Rhetorology: A Brief Introduction

I've spent the past week deep in the throes of sketching up a proposal for a graduate thesis and now I'm thinking ahead to how to flesh it out for the final product (an article length—25-30 pages). The basic project is an attempt to find a way to foster genuine understanding in contemporary democracies. To do this I hope to bring back Wayne Booth's neologism, rhetorology. The word, first introduced in 1981, hasn't caught on. A search for the word on Google yields just over 1,000 hits, and a search on Google Scholar yields only 41. JSTOR yields nine hits; comppile.org yields only two. It’s clear, in sum, that Booth’s neologism is dead.

This death may be proof to some people that the word should be dropped. I can concede that it's a mouthful—rhetorology, rhetorology, rhetorology—but I think the usefulness of the concept makes the word worth keeping around. Booth defines rhetorology as

not rhetorical persuasion but rather a systematic, ecumenical probing of the essentials shared by rival rhetorics in any dispute . . . Rhetorologists do not just try to discover the rival basic commitments and then "bargain." Nor do they just tolerate, in a spirit of benign relativism. Instead, they search together for true grounds then labor to decide how those grounds dictate a change of mind about more superficial [i.e. external, outward] beliefs. Any genuine rhetorologist entering any fray is committed to the possibility of conversion to the "enemy" camp.

Booth presents rhetorology not as a replacement for rhetoric, but as a rhetorical practice that leads people to focus on similarities rather than differences. In other words, while rhetoric is perhaps most commonly defined as the study of persuasion, rhetorology is the study of how to listen. Persuasion may come later, but it comes, for the rhetorologist, only after he or she has systematically tried—really tried—to find common ground.

The reason we need a word for this concept is because it is a way to foster reverence in contemporary democracy. Picture this: Glenn Beck invites a liberal on his show and for a full ten minute interview he and his opponent focus exclusively on finding common ground. All disagreements are off the table, reserved for another night.

It doesn't seem likely to happen anytime soon, since all big-name political pundits seem obsessed with what Booth terms "win-rhetoric" (the desire to win at all costs), but I think that if we need anything in our current political discourse, it is rhetorology (literally, from the Latin roots, "the [objective] study of the speakers"). If we spent as much time probing for common ground as we spent disagreeing we'd see more civility and genuine progress.