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The Rhetoric of the Open Hand and the Rhetoric of the Closed Fist Author(s): Edward P. J. Corbett Source: College Composition and Communication, Vol. 20, No. 5 (Dec., 1969), pp. 288-296 Published by: National Council of Teachers of English Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/355032 Accessed: 11-12-2015 00:54 UTC

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The kRh oric of the Open -land and the Rhtoric

of the Closed Ti§t

EDWARD P. J. CORBETT

THE FAVORITE METAPHORS USED during the Renaissance in referring to logic and rhetoric were Zeno's analogies of the closed fist and the open hand. The closed fist symbolized the tight, spare, compressed discourse of the philosopher; the open hand symbolized the relaxed, expansive, ingratiating discourse of the orator. When, sometime after the ap- pearance of Descartes's Discourse on Method in 1637, logic became more a theory of inquiry than a theory of com- munication, rhetoric became the ration- ale for both learned discourse and popu- lar discourse, and these traditional met- aphors came to be looked upon as de- scribing the two varieties of communica- tive discourse. I see the two metaphors now as having taken on a new tenor. The open hand might be said to charac- terize the kind of persuasive discourse that seeks to carry its point by reasoned, sustained, conciliatory discussion of the issues. The closed fist might signify the kind of persuasive activity that seeks to carry its point by non-rationale, non- sequential, often non-verbal, frequently provocative means. The raised closed fist of the black-power militant may be emblematic of this whole new develop- ment in the strategies of persuasion in the 1960's.

The style, the tactics, the ethos of much of the activity which seeks to change attitudes and influence action have certainly changed remarkably dur- ing the troubled years of the 1960's. I should like to describe the changes I have noted, to compare these new rhetor- ical strategies with those that prevailed in the Renaissance when the study of

rhetoric and logic reigned supreme in the schools, and to try to account for the changes that have taken place.

+

Book-length historical studies pro- duced during the last thirty years or so by such scholars as T. W. Baldwin, William G. Crane, Wilbur Samuel Howell, Sister Miriam Joseph, Rosemond Tuve, and Walter J. Ong have served to acquaint teachers of the humanities with the gen- eral rationale and the specific details of the disciplines of rhetoric and logic in the English Renaissance schools. The arts of communication-rhetoric, poetics, and logic or dialectic-that were incor- porated into the curriculum of the Ren- aissance schools of England were es- sentially the same disciplines that were originated by Aristotle and extended or modified by Cicero, Quintilian, and Hor- ace and by such medieval scholars and teachers as St. Augustine, Alcuin, John of Salisbury, and Geoffrey of Vinsauf. They were rigidly codified and struc- tured studies, taught predominantly in Latin until vernacular texts on rhetoric, logic, and poetics began appearing about the middle of the sixteenth century. Al- though the Renaissance humanists adopt- ed the full panoply of persuasive strate- gies-the logical, the emotional, and the ethical-they certainly placed the great- est emphasis on the cognitive approach to invention. In none of the Renaissance rhetorics do we find as much attention paid to emotional appeals as Aristotle paid in Book Two of his Rhetoric. It is not until the third quarter of the eigh- teenth century, with the appearance of

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George Campbell's The Philosophy of Rhetoric, which coincided with the growth of interest in faculty psychology, that we find increasing attention being paid to the strategies of the emotional appeal. The emphasis on the cerebral in Renaissance discourse is the natural consequence of the close union of rhet- oric and dialectic in the Tudor class- room. The emotional had its chief outlet in the lyrics and dramas of the period.

The ethical appeal does not receive much explicit attention in Renaissance rhetoric, but the concern for the per- suasive efficacy of the personal image of the speaker or writer is implicit in the whole educational bias of the period. One of the reasons for the popularity of Cicero and Quintilian's rhetorics with Renaissance schoolmasters, most of whom were ordained priests, was that these Roman rhetoricians placed so much emphasis on the moral formation of the aspiring pupil. They subscribed to the definition of the ideal orator as being "a good man skilled in speaking." The appeal of such how-to-win-friends- and-influence-people texts as Ascham's Schoolmaster and Castiglione's The Courtier was that these texts were de- signed to produce the man for all seasons. The Renaissance schoolmaster's efforts were directed to the education of an aristocracy, not only in the sense of edu- cation for the landed gentry but also in the Greek sense of rule by the best men, men characterized by those Aristotelian ideals of good sense, good will, and good moral disposition.

