Non-Fiction Corner: When arguing was an art, not a free-for-all

•  JOHN MCWHORTER

NEW YORK: Robin Reames, an English professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, was frustrated by the intractability of the political arguments she had with her Bible Belt, Fox News-fan father as she took on liberal views in college. She is now similarly frustrated, like so many, by the vast, glum cleft between leftist and rightist ideals, and “The Ancient Art of Thinking for Yourself” joins a recent spate of books seeking to help us to communicate, in the current phrase, “across the divide.”

Reames, a specialist in rhetoric, sees us as unsuitably numb to the fact that our opinions are conditioned by what we already believe rather than springing from incontrovertible truth. She hopes that we can learn from the consciously honed rhetorical techniques of the ancient Greeks and Romans, among whom the art of argument was elevated in political discourse to an extent that seems almost unthinkable today. The Greeks and Romans expected political speeches to be lengthy, careful, thorough examinations of a case, crafted to persuade on the basis of logic rather than charisma. “If ancient rhetoricians listened to some of our public disputes these days, they would think we had lost our minds,” Reames writes, noting that “when we cling like hell to our hermeneutic circle” — our basic predispositions and predilections — “it forces us to hide from ourselves the places where our perceptions might just be wrong.”

Reames’s conceit for the book is intriguing. The ancients’ studious cultivation of persuasive techniques was a high point of cultures barbaric by modern standards with respect to slavery, sexism, classism and institutionalized violence. The Greeks classified rhetoric by kind: the judicial and the deliberative were designed to make a point, while the epideictic was intended merely to entertain — to diss or give props to someone.

There were no political parties; a speaker was expected not to rally the base with boilerplate speech but to create a new, self-standing argument each time he addressed the assembly. In our era of Fox News and chants of “from the river to the sea,” it is difficult not to gaze in admiration upon a people so committed to soberly debating ideas rather than settling for sloganeering. Yet Reames never quite succeeds in showing how these ancient techniques will be of much aid today. The description of bygone oratorical tradition is always diverting, and her account of the Sophists Gorgias and Alcibiades self-consciously using language to make logically convincing but false arguments for the Athenians’ disastrous invasion of Sicily is no exception.

Some will see modern-day sophists in contemporary politicians arguing without evidence for policies like trickle-down economics, or in Fox News pundits who promulgated the fiction that the 2020 election was stolen. But it’s unclear that warning us against sophistry is helpful to Reames’s goal. These days people seem, if anything, overly sensitized to the idea that their political opponents are simply lying.