Background Information
Rhetoric
According to Aristotle, rhetoric can be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. 10 In this sense, it can also be seen as the first practical psychology in that it necessitates a thorough understanding of one's audience. An excellent way to begin to assure students that they already possess considerable expertise in the application of rhetoric is to draw their attention to the different approaches they might employ to get permission to go to a party or to separate their parents from their money. Aristotle and his descendants classified and called the rhetorical appeals ethos, pathos, and logos.
Ethos
Ethos is Greek for character, and it refers to the credibility or trustworthiness of the speaker or writer. Ethos can be further broken down to consider the categories of trustworthiness, similarity, authority, reputation, and expertise. 11
Persuasion from ethos establishes a speaker's or writer's good character. Students understand that we are much more likely to believe or be persuaded by someone if we trust that person. But just how is it trust or credibility established? The Greeks established a sense of ethos by a family's reputation in the community, as in Plato's Phadreus. 12 Today, in most of our current culture and for many of our students, family ethos is less consequential as families are separated by distance and dynamics. In any case, students, especially those with older siblings, can understand that ethos based on family identity can work for or against a speaker. According to Martha L. Henning, "Without the ethos of the good name and handshake, current forms of cultural ethos often fall to puffed-up resumes and other papers. The use of ethos in the form of earned titles within the community-Coach Albert, Deacon Jones, Professor Miller-are diminishing as "truthful" signifiers while commercial-name signifiers or icons appear on clothing-Ralph Lauren, Louis Vuitton, Tommy Hilfiger- disclosing a person's cultural ethos not in terms of a contributor to the community, but in terms of identity-through purchase." 13 Aristotle warned us though that we must be wary of such decoys, and that ethos comes not from appearances, but from one's use of language. Aristotle goes on to assert that three qualities of speech and speaker combine to create confidence in a speaker: high moral sense (phronçsis), high moral character (arête), and benevolence (eunoia). False statements and bad advice result from a lack of any of these elements, while embodying or exhibiting these three aspects of ethos can play a critical role in gaining credibility for one's argument.
Pathos
Persuasion from pathos involves engaging the audience's emotions. The word is derived from the Greek for suffering or experience. Most of our students have become adept at playing to emotion, crafting speech and delivery to evoke pity for being late to class or benevolence from tight-fisted parents. Aristotle himself identifies and then explains how to create seven pairs of opposite emotions, such as anger and calmness, fear and confidence, kindness and unkindness, envy and emulation. He then explains how to create such feelings toward ideas in various types of humans. Aristotle also warns of the dangerous potential for mind manipulation through the use of pathos.
Logos
Finally, a writer or speaker can persuade through the appeal to the audience's sense of logic. Aristotle identified this as the most important means of persuasion since, "rationality is humanity's essential characteristic. It is what makes us humans and differentiates them from other animals. Ideally, reason should dominate all of people's thinking and actions, but actually, they are often influenced by passions and prejudices and customs." 14 This is commonly called the logical appeal or logos, and it's derived from the Greek for word. There are two different types of logic used to persuade: inductive and deductive. Inductive logic leads listeners to a conclusion moving from specific observations to broader generalizations and theories, while deductive reasoning works the other way around, moving from the more general to the more specific.
While persuasion generally involves a combination of the appeals, being aware of their effective use allows speakers and writers to tailor their message to a particular audience or context in order to maximize the efficacy of an argument, whether the intended effect is to borrow a dollar or lead a nation to war.
The Five Canons of Rhetoric
Once students have an understanding of just how the rhetorical appeals affect an audience, they are ready to begin considering the practical application of these strategies. The first two considerations must always be audience and context. Effective arguments begin with the recognition of whom it is we are trying to persuade. All subsequent considerations derive from our understanding of audience. Next, we have to determine the context, or kairos, for our persuasive discourse. This might take into account time and place, but it probably also involves a larger consideration of setting. In other words, what situation provides the most opportune context to present a particular argument?
