Today’s post is a guest essay from my brother, Dr. Alexander Westenberg, a speechwriter, philosopher and frequent collaborator. More here!
John Milton is most famous today for writing Paradise Lost, the story of humanity’s fall from grace. It’s in this poem that Milton makes Satan the first great orator.
The suggestion is that the oratory – the art of public speaking and persuasion – from its very beginning is hellbent on corrupting humanity.
He wasn’t the only person to think this. We hear echoes of it today every time a national election is held.
And, certainly, history has had its fair share of corrupting orators – Hitler, Mao Tse Tsung, Stalin, to name just three in the last century.
But is this the whole picture? I don’t think so.
For one thing, Milton himself was well-known as a defender of free speech, free press, and a critic of pre-publication censorship, using the art of persuasion to make his case.
In fact, a close examination of history makes it clear that rhetoric was intimately connected with democracy since its very beginning.
We find the first systematic study of persuasion in the ancient cities of Sicily, after the political revolutions which drove out the tyrants – the beginning of democracy.
As democracy spread through Greece, it became more refined. When Athenian democracy came under threat during the Peloponnesian War, Pericles stood up, praised the glory of Athens, and consoled those who had lost their children in the war. At the same time he argued strongly and fiercely for the Athenian system of government – an early form of ‘by the people, for the people.’
He described oratory as the currency of democracy, not force. And for this, and the success it gave him as leader of the Athenians, he was labelled a populist.
When Athenian democracy was later threatened by the rise of King Philip of Macedon, one of history’s greatest orators, Demosthenes, launched a series of speeches against it, designed to galvanise the people to fight. Demosthenes failed to persuade, and Athens fell.
Again, when Roman democracy came under threat as Julius Caesar rose to power, Cicero spoke out against him. Once again, because he failed to persuade, democracy fell, and Caesar ruled.
After Caesar’s assassination in the hopes of restoring the republic, his friend Marc Antony skilfully turned a crowd angry with Caesar into a crowd calling for Brutus’s death. Once again, the fate of democracy is entwined with rhetoric.
The loss of freedom in both Greece and Rome led to a silencing of true rhetoric and persuasion, and became little more than a study of style and literary tricks – in Milton’s words, it became ‘mute’.
But it was never truly silenced. Again and again we see the art of persuasive speaking intimately connected with the rise and fall of democratic institutions. In the lead up to the English civil war, the great persuasive speakers and writers warred over the role of the King over Parliament. When Parliament won the war, the king was replaced by a council, who had to persuade each other to vote with them. Then Cromwell decided to abolish the council and make himself sole ruler. How did he justify it? With a famous speech, of course. One which painted himself as the guardian of democracy, and the council as corrupt.
When America sought freedom from British rule, how were the people galvanised? How were they convinced after the war had ended that they had chosen the right path? With the powerful and persuasive writings and speeches of men like Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and others.
During the American Civil War, Lincoln stood out as a powerful orator – his Gettysburg address stands at just 272 words, and echoes through history.
When Hitler and Mussolini used rhetoric to crush democracy, it was Churchill who inspired the British to stand their ground, and Roosevelt who inspired the Americans to join them.
When General Patton arrived in Europe after the D-Day invasions, his men saw only war ahead of them – but with one speech he showed them not war, but victory. “And when we get to Berlin, I’m going to personally shoot that son of a bitch Hitler myself,” he declared to thunderous applause.
When the people marched for equal voting rights for black Americans, who stood out as the obvious leader? Martin Luther King Jr., whose powerful dream has a permanent place in the history books.
Yes, rhetoric can be abused – that’s the danger of any tool. But at its heart it gives the power to the people spoken to, not the person speaking. He or she only gains it back from the audience if they’re successfully persuaded. Which means that at its heart, rhetoric is democratic.
So, whether they used rhetoric for good or ill – what can we learn from the great persuaders of history? Many things. But here are two particularly important lessons:
First, there are three parts to any speech – the speaker, the subject, and the audience. Persuasion must always start with the audience. Cicero and Demosthenes failed to consider what their audiences needed to hear to act, and so both spoke in vain, and watched the fall of their democracies. Hitler knew exactly what his audience needed to hear, and the people marched on Poland because of it. Persuasion builds a bridge from your audience to your message, not the other way around.
Second, a good speaker shows themselves as honest and trustworthy – that he or she has the audience’s best interests at heart – and that he or she knows something about what they’re saying. Notice I didn’t say they have to be true. They should be, of course. But whether it’s true or not, doesn’t matter. What matters is whether your audience sees it as true. So every good speaker must show it to the audience, again and again.
Look around you – you’ll see all the best advertising follows these lessons. So do the best speakers. The losers don’t. And when the losers are consistently on the side of democracy… well, history shows what happens.