Another thing we must keep in mind when assessing the rationale of Renais- sance rhetorical training is that Europe was just entering upon the typographical age, with all the cultural consequences which that revolution effected. It is sig- nificant, and perhaps ironic, that the two men who have written most exten- sively about the electronic era upon which we have now entered are two Renaissance scholars-Walter J. Ong and

his former colleague Marshall McLuhan, who, as few people are aware, wrote his doctoral dissertation on Thomas Nashe (Cambridge, 1944). Printing from movable type was barely a half century old when the Renaissance be- gan in England, but this revolution very soon exerted a profound influence on the schooling and the mental set of the period. As Father Ong has reminded us,1 there was a heavy oral residue in Tudor prose style throughout most of the sixteenth century, as is evidenced in the stitching-together, nonperiodic pattern of prose discourse, a pattern which was fostered by the great stress in Renaissance schools on copia, on commonplaces, on formulary phrases and structures. The lingering on of the oral medium is evidenced too in the scholas- tic disputations, in the oratorical struc- ture recommended by the letter-writing manuals for formal epistles, and in that most oral of all the literary arts, the drama, which attained its pinnacle of glory during this period.

But the predominance of dynamic, personalizing sound soon gave way, in the academic world at least, to the fro- zen, silent, impersonal matrix of print. As Marshall McLuhan has been telling us, print served to detribalize man, to remove him from the group, to make him more independent, more solitary, more inner-directed. Instead of the teach- er on one end of a bench and the stu- dent on the other end, we now had the student curled up in the corner with a book. Instead of the give-and-take, ques- tion-and-answer dialogue between teach- er and pupil, we now had the teacher's monologue, delivered from the lectern from a handwritten or printed text and not so much heard by the student as he sat silently in his seat as transcribed by him into his notebook.

As a consequence, persuasive dis-

1"Oral Residue in Tudor Prose Style," PMLA, LXXX (June, 1965), 145-54.

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course for the next three centuries took the form mainly, not of the stop-and- go, fragmentary, oral-aural dialogue that Socrates had practiced but of the se- quential, structured monologue that Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian had given instructions about in their rheto- rics. One difference of course is that whereas the classical rhetoricians were dealing with the kind of monologue that would be delivered orally before a live audience, the Renaissance rhetoricians dealt with the kind of monologue that more often than not would be delivered to an unseen audience in the visualist medium of handwriting or print. This is not to say that persuasive discourse in the oral-aural medium disappeared entirely during the late Renaissance. Throughout the period, there continued to be a great deal of discourse conducted orally, in the courtrooms, the parliaments, and the classroom. But with the grow- ing consciousness of an international community of scholars, merchants, and statesmen, the Renaissance man found that he had to manage more and more of his communication with that farflung community through the medium of the printed book or the handwritten letter.

Latin of course was the international language of communication in scholar- ship, commerce, and diplomacy, and that fact not only strengthened the position of Latin in the curriculum but helped to foster the growing orientation of the period to the print medium, because, as Father Ong has reminded us,2 once Latin had ceased to be the language of the family circle, as it certainly had by the time of the Renaissance, it became a language artificially preserved and con- trolled by writing and by printing. And while there were some educated people during this period who could speak Lat- in fluently, the significant fact is that there was no one who could speak Latin

2"The Vernacular Matrix of the New Criti- cism," The Barbarian Within (New York, 1962), pp. 177-205.

who could not also write it. That profi- ciency was certainly not possessed by the majority of Englishmen, who could handle only the vernacular; for that majority, the vernacular was exclusively an oral medium.

