Discussion Post

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Rhetoric, a Good Thing

  , finally, should we adopt? I think we need a citi- zenship of political friendship. The phrase designates both a set of ideas and some core habits that might guide our relations to the strangers with whom we share our polity. I discussed the ideas implicit in polit- ical friendship in the last chapter; now I turn to the habits. How can the expertise of friendship be brought to bear on politics?

I begin with a simple thought. Remember that Aristotle had de- scribed political friendship as differing from ordinary friendship in “not possessing the emotional factor (aneu pathous) of affection for one’s associates” (NE .). This Aristotelian virtue of public life, con- cerning proper interaction with strangers, looks like friendship even if it doesn’t feel like it, since an emotional charge is missing. Political friendship is not mainly (or not only) a sentiment of fellow-feeling for other citizens. It is more importantly a way of acting in respect to them: friendship, known to all, defines the normative aspirations. One doesn’t even have to like one’s fellow citizens in order to act to- ward them as a political friend. There is a very easy way of transform- ing one’s relations to strangers. We might simply ask about all our en- counters with others in our polity, “Would I treat a friend this way?” When we can answer “yes,” we are on the way to developing a citi- zenship that is neither domination nor acquiescence. When the an- swer is no, we have not escaped our old, bad habits.

Beyond this simple question, there exist several other specific techniques for cultivating political friendship. It is time to turn to the imperfect ideals for trust production crafted in the rhetorical tradi-

tion. I find important aids to inject friendship into citizenship in Aris- totle’s Art of Rhetoric. That book is neither a guide to manipulation nor a superficial manual of style, but rather a philosophically subtle analysis of how to generate trust in ways that preserve an audience’s autonomy and accord with the norms of friendship. Notably, he be- gins his treatise with the overarching point that a speaker must re- member that it is the business of the audience to judge, not to learn (..). Here he invokes a distinction from the Nicomachean Ethics be- tween the understanding of the judge and of the student. A judge’s understanding operates in the field of opinion, where each must make her own decision; a student’s understanding is to be led to truth by a teacher (NE ..‒). Rhetoric is the art not of rousing people to immediate or unthinking action but of putting as persuasive an argu- ment as possible to an audience and then leaving actual choices of action to them. But let me provide some background on the Art of Rhetoric, that is, on the book itself, before I turn to its substance: the art of trust production.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle had defined the art of politics as involving two distinct sciences: legislation, which deals in general, prescriptive rules, and judgment, which concerns the actions to be taken in particular cases (.). It is seldom noticed that the Politics con- centrates only on legislation and primarily on constitutions, ignoring the subject of deliberation other than to affirm its importance and to argue that the many will typically judge better than a single individ- ual. Aristotle left the study of judgment, and of the speeches that lead up to it, to the Rhetoric. Judgment is not merely the second political science but also, according to the Rhetoric, “that for the sake of which rhetoric is used” (..; cf. ..).1

Decisions that cannot be automatically determined by simple ref- erence to the law, and that are ultimately a matter of judgment, are carried out in the realm of “equity,” as Aristotle calls it. Equity is not merely that quality of character which aids conflict resolution among friends and friendly citizens; it also names the arena of public decision making where resolutions can be achieved only when citizens and politicians establish conditions in which adversaries can yield. Aris- totle’s account of the relationship between law and equity requires that judgments issuing from communal deliberation be compatible, like the rule of law, with the consent of citizens, whose equality and

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autonomy they protect.2 The quality of the citizenly speech preced- ing a judgment will determine whether citizens can make their eq- uity decisions justly.3

What kind of persuasion is compatible with legitimate consent? Interestingly, Aristotle’s discussions of consent also identify the vari- eties of legitimate persuasion. He describes those who have consented to obey in legitimate regimes with the Greek phrase boulomenoi pei- tharkhein. This term, peitharkhein, has the word for persuasion, peithô, in it; the phrase boulomenoi peitharkhein therefore identifies people who obey because they wish (boulomenoi) to obey on the basis of having been persuaded. He also uses the term peitharkhein to talk about the operations of the soul, and this other usage delimits precisely the kind of persuasion that is compatible with consent.4 “The irrational part of the soul has two parts,” he writes, “one that is vegetative, and one that shares the rational principle to the degree of being amenable to it and persuadable by it [ peitharkhikon] even as we say one consents [logon echein] to the speech of father and friends and not as in mathematics” (NE ..). This description of one part of the soul consenting to another part has within it two different models for understanding the nature of persuasion: it may be equivalent to the speech either of father to child or of friend to friend. The former establishes a hier- archical relationship between speaker and audience, the latter a re- lationship of democratic equality. As it turns out, the hierarchical model is nowhere to be found in the Rhetoric as example, explanation, or justification for the art of rhetoric;persuasion is treated solely as the speech of a friend. For instance, Aristotle remarks that those who are stronger than others force people to do things (anagkazo, kreissous), but friends persuade each other (peithoi, philoi ) (R ..‒). Masters (kurioi ), in contrast—and fathers were masters in ancient Greece— use a combination of force and persuasion. To be fully a “persuader” and not a master or aggressor, one must address oneself to others as a friend and democratic equal.5