Once audience and context have been determined, the Roman rhetorician Cicero continued to describe the essential steps to eloquence and effective persuasion as the Five Canons of Rhetoric. These include: Invention, Arrangement, Style, Memory, and Delivery.
Invention
Invention is the process of developing and refining an argument, and it involves considering what the most effective appeal may be to derive a desired result. Invention is the stage when we consider "Which words." Considerations in the invention stage might include audience, evidence, timing, appeals, and format.
Arrangement
Arrangement is consideration of organization for maximum effect. If invention addresses the question of "Which Words?" arrangement asks the question, "In which order?" Generally, it's most effective to establish credibility with ethos first. Once credibility is established, context and circumstances dictate whether logos or pathos is the most effective way to proceed. A standard method of arranging a persuasive argument is: introduction, narration, division, proof, refutation, and conclusion.
Style
Style answers the question of "How?" In other words, style is the process of determining how to present arguments using figures of speech and other rhetorical techniques in order to maximize impact. Correctness, Clarity, Evidence, Propriety, and Ornateness were the five virtues of style developed and taught by the Roman rhetoricians Cicero and Quintilian.
Memory
Memory is the ability to master a speech in one's mind such that it can be delivered naturally and effectively without notes. It's the result of practice, but it can be supported by various techniques. Once mastered, a speech delivered from memorization contributes to credibility, strengthening the speaker's ethos.
Delivery
When Demosthenes, the Greatest of the Greek orators, was asked what he considered to be the most important part of rhetoric, he replied, "Delivery, delivery, delivery." 15 Like style, delivery answers the question "How?" While the canon of style, however, deals primarily with language, delivery focuses on the physical mechanics of how a message is imparted. It includes body language, physical gestures and vocal intonation. Mastering delivery is another method to help a speaker establish ethos with an audience.
Monroe's Motivated Sequence
In the mid-1930s, Alan H. Monroe developed a pattern of logically and psychologically sound steps for moving an audience to action. The method he developed is a sequence and includes: Attention, Need, Satisfaction, Visualization, and Action. (ANSVA)
Attention
A speaker first needs to capture an audience's attention, and then ease the audience into a consideration of the topic. This can be done in a variety ways such as illustrating or emphasizing the importance of the topic, making a startling statement, arousing curiosity or suspense, posing a question, or telling a dramatic story.
Need
Next, a speaker must create a reason for the audience to care about the topic. This is done by developing a problem or creating a need that can only be satisfied by engaging with the speaker's proposal.
Satisfaction
Proposing a satisfying solution to the need or problem is the next step.
Visualization
True persuasion next provides the audience an image of the consequence of their choice.
Action
The final step is to move an audience to take some form of action in response to the speech.
William Golding
William Gerald Golding was born in Cornwall, England, on September 19, 1911, and he died at his home in 1993. 16 The span of his life occasioned him to experience World War I as a child and to participate as a combatant in World War II. The revelation of the Holocaust and the dropping of the Atomic bomb on Japan affected him deeply, and changed his views on humanity and man's capacity for evil. He is remembered as a prominent English novelist, essayist and poet, and was awarded the Booker McConnel Prize, the greatest British Literature Prize, as well as the Nobel Prize for Literature. Golding's fiction is often seen as allegorical, with broad use of allusions to classical literature, mythology, and Christian symbolism. Although no distinct thread unites his novels, most deal principally with man's destructive nature and his capacity for evil.
Golding was educated at Marlborough Grammar School and at Brasenose College, Oxford, where he studied English literature and philosophy. After he graduated, he worked as an actor, a lecturer, a small craft sailor, a musician and finally a schoolmaster. He joined the Royal Navy in 1940, and saw action against battleships, submarines and aircraft. He was present at the sinking of the Bismarck and finished the war as a Lieutenant in command of a rocket ship.