And while I am speaking about lan- guage, I might make the observation that the language of traditional discourse, in classical times as well as in the Renais- sance, tended to be highly formal, learned, even uncommon. It is curious that this should have been so, because rhetoric, from its beginning, was con- ceived of as the discipline which gov- erned communication with a mass au- dience. But the whole doctrine of the schemes and tropes was founded on the notion that language would more effectively convey a message to an au- dience if it frequently departed from the literal meaning and the normal pat- terns of words. Wilbur Samuel Howell suggests a plausible reason for the de- velopment of this linguistic bias:

It is suggestive to speculate upon the cultural implications of a rhetorical theory which equates true elegance and hence true effectiveness with a system of studied departures from the estab- lished patterns of everyday speech. Such a theory appears to be the normal concomitant of the social and political situation in which the holders of power are hereditary aristocrats who must be conciliated by the commoners if the lat- ter are to gain privileges for them- selves. In a situation like that, persua- sive forms of speech would emerge as agreeable forms; and agreeable forms would be those which sound agreeable to the aristocratic holders of power. What forms could sound more agree- able to the aristocrat than those which originated in a repudiation of the speech of the lower classes? Would not such forms remind him of the superior- ity of his own origin and thus be a way of softening his will by the subtle in- ducements of flattery?3

3Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700 (Princeton, N.J., 1956), p. 117.

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Late in the seventeenth century, with the growth of parliamentary government and with the reform programs of the Royal Society, there was a revolt against this notion of a mandarin language. But even as early as the mid-sixteenth cen- tury, John Jewel, in his Oration against Rhetoric, delivered before the members of Corpus Christi College at Oxford, raised some serious doubts about the appropriateness and effectiveness of the ornate style of address:

For if in speaking, we seek this (as we certainly do), that we may be under- stood by others with whom we deal, who can discover a better mode of speech than to speak intelligibly, sim- ply, and clearly? What need of art? What need of childish ornaments?4

In a recent article on "The Rhetoric of Confrontation," Robert L. Scott and Donald K. Smith observed, "Since the time of Aristotle, academic rhetorics have been for the most part instruments of established society, presupposing the 'goods' of order, civility, reason, decorum, and civil or theocratic law."5 We might use that quotation as a transition to the description of the rhetoric of the closed fist, since it contains suggestions of how and why changes have taken place in the style and strategies of modern rhetoric. I hope, however, that this abrupt transi- tion will not create the impression that the reasoned, highly structured, elegant manner of discourse that prevailed in the Renaissance changed suddenly into the new style of rhetoric. There were all those intermediate stages, all those con- tributions to the development of a "new rhetoric" made by Peter Ramus and Omer Talon, by Rene Descartes and the Port-Royal logicians, by Thomas Hobbes, Francis Bacon, John Locke, and

4Hoyt H. Hudson, "Jewel's Oration against Rhetoric: A Translation," QJS, XIV (1928), 381.

5QJS, LV (February, 1969), 7.

David Hume, by Hugh Blair, George Campbell, and Richard Whately, by the Boylston Professors of Rhetoric at Har- vard in the nineteenth century, and by Alfred Korzybski, I. A. Richards, and Kenneth Burke in the twentieth century, but time simply does not allow for a tracing out of that history here.6

Let us begin by acknowledging that there has been a marked revival of inter- est in rhetoric in the twentieth century and that there has been a conspicuous increase in rhetorical activities in this country during the 1950's and 1960's. It is Wayne Booth's judgment that "we are quantitatively the most rhetorical age in history-and not only in the undeniable sense that more men are living by rhet- oric than ever before."7 Let us see what some of the characteristics are of this new rhetorical activity to which I have attached the metaphor of the closed fist.