And which others, exactly, should one address this way? Aristotle asks his students to imagine speaking to an audience consisting of people from diverse economic classes and with varying abilities, edu- cations, and experiences. They are even to imagine that their audi- ences include people who envy or dislike them as well as people who believe slanderous lies about them. Finally, the art pertains not only

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to public life but to every citizen’s daily interactions. “Everybody,” he says, “has in a manner a share in both rhetoric and dialectic since everyone, up to a certain point, endeavors to criticize or uphold an argument, and to defend himself or to make accusations” (R .). The Rhetoric is in fact a treatise on talking to strangers. At last, we have hit upon some useful clues as to how to do that.

To understand trust, one must begin with distrust. Two types of it trouble politics. First, there is the distrust that arises from the insta- bility of political events, and the difficulty that any of us has in trying to judge facts, causes and effects, and the relations of past and present to future in the political realm. Second, there is interpersonal distrust, or distrust of one’s fellow citizens themselves. This arises from a citi- zen’s uncertainty about how others’ interests will affect his own vul- nerabilities, and about how other citizens will see the relationship be- tween their interests and his own. In order to dispel the first sort of distrust, which is caused simply by factual uncertainty, a speaker must give his audience good reason for trusting his facts and factual analy- ses. He must prove to his audience that his proposals to resolve partic- ular problems are most likely to navigate future obstacles successfully. This is the first challenge a speaker faces. The problem of interper- sonal distrust introduces three more challenges. A speaker must try to bring an element of predictability to the unstable world of human re- lations; he must tackle negative emotions like anger and resentment and try to convert them to goodwill; and above all else, he must prove that his approach to self-interest is trustworthy. In meeting these three challenges, the speaker addresses the ethical status of the proposed policy.

This distribution of effort—in which  percent of the work of political conversation is directed toward generating interpersonal trust among citizens—already makes the important point that in every po- litical discussion, audiences are always judging not merely the prag- matic political issue under discussion—say, the most cost-effective way of providing health care—but also a speaker’s commitment to developing relations among citizens and forms of reciprocity that jus- tify trust.6 Decisions about how to handle health care must be satisfy- ing on these grounds too. Logic, understood technically as demon- strative argument, is on its own insufficient to bring debate to a successful close in the deliberative forum. In fact, language equips us

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with three distinctive capacities for meeting the challenges of distrust. They are our capacities () to make logical arguments, () to convey character, and () to engage the emotions of our audience. A speaker’s display of character or her response to an audience’s emotions does not involve her in irrational speech. Aristotle’s important point is that reason, properly understood, extends beyond arguments about natu- ral facts (say, historical or physical facts), and even beyond arguments about universal or universalizable principles. Reason extends beyond such subject matter as can be handled by demonstrative logic and also has the job of helping us draw conclusions about how people are likely to treat others. These are conclusions about human probabili- ties. What is the probability that a speaker is telling the truth when she introduces facts to support her arguments? Is another speaker likely to act in accord with the general principles he espouses? How likely is it that the fear that still another speaker inspires accurately an- ticipates some evil that may come from her proposal? A speaker’s words, all of them, including those used in her logical arguments about facts, causes, and effects, also provide information about a speaker’s reliability and about whether circumstances obtain to justify particular emotions. This information about probabilities also be- longs to the domain of reason, regardless of whether the words that convey it are part of a logical syllogism crafted by the speaker. Even words dropped casually into speech can trigger syllogisms in the lis- tener. I offer a crude example that makes the point easy to see. An au- dience member who hears a slur against her ethnic group will distrust the speaker, and her distrust rides on the following syllogistic thought: “Speakers who use ethnic slurs are not likely to take the interests of the slurred group to heart; the speaker has just made a slur against my group; she is therefore not likely to take the interests of my group to heart.” The project of persuasion depends on speakers’ recognizing the rationality involved in ordinary, human judgments about the probable behavior of others.

