the rhetoric and critical thinking skills necessary to engage productively with those who see the world differently.

Because a free and pluralistic society will always be VUCA, education institutions should prepare students to navigate it in a way conducive to the pursuits of life, liberty, and happiness.

Image: Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | autsawin, Davizro and SilverV/iStock/Getty Images

Serious academics must be able to distinguish between criticism and hostility, and a serious academic culture must be conducive to that distinction. This is especially true for the academic Humanities, in which argument and honest interpretation are supposed to be virtues. Yet, one of the biggest problems in the Humanities is the tendency to treat critical inquiry and institutional criticism as aggression and disagreement as evidence of immorality.

This is not just a failure of temperament. It is a failure of rhetoric. Rhetoric, properly understood, is not the art of disguising bad arguments with attractive language. It is the art of making arguments clear and understandable within situations involving different audiences, assumptions, values, and interests. Scholarly rhetoric, therefore, requires more than stating one’s own position clearly. It requires identifying what another person is actually arguing, locating the genuine point of disagreement, and representing opposing claims in terms their advocates can recognize. Otherwise, academic debates become contests to impose the most morally charged interpretation.

The recent Report on the State of the Humanities and Humanistic Sciences (henceforth, “The Report”) has been received in precisely this way by some of its most vocal critics. The report is clear in saying it does not reflect intolerance of subjects or viewpoints. However, rather than engage the Report’s stated concerns, which are about scholarly standards and intellectual rigor, critics often interpret its existence as a coded attack on progressive scholarship. Ironically, this reaction itself reveals the deeper crisis the Report attempts to engage: the lack of good-faith critical thinking in both scholarly production and critique.

The Report’s authors are clear about what they are trying to do and, as is appropriate for such documents, repeat their thesis throughout. Their argument is made most prominently in Section 3 of the Report, titled “The Nature of the Problem.” Here, the authors insist that “[t]he problem is not that scholars in these areas are significantly more liberal or progressive than the general public” nor is it “that many scholars are politically active, or that they see their scholarly work as relevant to their activism.” Generally, the authors are not concerned with subject matter or differing perspectives. This is not an attempt to save the academy from the barbarians at the gate, as it were.

Yet, prominent scholars like Michael Bérubé and Dwight McBride insist that the document either promotes or strongly implies the promotion of all those things. Why do they seem unwilling to engage the material as it is?

Part of the answer is rhetorical framing. Once a document is placed within a narrative of conservative assault, censorship, or hostility toward marginalized scholarship, every subsequent statement is interpreted through that frame. Explicit qualifications are treated as camouflage. Calls for rigor become attacks on particular fields. Appeals to disinterested inquiry become demands for political conformity. The critic no longer asks, “What is the argument?” but “What political project must this argument secretly serve?” The latter question may sometimes be legitimate, but when it is used in lieu of the former, interpretation becomes circular, which is to say, the text is presumed hostile and that attempts by its authors to deny hostility are interpreted as further evidence of their concealment.

The answer can be found in the Report’s conclusions. What the document boils down to is a defense of critical thinking against fallacious reasoning. The late philosopher Richard Paul, who also directed the Center for Critical Thinking and served as chair of the National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking Instruction, identified different modes of critical thinking in academia. I believe the mode promoted by the Report is what Paul would call “fair-minded critical thinking.”

To paraphrase, this mode of critical thinking is defined as skilled thinking that meets consistent epistemological demands, is characterized by empathy, and demonstrates a commitment to entertain in good faith all viewpoints “regardless of the vested interests or ideological commitments of the thinker” and “without reference to one’s own feelings or vested interests, or the feelings or vested interests of one’s friends, community or nation.”

By contrast, Paul describes “sophistic critical thinking” as thinking which meets epistemological demands and is heedless of assumptions and implications only “insofar as they square with the vested interests of the thinker” or “only insofar as it is in the vested interests of the thinker to do so.” The term “insofar” is most salient here. The Report argues that many professors in the Humanities think critically insofar as it supports a particular political agenda irrespective of empirical evidence or reasoning to the contrary. Paul rounds out his definition of sophistic critical thinking by calling it “skilled thinking that is motivated by vested interests, egocentrism, or ethnocentrism rather than by the truth or objective reasonability.” If that does not remind you of the Humanities to a significant extent, you have not been paying attention.

Paul’s use of “sophistic” should not be confused with rhetoric itself. Rhetoric can be manipulated for strategic advantage, but it is also indispensable to fair-minded inquiry. Scholars cannot deliberate without language, framing, interpretation, persuasion, and judgments about audiences and circumstances. There is a difference between rhetoric governed by intellectual responsibility and rhetoric used to protect ideas from scrutiny.

Again, I do not believe the Report is about xenophobia or political animus. It is about the way certain professors and certain fields do not abide by critical thinking divorced from political goals, thus making the goals, not the truth, the primary objectives. This is not to say that the truth and one’s political goals cannot align; the Report’s authors admit as much. This is to say that the pursuit of knowledge should not be subordinated to those political goals. Hence their advice to embrace “disinterested inquiry” in the Humanities, which is basically advice to embrace “fair-minded critical thinking” and neglect “sophistic critical thinking” to the best of our collective ability.

Critics of “The Report” seem to be committing something akin to a large-scale strawman fallacy, insisting that the Report says one thing when it really says another. This is more than just an isolated logical fallacy. I think that very conclusion derives from sophistic critical thinking. How could this not be a problem? A discipline that cannot hear criticism without translating it into oppression is a discipline whose findings become harder to trust. We need a renewed commitment to fair-minded critical thinking, even when that commitment unsettles the stories scholars tell about themselves.

Actually, the humanities need more than a renewed commitment to abstract critical thinking. They need a renewed commitment to fair-minded critical thinking and responsible rhetoric, and both terms should be understood as mutually dependent. This may bring us out of the current “crisis” in the humanities and into an academic culture in which scholars identify actual points of dispute, distinguish arguments from presumed motives, describe opposing positions accurately, and regard disagreement as an invitation to inquiry rather than a form of violence rooted in corruption.

To put it plainly, critical thinking provides standards for judging claims; rhetoric allows people who differ in their assumptions and commitments to reason together.

The answer is as simple as it is elusive. People do not believe what they believe because they are irrational, evil, or uninformed. Often, the issue is more fundamental: people are seeking validation that they matter.

Much of today’s polarization reflects a crisis of mattering. People feel unseen, unheard, culturally invisible, or even disposable (e.g., replacement theory). In response, they seek significance through ideological absolutism, virtue signaling, perpetual grievance, tribalism, and other behaviors that are all too familiar in today’s sociopolitical landscape. For this reason, civil discourse becomes a tool used primarily to secure existential validation in a zero-sum game of mattering. (For example, many people seemed to interpret “Black Lives Matter” as “White Lives Don’t Matter,” because it was seen as a threat to their own significance.)

A crisis of mattering develops when people feel voiceless and powerless. Generally, they lack a sense of agency. This crisis produces desperate selves, and desperate selves do things out of desperation, like embracing egregious ideologies and policies. Much of what is wrong in sociopolitical life can be understood as an attempt to compensate for feelings of insignificance. This helps explain why civil discourse breaks down. A free and pluralistic society requires citizens whose sense of worth is stable enough to endure disagreement without psychological collapse. Such stability cannot depend entirely on external validation; that foundation is too fragile.

If people are preoccupied with proving their own significance, they cannot fully listen to others, especially those whose views seem to imply that they matter less than they believe. Philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein writes in The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us, “We long to demonstrate that the reason we subjectively feel we matter is that we objectively do,” which is to say that most of us seek external validation for our sense of mattering.

But what if mattering were primarily an internal endeavor?

This is where rhetoric comes in, specifically what is called internal or intrapersonal rhetoric. If rhetoric is the art of persuading others, intrapersonal rhetoric is the art of persuading ourselves. Goldstein argues that the mattering instinct arises from a need to persuade ourselves that our lives are worth preserving and cultivating. This raises an important question: How do we persuade ourselves that we matter? The answer may determine the quality of our civil discourse. Healthy public discourse depends on healthy private discourse. If individuals cannot establish a durable sense of self-worth internally, they will continually seek confirmation from external sources such as politics, ideology, or group identity. Mattering may be a rhetorical endeavor at a fundamental level.

The foundation for grounded mattering includes more than rhetoric per se. It connects rhetoric, psychology, ideology, and identity into a single framework. Human beings are not merely truth-seeking creatures; they are mattering-seeking creatures as well. As a result, narratives that provide existential significance, moral importance, symbolic heroism, or protection against insignificance can become emotionally compelling even when they do not align with reality. People are not necessarily choosing falsehoods on purpose. Rather, they are often drawn to narratives that preserve their sense of legitimacy and worth.

Thus, challenges to those narratives can feel less like intellectual disagreements and more like attacks on their very being. This is why disagreement can feel so threatening and why civil discourse can feel anything but civil. When a person’s sense of worth depends upon a particular narrative, questioning that narrative may feel like questioning their right to matter. Perhaps this is why critical inquiry has been called a form of violence by many social justice activists.

Seen this way, mattering becomes a hidden motivational substrate beneath many human endeavors. A sense of insignificance is difficult to tolerate. Ideological extremism, chronic outrage, status obsession, tribalism, moral grandstanding, and other all-too-familiar culture war phenomena can all emerge from an unstable sense of mattering. The narratives people embrace are often shaped not by what they believe is true but also by what helps them feel significant.

A free, pluralistic, and civil society cannot flourish without citizens who genuinely believe they matter. People who feel they belong tend to participate constructively in civil society and pursue life, liberty, and happiness with confidence. By contrast, those who feel invisible or abandoned often describe themselves as having been “left behind” or ignored by institutions meant to serve them.

Sometimes, these feelings emerge from concrete circumstances, such as economic decline or social disruption. Yet, they can also arise when people perceive that cultural, political, or social elites view them as unimportant. Whether accurate or not, the perception that one does not matter can profoundly shape political behavior and public discourse.

If we wish to repair civil society, we must address the deeper human need to matter.

Hudson argues that people have an innate tendency toward excessive self-love, i.e., a disposition that prioritizes one’s ego, grievances, impulses, and desires above all else. (This is not to be confused with healthy self-love, which is part of the “emerging discussions” mentioned earlier.) When unchecked, this tendency corrodes pluralistic and civil societies. People become incapable of disagreement without dehumanization, incapable of criticism without contempt, no longer recognizing the legitimacy of others.