After the war he returned to Bishop Wordsworth's School in Salisbury and was there when his first novel, Lord of the Flies, was published in 1954. He gave up teaching in 1961, and went on to write twelve more novels, including The Inheritors, Pincher Martin, and The Spire. In addition to his novels, he published a play, The Brass Butterfly (1958); a book of verse, Poems (1934); and the essay collections The Hot Gates (1965) and A Moving Target (1982).
Golding's first novel, Lord of the Flies introduced one of the recurrent themes of his fiction—the conflict between humanity's innate barbarism and the civilizing influence of reason. 17
Lord of the Flies
Many, though not all, of the important self conscious novels in the twentieth century are deeply concerned with a particular historical moment, with the nature of historical process, even with the future of Western Civilization, as they deploy their elaborate systems of mirrors to reflect novel and novelist in the act of conjuring with reality. 18
In "Lord of the Flies: Trust the Tale," William Golding explains that Lord of the Flies grew out of his experiences in World War II, where he was confronted with "what one man could do to another." 19 He goes on to explain, "anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head." 20 In a conversation with Jack Biles published in 1970, Golding described the impetus for creating Lord of the Flies, as he recounted, "sitting on one side of the fire and Ann was sitting on the other, and I had just been reading a God-awful book… a book about boys on an island, the usual adventure story… I remember saying to Ann, 'Oh, I'm so tired of this business. Wouldn't it be fun to write a book about boys on an island and see what really happens.'" 21 His dismissal of the popular boys adventure genre that includes English classics like The Coral Island and Treasure Island stemmed from his own experiences as a schoolteacher and as a naval officer in World War II. The novel that he went on the write is a synthesis of both of these experiences, and while he remained "reluctant to view himself as a politically engaged novelist," 22 and though "his politics are often implicit rather than explicit," 23 he never equivocated on his views of man and his essential nature. At the time of publication, Golding himself replied to an inquiry regarding the book's theme. The novel, Golding wrote, "is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable." 24
First published in 1954, the story takes place during an unnamed war, as an airplane carrying a group of small British schoolboys crashes onto a deserted tropical island. The boys are left alone with no supervising presence as the adults on board have been killed and swept out to sea along with the plane wreckage. The first characters to be introduced are myopic, asthmatic, overweight Piggy, and the charismatic "fair haired" 25 boy called Ralph. Together the two find a conch shell and use it to summon the remaining survivors. Among those who show up is Jack, head choirboy bullishly leading his charges up the beach in tight formation under a blazing sun. Immediately, the boys democratically elect Ralph as chief, even though "none of the boys could have found good reason for this; what intelligence had been shown was traceable to Piggy, while the most obvious leader was Jack. But there was a stillness about Ralph as he sat that marked him out: There was his size, and attractive appearance; and most obscurely and most powerfully, there was the conch." 26 As the boys set about to survive with the resources they find on the island, duties and rules are established and they develop the beginnings of a functional society. Piggy, though physically useless possesses some intelligence and he becomes companion to Ralph. Though each boy lacks the crucial quality the other exhibits, together they possess both physical and intellectual prowess. As time passes on the island Ralph relies on his ethos as he tries to maintain authority and delegate responsibility, but most boys would rather swim, play, or hunt pigs than maintain the signal fire or help build huts.
Soon Ralph's rules, supported by Piggy's whining use of logos, are being ignored and challenged outright. Jack becomes his fiercest antagonist, drawing other boys away from Ralph and towards himself through pathos, promising the thrill of the hunt and protection from growing fears of some sort of beastie on the island. Soon Jack has seduced some and silenced others with his eloquence, ultimately establishing himself as leader of an alternate society on the island. Some join his band of painted savages for the promise of fun, others out of fear of the beast.