One of the more obvious character- istics of those contemporary activities that seek to change attitudes and affect action is that many of them are non- verbal. Demonstrations of all kinds- marches, boycotts, sit-ins, take-overs, riots-have taken on a new currency in our time, and if they need a label, they might be called "muscular rhetoric" or "body rhetoric." They seek to convey a message, to exercise an influence, simply by massed physical presence, either stat- ic or kinetic, either organized or sponta- neous. The accouterments of the demon- strators are often such non-verbal sym- bols as flags, armbands, bizarre cos- tumes, and occult insignia worn as pins, buttons, or neck-chains. It is remarkable

6See my articles, "Rhetoric and Teachers of English," QJS, LI (December, 1965), 375-81, and "What Is Being Revived?" College Compo- sition and Communication, XVIII (October, 1967), 166-72, for a brief survey of this history.

7"The Revival of Rhetoric," PMLA, LXXX (May, 1965), quoted from New Rhetorics, ed. Martin Steinmann, Jr. (New York, 1967), p. 5.

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too how much a part music plays in this non-verbal rhetoric, especially the music of the strummed guitar. Words, of course, do play some part in these dem- onstrations, but words clearly play a subsidiary role, and it is notable how fragmentary these verbal utterances are. Aside from the broadsides that issue from the mimeograph machines, written words mainly appear as slogans in- scribed on posters or as graffiti painted on walls. In the oral medium, single words or phrases are chanted endlessly in unison. Of course when the ultimate confrontation comes, coherent sentences have to be resorted to, and we are back to the strategies of traditional rhetoric. But body rhetoric has set the stage for the nitty-gritty of negotiation, and in the last analysis, body rhetoric is the medi- um that has conveyed the main message.

The heavy reliance on non-verbal means of communication serves to con- firm Marshall McLuhan's claim that the electronic media have expanded and in- tensified the human sensoria. Aural, visual, and tactual images have an im- mediacy, an intensity, a simultaneity about them that words strung out one after the other on a page can hardly achieve. Recently I visited the Electric Circus in Greenwich Village, and after an hour in that atmosphere of high- decibel music, blinking strobe lights, and throbbing floor, I understood for the first time what young people mean when they speak of a complete immersion in an experience that involves the senses of sight, hearing, touch, and even smell simultaneously. And I began to under- stand too why there has been a shift in educational theory recently from the cognitive approach of men like Jerome Bruner to the affective approach of men like Jean Piaget. This may be part too of what George Steiner refers to as "the retreat from the word," a retreat that he finds taking place not only in the physi- cal and biological sciences but also in such traditionally verbal disciplines as

history, economics, sociology, and logic. Unlike the writer of the Tudor, Eliza- bethan, and Jacobean periods who han- dled his language in a spirit of exuberant discovery, the writer today, Steiner maintains, "tends to use fewer and sim- pler words, both because mass culture has watered down the concept of literacy and because the sum of realities of which words can give a necessary and sufficient account has sharply diminished."8 Any new rhetoric that develops will certainly have to give increasing attention to the non-verbal means of communication.

Another characteristic of the rhetoric of the closed fist is that it tends to be a group rhetoric, a gregarious rhetoric. Traditional rhetoric was designed for the solitary speaker or writer addressing a captive audience. The solitary speaker or writer held forth, as I am doing now, for an allotted time or space. Today, except for the lone martyr who immolates his draft card or himself, a good deal of rhetorical activity is conducted in groups. The mass demonstration, which we have just considered, is the best man- ifestation of this phenomenon. One of the vogue words today is participatory, and participatory means of course "op- erating as part of a group." This ten- dency may be a confirmation of another of McLuhan's claims, namely that far from making passive automatons of its viewers, television has retribalized men to the point of making them want to act in concert with others. And so the new passion of the young for action and for involvement, for abandoning the passive lecture-room, with its print-locked books, and mixing in the marketplace. A new sense of community and commitment flourishes today, as is evident in the popularity of the Peace Corps and the Vista and the tutoring programs. We see it too in the renascence of the dialogue, or what I call the "polylogue," forms of

8"The Retreat from the Word," Language and Silence (New York, 1967), p. 25.

