The world is filled with Rhetoric. Flat-Earthers, Conspiracy Theorists, Creationists, so-called Race Realists, Geocentrists, Climate Change Deniers, Postmodernists, Critics; they are all the same. Rhetoric makes people believe that appealing to words can overturn what we know. Rheotric waves the flag of the literal turn, gets in bed with Derrida and suggests that scientific knowledge is mere opinion. Rhetoric claims that any interpretation- any unqualified interpretation- is a valid as any other. It appeals to emotion and incredulity in a desperate attempt to overturn the universe we observe. They misuse and abuse logical fallacies, fallacies that for the most part should have been consigned to the intellectual grave with the rest of the Scholastic Aristotelian school that spawned them. Reality is NOT about opinion. It is NOT about faith. It is NOT about blindly following your otherworldly worldviews and casting what is actually observed aside. Real Science, real History, real Psychology and Sociology are not about words but actions, and the understanding of those actions. They are about study, research, hard work. They are about putting the hours in, many hundreds of hours in, and after all that time, all that searching, being prepared to find nothing, being prepared to be wrong.
That is what makes science amazing. With each mistake comes a correction. With each correction comes a better understanding of the real world. Those of us in pursuit of such an understanding know it is not going to be easy. But to overturn what the Germans would called ‘wissenschaft’ [“ learning : science”- Mirriam Webster.] takes hard work and study. Far too many are far too lazy. They would rather indulge their personal biases by seeking out You Tube videos, Wikipedia entries and the abstracts (though rarely content) of seemingly supportive papers; often without reading the papers, almost always without seeking out dissenting voices and never considering the academic consensus. Science and learning are not based around controversy; there are actually very few controversies to teach because what rhetoricians call controversy, we call ‘unknowns’. It is about consensus. To many of the more rhetorically minded, consensus has become a dirty word, a conspiracy word, and they surround it with whooping hordes of rhetoric, wilful ignorance and more science denial.
Rhetoric is not enough. You can state whatever it is you believe and you can throw around your fallacies, long words and philosophical [mis]interpretations all you want. You can smother the observable universe in semiotics and linguistics and postmodern deconstructionist analyses. But at the end of the day, as David Hume observed
"We shall then see, whether you go out at the door or the window; and whether you really doubt, if your body has gravity, or can be injured by its fall".-David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.
www.davidhume.org/texts/dms
So why do I care? Some might say I myself have been guilty of such rhetoric in the past, and they are right. I am prepared to be wrong and move on; are you? Some would accuse me of using rhetoric right now: perhaps, again, they are right. But my words are backed up by the fruits of Wissenschaft; by the computer I am using, by the coffee by my side, by the train that brought me home this evening. They are not merely contemplative, but demonstrative. I don’t imagine them at work, I see them in action.
The more people disappear into their other-worlds, no matter what those worlds may be, and think that rhetoric, born of emotion, born of faith and in turn born of whatever fairy story their culture or subculture likes the most at the time, the more the reality- what we actually know- will become diluted. I am a Historian, and I for one do not want to return to a world where the only reality is rhetoric, the only truth the loudest shouting voice; I have seen it in the pages of documents and the horrors of Europe’s past. Others would rather rule by loudly shouting about what they cannot possibly know. They want to change the game back from observable, measured reality to conjectured, rhetorical fantasy.
I do not. And neither, if truth be told, do they.
Richard Firth-Godbehere
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