The two opposing groups come to a head at a tense meeting where Ralph's ethos is overtly challenged by Jack's pathos, while Piggy's voice of reason, or logos, goes largely unheard and completely ignored. The once well-organized society breaks up and splits into two groups: those who hunt and become savages, and those who believe in rational living and cling to hope of rescue. The one is represented by Jack, who like Hitler, leads by rousing emotion and ignoring the intellect; the other is lead by Ralph whose undelivered promises and failed leadership have eroded his ethos. Ralph is assisted by the clear-thinking but uncharismatic Piggy, but this does nothing to support his argument for leadership. The speech communities represented by ethos and logos become subsumed by Jack's pathos-blinded tribe. By the end of the novel, Piggy is dead and Ralph is hunted by Jack and his savages. A naval officer arrives on the island just as chaos is consuming the island in fire, but the boys' rescue from the island is only deliverance back to the larger world where the same dynamics are playing out in a world still raging with war.
As Golding's novel allegorically explores the boundary between reason and passionate instinct, between order and chaos, the dynamics at play can also be traced through the politics of rhetoric employed by Jack, Piggy, and Ralph. It is also possible to make distinct connections between these characters and the rhetoric of politics within speeches by Adolph Hitler, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Neville Chamberlain.
Hitler's Speech
Delivered to a Mass Meeting of the National Socialist German Workers Party
27 February 1925
Even before the advent of the National Socialist party, Hitler understood the power and potential of the spoken word to touch individuals and move great masses. As early as 1925 he recognized, "[T]he power which has always started the greatest religions and political avalanches in history rolling has from time immemorial been the magic power of the spoken word, and that alone." 27 Randall Bytwerk goes so far as to proclaim, "National Socialism was the most prolific rhetorical movement of the twentieth century." 28
Hitler recognized that average people were uninterested in complex arguments and much more likely to be swayed by emotion rather than intellect, and that speakers who attempted to persuade through complicated rational arguments were doomed to fail. This dependence on both his own passionate presentation and fiery words to stir emotion was a lethal combination that captivated and inspired a nation towards the atrocities committed in support of the Nazi party. As Hitler's political power grew, so too did the rousing language of his speech and the mob mentality of his audiences. He described the effect of pathos to move a mass as he described a person who "steps for the first time into a mass meeting and has thousands and thousands of people of the same opinions around him, when, as a seeker he is swept away by three or four thousand others into the mighty effect of intoxication and enthusiasm, when the visible success and agreement of thousands confirm him to rightness of the new doctrine and for the first time arouse doubt in the truth of his previous conviction- then he has succumbed to the magic influence of what we might designate as 'mass suggestion.'" 29 Most of Hitler's speeches followed a formula and were intellectually simple, emotionally charged, and repetitious. They generally began by establishing the speaker's ethos, proclaiming Hitler's own greatness and demanding obedience from his followers. What would generally follow would be a histrionic presentation of the Nazi worldview veiled in rhetoric and disguised as logos. At the heart of every message, though, was a diatribe rooted in pathos that was crafted and delivered to passionately rouse his audience towards blind party allegiance and ideological acceptance.
In Lord of the Flies students will see Jack trying out the other appeals before establishing and then maintaining his own power through pathos. At the boys' first meeting, Golding shows us Jack unsuccessfully trying to establish his power through ethos: "'I ought to be chief,' said Jack with simple arrogance, 'because I'm chorister and head boy. I can sing a C sharp.'" 30 When this doesn't work, a short time later he vies for leadership power through logos, working within the system established on the island. After assenting to the logical and dutiful need to keep a signal fire burning, he delegates the task to his choir, "Altos, you keep the fire going this week, and trebles the next—" 31 In response, "The assembly assented gravely." 32 Jack's real power, however, is established and asserted once he becomes a hunter —both of the island's pigs and of the elusive (and imagined) beast. Once this power is seized, like Hitler, he maintains control though pathos that inspires through fear and excitement.
