July 4, 2005
Martin Krygier has an article on the rhetoric of reaction in the Review section of the Australian Financial Review. It really ought to be online. But see here.
Krygier works with the modern, negative conception of rhetoric to explore the way the rhetoric of reaction has function in terms of the history debates about the violent Aboriginal/settler relations in Colonial Australia through the use of the tropes of Holocaust and genocide. He says:
"The rhetoric of reaction is a device intended not to further the flow of conversations among citizens, but to dam it up or redirect it into unthreatening channels. Where it is the characteristic mode of intervention, it should, I believe, be exposed and criticised."
This 'rhetoric of reaction, is born out of a desire to deny, divide and abuse, does considerable damage. This is all very familiar and it expresses the partisan nature of this kind of polemics (not debate) in Australia. The effect it has had is I do not even bother reading the books I see on the shelves of bookshops on the history war of words.
Krygier defends the regulative ideal of conversation as distinct from a war of words, and asks:
"What is needed, then, for real engagement in conversation? One answer can be stated in simple, even, banal terms: a conversation necessarily has more than one party, and it is a pecularity of the particpants' engagement, as distinct from a monologue, a harangue, a tirade, a shouting match, that they treat each other with respect."
He then asks:
"What might that [conversation] involve, particulary when passions are high and moral energies charged?"
Krygier says that he does not have clear answers to this. He does insist that a rhetoric of critique can be similar to a rhetoric of reaction as a mirror does a reflection:
"It relentlessly moralizes about what other with equal determination seeks to sanitize, exaggerates what the other is determined to minimize, demonises what the other sanctifies, closes off exactly the complexities that the other also denies, but for opposite ends."
That describes a lot of left-liberal critique in Australia.
Anyone concerned with the conversation of citizens has a responsibility to avoid both debased forms of rhetoric.
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So very true.