Hudson’s take on “self-love” can also be understood rhetorically. Human beings are interpretive by nature and constantly engaged in internal narration (intrapersonal rhetoric). We tell ourselves stories about who we are, who others are, what events mean, and whether the world respects or diminishes us. This intrapersonal rhetoric shapes our emotional reactions long before they become public speech. To put it succinctly, public discourse begins as private discourse, and recognizing this reality is an imperative next step in preserving civil discourse.

The nature of that intrapersonal rhetoric, which can also be understood as a kind of conversation with oneself, should not be neglected. The person who internally rehearses narratives of humiliation, resentment, superiority, or perpetual victimhood will eventually communicate those orientations outwardly. Likewise, the person who rehearses reflection, emotional discipline, curiosity, and self-awareness is more likely to engage others constructively, even amid serious disagreement. Civility is an outward expression of disciplined intrapersonal rhetoric.

In today’s world, discourse treats every emotional impulse as rhetorically sacred and every disagreement as existential aggression. (Social media has done nothing but worsen this.) This results in a culture in which emotional escalation and its corresponding rhetoric becomes normalized. We tend to react before looking into things and condemn before we have sufficient information to make a decision. It almost seems as if outrage is more important than the truth. Hudson’s defense of civility pushes against this entire communicative environment. Her argument implicitly revives an older rhetorical tradition stretching back to antiquity. Thinkers like Aristotle, Cicero, Erasmus, and others put forth the belief that communication is inseparable from character formation.

Rhetoric is not simply about winning arguments. It is about becoming the kind of person capable of living a happy and fulfilling life with others!

This is a vital point because many of today’s conversations about personal power misunderstand power itself. Empowerment is more than unrestricted self-expression or removal of social restraints. Real empowerment requires the ability to govern oneself. It is about emotional self-management, self-regulation, and self-awareness, which means one’s intrapersonal rhetoric is key to civil discourse. Why? Because a person who cannot regulate anger, interpret disagreement charitably, or maintain perspective under pressure may be too reactive to take part in generative dialogue with others.

For this reason, I think Hudson’s take on civility aligns with what I would call rhetorical empowerment: the cultivation of individuals capable of navigating volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (aka VUCA) during disagreements without devolving into resentment or the need to dominate. Civility, then, must be about developing the rhetorical maturity necessary for a free and pluralistic society.[i]

In The Soul of Civility, Hudson lays out this path. For Hudson, civility recognizes that others have dignity irrespective of ideological agreement. It acknowledges that democratic coexistence requires more than tolerance in the procedural sense; it requires rhetorical habits that affirm the humanity of our dissenters. Opposition is not enemy-hood, and disagreement need not require degradation. That insight might be the book’s most important contribution to civil discourse.

The Soul of Civility reminds us that rhetoric is more than just the art of persuasion. It is a way of inhabiting reality. The health of civil society depends on more than what is said and how it is said. It also depends on the quality of the conversations people have with themselves. A free and civil society is endangered if its citizens lack the internal capacities necessary for reflection, restraint, humility, and sound judgment. Hudson rightly points toward something deeper than manners and decorum. She points toward the recovery of rhetorical self-governance as a sine qua non of civil society, a disciplined practice of humanization that allows people to maintain both dignity and disagreement without collapsing into hatred, narcissism, victimhood, despair, or a sense of irrelevance. Citizens would do well to cultivate mastery of the rhetoric within before trying to reform and shape rhetoric without.

[i] This is why Hudson’s work and mine also intersects with the concept of mattering and “mattering studies” a burgeoning academic subfield that I count among the aforementioned emerging discussions. Much contemporary polarization reflects a crisis of recognition. People increasingly feel unseen, disposable, or culturally invisible. In response, many seek significance in less civil ways, like ideological absolutism, virtue signaling, perpetual grievance, and general intolerance of differing viewpoints, especially viewpoints they think suggest that they do not matter as much as they would like. (For example, upon hearing “Black Lives Matter,” many white people interpreted it as “White Lives Don’t Matter.”) For this reason, public discourse becomes less about deliberation than about securing validation on an existential level.

The need to say the first thing, or even to be one of the first to say it, is ever-present in what many call “the attention economy.” Journalists and influencers want to get the “scoop” on a situation because being the first is a form of ethos. That is, it gives one clout. It also makes sure that one’s contribution to the discourse around a situation is relevant. An innovative angle on an event matters much less after a few days, if at all. “Time is of the essence” is a silent but salient refrain in all forms of media.

What’s more, many of us have ready-made narratives through which we interpret the world. Sometimes, the narrative does the thinking more than we do. For instance, many Americans, regardless of race or socio-economic status, have a negative opinion of law enforcement. (For example, they assume statistics like the number of shootings of certain demographics is significantly higher than it actually is.) So, when they hear that a police officer has shot a black man, many assumptions follow: the officer was white and probably male, the black person was innocent or did not deserve to be shot, etc. Another group, however, may have the opposite assumptions: the cop, regardless of race, was doing his duty and the black person must have done something to provoke the officer. Both parties are making assumptions based on particular narratives.

I, a professional rhetorician, have also fallen victim to urgency and let the narrative do the heavy lifting. A recent example shows what I mean.

Recently, the Department of Justice charged the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) with wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering by funneling over $3 million to racist extremist groups, including the KKK, the American Nazi Party, Unite the Right, and Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club. According to FBI Director Kash Patel, “They lied to their donors, vowing to dismantle violent extremist groups, and actually turned around and paid the leaders of these very extremist groups—even utilizing the funds to have these groups facilitate the commission of state and federal crimes.” Upon hearing this, I made some impulsive assumptions.

My assumptions derived primarily from a narrative I had constructed based on preconceived notions. First was my knowledge of the SPLC’s “hate map,” a list of hate groups that includes organizations that do not actually fit that description and ignores groups that have a stronger claim to the label “hate group.” My narrative also emerged from a New Yorker article from 2019 in which Bob Moser, a former employee of the SPLC, discusses how dejected he and his colleagues were to see the reality of the organization. They felt like “pawns in what was, in many respects, a highly profitable scam.” Moser confessed, “We were part of the con, and we knew it.” Lastly, I have seen firsthand people creating problems so that they can be praised for solving them. Academics involved in social justice seemed to do this often. All this together coalesced into a narrative of dishonesty among those claiming to fight for justice.

Adding a sense of urgency to this narrative was like adding an accelerant to an already smoldering fire.

When I heard the news from the DOJ, I immediately wanted to write about it, and that is what I did. However, I was writing not from reality but from “narrative” reality. I wrote an essay about how the tendency to create a problem so that one can be praised for solving it is nothing new, and that the SPLC is simply the latest iteration. Of course, throughout the essay, I was committing a material fallacy: flawed reasoning caused by believing one has the necessary information to draw a conclusion when one actually does not. I had yet to hear the SPLC’s explanation or lawyers’ takes on the SPLC’s actions. If I had, I would have realized that this issue was more complicated.

Why did I do this? I am a rhetorician; I should know better! Usually, I do catch myself when it comes to things like this. But for this issue, for which I feel quite passionate, I sincerely wanted my voice to be in the national conversation about this story. That desire created an urgency that let my ready-made narrative do the thinking for me. I wanted my voice to matter, and being one of the first people to comment, I thought, would aid me in achieving that goal. This desire to matter resulted in a potentially fallacious essay that, thanks to the honest assessment of colleagues, will not see the light of day. (I get by with a little help from my friends.)

Urgency is dangerous to intellectualism because it necessarily pushes nuance out of our lines of sight. Urgency favors simplicity, and in an ever-changing and inescapably nuanced world, such simplicity can be a liability to anyone seeking true understanding. We cannot rush this process if we want to be fair and impartial. Simply put, we must guard against urgency.

So, I am asking you and myself to slow down and think things through before making conclusions. Hear all the relevant voices and get as many bits of information as possible. See what others think about the issue. Approach situations from as many angles as possible. I don’t know how the SPLC issue will shake out, but I do know that I will do my best to let it finish shaking out before I draw conclusions.

Rhetoric is the skill of discerning which words and delivery will convey real knowledge as clearly as possible to real people. Rhetoric is not something used only by the cunning; it is used by anyone who wants to get their point across, and that is everyone. The need for this skill does not discriminate between good and evil. Rhetoric is as intrinsically human as eating and breathing. It is a necessary skill to be used regardless of one’s moral purity. In fact, if the morally pure can use it, they can better combat those morally impure who abuse it.

Aptitude vs Moral Purpose

Perhaps decoupling the term from ignobility and mendacity is in order. Persuasion couched in trickery, phoniness, and manipulation, i.e., the kind of rhetoric represented in the above headlines, is called by a different label among rhetoricians. That label is “Sophistry,” named after the group of teachers and philosophers who, according to the most popular accounts, taught how to sound intelligent without actually being intelligent.

Aristotle wrote, “What makes a man a ‘sophist’ [as opposed to one who uses rhetoric] is not his faculty, but his moral purpose.” Rhetoric is a skill, an aptitude, to be wielded by a variety of characters. To take liberties with a culture war refrain, “Rhetoric doesn’t trick people; people trick people.”

Rhetoric is an imperative skill in a free and liberal society. If one cannot convey the truth in a way most receptive to an audience, one will be bested by someone who can couch lies in a way most receptive to an audience. Rhetoric is not just about persuasion; it is about protection from “sophistry.” Aristotle, when talking about the necessity of rhetorical skill in public deliberation, wrote,

[I]t is absurd to hold that a man out to be ashamed of being unable to defend himself with his limbs, but not of being unable to defend himself with speech and reason, when the use of rational speech is more distinctive of a human being that the use of his limbs. … A man can confer the greatest of benefits by a right use of these, and inflict the greatest of injuries by using them wrongly.¹

To take even more creative license with Second Amendment clichés, “The only way to stop a bad guy with rhetoric is a good guy with rhetoric.”

But notice the human quality to rhetoric. Aristotle analogizes the use of rhetoric with the ability to defend oneself against potential physical threats. Potential mental threats are more common and abundant. Where the human body needs martial skills, the human psyche may need rhetorical skills.