How, then, do our three speech capacities—to make logical argu- ments, to convey character, and to engage emotions—combine to dispel both the distrust caused by factual uncertainty and interper- sonal distrust? When I raise this question to students, they often leap excitedly to the conclusion that we use demonstrative logic to deal with factual uncertainty and other speech techniques to convey char-

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acter and respond to our audience’s emotions. If only matters were so tidy! In fact, demonstrative argument can do relatively little about a lack of factual clarity. Take the case of a country facing decisions about whether and how to go to war. More often than not, even when it has made its irrevocable decision, facts, probabilities, and likelihoods re- main murky. Regardless of how logical (in the technical sense) are the arguments for or against war, which are inevitably strung together from only the few facts that can be publicly agreed upon, they will not in themselves convince an audience that a speaker has an accurate, credible analysis of the future. In political controversies, there will al- ways be logical arguments for a counterposition, on the basis of ex- actly the same facts. In this circumstance, no amount of logical argu- ment will determine which speaker to trust. Audiences will turn to assessments of character, and so our capacity to convey our habitual mindsets turns out to be directed not merely at concerns about inter- personal relations, but also at the distrust arising from factual uncer- tainty. But in what sense is character relevant to this type of distrust?

People trust those who have the ability to make astute, pragmati- cally successful decisions in contexts of uncertainty and who can convey that practical levelheadedness through speech (R ..; cf. ..). Just as one prefers to be a passenger in a car whose driver pro- cesses large amounts of information quickly and can navigate an effi- cient, safe path through a world of constantly changing obstacles, so too one finds speakers persuasive who convey competence at practi- cal reason in political affairs. For Aristotle, competence at practical reason is a character virtue—phronêsis in the Greek.7 And how does one know someone has this ability? For Aristotle, character virtues are a matter of habit. If a policy advocate has previously made nine good proposals out of nine attempts, the likelihood is that his tenth will also be good. A speaker who wishes to convince his audience that his policy proposal is likely to bring practical success would do well to find ways of conveying to his audience that he does have such ha- bitual competence. This is not so much a matter of reciting one’s record as of recounting at least some of the thought process involved in one’s previous successful proposals. The point is to display to an audience that one’s habitual thought processes lead to pragmatically successful endeavors. The question of character arises here to prompt an assessment not of a speaker’s personal morality in general, but only

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of the probable efficacy of his proposals. Where logic cannot dispel the distrust that arises from uncertainty about the future, arguments from character often can. Character judgments, when they focus on evaluating a speaker’s competence at practical reason, are assessments of probability as to whether the proposed policy is likely to achieve success.8

This is not the only way that character affects persuasion. Clearly, audiences will distrust a speaker whose policy proposals are merely practicable. A proposal to save public funds by ceasing to collect garbage from the homes of the elderly may be practicable but meets obvious ethical objections. In conveying his character, a speaker re- veals not only his decision-making habits but also the ethical com- mitments that guide his treatment of other people. This draws us away from the issue of factual uncertainty and into the area of interpersonal distrust. Much more might be said, and Aristotle does say much more, about how to dispel the distrust arising from factual uncertainty, but since my concern in this book is indeed with interpersonal trust, I turn now to that issue.

Once again, there is no neat correlation between our three differ- ent speech capacities and the types of distrust. In fact, a speaker’s log- ical arguments are central to how she conveys her character, and this for two reasons. Aristotle recommends that speakers construct the logical element of their argument around general principles. His term is “maxims,” and he offers as an example the proverb that “the true friend should love as if he were going to be a friend forever” (R ..). For Aristotle, the principles one espouses express character. Demonstrative argument about general principles brings to the fore a speaker’s ethical commitments concerning the treatment of others, allowing an audience to assess these principles easily and to decide whether they render a speaker reliable. But the use of general prin- ciples has another important effect too.

In advocating the use of maxims, Aristotle seems close to the Habermasian argument that speakers should always try to convert their opinions into universal or universalizable terms in order to test whether those arguments are good for everyone. In fact, he is less in- terested in universality than in the value of general principles for so- cial stability. In using maxims, an Aristotelian speaker does not so much check whether her position is good for all as draw herself into

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a contract with her audience in order to stabilize the future (the re- sponses of her audience will tell her whether the principles are good for other people, too). Speakers who use universal principles—a lan- guage of eternity—indicate a willingness to fashion rules in the pres- ent that they too will have to abide by in the future;perhaps those rules will compromise those very speakers’ interests in the future. This does not mean that a community’s principles are set in stone after a public debate—only that those who have proposed particular principles have committed themselves to being judged by them at some future point, should other citizens choose to return to them. In using a language of eternity, and thereby accepting the possibility that her fellow citizens may one day use her own principle in cases where she will lose out, a speaker helps bring predictability to human relations and also accepts some degree of vulnerability before her fellows. In short, she em- braces a rule-of-law approach to politics whereby decision-rules are decided in advance of the appearance of the cases to be decided by them, and she offers her audience an opportunity to set the content of those predetermined principles. The best test of a policy proposal is whether the principles on which it is based are consistent with the terms on which citizens can live together. Speakers who use general- izable rules draw a rule-of-law ethos beyond institutions into ordinary interactions and help bring predictability to human relations.