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discourse-the interview, the panel show, the brainstorming sessions, the group dy- namics, the living theater. One of the reasons why dissidents against the es- tablishment so often resort to gregarious rhetoric is simply the realization that there is safety and strength in numbers. And in densely populated, highly com- plex societies, like ours, the individual is such a cipher that he thinks it presump- tuous of him to demand the sustained attention of an audience, but he realizes that his anonymity acquires a powerful voice when it merges with the group. Vox populi can be heard in the back benches of the executive and legislative assemblies.

A third characteristic of the new rhet- oric of the closed fist is that it relies more on coercive than on persuasive tac- tics. There was a moral dimension to the traditional persuasive process. As Yves Simon has said, "To persuade a man is to awaken in him a voluntary inclination toward a certain course of action .... persuasion implies the operation of free choice."9 Leland M. Griffin sees rhetori- cal activity become coercive rather than persuasive when it resorts to the non- rational, when it is dependent, as he puts it, on "seat of the pants" rather than on "seat of the intellect."10 James R. An- drews refines this definition a bit when he says, "Rhetoric becomes less persua- sive and more coercive to the extent that it limits the viable alternatives open to the receivers of the communication."l1 He cites as an example of coercive tac- tics the answer Mark Rudd gave to the many offers to negotiate made by the Columbia administration during the campus disturbances in the spring of

9 Philosophy of Democratic Government (Chi- cago, 1951), p. 109.

10"The Rhetorical Structure of the 'New Left' Movement: Part I," QJS, L (April, 1964), 127.

11"Confrontation at Columbia: A Case Study in Coercive Rhetoric," QJS, LV (February, 1969), 12.

1968. According to the Newsweek ac- count of the incident (May 6, 1968, p. 43), Mark Rudd's response was an un- equivocal "bull shit." Andrew's comment is, "The choice then was between the SDS position and 'bull shit': no choice at all."

I see choices as the key concept of rhetoric. Accordingly, where the choices are arbitrarily pared down or eliminated, rhetoric begins to disappear. This may very well be the most ominous tendency of the new rhetoric. But I can see why the tendency has developed. Mahatma Gandhi once said, "Violence is essential- ly wordless, and it can begin only where thought and rational communication have broken down. Any society which is geared for violent action is by that fact systematically unreasonable." People are likely to resort to coercive, non-rational, even violent tactics to gain their ends when they feel that the normal channels of communication are ineffectual or un- available. It is significant that the ones who have most often resorted to these coercive tactics have been the dispos- sessed, the disenfranchised in our society -poor people, students, minority groups -people who do not have ready access to the established channels of communi- cations. As The Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York: Bantam Books, 1968) puts it, "The frustrations of powerlessness have led some to the conviction that there is no effective alternative to vio- lence as a means of expression and re- dress, as a way of 'moving the system'" (p. 205).

As I say, I can understand why some people in our society resort to gut responses, but I become apprehensive when I see people abandoning the rea- sonable and reasoning approach in situa- tions where their freedom or their wel- fare is not at stake. I am talking about the habit, both in ordinary conversation or in formal discourse, of saying the thing that is patently untrue or grossly

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illogical. Mouthing untrue or invalid propositions is of course not peculiar to our age. We have all been guilty of that on occasion; I know I have. What does seem to be on the increase; however, is the deliberate disdain for, even revolt against, truth and logic among those whom we would expect to be more responsible.l2

In a recent article in the AAUP Bul- letin, A. M. Tibbetts remarked,

On most issues of importance that arise in university life, students are failing to investigate fully, clarify premises, define terms, think logically, use evi- dence properly, and write (or speak) precisely, truthfully, and to the point. As a consequence of these failures, many universities are moving toward the very antithesis of what they are supposed to be. They are gradually becoming places of untruth and un- reason.13

Among the examples of "unreason" that Tibbetts cited was one involving a very bright student in an advanced course of his, who said to him one day after a heated classroom discussion, "In not letting me, as a student, help run this university, they are taking away my civil rights." When Tibbetts pressed him to define civil rights so that they could intelligently discuss his assertion, the student replied, "Definitions are irrele- vant; I'm talking about facts."