Mind and Soul

Before Aristotle penned his treatise on rhetoric, his teacher, Plato, also had a revelation that graduated rhetoric from the weapon of deceivers to the medium of truthtellers. Plato’s Phaedrus is a tacit mea culpa for denigrating rhetoric about 2 decades earlier in The Gorgias, where he said that rhetoric was mere “flattery,” and “not an art but a habitude or knack” unconcerned with truth.2 Plato is kinder to rhetoric in The Phaedrus and crafts a new description of it acknowledging that everyone must use it to some degree, but that, in order to use it as a supplement to the truth, one must speak to the human soul.

Yes, the soul. Plato writes that anyone who wants to perfect or teach rhetoric “will, in the first place, describe the soul very precisely, and let us see whether it is single and uniform in nature or, analogously to the body, complex. For to do that is, we maintain, to show a thing’s nature.” He continues,

And secondly, he will describe what natural capacity it has to act upon what, and through what means, or by it can be acted upon. ... Thirdly, he will classify the types of discourse and the types of soul, and the various ways in which souls are affected, explaining the reasons in each case, suggesting the type of speech appropriate to each type of soul, and showing what kind of speech can be relied on to create belief in one soul and disbelief in another, and why.3

We go deeper than mundane humanity and address the human soul. That is, to truly get another to understand the truth, one first needs to know the nature of one’s soul and shape one’s words accordingly. To know one’s audience in an effective way is to know their values, attitudes, beliefs, hopes, and ideals: the things many would say constitute the human soul.

Rhetoric is a sine qua non for the mind and the soul; it is of instrumental necessity to both. This cannot be a bad thing. If so, human nature and the congruence of mind and soul would be a bad thing. Rhetoric must consider a person as a confluence of mind and soul.

By extension, empathy, of both the affective and cognitive variety, is a necessary part of rhetoric, especially when speaking to one’s soul, as it were. Thus, in a sense rhetoric is not just an extension of human experience. It can also enhance human experience because it is partly constituted by compassion. It is a practical compassion, but compassion, nonetheless. Empathy and compassion are powerful forces—life forces—in the human experience. Effective rhetoric does not work without them.

Rhetoric is a Life Force

Yes, rhetoric is a kind of life force. One need not be especially “woo-woo” to say such a thing. Civilizations are built and maintained by verbal persuasion. Rhetoric, then, is a skill that can move people’s hearts, minds, and wills. An anonymous definition of rhetoric from the 15^th Century reads “[Rhetoric] is the science which refreshes the hungry, renders the mute articulate, makes the blind see, and teaches one to avoid every lingual ineptitude.”4This seems a bit dramatic, but the implication is clear: rhetoric is powerful and almost esoteric, like some kind of life force that drives persuasion, motivation, and will. The rhetorician George Kennedy spoke of rhetoric as a kind of energy.

Rhetoric in the most general sense may perhaps be identified with the energy inherent in communication: the emotional energy that impels the speaker to speak, the physical energy expended in the utterance, the energy level coded in the message, and the energy experienced by the recipient in decoding the message.5

If we see rhetoric as energy, we can infer that it can be applied in a variety of ways toward a variety of directions. It is a force available to us all, and those who hone that force into a skill are the ones that will make the biggest differences in human interactions.

Rhetoric can be used for bad, but it is an ultimate good. We should all work to harness its energy.

“Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.”

—Aristotle, On Rhetoric

Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric is considered the standard. It means that if you are talking to an audience that you know has a limited vocabulary, then a vast vocabulary is not an “available means of persuasion.” In other words, if you want to be persuasive, know your audience to the best of your ability and speak or write accordingly.

As simple as this idea is, we do need to be careful when utilizing it. There is a difference between gauging an audience and projecting one. With the former, a speaker has done his or her due diligence, looking into the values, attitudes, preferences, and beliefs of an audience before determining how to convey a message. With the latter, no due diligence occurs. The audience is assumed, a priori, to have a particular disposition. Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric can thus be bastardized into a fallacious gauging of one’s audience.

Recently, California Governor Gavin Newsom, has been called out by the likes of Nicki Minaj and News Nation’s Batya Ungar-Sargon, for altering his speech to sound less intelligent and, therefore, more relatable when speaking to black people. Whether their assessments are accurate or not, though important, is not my concern right now.1 This essay constitutes the rhetorical concept of metabasis: discerning a more prominent issue from a seemingly prominent issue. The bigger issue is that the rhetoric Newsom is accused of performing is not an aberration among liberals, especially those of a white, middle-class background. It is a common performance known as “presenting lower competence.”

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In a 2019 analysis of political rhetoric, professors Cydney Hurston Dupree and Susan T. Fiske of Yale University and Princeton University, respectively, found that “liberals—but not conservatives—presented less competence to Black interaction partners than to White ones.” The study found that white liberals generally slow their speech and use a more narrowed vocabulary when speaking to black people.

This phenomenon, “presenting lower competence,” (PLC) is nothing new. I have experienced it throughout my life. Many who used it when interacting with me probably meant well, but many white liberals have devolved so deeply into an unthinking habit of infantilization that the phenomenon needs to be addressed immediately if they do not want to keep hemorrhaging black voters.

That said, I want to make clear that my concerns are more rhetorical than political. I am neither a Republican nor a Democrat. Just a few years ago, after a lifetime of being a registered Democrat, I changed my affiliation to Independent. Why? Because I had finally reached my breaking point with paternalistic or prescriptive racism, condescension disguised as empathy and camaraderie, perpetuated by white liberals, predominately.

PLC and Prescriptive Racism

I believe PLC is a subcategory of prescriptive racism. Prescriptive racism/PLC is also why I left academia, a place where white people will gladly scold me for not being black correctly and scoff at my insistence that black people are not hopeless children who can only be saved by righteous progressives. The same white people who accused me, a black man, of being a white supremacist for saying that teaching standard English to black kids is a good thing, often behave as if they are supreme whenever interacting with black people.

As a rhetorician, I know how important gauging one’s audience is to effective communication, but that gauging cannot be predetermined. Too many white liberals assume that a speaker need not try to get to know a black audience because they assume blacks are to be addressed with less sophistication. This is not good rhetoric. It’s good old-fashioned stereotyping.

Credibility is important when it comes to persuasive speech. Aristotle called it “the controlling factor in persuasion.” 20^th Century rhetorician Kenneth Burke simply called it “identification” and wrote, “You persuade a man only insofar as you speak his language.” This is a fine rhetorical consideration. The problem is when “his language” is assumed and not discovered. When we assume an audience’s rhetorical preferences based on prescribed identity, we are not seeing that audience for what it is, but for what we assume or even want it to be.

And that is where things truly get uncomfortable. PLC is not always done with malicious intent; some people were taught that this must be done when addressing minorities. But if PLC is deliberate, it suggests that a particular narrative is being sold, one in which certain people are cast in certain roles.

Sadly, the narrative put forth by white liberals is one in which minorities, especially black people, are cast in the role of downtrodden victims who need to be saved by righteous and morally superior white liberals. To be fair, black liberals do this, too, when the victim role is seen as politically advantageous. Thus, PLC in general suggests a negative invocation of an audience. Rhetoric is not only used to persuade an audience but to summon an identity.

PLC and prescriptive racism toward minorities is so rampant that I and others created Free Black Thought to combat it. We were sick of the fact that mainstream media depicted black people as a mentally and emotionally stunted monolith who cannot even be trusted to procure their own driver’s licenses. Thus, we provide a platform for black voices that do not fit the victim narrative perpetuated by progressives.

So, as far as I am concerned, Newsom is not the real issue; this is bigger than one person. It is a phenomenon that has been around for a while. It is not enough for white liberals to say minorities are their equals. They need to talk to minorities as if they are equals as well.

The first thing that came to my mind after being vilified for asking a basic question was why the racist incident was not being described: either nothing racist happened or nothing could be proven. It was clear that clarification was not coming; asking “what happened?” (that is, asking for clarity) was a moral failing. Why? Because clarity is poison to contemporary Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. It’s the primary reason for their current demise.

Clarity can be scrutinized, and scrutiny can expose that this particular emperor was never wearing any clothes. Clarity demystifies, and mystification was a primary tool of contemporary DEI. The industry instead relied on ambiguity. Ambiguity breeds confusion, and confused people are easier to manipulate, especially confused people who feel it is best to defer to the experts.

The Rhetorical Power of Ambiguity

The semantic game is all about ambiguity. For example, racial discrimination is not racism if done to a white person. Core tenets of contemporary DEI are made to be deliberately confusing. In the case I described, the mandate to “listen to all minority voices” was put forth while refusing to listen to my minority voice! Which minority voice counts? And what of microaggressions? Based on their official definition, anything can be a microaggression, and people will stay quiet before they risk offending people with innocuous statements.

Perhaps the most detrimental ambiguity is the concept of “disparate impact”: attribution of racism to every disparity between white people (or “white-adjacent” people, another ambiguity) and others without looking into the matter.

Disparate impact is seen as proof of “systemic” or “institutional” racism: the idea that something in the way an institution is structured must cause the disparity, and that something is rarely clarified. This is the idea that racism is something that is just in the air. It is unfalsifiable (the evidence is literally invisible) yet a part of post-civil rights case law! In actuality, disparate impact only shows us an effect; it does not directly identify a cause. Disparate impact’s only signal is that we should look into an issue, not determine a single and certain cause of it. There is no further assessment.

This is why the Department of Justice recently ended disparate impact litigation and instead mandates that institutions show proof of actual discriminatory conduct and end the immediate presumption of racial discrimination based on disparate outcomes.

This policy is compliant with the Civil Rights Act’s prohibition of discrimination based on immutable characteristics like race. Colorblindness was supposed to be a constitutional mandate for the last 60 years, regardless of how academics and activists felt about it.

The Demand for Clarity

But haven’t people been demanding clarity this entire time? Those academic voices unencumbered by fear of ostracization have been calling out the ambiguity and fallacious reasoning of DEI initiatives before the term gained prevalence. Haven’t we been trying to reinforce colorblindness and point out the gaps in reasoning and hasty generalizations that have been intrinsic to disparate impact theory for years? Why is this happening now? There are two reasons.