An example of the role of logical argument in clarifying ethical commitments, as distinct from factual claims, can be found in events surrounding the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Prior to March , when the U.S. invaded in its first-ever application of the doctrine of preemp- tive strike, which the administration had put forward in its  for- eign policy statement, citizens and pundits debated whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and whether there was a connection be- tween Iraq and the terrorist group Al-Qaeda. These were fairly fruit- less arguments. The facts, had we been able to reach public agreement about them, would have mattered, but logical argument itself was un- able to achieve factual clarity on these issues. On the contrary, these arguments generated ever-increasing levels of confusion about the pertinent facts. In contrast, citizens debated very little about whether the doctrine of preemptive strike is compatible with a democratic way of life, let alone the terms on which it might be compatible. If citi- zens and politicians had wanted to produce political stability, this

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question should have been at the center of the debate. Logical argu- ment often cannot clarify the facts of uncertain political situations, but it can always provide a public airing of communal standards and reinforce a rule-of-law culture.

A rule-of-law ethos cannot, however, simply be equated with a fixation on rules; it entails a more fundamental commitment to social predictability and to a limited but acknowledged vulnerability of cit- izens to each other. A rule-of-law ethos can therefore be drawn into ordinary relations even without the use of maxims or general prin- ciples. The events of the U.S. invasion of Iraq yield two odd, but use- ful, examples here. The British, important allies to the U.S., had been assigned the job of securing Basra, and in the war’s immediate after- math, generally did a much better job than the U.S. military in culti- vating trust among hostile Iraqi citizens. Many commentators pointed this out, and attributed the British success to their army’s experience with hostile civilians in Northern Ireland.9 Trust-generation, the com- mentators suggested, is a cultural habit.

What, then, did the British do to try to bring peace out of war? Upon capturing the headquarters of the ousted Baath party, they al- lowed local civilians to ransack it, contrary to standard procedure to halt all looting. The British soldiers had found a way to show sym- bolically that the arbitrariness of the ruling Baath party no longer held sway in Basra; not only were the British now in charge, but things would be counter to what they had been. In permitting the looting, the British allowed an exception because it confirmed a rule, and so the aim of this lawlessness was, ironically, to establish a rule-of-law ethos. Also, at a point when U.S. soldiers were still decked out in full armament, the British wore soft berets and shed their body armor, ac- cepting some vulnerability to make the point that the time had come for peace. Both gestures—the blow struck to arbitrariness and their elected vulnerability—revealed a sophisticated relationship to rheto- ric and display; both symbolic acts astutely conveyed the character of a rule-of-law culture, and in so doing might have served as founda- tion stones for rule-of-law institutions.

In the end, though, the British efforts at trust-generation had less success than anticipated. Similarly, even a speaker who has managed to deal with factual uncertainty, who has convinced his audience that his core principles are sound, and who has found ways to cultivate a

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rule-of-law ethos, has by no means yet faced his most difficult chal- lenges. He must still tackle negative emotions like anger, fear, and re- sentment. At the core of such emotions are problems of self-interest. Envy, indignation, and the like are often judgments on an important matter: do a speaker’s interests clash or harmonize with those of his audience?

Many commentators have taken Aristotle’s willingness to discuss the political impact of emotions as proof that rhetoric inevitably dis- integrates into a sophistic manipulation of the passions. But, on the contrary, he frames his arguments by criticizing speakers who “warp” (diastrephein) their auditors by rousing them to anger, envy, and pity. Also, he repeatedly insists that speakers prepare their audiences emo- tionally “in a certain way” (poion tina kai ton kriten kataskeuazein), and then casts his discussion of the emotions as an analysis of goodwill (eunoia) and friendship (philia), saying, “It is necessary, with these dis- cussions about the emotions, to take up the subject of goodwill and friendship” (R ..). The “certain way” in which audiences should be prepared is such that they are ready for the possibility that good- will and friendship can arise between them and other citizens.

