July 28, 2020. Sheltering at Home Week 20
When we talk to “those people,” do we really want to be heard? Or do we just want to get mad, feel righteous, and force our opinions, our political will, and our desired political and economic outcomes on others — on “those people.”
I don’t feel talked to, I feel argued with when I hear words like “Make America great again” or “the China virus. ” Also, from the opposite end of the political spectrum, when I hear words like “America is a nation of immigrants.”
I feel somebody is using speech to get their way, by force, by intimidation, by asserting that something is true (or will soon be true) because a lot of people believe it and they are going to make it happen, whether I like it or not.
Messaging Speech — How It Works
University of Chicago philosopher Agnes Callard has a name for this kind of speech. She calls it messaging speech.
In an op ed in the New York Times earlier this month, Callard described messaging speech this way: “in messaging speech, some aim other than truth-seeking is always at play.” Advertising and political rhetoric are obvious examples.
On the other hand, “Literal speech,” says Callard, “employs systematically truth-directed methods of persuasion — argument and evidence.” It is exactly what it appears to be — an assertion of a point of view without an accompanying power agenda.
If Enough People Say They Believe It, Is It True?
One way to turn literal speech into messaging speech, she says, is to attach a list of names as in an open letter, as if many people believing something makes it true.
“Messaging exerts some kind of non-rational pressure on its recipient,” she writes. A public apology, for example, is often messaging speech because it can put public pressure on the victim to forgive the perpetrator.
Messaging often surfaces in the midst of a power struggle. In our current, politically-charged public square, a person’s words can be taken as messaging — as a power move that requires a counter power move.
For example, I suspect that those of my readers who are not keen on Donald Trump would perceive his slogan, “Make America great again,” as messaging run amok.
But if they locate themselves in the liberal camp, how do they feel about the phrase, so often heard on CNN and elsewhere, “America is a nation of immigrants”?
It’s a phrase that stops me every time I hear it. First of all, we are not a nation of immigrants. A whole swath of our citizens — Native Americans — did not immigrate here any time recently.
Second, and more to the point, the phrase “America is a nation of immigrants” might look like a simple statement of fact, but it is not. It is actually a political statement aimed at “those people” that advocates for immigrants.
I’m Looking at You, CNN
Nothing wrong with advocating for immigrants. But making a messaging statement in the middle of a newscast and passing it off as factual — literal — speech (CNN, I’m looking at you) gratuitously raises the temperature of the public conversation.
The phrase, “America is a nation of immigrants,” calls for a counter-move from someone worried about illegal immigration, resulting in even more messaging speech.
The upshot is a non-conversation that does not address the real challenges of creating a just and workable immigration policy.
Advice for “Those People” — And “Us” as Well
Callard has advice for our troubled times.
Philosophers have an ideal, she writes, “of never treating our interlocutor as a hostile combatant. But if someone puts forward views that directly contradict your moral sensibilities, how can you avoid hostility? The answer is to take him literally — which is to say, read his words purely as vehicles for the contents of his beliefs.”
Easier said than done. But I’ll give it a try.
More thoughts about the uses of words at “The Two-Year-Old Rhetorician at Our House.” Also, “The Rhetorician in the White House — Or, How I Learned to Love the Passive Voice.”
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