One reason is a wider demand for clarity and fairness; the public got involved. The reactions in the aftermath of October 7th, 2023, when Hamas took 251 Israeli hostages, showed the world how far left activism ignores nuance: people were either good or bad with no consideration of context. What’s more, the failure of university presidents to condemn the acts opened many people’s eyes to the fact that something was severely amiss in academia.

The second and most consequential reason was the ending of affirmative action in the Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard ruling, which enforced the need for evidence and transparency in the admissions process. This logic has been extended to hiring practices and institutions beyond higher education. If racial favoritism is wrong in admissions, it is probably wrong in other funding, affinity groups, housing, and other contexts.

One of the consequences of the SFFA ruling was a re-clarification of colorblind ideology, the evaluation of people’s character irrespective of race, which was supposed to be a constitutional mandate for the last 60 years, regardless of how academics and activists felt about it. The rejection of colorblindness by people of color confused most Americans because it, too, was being redefined to mean blindness to racism or to the beauty of non-white races.

If the DEI era leaves us with anything durable, it is the lesson that ambiguity rewards those who control definitions and vilifies those who ask for evidence. The remedy is clarity. Asking for clarity is not a moral failing. On the contrary, it is the first obligation of anyone committed to truth.

When I say, “rhetorical fallacy” I mean an error in reasoning. It is when a speaker seems to be following the rules of logic but only gives the semblance of a sound argument. A rhetorical fallacy can also be the replacement of reason with emotion in ways that make a statement feel correct. As scholars W. Ward Fearnside and William B. Holther put it, fallacies are “counterfeit arguments”: they look authentic and can fool many, but the ones aware enough to look for fake logic can avoid being duped.

Fearnside and Holther’s Fallacy: The Counterfeit of Argument (in my opinion, the best book for understanding rhetorical fallacies) breaks rhetorical fallacies into three categories that we would do well to know: logical, psychological, and material. They explain the distinction with an analogy.

Suppose we compare argument to a manufacturing process which uses a machine, an operator, and raw materials. If the materials are up to standard, the operator efficient, and the machine running smoothly, the finished product will probably pass inspection. However, three kinds of things can go wrong. The materials can be below standard or poorly prepared. The operator can make a mistake—get sleepy or be distracted and turn the wrong knob. And the machine itself can break down or misfunction. In any of these three cases, the product will probably not pass inspection. If the trouble lies with the material, we call it material; if with the operator, we call it psychological; if with the machine, then logical.

It’s worth addressing each kind of rhetorical fallacy separately.

Logical Fallacies

Logical fallacies are, perhaps, the most popular form. So popular, in fact, that people label fallacies as logical when they are really psychological or material. A logical fallacy is a flaw in reasoning. Let us take the example, “All Democrats are Socialists.” Here is the line of “reasoning” implied in the statement:

Jim is a Democrat

Jim is also a Socialist

(Therefore) Democrats are Socialists.

We can discern the flaw here. One Democrat does not determine the characteristics of Democrats in general.

Another popular logical fallacy is the ad hominem statement in which a person’s character is attacked in lieu of that person’s argument. For example, dismissing someone’s ideas about social justice because, as a white man, he couldn’t possibly understand the most pressing issues. However, in reality this does not mean he cannot have a good point or an ideal strategy. His thoughts, even if disagreed with, can inform a discussion in positive ways. (If anything, it provides more information.) But many see the dismissal of a person based on his race as a legitimate act in this situation. Ironically, the ad hominem fallacy has been a remarkably effective fallacy in academia and activist circles.

Psychological Fallacies

Although logical fallacies may be the most well-known, psychological fallacies are just as common, if not more. Psychological fallacies appeal to emotion or character: if something feels right, it is right; if something is said by a respected figure, it is taken as truth.

Regarding feeling, an all-too-common example is called “mind reading”: acting, with certainty, like one’s motivations for something are no good or flawed with no proof other than a feeling. A statement like “Steve is against affirmative action because he is racist,” either before or after hearing Steve’s reasons, is a mind reading fallacy. It feels true in certain environments because Steve is a white male, the symbol of Western oppression, disagreeing with a policy meant to help minorities. Regarding character, the same people who dismissed Steve at face value would always give the benefit of the doubt to a black female. That person’s character or identity takes precedence over the soundness of her statements.

Material Fallacies

The third category is the material fallacy. It occurs when there is a flaw in information that, by extension, creates a flaw in one’s conclusions. Based on the information given, one can make a seemingly logical statement. However, if the information, the material, is flawed from the beginning, one’s conclusion will be as well. Often, people with differing viewpoints on the same topic are simply acting on different information about that topic, altered by biased news outlets, motivation toward a particular ideology, and reports from only one facet of a multi-faceted issue. Reactions to the shootings of civilians by ICE agents are examples. People hear and see different things from different people, which inevitably results in different conclusions.

Knowing the nature of these fallacies can help people defend themselves against bad-faith actors who want a particular outcome irrespective of the truth. It can also defend us from good-faith actors with incorrect information or whose emotions overpower their logic. Those unaware of rhetorical fallacies are most vulnerable, so fortify yourself against those modern-day sophists saying the wrong things in the “right” ways. That said, remember that you, too, are imperfect and may commit inadvertent rhetorical fallacies yourself. Recognize these fallacies so that you can create stronger, logically, materially, and psychologically sound arguments of your own.

Image: Paul Bielaczyc, Yin Lang (charcoal drawing), private collection.

Last week, I wrote an essay arguing that education should prepare students for a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous world. This “VUCA” world is inevitable, and refusing to prepare students for it is tantamount to educational malpractice. We need VUCA education focused on the concept of Kairos and the cultivation of a “kairotic disposition”: a temperament that is comfortable with Kairos and could be said to be the embodiment of kairos.¹ The constituent parts of any Kairos tend to be products of a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world. Acquiring a kairotic disposition is ideal for such a world; it is tantamount to inoculating oneself against chaos. It is like VUCA-proofing one’s life. But this entails acknowledging the good and the bad.

The Challenge of a Kairotic Disposition

Kairos is the amalgamation of all perceived aspects of a situation; it is an embrace of VUCA. There is an intrinsic openness to Kairos—it takes in all aspects of an experience. It does not curate one’s existence to see only what induces positive thoughts and emotions. Those who do so are not thinking kairotically. Kairos takes it all: the good and the bad, the light and the dark. If one is to achieve a kairotic disposition in hopes of better navigating a VUCA world, one has to acknowledge this and be ready for it. Taking in the light of Kairos is easy for obvious reasons, but Kairos is also about the dark. A kairotic disposition, then, needs to be as comfortable as possible with both.

Someone with a kairotic disposition confronts emotions like disgust, abhorrence, hate, and an overall detestation of anything considered morally repugnant. A kairotic disposition does not cherry-pick what it wants to acknowledge or accept in a given situation; it rises to meet it all. Thus, a kairotic disposition includes a tolerance for contradiction, the acceptance of uncomfortable truths, and an acknowledgment of ambiguity and uncertainty of meaning. Cultivating and maintaining a kairotic disposition is a way to stay present with suffering, ambiguity, fear, or greed without fleeing them or turning them into stories of martyrdom and moral purity.

A kairotic disposition can “hold the dark.”

Holding the Dark

The novel “Hold the Dark,” by William Giraldi, which Netflix made into a film in 2018, revolves around a wildlife expert charged to track and kill a wolf believed to have taken a small child, but his understanding of nature as indifferent and innocent stills his hand. The wolves did not kill because they were evil; they killed because they were wolves. Their tragic acts were not personal, but natural. Likewise, the world is not volatile, uncertain, complex, or ambiguous because of some sinister actors or forces. It is VUCA because it has to be. The world is full of individuals with their own unique perspectives, and this is exacerbated significantly in a society made to be free and pluralistic. If we can sit with discomfort and the reality of discomfort (i.e., realize that human discomfort isn’t going away), we may be able to stabilize ourselves enough to move ourselves and our society in generative directions.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. Below is an autobiographical excerpt from an essay I wrote on writing pedagogy. When I was a graduate student, I once tutored a student whose thesis was explicit and offensive: black people were taking over and ruining the country. He wrote that White people were the new oppressed class and that Black people must be stopped before it’s too late. After getting over the shock and wondering if the student knew I was black, I realized that if I reacted angrily, the student may shut down and not take my advice and probably see me as some kind of proof of his argument or at least someone who would probably try to sabotage his paper. I decided to face this student’s ideas without letting my shock and anger get the best of me. I even found myself morbidly amused by the student’s audacity. I proceeded to point out several logical fallacies in the argument and explain why they were fallacious. I told him many of his arguments needed proof and appropriate citation. When the session was over, he thanked me and left.2

In this situation, I was able to successfully hold the dark. I did not let his explicitly racist thoughts send me into a downward spiral of anger, hurt, and grievance, although I was entirely justified in doing so. I saw this student the way the narrator of Hold the Dark saw wolves: part of the inevitable dangers and misfortunes of the world. Accepting the wolves did not mean tolerating their dangerous behavior. It meant that their mitigation need not be accompanied by resentment. Because of this mindset, I could discern the best course of action within that particular kairotic moment and realize I did not have to choose between righteous refutation and my job; I could refute his statements precisely by doing my job. Both my overall goal as a tutor and my self-respect remained intact. I will never know if it had a positive impact, but this experience aligns with my point: holding the dark can get us through the dark.

Life is Kairotic; Life is VUCA

The adaptability, openness, and complexity of a kairotic disposition will better prepare us for success and fulfillment in a VUCA world. To have these qualities is to harbor the ability to dance with VUCA, to work with it and not against it. It allows one to improve in a variety of yet to be experienced experiences. Those who lack the ability to ride the existential wave of Kairos have their options narrowed significantly.

The culture wars of contemporary American society rage on because many people cannot hold the dark. They would rather flee from, ignore, silence, or even kill those who voice opinions we deem unacceptable. We see this play out in a variety of arenas (academia and political activism most prominently). Thus, as long as we are in this world, especially a free and pluralistic one, we would do well to cultivate a kairotic disposition. The ability to handle the good with the bad, holding both the light and the darkness, is tantamount to a superpower in a VUCA world. It behooves us to cultivate it in ourselves and help others do the same.

We live in a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous World: a “VUCA” world. This isn’t hard to discern; the stock market, the parenting of a teenager, and this year’s NFL standings all fit the VUCA label. More broadly, VUCA should be an expected condition in a free and pluralistic society in which a variety of people with different preferred ideologies must co-exist. Recognizing this world as thoroughly VUCA should not be a profound revelation. What may be less intuitive is that VUCA is not necessarily a bad thing.

