Rhetoric.

A lot of this topic focused on the idea of rhetoric.  At first I thought, we focused mainly on the idea of rhetoric, but the first unit was supposed to be focused on the idea of what American society looked like before the 2016 election.  This got me thinking, how do these relate?  In working to understand American society before the election, rhetoric was key in influencing people to support a specific candidate.  I, for example, supported Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign because of his rhetoric, that he wanted to create a more fair and just society and help to fight for the working class in America.  Sanders’ plea to help the working class in this country were very similar to that expressed by Donald Trump during his presidential campaign.  However, they did use very different rhetoric.  While Sanders campaigned on a message that the reason for the economic difficulties in America is due to rising inequality in the country, and that America had to work and depend on each other to rebuild the middle class, Trump campaigned on a vastly different message, blaming immigrants and minorities for the issues in the country, and saying that he could fix all the problems in America if everyone believed in him.

In class, we worked to unpack the rhetoric of Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf by reading the paper The Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle by Kenneth Burke.  While the cliche comparison between Trump and Hitler can often undermine the seriousness of the various groups of people (Jews, Romani people, homosexuals, and those deemed “politically unfit”) who were tortured or killed in the Holocaust, it was still very interesting to observe how Hitler’s rhetoric was able to persuade Germans to be on his side, by encouraging people to unite together against a common enemy, and also by acknowledging himself as a “god-like” figure, that can solve many of society’s problems.  As much as I tried to avoid any comparisons between Trump and Hitler, I just couldn’t help but see the similarities in the rhetoric in both of these leaders in the way they worked to rile up support.  It wasn’t even between Trump and Hitler either, but also between other populist candidates that I observed.  For example, a similarity I saw between different populist candidates was their ability to blame a common enemy, whether it be a person, a group of people, or a thing.  For Trump, it was immigrants, minorities, or “Crooked Hillary”.  For Sanders, it was the big banks and Wall Street.  Perhaps this is an observation in politics that political scientists need to investigate moving forward.

Studying the idea of rhetoric, I felt the need to tie this back into my role as a climate scientist.  One of the biggest issues in fighting climate change is communication of the research that climate scientists do.  A video by Derek Muller (Veritasium on YouTube) explains this well.  This is where I feel the need to tie in Wayne Booth’s ideas on realities in his work How Many Rhetorics? and also his work Judging Rhetoric.  In the video by Muller, even though almost every scientist agrees that the climate is warming, and even though there is clear evidence to support that and it should be what Booth describes as “unchangeable truth”, because there is so much rhetoric from climate change deniers and the way they are represented in the media, many people do not know how climate change even works.  Thus, the idea that climate change is happening is more of a third reality, where realities seem to be created from rhetoric.  In this case, climate change deniers create a reality that climate change is not happening from the rhetoric that they use.  Another point that Muller makes is that people are more compelled to read an interesting story, even if it means sacrificing the truth.  This brings me to Booth’s Judging Rhetoric, where he talks about whether or not it is ethical to be able to sacrifice the truth in order to accommodate an audience.  I firmly believe that the public needs to know the truth about such an important issue such as climate change, so I personally think there needs to be a way to be able to educate the public on how climate change works in a manner that the public will understand.  The question of how to communicate climate science to the general public effectively remains one of the biggest challenges in public science education.