By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, April 03, 2026
The other day I was trying to write something, but the
ballpoint pen wouldn’t work properly on the bathroom wall at the American
Enterprise Institute. But that’s not important right now.
When I got home, I was trying to write something else on
my computer, and I found that I had used the word “rhetoric” too much. I don’t
like repeating words, so I figured I’d check out what Thesaurus.com had for me.
It gave a shorthand definition: “wordiness; long speech.” The “strongest”
synonyms were “hyperbole” and, more defensibly, “oratory.” Most of the “strong”
synonyms reflect how far rhetoric as a concept has fallen in the modern age:
“balderdash,” “verbosity,” “bombast,” “rant,” even “magniloquence”! A few are
more neutral or vaguely positive: “address,” “eloquence,” “composition.”
But here’s the thing: I’m using too many colons. No,
that’s not right. Here’s the thing: Nearly all of these synonyms are wrong—at
least if you are on Team Aristotle.
“Rhetoric,” according to Aristotle, “may be defined as
the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.”
Rhetoric was one of the three arts (trivium) of discourse, along with grammar
and logic. Plato refined rhetoric further as the skill of leading men’s souls (psychagogia),
and he defined “true rhetoric”—as
opposed to pandering and flattery—as persuading men of the truth. For thousands of years,
rhetoric was considered central to the liberal arts and a prerequisite of
statesmanship.
My favorite definition of rhetoric comes from the critic Wayne Booth.
Rhetoric is the “art of probing what men believe they ought to believe, rather
than proving what is true according to abstract methods.”
I’ve quoted Booth many times, but I usually stop at
“ought to believe.” This time I want to focus on the second part of that
sentence.
I recently read this excellent National Affairs essay titled “Envy and Social Justice,” by (my old friend)
Steven Hayward and Linda Denno. For centuries, they write, envy was “the
subject of philosophical contemplation, moral teaching, and cultural
proscriptions.” And then it basically went away.
Just to buttress their point, Thomas Aquinas defined envy
as “sorrow for another’s good.” Immanuel Kant wrote that “[e]nvy is a
propensity to view the well-being of others with distress, even though it does
not diminish one’s own.” Adam Smith, Shakespeare, Dante: The greatest thinkers
in the Western canon recognized envy as socially and spiritually corrosive.
And yet, the last serious study of envy was published
more than a half-century ago: Helmut Schoeck’s Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour (a book I’ve
actually read).
“Writing in that seemingly antediluvian time,” Hayward
and Denno write, “Schoeck noted how the rich teachings on envy in
pre-scientific and philosophical literature all but disappeared once the
social-science revolution of the mid-20th century took root.”
You should read the whole essay, but I’ll give you the
spoiler. It stopped being a serious subject of study because the progressive
“social agenda” depends heavily on envy. I’m willing to concede that the
obsession with income inequality and the desire to “ban” billionaires is about
more than envy. But if you’re not willing to concede that envy plays a major
part in the rhetoric and politics of these programs, you’re either lying or in
denial. Conceding that a political project is grounded in one of the seven
deadly sins is problematic. As Schoeck writes:
The aversion of
the radical left-wing writer to any consideration of the problem of envy is
comprehensible. This is a sphere that must be made taboo, and he must do all in
his power to repress cognition of envy in his contemporaries. Otherwise he
might lose the support of serious-minded people, who, while sharing his views
for sentimental reasons, and even following him in his demands for a policy and
a political ethic dependent upon common envy's being regarded as an absolute,
yet are aware how little esteemed envy is and how little it is capable of
legitimizing itself openly in most Western societies even today.
I am fascinated by the pernicious role of envy in society
and history, which is why I read Schoeck’s book. I’ve written about it a bunch
over the years. But Hayward and Denno do such a good job exploring all of this,
I think I should broaden out the point more.
Irving Kristol, one of my intellectual lodestars, wrote
in an autobiographical essay about the “intellectual shock” of encountering Leo
Strauss’ work. “Suddenly, one realized that one had been looking at the history
of Western political thought through the wrong end of the telescope.” He goes on: “Instead of our looking down at
them from the high vantage point of our more ‘advanced’ era, he trained his
students to look at modernity through the eyes of the ‘ancients’ and the
premoderns, accepting the premise that they were wiser and more insightful than
we are.”