I think the real conversation about VUCA should emphasize strategies for collaborating with it. Many try to mitigate VUCA by trying to engineer its opposite (a Stable, Certain, Simple, and Clear world). Others, VUCA “enthusiasts” like myself, believe we should lean into it and encourage ourselves and the world to work with the inevitable chaos of the human experience. In fact, educators would do well to prepare students to navigate a VUCA world explicitly. To be clear, I do not think the problem is VUCA. The problem is our inability or refusal to embrace VUCA, to lean into it. What’s more, I think a framework for doing so is already in place for both educators, managers, and other kinds of societal leaders. That framework is rhetorical education, specifically as it pertains to civil discourse.

Though rhetoric’s specific relevance to VUCA is implied, I see other education specialists insisting that VUCA is not an obstacle, but an opportunity. Education professional Erin Lynn Raab believes that traditional schoolings prepares students for a stable, certain, simple, and clear world—in other words, a world that doesn’t exist. She writes “What should drive the design of K-12 schooling is a deep understanding of how individuals flourish, grow, and learn, a vision of the kind of community and society we want to create together, and an explicit set of values that underlie that community.” I agree, as does educator Edward Cosentino, who sees VUCA as a collection of leadership challenges and an ongoing discipline that can help develop people with emotional intelligence, courage, and a strong sense of purpose. For Cosentino, embracing VUCA “is a mindset and a way of life.” I believe that mindset could be construed as a rhetorical mindset.

VUCA and Kairos

Life in a VUCA world is best served by cultivating a “kairotic disposition.” In rhetorical theory the term “Kairos” denotes the confluence of time, place, audience, subject matter, and essence. A change in one of those things can alter what one does, how one does it, and even why one does it. Thus, Kairos is the word for how communication can be volatile (e.g., unpredictable developments), uncertain (predictive difficulty) complex (various causes and effects), and ambiguous (unclear meaning). We should learn how to communicate and, by extension, work together within it. We should cultivate a disposition of Kairos.

The efficacy of a kairotic disposition is what medieval philosopher Desiderius Erasmus tacitly proposed with his concept of “Copia”: an abundance of expressions to be used based on the moment. In “On Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style,” Erasmus elaborates on the “exercise” of Copia, insisting that variety and ambiguity should be embraced and that we should develop the skills to foster “the ability to speak or write extempore,” which “will prevent us from standing there stammering and dumbfounded, or from disgracing ourselves by drying up in the middle.” Other than avoiding embarrassment, Erasmus also highlighted that rhetorical skill would help us navigate a VUCA world, insisting that rhetoric will help us “divert speech, even when we have embarked upon it rather hastily, into the course we desire when we have so many expressions lined up ready for action.” Erasmus seemed to believe that rhetoric was the most salient skill for VUCA navigation, even in his much less free and pluralistic environment.

This is the reason aspiring leaders from antiquity to the present create “commonplace” books: notebooks full of terms, phrases, and talking points collected through everyday life that may come in handy in the future. Commonplace books were kept by prominent leaders and thinkers like Marcus Aurelius, Francis Bacon, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Virginia Woolf, and, unsurprisingly, Desiderius Erasmus. Lest you think “commonplacing” is an antiquated phenomenon, people like the writer and influencer, Ryan Holiday, swear by commonplace books. People like Bill Gates and Ronald Reagan are said to have used them. The writer and entrepreneur Navil Ravikant seems to have actually published a version of his commonplace book, titled The Almanack of Navil Ravikant. Clearly, there is benefit to be had from keeping such a journal.

VUCA Ed

Kairos and commonplace books notwithstanding, cultivating a kairotic disposition takes some work. The good news is that K-12 schools are starting to emphasize effective communication by basing their education on The Trivium: a form of education popular in medieval Europe that focused on three core areas: Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric. The Trivium School in Massachusetts may be the most explicit about this mode of education (It’s in the name, after all), but schools like the Veritas School in Oregon or Rockbridge Academy in Maryland have also embrace the trivium. More schools like this exist nationally, and students attending these “trivium schools” may be the best equipped to function successfully in a VUCA world. They are starting young and are in good positions to achieve Erasmus’s Copia. In fact, they may have several volumes of such journals by the time they graduate. The kids are alright.

Don’t Avoid it; Lean into It

That said, more schools, including institutions of higher education, need to follow suit. If we want today’s youth to become adults that can handle, manage, and, contribute to society in a VUCA world, rhetorical savvy is a must. The present and future are VUCA in nature. Education must be geared toward VUCA preparation, not VUCA avoidance. I think rhetoric is a powerful way to do so.

In an age defined by outrage, polarization, and mutual misunderstanding, I think contemporary America is in dire need of well-rounded speakers.

I believe the Greeks were onto something with the Progymnasmata, but we need not go through the whole thing right now. Instead, I want to focus on the first three parts because they all constitute a skill I think is more important now than it has ever been for helping stabilize cohabitation in a pluralistic and civil society: storytelling.

The first three genres of the Progymnasmata are all about the general idea of a story: Fable, Narrative, and Chreia (anecdote).

Fable: a fictional and often fantastical story meant to teach a lesson

Narrative: A story about something that happened or is said to have happened, formatted by plot, setting, character, conflict, and theme.

Chreia: an anecdote about a famous person’s statements to teach a lesson.

The genres of fable and chreia are appropriate for particular audiences, but, as I will try to explain, the skill most universal, and most direly needed in American society, may be narrative.

Crafting a Good Narrative

Many rhetoricians have written and argued about the power of narrative, but they all seem to agree that, to varying degrees, humans are storytelling creatures. They also agree to a large extent that everything is a story; that is, everything has a narrative explanation for why it exists, from our thoughts to our actions. A feeling, whether individual or communal, has a previous story that causes and/or justifies it.

That said, narrative is more than simply telling a story. According to Aphthonius2, writer of the most well-known treatment of the Progymnasmata in Ancient Greece, said Narration must have six components: the person doing the action, the action itself, the time, the place, and the cause and delivery of the act. Kenneth Burke, a prominent 20^th century rhetorician, called this criteria “dramatism” and rendered its parts as a “pentad” of scene, agent, agency, purpose, and act.

Both these authors agree that a plot of some sort is necessary, and in that plot a specific act or thought is implicitly or explicitly justified or condemned. We can see echoes of this take on storytelling in journalist education, in which burgeoning writers are told to be sure to address the “Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How” of each situation. These considerations are imperative to comprehensive storytelling.

But that is not the only criterion. Aphthonius also insisted that good narrative must be clear, concise, plausible, and pure in diction. The first two criteria are quite understandable; a storyteller should be as clear as possible and get to the point relatively quickly. However, I believe the latter two criteria are the most relevant for our purposes; they determine how strongly a clear and concise story can land.

Setting a Story

Amphthonius wrote that a story had to make logical and chronological sensed and it had to sound authentically Greek, because he was thinking solely of a Hellenistic audience. We can read this as gearing one’s language, historical references, and consideration of values in ways an audience would recognize and respect.3 Contemporary rhetoricians like Walter Fisher call this “narrative probability” and “narrative fidelity.”

In “Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm: The Case of Public Moral Argument,” Fisher defines narrative probability as coherence: how well a story holds together. Do the events, characters, and facts line up? Narrative fidelity is about how well a story resonates with a particular audience: how does a story align with the references, values, attitudes, beliefs, and already accepted stories of the audience in a way that will most likely result in persuasion. According to Fisher, narrative probability and fidelity are essential for getting one’s point across. Along with clarity and concision, these concepts of probability and fidelity will make for a powerful story.4

Why Narrative Matters More than Ever

So, why do I focus on narrative as opposed to other genres in the Progymnasmata? Well, one’s reputation and credibility is based on a perceived story about one’s life. And, whether we realize it or not, one’s conclusions and beliefs are the products of a story of how a person came to those conclusions and beliefs. If we want people to understand us (who we are and why we have certain beliefs), and sound logic is not doing the trick (as contemporary American society shows clearly), maybe narrative, i.e., an argument or explanation wrapped in a relatable story, can do the trick.

However, we have to acknowledge that there are competing narratives; everyone has a story, and some of them may contradict the lessons of our own preferred narratives. Comparing conflicting stories may be more civil than trading well-reasoned conclusions about the world. Conclusions feel, well, conclusive; they feel done. Stories, although they have an end, can easily keep going in our minds.

We can always create better and more beneficial stories.

The Fulnecky incident at University of Oklahoma took off because she received a failing grade. If she had received a respectable grade, would Curth’s feedback have prompted her to make a formal complaint? I don’t think a score of 15 out of 25 would have induced the same social media storm, a suspension of Curth, or a reaction from the Governor. The grade is the thing, and the act of grading is something worth looking at.

I am not the only one who thinks so. The act of grading has emerged as its own subject matter, especially in my field of Rhetoric and Composition. Traditional grading involves a hierarchy of merit involving assigning letter grades based on work quality. Traditional grading, however, is getting a bad rap from many academics who argue for alternative and social justice-oriented modes of student evaluation.

Grading has always been a touchy subject in my career, but I think it is now having a moment. The most meticulous rubric could still have enough subjective wiggle room to encourage a student’s dispute, as we can glean from the Fulnecky incident. I believe better student preparation can go a long way in assuaging this issue, but some scholars have decided to lean into this and created alternatives to traditional grading. Given my experience as a professor and what I know about alternative forms of grading, I still think traditional grading has more upside than downside, and that alternative forms of grading do more harm than good.

Grading Alternatives

One alternative to traditional grading is “labor-based grading,” a method of evaluation that gives more emphasis to the work put into an essay than the quality of the actual essay. Don’t know how to craft an introductory paragraph or properly use a semicolon? No problem! No one can fail if they work hard enough.

Many scholars who support this form of “grading” cite unavoidable human subjectivity as the reason to emphasize labor over quality, but the main motivation seems to be ideological. For most proponents of labor-based grading see traditional grading as a system driven by “whiteness,” therefore making the teaching of writing to non-white students a form of oppression. This may seem like a far cry from the Fulnecky issue, but it really is not. Fulnecky claimed that anti-Christian and or progressive gender ideology was the reason for her failing grade. This means that ideology, in general, is perceived to be the issue.

