Among the primary aims of our educational movement is to train our students in the art of rhetoric so that they can contribute meaningfully to the major cultural debates of our society. Enacting real and lasting change occurs as people dare to promote and defend what is true, good and beautiful in a world that is fallen and hurting. As we continue our series on training the prophetic voice, we consider next what it means to speak truth to power.
Previous articles in this series, Training the Prophetic Voice:
Part 1: The Educational Heart of God
A Sweltering Day in August 1963
His white, button-down shirt with rolled up sleeves shows a man working diligently. With pencil in hand, he revises some thoughts that had been rehearsed in small settings over the course of the preceding years. This is the calm before the storm. A simple office provided to Martin Luther King, Jr. offered a little space to think and to write on the eve of the March on Washington, August 28, 1963. It’s an image of Rev. King alone, cerebral and dispassionate. According to legend, the prepared notes had no reference to the phrase “I have a dream.”
It was in this setting that a masterpiece was prepared. Rev. King referred extensively to the Bible, with allusions to the Psalter, Isaiah, Amos and Galatians interspersed, anchoring his speech to the biblical prophetic tradition. American patriotism rings through as well, with references to the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution and the national hymn “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee.” Literary allusions permeate the speech, with a deft rephrasing of one of Shakespeare’s famous lines in Richard III. The man was clearly a well-educated minister, perhaps seizing a moment of national television coverage to showcase his rhetorical sophistication.
Contrast the staid moment of solitude with the thronging crowds on the National Mall gathered near a body of water (the Reflecting Pool) looking at the mountain of steps leading up to the Lincoln Memorial. It was a full day, with numerous speakers and singers preceding Rev. King. The recently deceased John Lewis had spoken earlier in the day. Many celebrities and dignitaries turned out for the event. This was a charged moment, so much so that Rev. King caught a moment of lightning that took his prepared notes to another level.
As legend has it, Mahalia Jackson, who had sung “How I Got Over” earlier in the program, called out in the middle of speech, “Tell them about the dream, Martin.” Rev. King departed from his notes and improvised with cadences of “I have a dream” punctuating the speech about two-thirds of the way through. It became something more than a speech. Martin Luther King, Jr. experienced a moment of transcendence that crystallized what the civil rights movement was all about. This speech directly contributed to a wellspring of support for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ended segregation and outlawed discrimination.
Speaking Truth to Power
The phrase, “speaking truth to power,” is the essence of the prophetic voice. The nature of truth is funny, though. The Correspondence Theory, as expressed by Aristotle in his Metaphysics, says that a statement or proposition is true to the extent that it corresponds to the way the universe actually is. If I were to say I live in Chicago, the truth of that statement would have to correspond to factual reality. For most people living outside the Chicagoland area, to say I live in Chicago is good enough. It is an approximate reality, because Chicago is the nearest major city to where I live. But in fact, I don’t live within the city limits of Chicago. My proposition doesn’t correspond to the world as it actually is. So have I actually told a falsehood?
The power of this little fact of where I live is fairly minuscule. Thus we might call it a little, white lie. It’s fairly inconsequential in most circumstances. It’s also not the kind of truth we’re talking about when we consider what it means to speak truth to power. One of the limitations of a formal definition of truth is the inability to handle subjective values, such as goodness, beauty, justice and so forth. But it is exactly these kinds of values that we mean when we speak about truth in the context of enacting meaningful change in society.
Aristotle is once again helpful, this time drawing upon The Art of Rhetoric. In his opening chapter, he begins a definition of rhetoric through comparison with dialectic. In both dialectic and rhetoric, one poses two or more points to be examined and debated, with the view of arriving at the truth through a process of logical evaluation. Aristotle writes:
“Rhetoric is useful, because the true and the just are naturally superior to their opposites, so that, if decisions are improperly made, they must owe their defeat to their own advocates; which is reprehensible. Further, in dealing with certain persons, even if we possessed the most accurate scientific knowledge, we should not find it easy to persuade them by the employment of such knowledge. For scientific discourse is concerned with instruction, but in the case of such persons instruction is impossible; our proofs and arguments must rest on generally accepted principles, as we said in the Topics, when speaking of converse with the multitude.”
Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1.1.12
What Aristotle is saying here is that truth and justice, although obviously better than falsehood and injustice, are not always decided upon by those who advocate for certain policies in society. Moreover, even if we were able to produce scientific facts, we would need to instruct the “other side” as though we were educating them. However, we often don’t have that kind of time, so the art of persuasion must be used to convince the “other side” of the truth and justice of one’s perspective. Aristotle continues:
“Further, the orator should be able to prove opposites, as in logical arguments; not that we should do both (for one ought not to persuade people to do what is wrong), but that the real state of the case may not escape us, and that we ourselves may be able to counteract false arguments, if another makes an unfair use of them.”
Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1.1.12
Here Aristotle suggests that the one speaking truth to power should be able to take on board the opposite viewpoint, in order to point out and counteract falsehood. This begins to get at the heart of our nature as human beings. In our search for truth and justice, we are prone to error and corruption. Therefore we need such arts as dialectic and rhetoric to challenge our thinking as individuals and as a society so that truth might emerge despite our limitations.