Wayne Booth, Dean of the College at the University of Chicago, also notes a disturbing increase of unreason in the rhetoric of the left, right, and center. "The simple task of putting ideas to-

12See Franklyn S. Haiman, "The Rhetoric of 1968: A Farewell to Rational Discourse," The Ethics of Controversy: Politics and Protest (Law- rence, Kansas, 1968), pp. 123-42. Reprinted in Contemporary American Speeches, ed. Wil A. Linkugel, R. R. Allen, and Richard L. Johanne- sen, Second Edition (Belmont, California, 1969), pp. 153-67.

13"To Encourage Reason on the Campus," AAUP Bulletin, LIV (December, 1968), 466.

gether logically so that they 'track' or 'follow,' " Booth says, "doesn't seem to appeal to many of us any more." Booth cites the example of a speech that Leslie Fiedler gave at Chicago a few years ago, in which Fiedler advanced the thesis that "all the younger generation is really imitating Negro culture and that the cul- tural warfare between what he calls palefaces and redskins accounts for our literature today." When Booth protested to a student afterwards that Fiedler had not offered any evidence or proof to sub- stantiate his thesis, the student replied, "But that doesn't matter, because it was so interesting."l4

This is the kind of irrationality or non-rationality that should disturb all of us in the university community. This is not the desperate rhetoric of a disen- franchised people who have exhausted, or who do not have available, the normal channels of communication with those who can do something to alleviate their miseries. This is the aberrant rhetoric of supposedly intelligent people profession- ally engaged in the pursuit of truth and reason. The older rhetoricians, who de- voted most of their attention in the class- room and in their texts to instruction in the strategies of the logical appeal, would be appalled at this development in contemporary rhetoric. This retreat from reason may be part of the shift to the primacy of the emotional appeal. God help us all.

The fourth characteristic, one that is closely allied to the previous mark and one that lends a particular aptness to my metaphor of the closed fist, is that a good deal of contemporary rhetoric is non- conciliatory. By this I mean that whereas speakers and writers once took special pains to ingratiate themselves with their audience, today many speakers and writ-

14 "'Now Don't Try to Reason with Me': Rhetoric Today, Left, Right, and Center," The University of Chicago Magazine, LX (Novem- ber, 1967), 12.

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ers seem actually to go out of their way to antagonize or alienate their audience. Aristotle regarded the ethical appeal, the image of himself that a speaker pro- jected, as the most potent means of per- suasion. Militants today seem to think that all they need to do to move an audience is "tell it like it is." It matters not that in the process the audience is shocked or angered or unsettled. Jim Corder has made this observation: "Argument often fails because speakers and writers assume that the right to speak, coupled with sincerity, inevitably endows their voices with worth." Be- cause any position we take in an argu- ment necessarily establishes a note of partiality, we must, Corder contends, search out those ethical arguments which can make "what is partial worth some- one's time."15

It was Kenneth Burke who, in his A Rhetoric of Motives, established iden- tification as the crucial strategy in the persuasive process. "Identification," Burke says, "is compensatory to division. If men were not apart from one another, there would be no need for the rhetori- cian to proclaim their unity." "You per- suade a man," Burke goes on to say, "only insofar as you can talk his' language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his.... For the orator, follow- ing Aristotle and Cicero, will seek to display the appropriate 'signs' of char- acter needed to earn the audience's good will."16

That is a lesson that many contem- porary speakers or writers have not learned. Or if they have learned it, they have chosen to ignore it. A third possi- bility is that they are seeking to develop a new technique of ethical appeal. May- be their thinking is that the way to move

5 "Ethical Argument and Rambler No. 154," QJS, LIV (December, 1968), 352.

