I (Partly) Blame Gorgias for Our Mess

By Dale Short My family, being Scots-Irish, developed the processes of argument and debate to a fine art when I was growing up. Like any good attorney, we each could present and support all six sides of any given dispute at the drop of a hat. Or even without the hat, if a hat was not handy. I wouldn't call it the good old days, because such contentiousness wore on all our nerves, gave us acid reflux, and turned our hair prematurely gray. But compared to the past two decades of American politics, that period of time seems like an Eden of public discourse. Because in today's society, the concepts of argument and debate are effectively dead and gone. The idea of two individual speakers jousting in front a crowd by presenting facts and interpretation, and an audience impartially measuring the evidence and changing their opinions as a result, is as gone as the dinosaurs. When's the last time you heard a debate on any subject that changed your mind? That's because nowadays, the rules of discussion and debate no longer exist. Whether online or on broadcast TV, a debater can show definitive, historically documented proof that events A,B, and C happened, and thousands of commenters can respond, I disagree. Before old Gorgias, bless his heart, nobody realized you could disagree with a fact. So the whole discussion hits a dead end, and we, the audience, sleep to prepare for tomorrow's debate, which is rinse, and repeat. In practice, there is no longer any difference between fact and opinion. This all mystified me until I was asked to review a history book by UAB professor Bruce McComiskey titled Gorgias and the New Sophistic Rhetoric. Turns out, Gorgias (pronounced gor-JEE-us, not to be confused with the superstar wrestler Gorgeous George) lived in ancient Greece from 485-380 B.C., and pioneered a form of rhetoric that would come to be known as Sophistry. To get the whole picture, you need to read Dr. Comiskey's book and a bunch of other historical texts. But in a nutshell, Gorgias is eerily similar to today's TV talk-show hosts. He made a fortune and was in great demand as a public speaker,

because he figured out a speaking technique that's the equivalent of sleight-ofhand, or stage magic. By cleverly playing on words and associations, Gorgias could prove that dark was light, or vice versabut only to the percentage of the Greek audience who had not studied the science of logic in school. Gorgias was a superstar. The toast of the town. He was a hoot, and he put those elite folks with an education in their places. In the meantime, some present-day GOP strategists discovered Gorgias's technique and have used Internet and TV to multiply that advantage a thousandfold. Whereas the percentage of Greek folks who didn't really understand logical thought in those days was about half-and-half, nowadays the percentage of people who have studied Logic in school are right up there with those who speak Greek or Latinon a good day, around one percent. As a result, electoral politics has become (speaking of Gorgeous George) the equivalent of professional wrestling. The fact is that, for some 30 years, think tanks with billions of dollars to spend, much of it from our tax money, have honed old Gorgias's techniques to a point he could never have imagined. And when we look around at how the standard of life in our local communities has changed during that period, we can see how the sleight-of-hand debating technique that equates facts with opinions has worked for us. # # #

(Dale Short is a native of Walker County. His columns, books, photos, and radio features can be found on his website, carrolldaleshort.com. His weekly radio program Music from Home, featuring Alabama singers, songwriters, and bands, streams live online each Sunday at 6 pm on oldies1015fm.com)