I want here to be precise about the role of each of these terms, friendship and goodwill, in the project of trust production.10 Aristotle takes care to distinguish friendship, and also hatred, from the emo- tions. Both are habitual dispositions, or sets of practices for interact- ing with others, not passions.11 Significantly, he concludes his discus- sion of friendship and hatred by remarking, “It is evident, then, from what we have just said that it is possible to prove (apodeiknunai ) that men are enemies or friends, or to make them such if they are not; to refute those who pretend that they are, and when they oppose us through anger or enmity, to bring them over to whichever side may be preferred” (R ..). This is the only passage in the discussion of the emotions that states what rhetoricians need to accomplish when they engage with the emotions, and the possibility of generating (or destroying) friendship is just what’s at stake. Goodwill is the pivotal emotional element of this work, because it is an emotion that can arise between strangers and that paves the way for friendship. But to get to goodwill and then to friendship, a speaker needs to work prin- cipally with negative emotions.

The emotions, as Aristotle defines them, are pleasures and pains

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(lupai) that, as they change, affect men’s judgments (kriseis) (R ..). These pleasures and pains mark moments when people’s interests are either satisfied or left unfulfilled, and so emotion registers the effects of loss and sacrifice on politics. “All men rejoice when their desire comes to pass and are pained when the contrary happens; so that pains and pleasures are signs of their interest” (R ..). A speaker who seeks to inspire trust must be especially concerned with the pains, or losses. In the Rhetoric, Aristotle investigates ten specific emotions: anger, fear, shame, charity, pity, indignation, envy, emulation, mild- ness, and confidence. Notably, all but the last two are pains, or sym- pathetic responses to the pains of others. Nor are the two exceptions, mildness and confidence, pleasures exactly. Mildness is only the ab- sence of pain (R ..), and confidence is the absence of the partic- ular pains that characterize fear. Recognizing that anger, fear, and the other negative emotions on the list are the critical political passions, Aristotle teaches his speakers to deal with the impact of feelings of loss on politics by converting the negative emotions into these other two, mildness and confidence. This conversion is prior, even, to any ef- fort to inspire the positive emotion of goodwill. How can such a con- version be accomplished? A question for our time.

Emotions have conceptual structures, as Aristotle argues; this is what makes it possible to intervene in them. Anger, for instance, differs from indignation in that the first arises when one gets less than one thinks is one’s due;and the second, when someone else gets more than what one believes to be her due. People are talked into their feel- ings of loss insofar as their assessments of what they are owed rest on ideas about what is due to whom within their polity, and such ideas derive from discourse.12 They can, therefore, be talked out of them. One can counteract the anger, for instance, by proving that no slight occurred, or that it was unintentional. One can assuage fear by re- vealing or creating safeguards. And for a range of the negative emo- tions, one can draw on the techniques of mourning.13 As Aristotle anatomizes the conceptual content of the negative emotions, he con- structs a very precise taxonomy of political vulnerability. Speakers who succeed at dealing with the play of emotion in politics find ways to minimize that experience for others. But a speaker can begin the process of turning negative emotions first into mildness and then into goodwill only if she takes the time to identify precisely which ones

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buoy up the distrust she intends to disarm. Which emotion is the problem precisely? Having answered this question, the speaker can then engage the conceptual content particular to that emotion.

Importantly, the negative emotions are pains that register not merely objective, but also “apparent,” losses, to use Aristotle’s termi- nology. Speakers always have to deal with exactly how painful a given proposal appears to their audience, regardless of their own beliefs about how much suffering their proposals in fact inflict. Citizens’ idio- syncratic perceptions of events and beliefs about their due and that of others within their polity determine the intensity of their feelings of loss. Democratic citizens are obliged to recognize that even the sub- jective experience of loss is politically significant, for it establishes the extent of any given citizen’s consent to a polity’s policy. Although we may wish it otherwise, citizens can negotiate loss and generate trust only on the shifting ground of subjectivity.14 This does not mean that apparent losses and real losses should be treated in the same way. The first step in dealing with apparent losses is to make the case that the loss is only apparent. If citizens can be convinced on this account, the real pain they feel in respect to their apparent loss should shift in its nature; citizens would then deal with the remaining pain felt by their fellows on the terms necessary to it, whether through mourning techniques, techniques of reassurance, or other psychologically rele- vant responses.

Public negotiation even of apparent pains is crucial to democratic deliberation because it gives a community an opportunity to address inconsistencies in how different citizens think benefits, burdens, rec- ognition, and agency should be distributed within the polity. Since these are the basic topics of justice, it is in addressing, and trying to resolve, negative emotions, that a citizen-speaker contributes most to refining his polity’s account of justice. Only by addressing negative emotions with a view to generating goodwill can a citizen find the seeds of improved citizenly interactions and a more democratic ap- proach to the problem of loss in politics. Citizens must, then, cultivate their capacities to identify the particular emotions at play in respect to any given political question as well as refining their understanding of how particular emotions can be dealt with. Here I have named only the emotions to which citizens must especially attend: anger, fear, shame, charity, pity, indignation, envy, emulation. Each has its own concep-

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tual structure and requires a logical response fitted to that structure. For now, I leave it to citizens to study the particular content of each of these emotions independently, or with Aristotle.