Now, I’m not a Straussian, and I don’t subscribe to this
entirely. We “moderns” have figured out some important stuff the ancients were
just wrong about. I don’t want to get all woke here, but I think the ancients
were way too comfortable with slavery, had some really bad ideas about
economics and women, and their astronomy blew chunks.
But just because the ancients were wrong about some
things doesn’t mean they were wrong about everything. Likewise, just because we
moderns are right about some things, that doesn’t mean we’re right about
everything.
What Hayward and Denno say about the erasure of envy as a
serious subject of study and contemplation is true for the other deadly sins as
well.
Take pride, for example. I mean, at least envy still
means envy. Pride has been entirely redefined by the moderns. Here’s
Wikipedia’s opening on “Pride”:
Pride is a primary emotion
characterized by a sense of security with one’s identity,
performance, and/or accomplishments. It is widely considered the opposite of shame.
The last person I know of who stuck to his guns on pride
was former Attorney General John Ashcroft. My wife was his chief speechwriter,
and whenever The Fair Jessica put the word “pride” or “proud” in his speeches,
he would take it out. Why? Because, he rightly insisted, pride is a sin.
Of course, we have words that carry some of the load:
Arrogant, narcissistic, self-involved, etc. But do you see the differences?
Pride is now a characteristic of personality or psychology.
According to the classical Christian understanding of
pride, it was “the queen of sins” because it put the self above the
demands of faith and God’s will. The prideful man, according to Aquinas, says
to God, “I will not serve.”
To the extent that we consider excessive pride to be bad
today, it’s because it suggests that someone is better than other people.
Gluttony still has negative connotations in many
contexts, but nearly all of them stem from the cult of the body. It’s a purely
aesthetic, self-referential sin against yourself. The body has gone from
being a temple to the idol on the altar—though this is, of course, contested by
those who argue that the overweight should be proud of their bodies and
the fatphobes who shame them are bigots.
I’m not a fan of either end of the argument, but what is
remarkable is that both sides argue in therapeutic, medicalized, or
identitarian language. Whether you call obesity a metabolic disorder, a product
of unhealthy self-indulgence, or an identity to take pride in, the notion that
there is an ideal of behavior outside of ourselves is almost entirely absent.
The same goes for lust, of course. Outside of pedophilia
and rape, there’s almost no form of lust that isn’t defended or given wide
latitude as a form of authentic self-expression. Sure, at the margins, we
employ the therapeutic language of “sex addiction.” But the idea that the
underlying behavior is itself in any way sinful is too fraught to entertain.
Wrath might be the most troubling transformation. Wrath
involves an anger-fueled lust for retribution or revenge. Lots of avowed
Christians loved Donald Trump’s promise that he would be their “retribution.”
“Vengeance is mine,” God says in Romans 12:19 and in
Deuteronomy 32:35. But now we have a president who says his favorite biblical
passage is actually “an eye for an eye.” He openly rejects the idea of forgiving
his enemies. “I hate my opponent[s] and don’t want the best for them.”
But I don’t want to go down a Trumpian rabbit hole.
Social scientists now talk about “anger” as a form of
mobilization. We do talk a great deal about “hate” but almost entirely in the
context of how hate is oppressive to other people. With the exception of Jonathan Haidt and a few others, we rarely talk about how
hate is destructive for the hater.
Now, greed is still considered something like a sin. But
here again, greed is a problem because of its alleged impact on other people.
The moderns who denounce greed rarely pause to consider that their hatred of
greed is driven by—you guessed it—envy. The social justice-fueled understanding
of greed is that having too much money—which, for the record, isn’t what greed
means—is unjust because other people deserve your money more. Lord knows I have
my issues with Joseph Sobran, but he was right when he said, “‘Need’ now means wanting someone else’s money.
‘Greed’ means wanting to keep your own. ‘Compassion’ is when a politician
arranges the transfer.”