16A Grammar of Motives and A Rhetoric of Motives, Meridian edition (1962), pp. 579-80.

people is to speak abrasively. "The squeaking wheel gets the grease." Shouts, threats, obscenities do gain at- tention. Whether they elicit conviction or action from anyone not already com- mitted to the speaker's point of view is another matter. There is another folk maxim to set against the one about the squeaking wheel: "You attract more flies with honey than with vinegar." The open hand has at least the chance of being grasped cordially. The closed fist just prompts another closed fist to be raised.

I have been tracing out the contrasts between an older mode of discourse which was verbal, sequential, logical, monologuist, and ingratiating and a new- er style of communication which is often non-verbal, fragmentary, coercive, inter- locutory, and alienating. In the course of this exposition, I suppose I have be- trayed my preference. But I am really not disposed to contend that the older mode of discourse is superior on all counts for our age. Our worl'd is' chang- ing at a faster rate than any of us realize. It is notable that the newer style of rhetoric has been adopted mainly by young people. Perhaps the generation under thirty realizes more than the rest of us just how much the world has changed, senses, if it does not realize, that we exist in a world dominated by the electronic media. I for one regard these young people as a beautiful gener- ation-although I wish that they were not so implacably self-righteous and that along with their burning preoccupation with the present they displayed some interest in the past and some concern for the future.

Extravagant and inconsistent as his pronouncements sometimes are, Mar- shall McLuhan has indeed articulated the epistemological and elocutionary dis- position of the present age. There are two ironies in all of this: first of all, McLuhan, the apostle of the electronic

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media, has propagated his message to the world largely through the medium of the printed page; secondly, we have re- turned to the oral-aural world in which classical rhetoric had its beginnings over 2,000 years ago. But perhaps in these two ironies we can see the opportunity for a rapprochement between the rhetoric of the open hand and the rhetoric of the closed fist.

The exponents of the older mode of discourse have been too slow to recog- nize the efficacy of the new techniques of communication. Who can deny that

body rhetoric, for instance, has had its successes in affecting attitudes and ac- tions in regard to such matters as the Vietnam war, civil rights, the military- industrial alliance, the rationale and con- tent of the college curriculum? On the other hand, the practitioners of the new rhetoric have been too quick to reject the proven soundness of many of the

strategies of the older rhetoric. The

younger generation may regard the open hand as bearing too much of a resem- blance to the glad hand; they may see the civility, decorum, and orderliness of the older mode of discourse as a facade

behind which the establishment in all ages has perpetrated injustices on the have-nots. But if there has been hypoc- risy in the older rhetoric, it has been the result of human frailty, not of an inherent weaknes's in that ancient art which taught that a man was most per- suasive when he displayed himself as a man of good sense, good will, and good moral character. In the existential mood of the times, it may seem that reason has not governed, and cannot effectively govern, the affairs of men. But it would be a simple task to demonstrate just how quickly the everyday world would unravel if man, the rational animal, were to abandon logic.

The open hand and the closed fist have the same basic skeletal structure. If rhetoric is, as Aristotle defined it, "a discovery of all the available means of persuasion," let us be prepared to open and close that hand as the occasion de- mands. Then maybe the hand-me-down from the dim past can lend a hand-up to us poor mortals in this humming present.

Ohio State University Columbus

If the power of the American Way is its ability to adapt itself to change, Black Power may give that American power one of its more severe trials. Will the inevitable modifications strengthen or weaken its institutions? Black Power's radical confrontation with the established power in this country reveals strong strains of hypocrisy in the system. The Establishment may be able to purge these tendencies. In rage at the revelation, eager for a righteous self-justification, it may contort democratic institutions into Orwellian molds long before 1984. It has the economic and political power to buy off or rub out those who denounce things-as-they-are. It also has the economic and political power and, it is hoped, strong enough democratic traditions to work out accommodations that will not be uneasy compromises but substantial solutions to the social ills of which Black Power is symptomatic.

Black Power, no matter what shapes it assumes in the next few years, will remain vital as one starting point for the study of the American ethos which is now developing and which will dominate lives for the last quarter of the twentieth century.

ROBERT L. SCOTT and WAYNE BROCKRIEDE From the Preface to The Rhetoric of Black Power

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