Once a speaker has converted negative emotions to mildness, the next task is to convert mildness to goodwill. Goodwill is not friend- ship proper but only its first root. It blossoms into friendship only af- ter it becomes mutual (NE .., ..). The actual production of goodwill therefore involves two steps. A speaker must display her own goodwill to an audience, and then must inspire reciprocal goodwill in them.

How can a speaker prove his own willingness to befriend his fel- low citizens? Here, since any willingness to be friends involves a de- sire to enter into real, and not merely juridical, peer relationships with one’s fellow citizens, we return to the topic of freedom and equality. To prove that one speaks as a friend one must demonstrate a commit- ment to the equal autonomy of all citizens. As we saw, Aristotle began his treatise with the overarching point that a speaker must remember that it is the business of the audience to judge, not to learn. In essence, if a speaker is to know that his audience consists of judges rather than of passive and submissive students, he must check that the audience is not simply suffering in silence while being told what to do. It is evi- dently to this end that Aristotle recommends that speakers be willing to let anybody whom the people choose judge their speeches (R .). Citizens who are political friends do not stray into patronizing their fellow citizens. They are willing to share power with their audiences and to make themselves vulnerable to them. This was the important message of the soft berets worn by the British in Iraq. They chose unnecessary, conspicuous vulnerability in order to prove themselves trustworthy. In political deliberation, Aristotle requires that citizens accept being vulnerable before the judgment of any of their fellow cit- izens, even those of diverse social classes and backgrounds.15

The requirement that speakers submit to the judgment of any ran- domly chosen audience member has another important effect, too. It forces speakers to ask themselves whether their narratives will seem to everyone a convincing account of reality. The willingness to be judged by anyone whatsoever cultivates in citizen-speakers the regu- lar habit of checking how different proposals look from perspectivally differentiated positions within the citizenry. This habit is crucial to

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generating trust, because citizens generate goodwill when they can prove that they are concerned to address the whole citizenry and not merely the  percent plus one whom they need to carry a vote. This technique helps reduce the play of negative emotions in politics by anticipating and avoiding them. The speaker who checks how a pro- posal will look from all the perspectivally differentiated positions within the citizenry explores the problem of loss in advance of the imposition of losses on particular people, and deals with it directly. Citizen-speakers should be vigilant not to induce a feeling of politi- cal vulnerability in their audience; and to deal effectively with nega- tive political emotions, they must both anticipate how their proposals will sound to their diverse fellow citizens and also develop their will- ingness to be judged by any fellow citizen.

Again, I will offer a small success story that reveals the connection between anticipating negative political feelings by listening to the whole of one’s audience and successfully dealing with those emotions. In  Los Angeles hired, as its chief of police, Bostonian William Bratton who was credited with “licking” crime in New York during his time as police commissioner there from  to . When he got to LA, he decided to tackle gangs, and to quote the Economist, im- mediately “declared ‘war’ promising to take back the streets” (March ‒, , ) This was his mistake. When he began to cultivate his “many constituencies,” talking to rich folk in restaurants but also spending time at churches and with neighborhood organizations in Central Los Angeles (as the city has renamed notorious South Cen- tral), the people in Central L.A. told him “that talk of ‘war’ was not a good tactic.” One makes war only on those with whom one will not share a polity; to declare war on a neighborhood or set of citizens is tantamount to banishing them. The point of the term is to intimidate and produce political vulnerability. Bratton rightly dropped the term and as a result has gained some trust to make his job easier. The Econ- omist concluded its report by saying, “If Mr. Bratton is to win the approval of LA’s honest citizens, he will have to teach his officers the lesson he learned himself—less war and more jaw” (ibid.). To provoke or assuage people’s sense of vulnerability is learned behavior. Cops, too, learn how to succeed or fail at trust production, and public diplo- macy is as necessary at home as abroad.

