Friday, December 11, 2009

Classical Rhetoric, Psychology and Audience Analysis

Classical thinkers like Aristotle have apparently been aware of the importance of the physiological factor in the audience. After all, a speaker is supposedly appealing to both the rational side in the audience as well to the emotional side, and the latter seems to be inherently related to the psychology of the audience. The book goes on to mention that for Aristotle (as is typical of his philosophy) psychological factors are treated as universals and believed to be true of all members of the intended class. “All young men have hot tempers,” for example.

However, I think when talking about psychology another very important factor must also be considered, what I think can be called the “ethical dimension.” A hypothetical thought experiment can clarify this point.

Suppose a scientist has discovered a certain kind of radiation whose effect is to suppress the power of reason and rational thinking in whoever is exposed to it, in such a way that the subject becomes extremely susceptible to being persuaded by any proposition he is exposed to. The scientist hides a source of this radiation in a lecture room, and turns it on during his lecture. Sure enough, the audience is completely convinced by his arguments, and he is given a standing ovation at the conclusion of his speech. The question is: can we count this as a case of “good” rhetorical skills? Apparently, in a sense, the answer should be yes, because after all, the scientist has used language to convince his audience. The fact that the audience was made predisposed to accepting his argument by the radiation is more or less a fact of psychology, because the radiation just caused release of certain chemicals and firing of certain neurons that could have, at least in principle, been achieved by use of other advanced psychological methods. Yet, something is not right here; we intuitively feel that the audience has in some sense been “violated.” This episode may be counted as a case of good rhetoric, but from an ethical standpoint something is wrong.

Of course a new kind of radiation with such an effect may sound too far fetched and something out of a Sci-Fi movie, but very similar techniques are being used (perhaps to a lesser degree) in many occasions. There are reports of prisoners who have been subjected to such psychological pressures (so called white torture, including long solitary confinements, being frequently bombarded by speeches contrary to their beliefs by powerful loudspeakers, constantly being verbally humiliated for the purpose of breaking their character, etc.) that after a few months they have come out and rejected all their previous beliefs, as if they are new persons, “newly born” and awakened from their “wrong past life”. Again, we feel very strongly that there is something seriously wrong about such techniques of persuasion, even if they are applied solely through language. Similar psychological techniques are used in advertisements, although to lesser degrees and in more subtle ways.

Perhaps one way to clarify this problem is to use the Kantian ethics and require that in any rhetorical act, each and every individual among the audience should be treated as an autonomous agent, an end in itself, not to be manipulated for some other political or commercial purpose. But this requirement is not sufficient, because the perpetrators of white torture can in principle also treat their subjects as autonomous subjects with the goal of converting them and making “good citizens” out of them at any cost. One way to complement this requirement is to add that anything that “causes” a change in the opinion of a person without his or her accepting it “knowingly” and out of his or her “free will” is an unethical tool of persuasion, be it rhetorical, psychological, scientific, etc. In this way, a torturer who forces the accepted ideology of a tyranny to his or her subject and an advertiser who uses the back-alleys of psyche to persuade us to buy a product that we really don’t need without us are both violating the independence and freedom of their audience. Such rhetorical practices can be described, but cannot be prescribed.

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