In addition to labor-based grading, there is the practice of “ungrading.” Ungrading happens when traditional grade is abandoned for feedback and dialogue, alone. Students write self-evaluations and propose their own final grade. Before you call this ludicrous, Schools like Baylor , Duke, and Columbia are experimenting with it. Evergreen State College and other small liberal arts colleges embrace ungrading throughout their curricula.

Putting the political and religious issues aside, I can see why these grading alternatives are attractive to some educators; the Fulnecky incident could have been avoided with a labor-based or ungrading form of evaluation. These systems assuage stress on both sides of the professor/student dichotomy. Professors are relieved of the burden of rigorous assessment and students are relieved of the pressure to produce a well-written essay. Professors can relax and students can give themselves A’s with no pushback. Everyone’s happy. So why grade?

So Why Grade?

To be clear, the idea that grading is the problem does not prompt me to embrace labor-based assessment or ungrading. It does, however, further cement a suspicion I’ve had about those grading practices all along: it’s just easier and better for business. It seems like everyone can get what they want. What’s more, students are seen less as minds to be educated and more as clients to be satisfied with the “product” of an education. The business maxim, “the customer is always right,” comes to mind; with labor-based grading and ungrading, the student is always right.

With these grading practices, it is almost impossible to fail. (I wonder if some students actually fail themselves! I’d love to talk to them.) It is also almost impossible for a professor to suffer a student’s ire. Even if a professor’s feedback is disagreeable to a student, a guaranteed passing grade may douse a fiery dispute. Again, if Fulnecky had received an A, we probably would not know her name.

I don’t think these modes of alternate grading are good things. I think we need a clear and shared discourse of standards, and I think employers and managers of the world should be engaged on a regular basis to discern which hard and soft skills are most necessary. That would be better to align grading with real world expectations and help clarify what distinguishes an A from a B.

This is not to say that labor-based grading and ungrading don’t have their place. (I think they align with the complexities of problem-based learning in which both teachers and outside stakeholders evaluate student work.) But generally, I think we still need traditional grading; we need real and discernable distinctions between good and bad work. Students need to be incentivized to know the difference, because evaluators beyond academia (e.g., employers and supervisors) will definitely know. Being “ungraded” could get someone “unhired.”

In addition, I believe incentive is a strong driver, and ambition can be harnessed. “Chasing grades” has been coded as shallow, but I think it is quite profound. I truly enjoyed most of my college and graduate school classes and wanted to do well out of a genuine thirst for knowledge, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t get a substantial dopamine hit when I earned an A.

Grades did not stress me out; they invigorated and enthused me, and I wanted to do all I could to get the best grade. This meant honing my resourcefulness and agency, which in turn bolstered my confidence in successfully navigating the world. It meant meeting with professors during their office hours to get a better grasp of the course content or work out ideas of my own. When I got a bad grade, I would talk to the professor about why and how I could improve.

I have also seen the efficacy of extrinsic motivation as a professor. When I gave alternative grading a shot (I had 5 small assignments that I didn’t grade but counted toward class participation) many students did not like it. They wanted confirmation of an actual grade. Beyond my own experience, research shows that removing extrinsic motivation like grades has a detrimental effect on many students’ performances. Gradeless grading caters to a certain kind of “self-regulating” student: those with high self-discipline and prior preparation. Not every student (I dare say not most students) fit that description.

Traditional Grading Isn’t the Problem

I do not think grades are the problem. I think attitudes toward grades are the problem. I wonder what would have happened if Fulnecky and her professor had a face-to-face, civil conversation about the grade. We can’t know for sure, but it probably would have garnered more than 0 points on the assignment. Perhaps that is the real lesson here.

Thank you for following Competencies in Civil Discourse!

Nuance is Complicated

The term nuance denotes “a subtle distinction or variation” or, more significantly, “sensibility to, awareness of, or ability to express delicate shadings (as of meaning, feeling, or value).” Nuance is the presence of gradations in meaning and causation, and a nuanced outlook is one in which those gradations are acknowledged. Connected to the rhetorical concept of Kairos, nuance signals the intricate ways that time, place, people, and purpose can alter how we interpret our world. To put it in a simpler and, ironically, less nuanced way, it’s complicated. 

Nuance is so complicated that it simply cannot be addressed at all times. Aristotle acknowledged this when he used the term “enthymeme,” which denotes a statement that truncates a more elaborate explanation. For example, if I say “I am mortal,” I do not need to explain the concept of mortality or why I use a passive verb instead of an active verb. The argument is enthymemic in that it is implied in the statement. This foregoing of nuance is natural and necessary in everyday parlance; I do it myself throughout this essay (e.g., my use of the term “culture war” earlier). Truly unpacking every term and every statement we utter can quickly derail any conversation. However, when it comes to social and political messaging, evasions of nuance can cause trouble.

A real and nuanced outlook complicates the world so much that it can be seen as a sociopolitical obstacle. Political activism, for example, cannot tolerate much nuance. This is relatively simple to understand given the concept of the enthymeme. “Defund the Police” is easier to fit on a protest sign than, “dismantle or radically restructure police systems in a way that maintains those systems while redistributing funds to social services that, often, are more appropriate for many situations currently under the purview of the police.” Even this latter explanation is not really nuanced enough for a full understanding, but you get the point.

What’s more, activism defined more broadly sees a lack of acknowledged nuance across the political spectrum, but especially at the extremes, and this goes from political organizations to the federal government. In fact, communication without nuance could be understood as a definition of propaganda, a sophistic form of communication meant to discourage critical thinking and replace it with automatic belief. 

Avoidance is Bliss

Those activist messengers are not the only ones who bristle at nuance. Many who receive these messages also don’t care for it. Again, acknowledging nuance takes time and energy. For some, the mental discomfort caused by it can feel like pain. This “pain,” what the philosopher Charles Peirce, in his essay “The Fixation of Belief,” called “the irritation of doubt,” is “an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief.” I believe everyone feels a sense of discomfort at some level when considering the myriad gradations of a particular situation or phenomenon, especially those for which we feel strongly.

One way to avoid this feeling is to do just that: sidestep anything too complex. When nuance needs to be considered, simply don’t. Take things out of context, project motivations onto others, jump to hasty conclusions, stereotype people, and so on. One could say that the fundamental purpose of logical fallacies is to avoid or nudge others to avoid the challenge of nuance! This is why a lack of nuance in political messaging is a substantial reason why our society is becoming so starkly polarized.

On the other hand, one can take Peirce’s advice and rid oneself of the unease of doubt by acquiring something closer to its opposite: certainty. Peirce writes, “The irritation of doubt causes a struggle to attain a state of belief. I shall term this struggle inquiry. The irritation of doubt is the only immediate motive for the struggle to attain belief” (My emphasis). So, the more uncomfortable one is with how little he knows about something, the more he should be motivated to acquire that knowledge.

Curiosity is the Cure

Avoiding nuance in political messaging may be a symptom of the irritation of doubt, but perhaps curiosity is its cure. The stronger the curiosity, the more willing one is to put in the time and energy to consider nuance. This curiosity is liberating in a sense. This is why Peirce is also known for the simple demand, “Do not block the road to inquiry.” Such a block won’t just obstruct one’s search for knowledge; it will also impede one’s desire for cognitive relief. 

So, nuance is nuanced. For some, it is something to avoid, but for others it is a playground full of things to be discovered and understood. One need only jettison the fear of new knowledge and its ability to kill an erroneous but beloved belief. New knowledge can hurt even if beneficial. Some are willing to acquire it anyway; the pull of curiosity and their desire for accuracy are too strong. Either way, we need to emphasize this term, along with critical thinking, throughout the American education system. Perhaps if people understand the term and the benefits of acknowledging it, an immunity to the “irritation of doubt” can emerge organically.

In Metaphors We Live By, scholars George Lakoff and Mark Johnson point out how we, as a society, tend to conceptualize argumentation as a metaphorical war. They provide examples: “Your claims are indefensible. He attacked every weak point in my argument. His criticisms were right on target. I demolished his argument,” and so on. As an alternative conceptualization of argument, Lakoff and Johnson offer up a dance metaphor in which the implied goal would be to perform in a balanced and aesthetically pleasing way. They rightly suggest that an argument conceptualized as a dance probably would not be recognized as an argument at all.

I believe there is a benefit to both metaphors. In fact, I think ideal civil discourse is a combination of the two. In debates for which the stakes are relatively high, civil discourse is supposed to involve deliberation about the best course of action for ensuring, to the best of our ability, benefit for all stakeholders. This takes both a desire to win (use the best strategy to present your arguments while maintaining the ability to “shoot down” others) and a desire to move cooperatively, i.e., dance, by respecting the rules of engagement and appreciating the mutual benefit of “a marketplace of ideas.” Civil discourse is both a battle and a dance, but this combination doesn’t fit neatly into a metaphorical concept.

Or does it?

Conflict management and martial arts expert, Terry Dobson, and theater teacher Victor Miller seemed to see an apt metaphor for rhetoric in everyday life, e.g., civil discourse, in the art of Aikido. In Aikido in Everyday Life: Giving in to Get Your Way, Dobson and Miller explain that conflict is an unavoidable part of life; we must acknowledge it and learn how to manage it. The problem, however, is that we as a society immediately code conflict as something intrinsically bad. Dobson and Miller see this as a mistake and suggest we see conflict as neither good nor bad inherently, but as an opportunity for mutual gain. They see Aikido as an ideal metaphor for understanding and handling argumentative conflict, coining the term “Attack-tics” to denote “a wedding of the martial arts and theater” that “uses the physical throws and body movements of Aikido as metaphors for the way in which to handle all forms of social or psychological attack.” They continue:

“Aikido,” loosely translated, means a harmony of spirit and body, the opposite of what most of us experience when faced with conflict. It requires that the participant be “centered,” relaxed, and alert. Moreover, Aikido is primarily a form of self-defense; it does not teach you how to run right out and break the nearest arm. Likewise, Attack-tics will not teach you how to start conflicts. The balanced person rarely feels the need to cause trouble.