Now, to the final, crucial question. Having proved her goodwill

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toward her audience, how does a speaker also inspire others to feel goodwill? Here the main challenge is to prove that one’s approach to self-interest is trustworthy. This is the most fundamental element of trust generation and the task that Aristotle prioritizes. Above all else goodwill springs up, he argues, in response to a display of equity (epiei- keia) (..). As we have seen, an equitable person displays the gener- osity of friendship and is “content to receive a smaller share although he has the law on his side” (NE ..). Here we are again, at the need not only for flexibility but even for sacrifice. Equity is the core of friendship and also of trust production. A speaker’s equitability shows that her own interest in preserving her community has led her to moderate her other interests. This display allays an audience’s distrust of the speaker’s self-interest, from which all of the most politically corrosive distrust arises. The British in Basra are said to have captured a high-ranking Iraqi officer in the middle of the street with a crowd of boys around. They found beside him in his vehicle a significant stash of Iraqi cash. Rather than turn it in to their own officers, ac- cording to standard procedure, the soldiers distributed the cash to the boys. They were buying them, yes, but the soldiers were also show- ing that their own self-interest did not extend so far as to override the boys’ self-interest. The soldiers were advertising themselves as people who employ equitable, not rivalrous, self-interest. This is the basic move required for generating trust.

Of course, we have already encountered a significant example of this move. As we have seen, an exemplary sacrifice, like Elizabeth Eckford’s, declares a context of equitability, not rivalry, to obtain. Aristotle has a word for the ability to be good at such acts of equity. It is suggnomê. Usually translated as forgiveness, suggnomê more liter- ally means “judging with” (NE ..). “Forgiveness” captures only the form of equity that operates in the judicial realm, when a prose- cutor requests or a judge imposes a lesser penalty than the law allows. “Judging with” in the deliberative context is less forgiveness than the ability sometimes to argue for or to accept a decision that, to some degree, goes against one’s own interests or is even less than one’s due. Speakers need not shed their private interests when they advocate policies, but they must prove that they have in the past been and will again in the future be willing to accept decisions that benefit them- selves less than others.16 If a speaker openly takes less than his legal

 :              

share now and then, he will generate goodwill in his audience. The key to generating trust is, above all else, an ability to prove that one governs one’s life by equitable, not rivalrous, self-interest.

But the game of generating trust does not end with that sacrifice. If all else fails and a citizen is unable to talk his audience around to mildness and confidence, he can always make a signal sacrifice. In- deed, in contexts where trust has completely disintegrated, someone has to go first, as did Elizabeth. No single act of sacrifice can, how- ever, complete the work of generating trust until its audience recip- rocates. To quote Aristotle again, “A friend is one who befriends and is befriended in return, and those who think their relationship is of this character consider themselves friends” (R ..; emphasis added).

Political friendship must be reciprocal, and Elizabeth Eckford’s sacrifice was at last converted from a symptom of domination into an act of equity only when it became clear that her fellow citizens around the country would reciprocate her self-sacrifice by accepting changes to their political regime. Had they not reciprocated, people in posi- tions like Elizabeth’s would have had further grounds to distrust their fellow citizens.17 People who offer up sacrifices do not do it for noth- ing; they always aim to engage equitable reciprocity, and at the very least, like Jepthah’s daughter, implicitly expect to earn honor, grati- tude, and respect.

Aristotle might, with his stress on equity, friendship, and reci- procity, seem to set even more utopian standards for his speakers than do the deliberative democrats of chapter , but, to the contrary, his recommendations are embedded not in an argument about what cit- izens ought to do, but instead in an argument about what democratic persuasion demands for success. No decent judge, he argues, would consent to an argument in which a speaker does not establish a rule- of-law ethos, display equity, and cultivate goodwill in addition to making logical arguments. His rules for persuasion also constitute a theory of the grounds for reasonable consent, and so his Art of Rhetoric is as much a guide for listeners, who give or withhold their consent, as for speakers.18 Equity comes into existence in the interaction be- tween speaker and listener.

Equity is so important to Aristotle because no agreement can ever be equally good for all citizens, reconciling all their various interests and outlooks. No political decision can garner ardor from every cit-

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izen. To make consensus politics possible, democratic citizens need ways to consider those communal decisions that do not go in their fa- vor as nonetheless decisions to which they can consent. The idea that one consents even to those decisions that go against one’s own inter- ests, out of political friendship for the good of the other, makes such decisions products of an autonomous choice for everyone, and not tyrannical constraints on one’s freedom. Rhetoric, understood as the art of talking to strangers as equals and of proving that one has also their good at heart, inspires the trust that provides a consent-based regime with the flexibility needed to garner, from citizens of diverse backgrounds, consent to decisions made in uncertainty.

A final, surprising twist remains, however, before this account of the techniques for producing trust is complete. Aristotle encourages his citizens to cultivate goodwill, but in his view, goodwill does not arise “in friendships of utility and pleasure,” the two lowest and least taxing levels of friendship (NE ..). Yet citizens are, in fact, utility friends, by his own account. Has he set us to pursuing a phantom?

