Ancient & modern
Barack Obama has risen to power on the back of an enviable oratorical ability. But it is a two-edged sword. Ancient Greeks, who had a word for it (rhetoric) and were the first people to analyse and describe its rules, were both captivated by and fearful of it. One thinker, Gorgias, likened it to magic for its ability to charm you into unexpected courses of action.
It is no coincidence that the rules of persuasive public speaking were being formulated by Greeks in the 5th century BC when real democracy was in its first flush in Athens; for if a man was to be given the chance to take an active part in open debate in the assembly, he must know how to do it. Handbooks (as well as expensive educations) could help him. Democracy was not just for toffs.
But there was a rub: while such resources might be able to show a man how to persuade, would they also help him discern right from wrong? As Plato pointed out, imagine the outcome if a man thought a horse was a donkey and persuaded the assembly to equip its army with a squadron of donkeys to ride into battle.
Plato was convinced that persuasion by itself had an almost infinite capacity for doing harm, especially in the mouth of anyone who had the assembly’s ear. He was no fan of Pericles, for example, because he did not think that someone unable to bring up his own children properly was a fit person to advise a whole people on the decisions it took. As he says of the average Athenian politician, ‘he has no idea which of the beliefs and desires of the people is honourable or base, good or bad, just or unjust, but he employs all these terms in accordance with that great brute’s [= the people’s] beliefs, calling the things that please it “good” and the things that annoy it “bad”.’ In his comedy Clouds Aristophanes took up the theme, mocking Socrates as a charlatan for teaching his pupils how to make right seem wrong and wrong right.
Obama is currently a prophet, a medium, one who seems to be in tune with and able to interpret the aspirations of a whole people and make them feel he is speaking for them (according to bedazzled commentators, at any rate). That is why his election has been acclaimed as a revitalisation of democracy. But politics will soon intervene.
Peter Jones
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