Out of curiosity, the other day I googled "Glenn Beck fallacies of argument." Few, I am sure, would be surprised by the pages and pages and pages and pages...I retrieved, all of which contained exact matches to the above phrasing along with some quite funny commentaries and analyses. So what?
Well, in a now canonical essay, “Practicing the Arts of Rhetoric: Tradition and Invention,” Thomas Farrell wrote:
Rhetoric is held in the lowest regard when it is identified solely with the product domain: sham enthymemes, slippery slogans, fele-good sound-bites. It is not until we think of the two-sided argument, the running controversy, the ritual that becomes crisis: in other words, not until we admit the liminal elements of struggle, difference and thus reflective judgment that rhetoric itself is redeemed.
After viewing Lewis Black’s lambast of Glenn Beck on The Daily Show a couple weeks back (May 12), Farrell’s sentiments began to percolate a bit and I was moved to consider Beck’s rhetorical style, his respect for rhetorical history, his “inventional” (yes, I use this sarcastically and satirically) methods. It is not news to consider that, as Black indicates, much of our media culture (from news programs themselves to their parodical counterparts) is permeated with exaggerated and overstated accounts of daily happenings. Glenn Beck, too, admits to being a tad hyperbolic, but we can surely discern this without his admission. Consider his frequent equation of political self-interest and democratic patriotism; his likening of gay marriage to bestiality, his invocations of an illusory, near-utopian Founding Period defined by political harmony that was ostensibly bastardized by contemporary politics; his comparison of ACORN to slave-owners; his claim of Obama’s hatred of white people; his condemnation of Justice Sotomayer as a racist; his constant joke about killing both internal and external enemies (from Michael Moore and Nancy Pelosi to muslims); and, of course, his liberal usage of Nazi colloquialisms (or what Black calls his “Nazi tourettes”) and paraphernalia on his show. So what?
Without even illustrating Beck’s lines of thought or his syllogistic reasoning, one can pick out much of the fallaciousness, even the purposively deceptive nature, of his rhetoric. Beck himself has jibed about the pull of his inner demons and his trajectory toward “moral collapse.” Indeed, he seems to thrive upon misleading tactics in order to at once absolve himself of his own misgivings and to drive home the absurdity of contemporary politics that, he claims, calls itself out…and, to some extent, I would have to agree—provisionally.
Yes, Beck himself, but the media more broadly, have increasingly tended more and more toward a sort of rhetorical reductionism. That is, much of our accessible political discourse orients not toward understanding the complexities but rather to simplifying politics to “sham enthymemes, slippery slogans….” The result is a narrow and too often bifurcated depiction of political choice and ideological allegiance, which necessarily leads to arguments of right and wrong (or in Beck’s case, left), good and evil, true and false…really, one may insert his or her binary here. It also leads me to be wary of such rhetorics moving from controversy (sometimes, just for its own sake) to crisis.
The problem I see has much to do with Barry Brummett’s caution about certain trends in both researching and exercising a postmodern rhetoric—namely, that reduction (or what he calls “the simplification of phenomena and the context in which they are observed”) is necessarily the attempt to mechanize, and hence control, an individual’s or group’s experience of only certain parts of a much larger whole. Thus, Beck’s program (as much as Jon Stewart’s, Stephen Colbert’s, Fox News’, CNN’s, MSNBC’s,….) appears as a well crafted rhetoric of reductionism that too often attempts to simplify and narrow the frames within which we make sense of our social and political worlds. So while I agree with Jon Stewart when he quips that Beck “says what people who aren’t thinking are thinking,” I have trouble believing that any diametric opposition is the simple solution to the problem. This is especially the case if we consider that people tend to tune in to only what they agree with and switch off (or more bluntly, silence) those voices that present a different point of view.
No doubt, Black’s lambast is hilarious, and necessary. But we must be careful not to let even humor collapse into a disavowal of the seriousness of even play. Furthermore, I think we could all deal with a questioning of our social and political faiths much more than just time to time—and this, not to live utterly foundationless and thus in a perpetual state of doubt, but rather to remind ourselves of Kenneth Burke’s astute observation: that people reason perfectly well within their own frame of reference; the key is to widen the frame.
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