No. We have sought an appropriate goal. Aristotle places the effort to cultivate goodwill at the center of his art of talking to strangers because it matters what kinds of aspirations citizens have. Citizenly relations are not stable but change over time. Sometimes trust is in- creasing, or at least being renewed; sometimes, instead, it is corrod- ing. A polity will never reach a point where all its citizens have inti- mate friendships with each other, nor would we want it to. The best one can hope for, and all one should desire, is that political friendship can help citizens to resist the disintegration of trust and achieve a community where trust is a renewable resource. But to accomplish this, citizens must set their sights on what lies beyond their reach: goodwill throughout the citizenry. If they do, here and there citizens who were perfect strangers to each other will become friends simply by acting as if they were friends. More important, however, even in the vast majority of cases where citizens do not become intimates, they will at least have achieved a guiding orientation that will help make them more trustworthy to each other. Our aspirations deter- mine the nature of the failures amid which we have to live.

We have, at last, found a new mode of citizenship in friendship understood as not an emotion but a practice. One can use its tech- niques even with strangers and even in the absence of emotional at-

 :              

tachments, as in utilitarian friendships like business relations and most other relations among citizens. Political friendship consists finally of trying to be like friends. Its payoff is rarely intimate, or genuine, friend- ship, but it is often trustworthiness and, issuing from that, political trust. Its art, trust production, has long gone by the abused name of rhetoric. Properly understood, rhetoric is not a list of stylistic rules but an outline of the radical commitment to other citizens that is needed for a just democratic politics. The rest is a set of suggestions about how to turn those commitments into real politics. At this point, we might as well equip ourselves with a list.

In order to generate trust, a speaker should — aim to convince  percent of her audience; if she finds herself

considering rather how to carry a majority, she is acting in a fashion that over the long term will undermine democracy;

— test herself by speaking to minority constituents whose votes she does not need;

— once she has found the limits of her ability to persuade, she should think also about how to ameliorate the remaining dis- agreement and distrust;

— “separate the people from the problem” by (i) developing exter- nal standards and universal principles for assessing problems and (ii) recognizing that dealing with the people means engaging with specific features of their subjective situation;

—be precise about which emotions are at stake in a particular conversation;

— seek to transform conditions of utility into experiences of good- will;

— recognize that reciprocity is established over time and that enough trust has to be generated to allow this process to proceed;

— recognize that the most powerful tool for generating trust is the capacity to prove that she is willing to make sacrifices even for the strangers in her polity;

— be aware too that she is trustworthy only if she can point to a habit of making sacrifices for strangers and not merely to a single instance;19

— recognize that where there is no trust, a great sacrifice will be necessary to sow the first seeds of trust, which can develop only

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over time through repeated interactions in which citizens have opportunities to test each other;

— give her audience opportunities for judging (accepting or reject- ing) her arguments;

— be willing to have any member of the polity respond to her argu- ments.

In order to prepare the way for the generation of trust, a listener should — separate a speaker’s claims about facts from the principles on

which her conclusions are based; assess both; — ask whether a speaker has a history of making pragmatically cor-

rect decisions; — ask who is sacrificing for whom, whether the sacrifices are vol-

untary, and honored; whether they can and will be reciprocated; — ask whether the speaker has spoken as a friend; — insist on opportunities to judge political arguments; — judge.

Here then are some new habits to try on.20 Rhetoric is relevant not only in the halls of the legislature and in the courtrooms but wher- ever any stranger has to convince another of anything. Any interac- tion among strangers can generate trust that the polity needs in order to maintain its basic relationships. If citizens keep in mind these guidelines for speaking and listening to their fellow citizens, they will import the expertise of ordinary friendship into the political realm, and political friendship will grow out of that. Political friendship thus generated sustains a democratic polis by helping citizens to accept de- cisions with which they may disagree. But friendship must be mutual.

Self-sacrifice serves the political purpose of enabling and legiti- mating agreement only when citizens act generously toward other citizens exactly because they know that at some point they will find themselves befriended in return. If one citizen or group repeatedly lives with less than its legal share, political friendship has been vio- lated, or has never existed. Indeed, decisions that impose continuous sacrifice are based not on persuasion but on force and are therefore il- legitimate. Since democratic citizenship entails turn-taking at dis- plays of equity, democracy will be stronger for cultivating in citizens an ability to talk to strangers in ways that support taking turns.

 :              

And yet . . . again the skeptic’s voice rises: one can employ prac- tices like these in the supermarket, at the movies, in airports, at bus stands, at the workplace. But why should one believe that they will have an impact? One might even teach rhetoric to kids. But aren’t the words of politicians the only ones with power to transform our world? In what sense can ordinary citizens be said to be powerful? How can their techniques of political friendship have real political effects?

       ,          : 