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On Top-down Worldviews, Authority, and Rhetoric

Submitted by Ken Watts on Thu, 05/01/2008 - 19:23

I've been looking over the last year and a half of mulling I've done here, searching for a pattern or two, some underlying themes.

I've spotted a few, and I'll try to lay them out in some kind of order, as a guide to new readers, or just a summary (so far) for the rest of us.

One of the earliest themes to be announced, was my distrust of capital letters. I didn't know what that meant, at the time, as clearly as I do now.

I didn't mean, then, that the words or ideas I was referring to were always spelled with capitals; rather, it was the idea that some words take on a kind of self-importance when used in certain ways.

Since then, I've defined some of the unique characteristics those words tend to have.

They tend to reflect a top-down, authority-based, approach to thinking. When we talk about Goodness or Truth or Belief, we use those words in ways that are quite different from their daily, ordinary, counterparts.

I don't rely on an Authority to tell me whether a hamburger, or a pizza is good. I look to the evidence, not Doctrine, to tell me what is true. I don't have any Free Will as to what I will believe—I'm stuck following where common sense and the evidence leads.

But ask a person whether something is Good, or True and nine times out of ten, they'll appeal to some Authority. Ask what they Believe, and they'll end up describing Belief as though it were a choice, and, somewhere in the subtext, there'll be a hint of the idea that not to Believe offends some Authority.

So there is a split, in our current culture, between small letters and caps: between top-down approaches to thinking, and bottom-up approaches, rooted in evidence.

This split is related to, but not the same as, a second split—a split in the kind of rhetoric we use when communicating with each other, and when thinking things through ourselves.

I've called these two kinds of rhetoric scientific and political.

I don't mean that scientific rhetoric has only to do with physics and chemistry and biology, etc. I simply mean that it's the kind of language we use when we are trying to understand, or to communicate an understanding of something.

And, by the same token, I don't mean that political rhetoric is just the kind of rhetoric politicians use. Rather, I mean that it's the kind of language we use when we are trying to influence the way other's behave.

Both of these rhetorical styles are useful, in various settings. Neither one is necessarily dishonest. But political rhetoric contains a danger that scientific rhetoric is relatively immune to.

When I use language primarily as a tool of influence, it can be tempting to use it in the way that will influence people the most effectively. In the short term this often does not require, or even encourage, honesty.

The extreme example of this is that guy you know, who constantly twists the truth to his advantage. The bullshitter. We've all had one in our lives, and we've all marveled at his nonsense.

A slightly less extreme example can be found in many politicians—especially those who are too inept for the office they hold.

It's this misuse of political rhetoric—to manipulate people dishonestly—that tends, in the real world, to be closely related to the top-down worldview.

When I see Believing as a choice that people make, rather than an inevitable result of the evidence and common sense, and think that whether they believe the Truth is a Moral issue, it makes a kind of common sense to manipulate them into the Truth, even if I have to twist the truth (small-t) in order to do it.

I won't necessarily even have a guilty conscience, since I am likely to believe that Truth trumps truth, and so Believe that any "truth" that contradicts Truth can't really be True.

True?