For Dobson and Miller, a balanced person does not seek trouble, but such a person does know how to deal with trouble once encountered. With the Aikido metaphor, conflict is an exchange of energy by which we do not wish to “destroy” another, but to transform the situation itself. Ultimately, the authors argue that one can technically lose an argument and still feel like a winner. This methodology, dubbed “Attack-tics” by the authors, is too involved to address fully in this essay, but the authors insist it is a powerful way forward in a pluralistic society modeled on the ideal of deliberative democracy.

The purpose of Attack-tics is, in part, to get us all to be able to stand outside the arena of win-and-lose so that we can decide, as objectively as possible, what is really happening in the conflicts we face. If we can meet an angry friend or a recalcitrant child without worrying about wins and losses, we will immediately be better, more understanding, more effective parents, friends, and workers.

The authors acknowledge the negative emotions associated with losing an argument, especially an argument about an issue near and dear to our hearts, but they argue that the Aikido metaphor can help us transcend the ideas of “win” and “lose” altogether.

Argument as Aikido acknowledges the war metaphor while simultaneously acknowledging the dance metaphor. It is engaging with conflict and redefining “winning” as the act of coming to the best conclusion for all involved, including the person or people with whom one is arguing.

This is not so much a book review as it is a book suggestion. What do you think about the Aikido metaphor? Is this what we need to mitigate societal polarization?

The “debate bro” archetype captures a subset of online political commentators. These commentators verbally spar to “win” an argument over engaging in civil discourse. While many critics have condemned the emergence of “debate bro” content, they ignore the larger role this type of rhetoric plays in civil society. In a time when public discourse often feels like combat, true rhetorical skill lies not in unwavering civility, but in the ability to strategically wield both civility and incivility.

This article was originally published by the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism’s Fair For All blog.

Cover Illustration by Jade Cuevas/POLITICO (source images via iStock)

These days, vitriol is both ubiquitous and addictive for those spewing that vitriol (it feels good to vanquish one’s enemies) and spectators who see the spewing as a form of entertainment. People would rather shoot insults—or worse—at those with whom they disagree, and others take joy in watching those people do so. None of this is particularly civil in nature. For most, this may portend the end of civil discourse. However, many people who feel that way may inadvertently equivocate the meanings of the word “civility.” The common meaning of the term is politeness. However, the political meaning denotes public engagement guided by reason toward mutually advantageous ends; this does not necessarily involve being polite. Thus, I believe we can have civil debate without being civil. What might this mean for civil (in both meanings of the word) society?

I believe the revilement induced by the verbal sparring we see in lieu of dialogue can be transmuted into something good. Also, I believe compassion and active listening are important, but they are not everything. A famous Bible passage (and song lyric) says, “there is a time for every purpose under heaven.” Every purpose. That includes caustic language as well as congenial language. Ultimately, the problem is that focusing solely on compassion or anger, respectively, is a woefully incomplete rhetorical education. I contend that rhetoric must be taught in a way that sees particular modes as situationally contingent rather than morally fixed. For civil society to work, civility and incivility must have their places.

There is a Time and Place for Everything

An important term in rhetorical theory and practice is “Kairos,” often translated as “window of opportunity,” or the confluence of time, place, subject, and audience, and its impact on how we speak and act. One of the implicit lessons in the term is the idea that “appropriate or inappropriate” is the primary dichotomy to consider, “not right and wrong,” per se; the time, place, subject, and audience will dictate what one should or should not say for the utmost persuasiveness. So, most situations call for a level of civility, but some may not. Even I have made the conscious decision to add causticity to an argument based on my “kairotic” assessment of a situation; they saw civility as weakness, so I made my point in less civil ways. This is what Aristotle was getting at when he defined rhetoric as the ability, in any given situation, to discern the available (i.e., appropriate) means of persuasion.

I bring this up because, recently, Politico published an article titled “Winning Is the Only Thing: My Journey Into the Viral, Vicious World of Political Online Debate.” Politico’s Catherine Kim writes of two self-proclaimed “debate bros,” Andrew Wilson and Brian Atlas, who see debate as a particularly masculine contest of domination; using dialogue to enhance and get to the truth of a matter is not really their goal. For Wilson and Atlas, debate is verbal combat, a martial art all would do well to master. This is the raison d’être of Debate University, their set of courses for learning how to “dominate any discussion.” “Debate Bro rhetoric” seems to be about embarrassing another person and prioritizing antagonism (destructive enmity) over agonism (constructive and honest dialogue across differences)—the person who does the best job of humiliating the other “wins” the debate. To be clear, humorous degradation, not persuasion, is the objective.

Anger and Erudition

Wilson and Atlas’ embrace of invective is not novel. In fact, ancient philosophers saw the importance of being able to spew causticity effectively. Entertaining the benefits of anger—both having it and manipulating it—was a salient aspect of classical Greek rhetorical education. Though Plato and Socrates were not enthusiastic about rhetoric as a learned skill (They thought eloquence and persuasion were part of the natural demeanor of a virtuous philosopher), Aristotle and his contemporaries recognized that persuasion could necessitate vitriol or congeniality if the Kairos dictates it.

In Book II of Rhetoric, Aristotle writes, “The Emotions are all those feelings that so change men as to affect their judgements, and that are also attended by pain or pleasure. Such are anger, pity, fear, and the like, with their opposites” (My emphasis). You can see that no emotion should go ignored; certain emotions can affect judgments in certain ways, and anger can be just as rhetorically appropriate as civility. Aristotle elaborates with anger in particular:

We must arrange what we have to say about each [emotion] under three heads. Take, for instance, the emotion of anger: here we must discover (1) what the state of mind of angry people is, (2) who the people are with whom they usually get angry, and (3) on what grounds they get angry with them. It is not enough to know one or even two of these points; unless we know all three, we shall be unable to arouse anger in any one. The same is true of the other emotions. (My emphasis)

We see here that Aristotle expects those who aspire to be effective speakers to acquire the ability to arouse anger, not necessarily mitigate it. Apparently, sometimes we may want our audience to be angry; it can be quite the motivator, disrupter, and distractor. It should be no surprise, then, that “invective,” typically understood as insulting or abusive language, was part of formal rhetorical education in ancient Greece; it was one of the 14 exercises that make up the Progymnasmata, a favored form of rhetorical education.

Clearly, it was seen as a necessary skill, something that every speaker should have in his or her pocket just in case the Kairos suggests its use.

All this said, would Aristotle approve of Debate University’s emphasis on humiliation? Not quite. Using the word “insolence” to describe the act of deliberately shaming someone solely for the pleasure of oneself and/or others, Aristotle writes:

Insolence is also a form of slighting, since it consists in doing and saying things that cause shame to the victim, not in order that anything may happen to yourself, or because anything has happened to yourself, but simply for the pleasure involved. The cause of the pleasure is that he thinks himself greatly superior to others when ill-treating them. One sort of insolence is to rob people of the honour due to them; you certainly slight them thus; another is to act for the mere pleasure of it; hence boys and rich men are insolent, as they are happy and think themselves superior when they behave thus.”

Although Aristotle does not condemn insolence outright, the implications are there: the fact that it is done solely “for the pleasure involved” seems less than virtuous for Aristotle, and attributing the act specifically to boys and rich men implies that insolence is the tool of those who don’t take life seriously, either because they don’t know any better (boys) or are so untouchable they don’t care who they insult (rich men).

Aristotle believed there is a time and place for everything, and instructors of rhetoric should teach as much of that “everything” as possible. Aristotle, who taught his own course on rhetoric, would approve of an institution that approached rhetoric more holistically. He would disapprove of an institution that focused on a single tactic, which, for Debate University, is mordant humiliation. The problem with Debate University is that it is too one-dimensional.

So, How Should We Look at Debate University?

I am of two minds about Wilson and Atlas’s take on debate.

On the one hand, and as I’ve discussed, basing education on shaming, humiliating, and other slights is inappropriate if taught for their own sake and not as kairotic considerations. But perhaps we should recognize the fact that Debate University is exposing the power and skills of rhetoric to an otherwise uninterested audience. Kim writes that Debate University “isn’t your nerdy debate club from high school, where buttoned-up students. . . hope that the extracurricular scores them a spot at an Ivy League school.” No, it isn’t, and that seems to be by design.

Wilson and Atlas show some rhetorical savvy of their own, taking the concept of audience consideration seriously. How can we expose rhetorical skill to a wider audience, an audience not as academically inclined as “nerdy debate club” members? Wilson and Atlas found an answer: speak their language. Lean into the anger already festering in our society. It is the anger that gets them in the door. It places them in a space of rhetorical learning that is sold as antagonistic but may also expose people to argument and counterargument, the formality of traditional debate, the occasional benefits of humility, and the need to do research and know what one is talking about before speaking on it. Though this last one is done as preparation to, as Wilson says, “counter punch and hit really, really hard,” knowledge of others’ viewpoints and understanding why they have them may be another positive side effect. (If the importance of research is all that Wilson and Atlas succeed in instilling in people, they will be heroes in my book.) Lastly, Debate University dedicates a video warning people to choose one’s battles and refrain from caustic argumentation with friends and loved ones. There is a silver lining to Debate University’s cloud of toxicity.

On the other hand, humiliation for its own sake and not for a greater cause—e.g., clearing the way for a genuine search for truth—may be a waste of time and energy for all involved. Yes, anger and calumny can be explored for their rhetorical efficacy, but isolating shame and humiliation as a central point—or the only point—in debate is misguided. Regarding Debate University, my issue is not with the fact that Wilson and Atlas promote incivility and vitriol to embarrass opponents. My issue is that they mainly do that and seem to care nothing for the truth. They teach logical fallacy—something inherently detrimental to any search for truth—as a weapon to be used, not a cognitive distortion or misunderstanding to be avoided. Though they are also in erudite company with this idea (the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote a whole book encouraging the use of logical fallacies to “win” an argument), the one-sided presentation of the multi-sided phenomenon of rhetoric is a mistake.

One could say my issue with Debate University is teleological; their goal, not necessarily what they teach, is the issue. They teach the right things (e.g., thorough research) for the wrong reasons (to hit “really, really hard.”) Ultimately, Debate University’s contribution to rhetorical education is tragically lopsided.

