Chapter 4 in Crosswhite’s The Rhetoric of Reason brings up a number of interesting points, only a few of which are the author’s primary thoughts. Was I the only one who had a tough time with Crosswhite’s citing Hegel’s notion that, as a society, we need “the purifying experience of war” -- though not war itself, just intense conflict -- lest we lapse into corruption brought on by peace? (115) I don’t question the aspect of war itself, which seems to be Crosswhite's bone of contention; rather, I question the idea that peace is corrupting and that conflict is the remedy.
Supposedly, Hegel’s idea is that war requires us to make sacrifices that fortify our spirits, without which corporations could usurp us. First, who is he addressing? Certainly not the wealthy, especially not the folks in the military-industrial complex, and nor their happy stockholders. Who, then? One would assume it’s the rank-and-file who actually stand to lose during a war: everyone else. What kind of sacrifices do they make? They tend to lose jobs, lose income, lose housing, lose entitlements. For veterans, at best, they lose years away from loved ones; in combat, thousands die while the injured lose appendages, eyesight, mental and emotional capabilities and any hope of future livelihood, further encumbering themselves, their families or the state. How does this sacrifice prevent social corruption? Presumably, it wakes people up from the tendency to get fat and lazy, the tendency to take our freedoms for granted, the tendency to lower our defenses.
By contrast, nations plunged into war presumably have the advantage of skirting the rot of corruption and steeling themselves, instead, against corrupt corporations. This would suggest that Syria and Iraq, among others embroiled in battle, have the benefit of knowing who to trust and who not to trust. Yet few really understand the causes or the culprits, though the mainstream media serve it up like the "blue ribbon special" on the daily menu. For that matter, the US has been at war for some fourteen years, give or take, in Afghanistan and Iraq. We’ve lost thousands of soldiers to a cause no one can name. And, just when we thought there was a hope for peace, we’re marching back into the same bloody limbo. All this, and barely a voice is raised to question or protest it. Anyone aware of the corporate ownership of US media and its influence on bending journalism to its own agenda might have a hard time believing that, thanks to Hegel's "advantages" of war, we’ve avoided corporate domination. Rather, one has to question whether war has stripped the scales of corruption from America’s eyes or added another layer.
On a less strident note, I enjoyed Crosswhite’s endorsement of teachers’ “seeing things from the students’ points of view” in trying to help them develop claims and counter-claims. (130) In my mind, the ideal classroom activity for this is debate, whereby students work together, focusing on their own arguments and anticipating the arguments of their interlocutors. Still, in conferences and in written feedback, teachers also have the potential to play what Crosswhite calls “the ultimate audience-arbiter of the effectiveness of arguments. . .” (130) Ideally, we can nurture a sense of real back-and-forthness, a dialectic where “(e)veryone has a chance to be taken equally seriously.” (120) The question is, after we’ve studied for years and polished ourselves to become true professionals; after we’ve set ourselves up as the repositories of Compositional wisdom, to what extent can we keep our minds open to dialogue with students, to really hear their viewpoints, to possibly reconsider our own opinions, “to modify them, or take up new purposes altogether,” to quote Crosswhite. (122)
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