Truth in a Free Society
Perhaps the most cherished freedom in our society is the freedom of speech. Given what has just been stated about our human nature, the freedom of speech is actually the freedom to be wrong. It would be impossible to make people pass a truth test before they could speak freely. For one, who could pass such a test, knowing the limits of our knowledge and the complex motives that stand behind our utterances? More concerning would be the question of who gets to make the test that would grant freedom of speech to others. That kind of power would mean that certain people could set a standard based on their own limited understanding of what they think is true. This would be unjust and tyrannical. Therefore a free society must allow all people to speak freely, which means most free speech will be wrong to some degree.
So where is hope to be found, if everyone is basically wrong to some degree? The implication of freedom of speech is that our society would be a place of discourse where ideas are put forward equitably such that the best ideas – those that are true, good and just – would prevail. Certain ideas rise to the top, with a majority persuaded of its virtues. However, these ideas must simultaneously be challenged by those who hold the minority position. It is interesting to examine how the framers of the U.S. Constitution sought to protect the minority viewpoint through mechanisms like the separation of powers, checks and balances, a bicameral legislature, and term limits, to name a few.
Western democracies have established discourse and debate as a means to providing the greatest possible common good by validating the role of the individual’s right to speak freely, even if what is spoken is incorrect or offensive. In keeping with Aristotle’s rhetorical theory, it is best to have people speak out what they actually think, so that we can fully examine the truth or lack thereof. We can trust that if a person speaks falsely or offensively, people will let them know. This is the hope of Western society; that truth can be spoken even by those not in power.
Social Media, Ideological Possession and Echo Chambers
One of the tragedies of our society has been the erosion of genuine debate and discourse. We get the false impression that we are engaged in debate and discourse through social media. But what we most often find on Facebook feeds or in the comments sections of websites is something more like a drive-by shooting. Facts and opinions are fired from the protected silo our devices provide. We rarely have to look a person in the eye, but instead type up charged communiques with a sense of our own anonymity. Social media exacerbates the lack of serious engagement of issues due to its ever-present and instantaneous nature. We are lured into thinking we are engaging in civil discourse, but in actuality it is anything but civil.
Into this environment we can place the concept of ideological possession. I have written a bit about Jordan Peterson in the past. In an interview with Helen Lewis, Peterson described what it looks like when a person is beholden to a particular ideology:
“So, you’re not … integrating the specifics of your personal experience with what you’ve been taught, to synthesize something that’s genuine and surprising, and engaging in a narrative sense as a consequence. And that’s the pathology of ideological possession. It’s not good. And it’s not good that I know where you stand on things once I know a few things. It’s like … why have a conversation? I already know where you stand on things.”
Interview of Jordan Peterson by Helen Lewis for British GQ
This is the kind of person who has taken a position on a particular set of issues, yet most of the thought has not been original. They have downloaded a set of ideas from a prominent voice on the right or on the left. The prepackaging of the ideas from favored media outlets makes it convenient for individual to not actually think but react. This is different from the person who has carefully worked out a theory or philosophy on their own. They posses their ideas rather than ideas possessing them. The effort to work out a theory or philosophy means they are skilled at considering new information and either synthesizing it or countering it in a thoughtful way.
An echo tells back what we have spoken. One of the liabilities of politically aligned news outlets is that people can live within echo chambers that reinforce their ideological possession. lt feels like thoughtful interaction with the news of our day. But without listening to ideas and viewpoints that challenge us, we are liable to reinforce a conception of truth with no assistance to root out the error of our thinking. Being loud and proud about things we think we know (but is probably only just what we heard on YouTube) is very different than speaking with a prophetic voice.
Training the Prophetic Voice
Let’s return to the two images of Martin Luther King, Jr. One image is of the man preparing. The other is of the man exercising his prophetic voice. For me this models our educational program. The second image is of a person at the right place, at the right time, with the best opportunity to deliver a compelling message challenging injustice and calling for reform. This is quite rare and not to be expected by all rhetoricians or by every would-be prophet.
It is the first image, the man in solitude gathering the thoughts of many centuries. Rev. King assimilated into himself the wisdom of his biblical faith and the wisdom of his Western heritage. The ideas of Western civilization were the means by which he perceived a way to correct the corruption of that very same Western civilization.
This is what we are doing now in our classrooms. We are giving our students the tools they need to assess and evaluate the cultural heritage we are imparting to them. I mentioned in our teacher training recently that in educating our young ones, we are passing the cultural baton to the next generation. That’s why it is so important to teach the Greeks and the Romans, the Italian Renaissance, Shakespeare, the U.S. and French revolutions, the World Wars, the Civil Rights movement and so one. We are providing them with the best authors and the best ideas our society has produced. But we do so knowing that for as good as that tradition is, it is also a corrupt tradition. We remain the kind of society that would enslave or murder if given the chance. But we are equally the kind of society that would emancipate and protect the vulnerable if given the opportunity. We pass on our cultural heritage saying, “We tried our best to root out some of the corruption, but there’s still some there. Now you try the best you can.”
Training students to have a prophetic voice means that we are validating and supporting the personhood of each individual student. We are calling them to seek for truth wherever it can be found. And when they find it, they will utilize the resources and skills they’ve acquired to promote and defend the truth in a society that needs their contribution to the great discourse.
Other articles in this series, Training the Prophetic Voice:
Part 1: The Educational Heart of God
Part 3: The Schools of the Prophets
Part 4: Jesus as Prophetic Trainer