I had a very interesting conversation with my boss today. He called to ask how class was going, and we ended up talking about sophism. After last night's class, I wondered exactly how much I am guilty of sophism on a daily basis. As a collector, it is my job to win the argument. Every day I get on the phone and convince people to give me money. When I presented this to my boss, he had a different analysis of the situation. Quintilian believed that in order to become a successful orator, one has to have good intentions or ideas behind his argument. My boss argued that we are not sophists because we do have a goal. I argued that we are sophists because collecting money is probably not what Quintilian had in mind when he spoke of good men and good intentions.
As a part of our daily jobs, we do not make judgments about the situation of a client or a debtor. Our focus is clear and single minded. We need to quickly access the kind of person that we are speaking with and what the best way will be to influence that person, regardless of how we may feel or think about the debtor's situation.
When I train my team, I don't teach them emotion. I teach them technique. I teach them to analyze a caller's tone of voice, work choice, and responses to find the best way to win the argument, to find the best way to get the money. I teach them how to use the caller's reason for not paying to form their argument about why he should. Ultimately, we are successful if the caller responds to our argument. That is not to say that we are unethical or that we are not happy when the caller's best interest coincides with our client's, but our focus is primarily the art rather than the content.
Obviously, I am getting Cicero's theory tangled up in sophism, but the general idea stands. My boss argued that the fact that we have a goal clears us of any allegations of sophism and its negative connotations. I responded that it is not that simple. Our job as collection agents is predicated on the ability to divorce our emotions from the topic and create a practical argument, which I believe plants us in the sophist camp.
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Rhetoric on the job is an interesting addition to our lecture on Tuesday. To apply these principles to life beyond academia is refreshing and I commend you for this approach. It is funny how we can harbor our philosophies and morals and yet make them flexible when our job and ultimately our livelyhood conflicts. How many of us must set our true selves aside to fit into society and abide by its rules--I can say few have escaped with themselves intact and those strong views sometimes become dull when we must stifle them day to day to keep our position. With the view of the boss, he speaks from his position in justifying the rhetoric used on the job and he must indeed tell himself that as does everyone else charged with this particular job. We must reason with ourselves until we find our actions as correct if we must continue to repeat them.
ReplyDeleteI understand your position well. I too think of my employers as sophists, although they'd probably have a conniption if I said that. They don't like to be told the truth, with a T or a t, even if they ask for it.
ReplyDeleteIn my line of work, however, we are taught to use rhetoric to prey on emotion in order to make money rather than address them objectively. I guess that would be playing to their pathos, wouldn't it? We are told to ask the customer probing questions in order to "best help them" but we all know that's just politically correct lingo for manipulating them into buying more stuff. I know that makes me a sophist. And I never knew that until you mentioned it. Excuse me now, I must call in to work and quit...
I am glad that you decided to work with the area of rhetoric outside of academics. As a teacher, I am always looking for ways to connect the content my students must learn with the outside world. I would agree that simply having a purpose in an argument does not allow you to escape sophism. Purposes can be good and they can be less than agreeable. It seems that in the world outside of academics there are many purposes for rhetoric, but a great many of the those purposes are not as grand as we would like them to be.
ReplyDeleteI've had this discussion in a course before and with my comp. classes. The discussion always gets down to defining "good," at least in our contemporary terms. It seems that it always comes down to what is ethical or what is the situation calling for? Something to add to the discussion on the good man using rhetoric is that it was believed that if a man was intending on using rhetoric to manipulate in a way that was not beneficial for the situation or society, not only was he certainly not "good" but he was stupid as well. The good man using rhetoric was, by nature, a good man because he could understand rhetoric as an art. The "bad" man would be so inept with rhetoric and its terms and uses that he would simply not be able to accomplish his goal as a rhetorician. So, again, by nature, rhetoric was inherited by the good and could only be used by the good, as if there were some sort of code in individuals that allowed them to be good men and good speakers. Of course, this was idealistic and detrimentally optimistic. I think this idea of the good and bad person having access to rhetoric is just as worth discussing in the work place as pathos is.
ReplyDeleteCan of worms to be opened: What is "good"? Does it depend on the situation? Audience? Genre? Speaker? Ohhhhhh boy....
ReplyDeleteTo be a good is to be a good writer? I read Forbes and those writers are probably in it for the dollar. In fact most writers today are focused on being published, to earn money and fame. Does that really make them bad? How about journalists who want to promote a certain point of view for a political goal? Is the writing bad?
ReplyDeleteI agree that this is a big can of worms.
I also struggle with the issue that you have all commented on: what is good? Personally, my motive for using rhetoric the way I do is probably not so bad. Collecting money and teaching my team to collect money leads to commission based bonuses that allow me to pay for my education. On a personal level this is fine, but within the corporate structure, I am not responsible for only my motive. Am I not perpetuating the motives of my boss, and his boss, and his? As I work within the guidelines and structure that they have set up, how much of their ethics and 'goodness' do I inherit? How much do I pass on to the people who work below me? Just like rhetorical tradition was passed from Corx to Tisias to Isocrates, how much of an ethical tradition do inherite from the corporation at large and its parent companies? And, as an individual, how much responsibility do I bear for that tradition?
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