Billionaires don’t make non-billionaires materially
poorer; indeed the evidence all runs the other way. Outside of pure, and
illegal, theft, there are only two ways that you can argue one person being
rich makes another person poor. The first is a stupid argument about relation:
The 7-foot-tall man makes the 6-foot-tall man look “short.” The other is if you
assume that the wealth of a society is owned by the society as a whole, and
therefore the state should distribute it more justly.
In such a society, the slothful and the industrious are
each entitled to the same share. Which brings us to sloth. This didn’t used to
mean merely lazy, it meant indifference to duty, spiritual torpor. These are
different things today, and they are treated somewhat differently. But what
they have in common is how they are discussed by social science and the culture
generally. They are described as systemic or psychological problems, but not of
the soul. That would be fine in a secular age, but both the psychological and
systemic explanations are descriptive, not proscriptive, putting the blame on
others, not the self. How can you expect someone with a disability or someone
oppressed by “late capitalism” to get over themselves and get a job that isn’t “affirming”
in some way?
The last sin I’ll cover is despair (another favorite
topic of mine). It is not one of the seven deadly sins, but
according to some theologians it is among the gravest of
sins because it is the rejection of hope and the denial that one can do
anything to be redeemed. It is a heresy because despair says that not even God
can save you.
We talk a lot about despair today, but as with sloth,
it’s either something the “system” does to, or arouses in, people, or it’s a purely medical
plight. Wall Street is responsible for “our desperate inequality, relentless
outsourcing, and swaths of despair and premature death across the American
landscape.” Or neoliberalism is to blame for the widespread “deep sense of
despair” and “alienation.” Such claims
come from the left and the right. The riot of idiotic right-wing memes about “this is what they took from us” are the same
argument, just couched in gauzy nostalgia instead of Marxian anomie.
I’m not trying to minimize the problems with various
aspects of our economy (even if I reject much of the analysis and prescriptions
that accompany such complaints), and I’m certainly not trying to dismiss the
very real challenges of clinical depression. But I do believe that the way we
talk about these larger problems is not necessarily helping with them.
Which brings me back to rhetoric.
Maybe the problems we face stem in part from how we talk
about them? Maybe the worst thing about relentlessly telling people that they
are victims is that they will believe it? If you actually believe that despair
is a sin, even in some non-theological sense, then telling people their despair
is justified, their sloth is an understandable response to it, and that their
envy validates it all is itself sinful.
I hate the rhetoric of government-as-family or the
president-as-parent. But imagine if you or your own child is indolent,
despairing, envious, gluttonous, or lustful. Do you think the best course of
action is to validate all that? “Keep eating those Big Macs! You do you!”
“Don’t worry about getting off the couch today, Wall Street doesn’t care about
you.” “If you think you can shag her, by all means skip work today.” “If I were
you, I wouldn’t get out of bed either.”
I didn’t intend to write anything tied to Passover and
Easter, but it occurs to me that both are celebrations of triumph over despair.
Both start in darkness, the Crucifixion for Christians and the bondage of
slavery for Jews. Both are wholly justifiable causes for despair. Jesus has
been tortured and slain. The Jews, enslaved for generations, are on the brink
of erasure as a people. But Christ rises, and the Jews rise up. Death is not
final. The despair of slavery is not eternal. The Powers That Be, whether Roman
or Egyptian, are not immutable, unconquerable forces foreclosing the
possibility of hope. There is good work to be done, and the doing of it is a
reward unto itself.
Maybe if politicians and intellectuals could look through
the other end of the telescope and see that serious students of human nature
had important things to tell us before social science systematized, reified,
and medicalized human agency, more people would be motivated to pursue a good
life. Maybe a few more people would shed their sense of entitlement and grasp a
sense of gratitude for what they have rather than wallow in what they envy in
others.
Talk is inexpensive, but it is not cheap.
Talk—spoken or written—is the primary way humans communicate with each other,
frame expectations, and hammer out what is good and noble. Talk in its highest
form is called rhetoric, and rhetoric is not a science. It is the “art of
probing what men believe they ought to believe.”
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