We've all heard this narrative on the "news" channel of our choice: "America is too polarized,
they refuse to work with
us, we are going to Hell in a handbasket, and it's all
their fault." Depending on which flavor of media you prefer, you'll have inserted different values for "they" and "us," but the story is in general the same. And you know what? It's kinda true. Depending on where you're standing, either
they are standing in the way of progress, or
we are standing up for tradition. Or both, all at once. Or...something. It's disorienting to the point of becoming nonsensical, and maybe that's the part that really makes sense. As with nearly everything else humans do and say, this one can be explained using rhetorical theory (you knew I was gonna go there, right?).
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| He also looked like my grandpa. |
Enter Kenneth Burke. Burke was a rhetorician who was interested in...well...pretty much everything. The ways people use symbolic language to communicate and persuade, the ways dramatic and narrative conventions can be mapped onto persuasive speech, the ways things change, and the ways things stay the same. Of interest to me, today, is a wee little section in his book
Permanence and Change, in which he discusses a phenomenon he describes as "The Rock of Certainty."
