One Order of Rhetoric. Hold the Logic, please.

I watched the movie Idiocracy this weekend. It’s one of those futuristic, Sleeper-type comedies about a guy who is frozen in the present and wakes up in the future. The twist is that humanity got a whole lot dumber over time, and the main character, Joe, finds that he is the smartest guy alive in 2550. One particular scene struck me: Joe gets thrown into prison for not having a tattoo on his arm stating his identity; when he enters the prison he sees two lines—one line for those entering prison and one line for those getting out of prison—and so Joe hops into the line exiting prison and tells the guard that he is leaving; the guard sees that he is in the exit line and lets him leave. This scene made me laugh at the pure absurdity of logic sometimes: the use of ‘logic’ will determine factual circumstances and attempt to render other aspects of perception incorrect or ‘illogical.’ Hence, the logic that Joe was in the line to leave the prison made it illogical that he was truly supposed to remain in prison.

What does this long example have to do with this week’s readings? Everything. Thanks to those Greek founders of Western thought logic and rationality are the means in which we measure credible arguments. Hence, logic becomes the very means to exclude opinions and ideologically manage the recipient of ideas and arguments. This is the case in much of the new racism, stereotyping, and lexical manipulation mentioned in Intercultural Communication. All three ideological strategies utilize a certain logic to persuasively guard from certain social realities. Racism is deemed obsolete and is replaced by a view that “minorities are not biologically inferior, but different” (Holliday et al 122); stereotyping will try to scientifically classify a group by what are deemed to be common traits and “reduce everything about [a person in the group] to those traits” (Holliday et al 126); and lexical names for peoples are changed to portrait those people negatively or vilify them. Though these means of bigotry are socially inaccurate, many people do see them as logical beliefs. The simple rhetorical power of presenting a seemingly logical claim can be so dangerous and powerful—powerful enough to be so engrained in students’ minds that it is difficult to help them unlearn these thoughts.

What I think is interesting/frustrating is that in addition to students believing such false reasoning, they don’t trust a lot of reasoning from an instructor in a classroom. They are somehow trained to leave their reasoning unquestioned but immediately question the logic of certain authority figures. How do we as teachers fight logic with logic? Or do we fight logic by analyzing logic and letting them come to logical conclusions?

Educational institutions can be the worst users of false logic. Looking at the example of Tlaltelolco, the Spanish missionaries had a “mandate to institutionalize” the indios (Romano 260). Here, the Spanish rationalized that truly educating the indios in rhetorical studies would “endanger colonial society in unspecified ways” (Romano 263). The logic that the communal society (established in oppression) was more important than the empowerment of the indios creates a justification to control the educational experience of the indios, hence depriving the opportunities for contact zone educational experiences where the differing mentalities of the Spanish and indios could interact. So, in what ways do instructors manifest such rationality today?

As Bizzell states in her article, reason became the central means to argue for power between the Christians and Jews in the 13th century. However, her article highlights how logical arguments can be used to fight the power. Nahmanides recognizes the need to utilize logic in his arguments against Friar Paul, attempting to prove that “this Christian story is irrational” (Bizzell 23). Rationality wins Nahmanides respect and graces for the Jewish people essentially under Christian rule, which illustrates the need for logical rebuttal.

At the same time, how logical is any religion? Most religion is based in the irrational because the spiritual is beyond human understanding. Because the material world differs from the spiritual world, the material world refers to the spiritual world as irrational—it does not follow the rules that the spiritual world does. The same could be said of differing cultural discourses. When a different discourse comes into contact with Western discourse, that discourse tends to be dismissed as irrational. It does not follow the rationality of the dominant discourse.

Mao details much of this struggle of discourses in his piece. Especially when he discusses indirectness v. directness, he expresses frustration towards how Western discourse tends to rationalize indirect communication into a feminized discourse. In this, Mao shows how dominant discourse sees something as irrational by its definition and begins to rationalize it in order to legitimize it. All the while, this reductive strategy dismisses the possibility of contact zones. The same sort of thing happens with ‘correlative thinking’—it is not the way the dominate discourse does it, and so it is seen in some way irrational.

Logic is often used as a means of legitimization, rhetorically negotiating within mixed discourses. Each of the articles (Romano, Bizzell, and Mao) show this struggle of legitimating: the non-dominant group is legitimizing itself with the dominant discourse. The indios were prevented from legitimizing themselves; Nahmanides helps somewhat legitimize Jewish claims, and Mao states his case for legitimizing Chineze American rhetoric.

But how do we distinguish between legitimization and oppressive rationalization? How do we teach students the difference? Is there a difference?