fail rhetoric, fail life

Relatively few people in the world study rhetoric anymore. Heck, relatively few people even know what rhetoric is. I majored in it, and I could just barely explain it to you.

For the record, I wanted nothing to do with rhetoric at the beginning. At my college, it was some subject that came attached like an anti-theft device to the writing major I wanted, like the college felt it had to give you something academic sounding before you left.

It took me nearly until graduation to realize rhetoric was more like a free gift with the writing major. Or, maybe, that writing was a free side-effect of the rhetoric major.

Rhetoric, for those of you not products of the NWC English Department, has a few main principles. I shall describe them roughly and briefly.

Ethos: A speaker or composer has to establish their credibility with their audience in order to persuade them. (This has many facets, but it's not so important to this post.)

Pathos: Emotions can be "manipulated" in an audience to produce the desired effect. A political example: a nasty letter to the editor in a newspaper will produce more action than a simple, formal one.

Logos: This is my worst one. Instinctively I'd say it's building up a factual argument, but that does overlap with ethos to a degree. They all overlap some.

Kairos: The timing of a piece of rhetoric must be right for it to have the desired effect. A personal example: A press release on the Gateway corporation may be perfect, but no one will care unless you remember to publish it within three weeks of its release.

These principles are useful in endless walks of life and really do prevade everything we do: applying for a job, giving a speech, meeting new people, playing the stock market. And the principles also take work to develop. You can strengthen your ethos by making connections or acting with integrity; you can study to organize and add color to your rhetoric, etc.

But kairos -- kairos tops them all in my mind. It's most important and most difficult to master. It's the one you sometimes have least control over -- and then sometimes all the control in the world. It often requires wisdom more than book knowledge.

Your entire presentation can be ideal -- your PowerPoint is colorful and simple and typo-free and creative and factually strong. But if your presentation is scheduled right after lunch, or right before a holiday vacation, or just after a company fracas on that topic, you're out of luck.

Everything you're saying may be true, but the timing can make it wrong. Take for example, one of those Trinity Broadcasting Network cartoons. One brother was jealous he was having a new baby sister. The narrator brought up the story of Cain and Abel. Yes, the story of Cain and Abel is morally valuable and intergral to the story of humanity. But telling a little boy what other Bible characters did to their siblings when they were jealous (especially if you're not going to go into the fact that the characters were sinning!) may give him the wrong idea.

Even Jesus speaks kairos: wine for the Eucharist, but then not getting drunk on it.

And then there's Ecclesiastes -- a time for everything.

I wonder -- is bad kairos sin? It must be in some cases. (How's that for logos?)

Fail rhetoric, fail life.