Roosevelt's Speech
Fireside Chat 14: On the European War
3 September 1939
"All that man [Roosevelt] has to do is speak on the radio, and the sound of his voice, his sincerity, the manner of his delivery, just melts me and I change my mind." 33
From March 1933 to June 1944, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed the American people in 31 speeches broadcast via radio. His addressed topics both foreign and domestic. Despite the debilitating effects of polio on his body, "on the radio, Roosevelt was his voice. As his voice traveled through the ether, its authority and sincerity commingled to create the seductive and oft-noted intimacy between FDR and his audience." 34 Rhetorically, Roosevelt used pathos and ethos in support of one another to gain the support of millions of Americans who found comfort and renewed confidence in these speeches, which became known as the "fireside chats." Roosevelt was not actually sitting beside a fireplace when he delivered the speeches, but behind a microphone-covered desk in the White House. Reporter Harry Butcher of CBS coined the term "fireside chat" in a press release before one of Roosevelt's speeches on May 7, 1933. The name stuck, as it perfectly evoked the "compelling narrative of Roosevelt's "chats" –delivered in plain English that eschewed facts and figures in favor of anecdotes and analogies." 35 He used these opportunities to explain his hopes and ideas for the country, while inviting the citizenry to "tell me your troubles." The combination of the novelty and intimacy of radio with the believability of his message created a powerful force that enabled him to pass a sweeping set of legislation in the first 100 days of his presidency and then go on to many other accomplishments in the following twelve years. 36
Roosevelt's speech is an excellent place for student to practice critiquing the five canons (IASMAD). The care and attention that the President put into his addresses is clearly evident, and his language is readily accessible to students. He used words, phrases, analogies, and terms that people could grasp easily; eighty percent of his words were among the one thousand most commonly used words in the English vocabulary, and they were being delivered to a nation where nearly ninety percent of the populace had a radio. 37
Fireside Chat 14 was delivered only hours after Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. Roosevelt's challenge was to build public support for aiding the Allies while maintaining U.S. neutrality. The President announced a new proclamation declaring American neutrality, but he also implicitly stated his support for the Allies, preparing the public for his September 21st proposal calling for a relaxation of the neutrality laws to allow for the selling of arms to Great Britain and France on a "cash-and-carry" basis. Congress passed his proposal on November 3, 1939. 38
Chamberlain's Speech
"Peace for Our Time" 1938
Neville Chamberlain, Great Britain's Prime Minister from 1937 to 1940, has been much criticized for his attempts to appease the Axis powers. His apparent complacency in the face of wartime defeats brought forth the pressure both within and without the Conservative Party that resulted in his resignation from office. 39 In much the same manner that Chamberlain willingly conciliates Hitler and his rising demands in an effort to maintain peace and preserve the status quo in Europe, so too does Ralph pursue diplomacy and compromise with Jack in an effort to maintain his own loosening grip on leadership and order on the island.
In March 1938, Germany absorbed Austria in the Anschluss. Hitler then turned his attention to the Sudetenland, areas of Czechoslovakia populated by three million ethnic Germans. Hitler grew increasingly hostile towards Czechoslovakia over the course of the summer of 1938, culminating in a mid-September anti-Czech speech that intimated imminent war. Chamberlain's response was to fly to Germany in pursuit of a diplomatic solution that would preserve peace on the continent. Mindful of the generation lost to the horrors of World War I, and worried that the British military was not prepared to fight Germany, Chamberlain agreed to Hitler's demand that Germany absorb the Sudetenland. Without ever consulting Czech leadership, Chamberlain then persuaded Czech and French governments to accept the concessions. The Czech government was completely left out of the two final meetings in Munich that finalized the country's dismemberment. On October 1, 1938, Czech frontier guards left their post and German troops moved into the Sudetenland. The day before, Chamberlain had flown back to England where he was met by cheering crowds. He waved a memo and told the crowd he had brought "Peace for our time."
Not all of Chamberlain's fellow countrymen felt that he had saved the day. Winston Churchill's response to what Chamberlain agreed to at Munich was scathingly critical. "You were given the choice between war and dishonor, you chose dishonor, and now you will have war." 40 Churchill was right, as eleven months after the Munich Agreement was signed, German troops invaded Poland, and the Second World War had begun.
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