In Plato’s Gorgias the fear of the rhetoric student is that they will use their power to manipulate, to trick, to “stand in” for the one who knows. They will be a powerful opponent to the one who “really knows” the law, who “really knows” medicine, and will give harmful advice and be a danger to the civic order, to people’s health, and an affront to those who do know what’s right but cannot express it well.
I’m ok with teaching students with this risk in mind. The art of rhetoric is one that holds in it the risk of these sorts of things. Being able to convince an audience as to what is best to do, good to do, requires one to realize that the standards of the ethical, the good, evidence, proof, and reason must be reconstituted persuasively in every moment of advocacy. This is why advocacy and argument are so hard – one has to do the job of Atlas, holding up the world with one’s strength. The dangers of rhetoric set out by Socrates in Plato’s dialogue assume a static world where things are simply good and bad, existent or non-existent, can be known through questioning, and we merely turn to those who know in order to be told what’s what.
Trump attorney Jenna Ellis is the kind of university result that I’ve always been horrified in having a hand in creating. Here is someone who follows “the ones who know” – if we are to believe her statement in court when pleading guilty to election interference yesterday. Obviously, this is a deeply flawed person, but it might be useful to speculate as to why she bothers me so much.
This seems like the kind of person who believes that knowledge is a set of things one acquires. If one is a more experienced lawyer, one knows the law better. There’s no sense from her statements either then or now that there’s an understanding of the law as something that must be crafted each and every time it is used. There is a responsibility one has to articulating the law – making it – whenever one speaks.
The too-simple read is that Ellis is a selfish manipulator who did all this for her benefit and understood that she was altering the truth in a severe and dangerous way. I am not so sure. I think perhaps she could see the benefit of working for the President, and absolutely loved being on such a “big case,” but this wasn’t motivated by an understanding of articulation crafting the reality of the law. Instead, she was happy to follow those who know, and work with and for them in order to do what can be done in the law, what should be done in the law.
Anyone who teaches debate has taught a fair number if not an excessive number of future lawyers. There is a kind of student who loves the rules and believes that there are things that are fixed, extant, unmovable, and known that they can lean heavily upon when practicing the art. There is another kind of student who understands that all the rules are crafted, all the rules are made of paper, and therefore they have to be rewritten once in a while, rearticulated, their reasons for being must be spoken, and also that they require defending – they don’t exist without their defenses. There is a kind of debate student who loves the rules and just like the bad D&D player, the love of the rules disrupts the amazing possibilities that one can gain from participating in the game.
The danger of expert discourse is that people are willing to do things for it without realizing that “expert discourse” is always constituted and offered each and every time. I hope I do not teach people to follow what the expert information or the experts say. I hope alternatively I teach people that with the right words they can craft any sort of persuasive message. The reason is that every single message from an expert, a seasoned lawyer, anyone telling you what evidence is, has been made. It’s to the benefit of those who made it to make it look timeless, eternal, and without human fingerprints all over it. But the rhetorician knows better. And hopefully I’m getting this idea across to all my students so that I have no part in crafting the thought and approach of a figure like Jenna Ellis.