The most important thing to understand is that today it’s generally the quality of cultural power rather than the quality of logical argument that determines which views prevail in society and the church. People who want their position to win out need to make sure they are addressing all the components of persuasion and debate, not just facts and logic.
The Logic of Persuasion
One of the most important things to know about disputes in the modern world is:
If you’re debating substance, you’ve already lost.
That is to say, if you are trying to convince a skeptic or win a debate, including debates over what policies and views will prevail in a church or other institution, by using factual, logical, rational arguments, you are very likely to lose and in fact, have probably lost already and just don’t know it yet.
This is very important to understand because so many people, especially conservatives, default to a logical model of argumentation to the exclusion of all other forms of persuasion or influence.
As I noted in Masc #45, ideas may have consequences, but lots of other things have consequences too. For example, arguments that flatter the sensibilities of powerful people and institutions, or tell the audience what it wants to hear, are very likely to prevail even if they are weak. Conversely, true but unpopular ideas often flounder.
Today I want to further explore this problem.
Aristotle’s model of persuasion has three components: ethos, pathos, and logos. Taking them in reverse order:
Logos is rational argument based on facts and logic. When I speak of debating substance, this is what I’m talking about.
Pathos is an appeal to emotion or sentiment.
Ethos is an appeal to character, position, status, or “brand.”
In our modern, mass media saturated society, most winning arguments are only nominally based on logic. Instead, emotional based appeals are much more key. But above all the position or status of the person making the arguments trumps all. It determines to a great extent, for example, which arguments or emotional appeals are considered valid. The battle for social or cultural status ends up being definitive today in all too many cases.
The nature of logical argument is self-evident, but I will say a bit more about pathos and ethos.
An Example of Pathos
A good example of an appeal based on pathos is this twenty minute video by Mary Beth McGreevy defending the complementarian gender system of the Presbyterian Church in America. In complementarianism, women are not allowed to serve in a pastoral position. Her defense of this system is based on how it makes her feel and what it allows her to do. She’s attempting to assuage the possibly negative feelings of her female target audience towards the complementarian system, and to argue for applying complementarian doctrine in a minimalist manner.
Note how often she uses variants of the word “feel” in this video:
- “I started talking to women who felt hurt”
- “I’d always felt so affirmed”
- “I’ve always felt heard, like I had a place at the table”
- “I realize not all women have felt that way”
- “Let me tell you how that makes me feel as a woman”
- “It feels like I’m driving down the road”
There are many more occurrences of the word “feel” than these. Not that she makes no logical, theological arguments to defend complementarianism at all. Her video is designed to complement, as it were, that form of argument by engaging in a different way.
Is this a valid way to try to persuade people? Yes.
Provided you are trying to persuade someone of what you believe to be the truth, there’s no reason not to avail yourself of all the levers of persuasion and rhetoric, providing your techniques are not themselves deceptive or designed to manipulate.
Understanding Ethos
Ethos is a more expansive and complex matter. The simplest component is simply our character or reputation. We aren’t likely to believe someone who is known as a consummate liar, for example. The better our reputation for honesty, integrity, and fairness, the more likely we are to be believed.
Other attributes of a person can also affect his ability to persuade. Robert Cialdini, in his must-read book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, notes that social proof and likability are key factors in persuasion, and that similarity plays a key role in their effectiveness. We are more likely to be persuaded by someone we see as similar to ourselves. In that McGreevy video, for example, it’s important that she’s a woman making an argument about women’s roles in the church. That makes her more credible with other women than a man would be. This is one reason pastors often trot out their wives to deliver some of their more unpopular messages on gender.
The credentials or position that we hold (authority) can also help determine whether or not our position is accepted. Cialdini includes authority as one of his six key principles of persuasion. When a medical doctor in a white lab coat sits us down in his office, with his degrees and board certifications prominently displayed on the wall, we are more likely to believe what he says than we are to take health advice from some random person on the street. So powerful is this association that he said that even an actor who merely played a doctor on TV could tap into the aura of that. He cited a Sanka coffee ad from the 1970s that featured actor Robert Young, who had won an Emmy in 1970 for playing the lead character in Marcus Welby, M.D. We can also think of judges, teachers, etc. as having authority based on the position they hold.
Then there’s cultural status, which can be personal or institutional. What is written in The New York Times has a powerful and profound effect on what truths (or “truths”) are accepted in our society. The Times and other elite institutions define cultural reality in the United States.
Sociologist James Davison Hunter said that we should “think of culture as a form of capital, much like money itself.” He further says:
A Ph.D. has more cultural capital than a car mechanic; a member of the national academy of sciences has more cultural capital than a high school science teacher; the winner of a Nobel Prize in literature has more cultural capital than a romance novelist. These are extreme contrasts but you get the point. Like money, accumulated cultural capital translates into a kind of power and influence. But what kind of power? What kind of influence? It starts as credibility, an authority one possesses which puts one in a position to be taken seriously. It ends as the power to define reality itself. It is the power to name things.
Hunter argues that this cultural power resides primarily in networks and the institutions arising from them. And he says that culture changes from the top down, or from the center outward.
With economic capital, quantity is paramount. More is almost always better, and more influential, than less. With cultural capital, it isn’t quantity but quality that counts most. It is the status of cultural credentials and accomplishment. In other words, with culture, there is a center and a periphery. The individuals, networks and institutions most critically involved in the production of a culture or civilization operate in the “center” where prestige is the highest; not on the periphery, where status is low.
This is the most critical thing to understand from this newsletter. If the networks and institutions at the cultural center are relatively united, they will almost always get their way regardless of any emotional appeal, facts, logical arguments, or actual truth to the contrary. Almost no one can stand up against a campaign by the New York Times or Washington Post, for example. This is especially true today when American elites are unusually united on a wide range of issues.
New Calvinism as Culture Power Strategy
In our mass media society, this cultural power often trumps everything else. Attempting to argue about substance in the absence of cultural power is overwhelmingly likely to fail. Those possessing cultural power have no need to even seriously and legitimately engage with the arguments of their opponents. Conversely, people without much cultural power often resort to logical argument because that’s all they have.
The key to having your ideas prevail today is the acquisition of cultural power. This is not a simple matter. Because this power resides in networks, even getting a job at The New York Times doesn’t necessarily do a lot by itself. Ross Douthat is a conservative Catholic columnist for the Times, but he doesn’t have much influence on society as a whole. He’s also highly restricted in what he can say if he wants to keep his position. That’s not to say there’s no benefit to Douthat in being an NYT columnist. It definitely means many more influential people will be reading him than they otherwise would, for example. But a few well-placed people here and there don’t counter entire networks.
But high-status networks exist in multiple domains. There isn’t just one domain with the Times and Harvard at the top. In some cases, those who are attuned to how cultural power works can establish a degree of power over certain subdomains even if they cannot do so at the highest levels of society as a whole.
This appears to be the case with the New Calvinism movement, for example. Sociologist Brad Vermurlen, in his book Reformed Resurgence, uses a model called strategic action field theory to understand that movement. He writes:
The crucial insight from strategic action field theory that helps to explain the New Calvinism is that through social processes of game-like contestation, leaders of movements and organizations strategically battle and vie with their competitors for a more advantageous position in and over their field, which is defined by possession of symbolic capital and power.
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