One of the most smartest folks on rhetoric—and I know some smart folks on rhetoric!—is Guy Doza, with whom I’ve appeared at several speechwriting conferences, both in the U.S. and in the U.K. The author of his own big-selling book on communication, How to Apolgise for Killing a Cat, Doza recently reread my book, An Effort to Understand, and published an essay about it yesterday on his blog, The Cambridge Speechwriter.
In which he appreciates my unpopular insistence that my fellow citizens refrain from questionably motivated online self-righteousness. To illustrate the extent of that harm, he offers what he calls “a silly example”:
If I open my window and shout, I BELIEVE IN PEACE AND JUSTICE every single morning at 8am, we shouldn’t conclude that I believe in peace and justice any more than my neighbour who doesn’t shout out of their window. But it gets worse. Imagine that I shout every morning at 8am, feel great about myself, and then accuse my neighbour of being a violent oppressor for not joining me. Not only does shouting out of my window do literally nothing for peace and justice, but it happens to piss off all of my neighbours who are more likely to hate what is ultimately a good cause because they associate it with antisocial behaviour (this is sometimes called the fallacy fallacy: the idea that something is untrue because it has been badly argued). One of my neighbours is actually lawyer who does a lot more for justice than I do. They don’t shout about it out of their window or on Facebook, so I sometimes question their commitment to the cause…
I don’t think that’s such a silly example at all. A neighbor who did that would be more than a nuisance, he’d be a real menace to the peace and goodwill and ultimately the social stability of the community. And the thing is, we’re beset by neighbors like that every time we go on social media—all our hundreds of family and friends, colleagues and former colleagues, acquaintances and long-ago schoolmates.
No wonder we walk around shaking our heads all day long, and muttering under our breath.
Q. How did everything fall apart?
A. You know, I don’t remember how it started, exactly. Alls I know is that everybody got real upset and we all tore each other’s eyeballs out.