There is No One Facet to Rhetoric

To be clear, I think it is a mistake to “lop” any one particular side. Focusing solely on civility for its own sake can also be problematic. As much as I appreciate organizations like Braver Angels, an organization that claims it is “looking for common ground and ways to work together” and “support principles that bring us together rather than divide us,” its exclusive focus on civility and mutual understanding, though direly needed, is not the entirety of persuasion and active civil life. For example, Braver Angels is an organization that promotes sharing viewpoints with substantially less emphasis on persuasion, to emphasize inclusion, empathy, and balance in conversations between conservatives and liberals. This is good and a necessary part of a good speaker’s repertoire. However, it is not the whole story and, frankly, can’t be. Sometimes, we need to settle on the truth or an appropriate course of action moving forward. Agreeing to disagree is not always an option.

To Braver Angels’ credit, they published an article criticizing their practices on their own blog. In “A Mild, Sympathetic Critique of Better Angels Debates,” political scientist Michael Harrington writes that Braver Angels’ approach is noble but limited. He argues that Braver Angels’ debate model is admirable for its attempts to foster civility and empathy. Still, it discourages rebuttal and active persuasion in a way that, according to Harrington, actually reinforces polarization. Harrington proposes a concept he calls “satisficing,” which is “a term that bridges ‘satisfy’ with ‘suffice’,” to meet the demands of civil society. Harrington makes the point that differences are why we have politics in the first place; we need politics to manage the inevitable differences that emerge in a free and pluralistic society. Forgetting about the differences to focus on commonalities, though noble, is only part of the idea of persuasion, not the whole. To seek “a greater truth,” we must sometimes go beyond congeniality.

Neither incivility nor a focus on compassion—instead of persuasion in general—are inherently bad things, but focusing solely on one or the other is misguided. The persuasive potential of a variety of rhetorical modes should be taught.

My central argument is that rhetorical education should be holistic, not one-dimensional. Rhetoric, understood through Kairos, includes both civility (in both senses of the word) and incivility as potentially valid in certain contexts. For organizations like Debate University and Braver Angels, their common error is isolating one rhetorical mode—e.g., humiliation and compassion, respectively—and presenting it as intrinsically right and worthy of solitary focus. Rhetorical training should encompass a wide range of persuasive strategies, including both vitriol and empathy. Again, Kairos does not necessarily determine right or wrong, but appropriate and inappropriate. Thus, I promote a holistic and kairotic pedagogy of rhetoric for effective communication in civil—that is, public and participatory—society.

Given America’s current sociopolitical cold war, I think the salient points of this quote are the use of the word “defend” and the idea that rational speech is one of the things that make humans human, i.e., civilized creatures. When it comes to defense, words are not just “violence”; words are also a kind of armor against violence. Yes, words may be uncomfortable but not necessarily violent. If we are going to call words violence, then we have to make room for the idea that words are also a good counter to that violence. In other words, an effective way to deal with people who speak effectively against you is to be able to use words effectively yourself.

When it comes to rational speech as a distinctively human trait, we realize something that other rhetoricians have also recognized: communication is the glue that both helped build civil society and keeps it together. . . barely, these days. If we lack defensive confidence in communication—that is, if we don’t have enough faith in our skills to enter any debate in which we are invested—we are relinquishing one of our best tools for remedying misunderstandings and collaborating effectively.

So, I would like to extend Aristotle’s analogy as a preface to the rest of this essay. If, in a time of war, regular citizens must take up arms, forge their plows into swords, then it may be time for us to acquire the requisite skills for holding together a free and civil society. This is not to say that debate is necessarily analogous to war, but I’d prefer a war of words over a war of firearms.

Fortunately, the Greeks produced a system that looks like, at best, a curriculum for acquiring rhetorical skills and, at worst, a bootcamp for forging those skills. Given the name chosen for this system, it aligns more with the latter option.

The Progymnasmata

The Progymnasmata (“pro” meaning “before” and “gymnasmata” meaning “exercise,”) looks like a fancy word for practice, and it is, but its athletic connotations should not be ignored. Sure, this could be taken slowly over a course of years, but it could also be implemented like rhetoric’s answer to CrossFit.

The program is as follows:

1. Fable: a narrative, typically fiction, which is meant to teach a lesson.

2. Narrative: the ability to argue through the telling of a story.

3. Chreia: a brief narrative mean to supplement an argument as its illustration.

4. Proverb: the elaboration of common maxims to support a claim

5. Refutation: the direct countering of opposing views

6. Confirmation: the main body of a text where an argument is presented and supported

7. Commonplace: an argument for or against a virtue or a vice

8. Encomium: explicit praise of a person or a defense of that person’s actions

9. Invective: explicit blame of a person

10. Syncrisis: comparison of opposites to better understand both.

11. Ethopoeia: imitation of a perceived virtuous and usually well-known person.

12. Ekphrasis: elaborate description, typically of art

13. Theme: one’s main argument to be proven; a thesis statement

14. Deliberation: putting all previous exercises together into an argument for or against something.

Traditionally, the exercises within the Progymnasmata should be done in sequential order—one exercise provides the scaffolding for the next. However, we would be wise to take some creative license and appropriate this set of exercises according. For example, maybe we use only some or most of the exercises. Educators may decide that some exercises need more time than others. Perhaps the exercises should be accomplished within a month or several months. Maybe we add new exercises. The point is that we have a structure and plan for implementing effective communication and argumentation skills for the better working of civil society.

The time is ripe for taking seriously a system like this. With AI making extemporaneous oral communication the only form of communication still exclusively human, and as communication breakdowns open the door to targeted violence, the skills necessary for effective civil discourse are direly needed. Thus, my next essay will explore Exercises 1 through 4 of the rhetorical Progymnasmata and the general efficacy of storytelling.

Originally published on the Cato: At Liberty blog by Research Associate Priyanka Venkat

For the 29th straight year, the United States Congress has failed to pass its annual appropriations. It has also failed to pass the usual band-aid of a continuing resolution, triggering the 22nd government shutdown since the modern appropriations process began in 1976.

This government shutdown showcases something deeper than a usual partisan divide. Despite having a president who prides himself on the “Art of the Deal,” our Congress employs divisional tactics and hateful rhetoric to obstruct the very idea of compromise.

Politicians today are rewarded less for passing legislation and more for provoking outrage via “win rhetoric.” But a focus on “winning” rather than governing stalls the legislative process and erodes trust in the institution. It is only by returning to persuasion that we can progress.

Legislative Catastrophe

On paper, the process of deciding appropriations is simple: Congress receives the presidential budget request, passes a budget resolution, and then the Appropriations Committee divides the spending into 12 appropriations bills before the start of the next fiscal year. Clear deadlines. Clear procedures.

Even if there is no agreement by the end of the fiscal year, as there often is not, Congress can vote on a continuing resolution, which temporarily extends funding while lawmakers continue to deliberate. Such measures are in place to prevent the scenario we are facing today: a government shutdown.

A government shutdown reflects a complete failure of congressmen to properly legislate. The previous shutdown lasted 35 days, furloughed hundreds of thousands of workers, and cost the economy an estimated $11 billion.

To avoid these negative consequences, Congress must reach some consensus, either in the form of a continuing resolution or by passing an actual appropriations package.

But in just the last 12 years, that process has failed five times. There is little reason to believe that it will not fail again.

To understand why, we must look at political motivations from a rational, not romantic, perspective.

Taking Out the Romance

We often frame politicians’ actions in a romantic sense: Representative A fought for a bill because they care about their constituents; Senator B stood firm because they were looking out for the people’s best interests. But if we wish to discuss why appropriations voting failed, we need to strip away that romance.

A legislator’s primary goal is to get re-elected and maintain their position of power. Congressmen may believe that they are the best for the job, but they must also maintain their position in the “room (or, in this case, the chamber) where it happens,” where decision-making takes place to enact policy. That is the package that politicians sell you.

Political power, then, is best thought of in terms of profit and loss. To “profit” as a politician is to remain in power; to lose means losing it.

A government shutdown is a gamble that risks that power. Public opinion sours the longer the shutdown occurs. Recent polling from NPR reflects this fact. With midterm elections fast approaching, one would expect both parties to avoid this outcome. And yet, the Senate failed to reach an agreement on Wednesday evening.

Why? Because the gains from “winning” the narrative are more profitable than coming to the table and passing even a continuing resolution.

Win Rhetoric Is Profitable

Rhetoric is defined as the art of persuasion. But instead of persuading their peers, congressmen use rhetoric to discredit their opponents. This phenomenon is a perfect representation of scholar Wayne Booth’s concept of “win rhetoric.” The goal of “win rhetoric” is not to reach a compromise or discover truth, but rather to defeat the opposition.

Antagonism over differing viewpoints is not a new facet of American politics. From Alexander Hamilton’s letter concerning John Adams to Preston Brooks’ caning of fellow United States Senator Charles Sumner, division has long been a facet of the legislative process.

But modern legislators prioritize wins not in the congressional chamber but in the echo chamber of the media.

Whether it’s the White House stating that “The Democrats have Shut Down the Government,” posts on X that use crude language towards a fellow elected official, or AI videos mocking congressional leaders, today’s politics frames disagreements as a battle and compromise as defeat.

Both parties use speech to toss the blame and claim one viewpoint as honest and justified, upholding moral integrity for their party while demonizing the opposition.

The result is bifurcation: if the opponent is a villain, then any attempt to find common ground is viewed as a betrayal of the cause. Thus, appropriations fail and shutdowns become inevitable as both sides refuse to yield

Persuasion Is Our Last Line of Defense

The antagonism does not distract from the fact that to keep the government running, politicians must do the hardest thing: sit down and compromise.

Compromise is unpopular, especially when it comes with accusations of bucking a party’s base, but it is necessary for government to function. This is larger than one shutdown. It is a deeper pattern of legislators refusing to legislate.

And when Congress fails to legislate, it leaves the country vulnerable to the overreach of other branches: the executive through issuing executive orders and the judicial through issuing rulings that carry the force of law. Each time the legislature cedes its role to the other two branches, it harms its credibility and the public’s trust in the institution.

Recovering from this requires a shift from vitriolic “win rhetoric” to persuasion between congressional members. Mutual persuasion requires civility and a willingness to communicate with those who differ with you. When parties frame their opposition as villains and compromise as betrayal, they stop communication. It is only through active persuasion between members of Congress that the legislature can recover and defend its place as the law-making body

Congress must set its priorities toward lawmaking rather than infighting, lest the next shutdown shatter its credibility entirely.