“A rhetoric which serves to conceal behind the masks of morality what are in fact the preferences of arbitrary will and desire.”— Alasdair MacIntyre
Side-quest part two
This article is somewhat different from most of what I’ve published over the past three years, but not quite as different as the last one.
As I mentioned recently, I took a rhetoric course this winter and really enjoyed it. I learned a lot. One of the assigned readings for the course was After Virtue, by Alasdair MacIntyre. It was written in 1984, and even then the language must have seemed old fashioned. The book is heady, highly philosophical, and sometimes convoluted.
MacIntyre’s ideas are complex and the writing is dense, so it is not an easy read by any means. I do love a challenge however, and ended up really enjoying the book — even if I may have to go back and re-read some sections in order to fully comprehend the content.
This second article in my two-part series has a much more modern focus, bringing in current events and relevant socio-political issues.
Brief disclaimer
This is the second of a two-part article series is based on a paper I originally wrote for a University rhetoric course. If you missed part one, I recommend reading it first.
I broke my paper into two parts and made efforts to edit it to make it easier to read, so I hope you enjoy.
Individual rights
In his book After Virtue, MacIntyre describes three instruments of rhetoric: rights, protest, and unmasking. Here I will focus primarily on the first two instruments because rights and protest are inextricably linked. Without rights, we have nothing to fight for, nor violations to protest.
MacIntyre’s strongest statement to illustrate why the notion of rights is fictional is the following,
“Rights […] purport to provide us with an objective and impersonal criterion, but they do not […] for this reason alone there would have to be a gap between their purported meaning and the uses to which they are actually put.”— Alasdair MacIntyre
This very succinctly sums up exactly why the well-intended desire to uphold fundamental human rights does not result in equality for all, nor does it give us a useful schema for morality.
Persons with social, political, or economic power (usually all three at once) can and do manipulate — even weaponize — the concept of rights in order to further their own personal and political agendas.
One such example was outlined by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt in their book entitled “How Democracies Die”. As these authors explain, a threat to national security is a “political game changer”. The perception of such a threat allows political leaders to exert greater authority and to enjoy greater public support while appearing to protect the rights of their constituents.
A particular right dictated by law in the United States and other United Nations is the right to free and fair elections. After Barrack Obama won the presidency in 2008, in which minority voter turnouts were higher than usual, the Republican Party recognized this as a threat to their future success.
With the Republican Party being predominately white cis-men, they believed minority voters were less likely to vote for them. Because they couldn’t legally outright interfere with people’s right to vote, they instead found what appeared to be technically legal(ish) means of doing so.
Lacking a legitimate threat to national security, the Republicans created one for themselves. They manufactured a sense of urgency and concern over potential voter fraud — a threat which has, time and again, proven unfounded.
In the court of public opinion, however, facts are often of little importance. The Republicans didn’t need proof to support their claims, they needed only to generate enough fear that certain groups were infringing upon the rights of Americans to hold free and fair elections.
They were then able to use this fear to push for stronger voter identification laws, which have been demonstrated to have the most significant impact on marginalized and formerly disenfranchised groups, especially people living in poverty and those in ethnic minority groups. In a technically legal way, the Republicans were able to, in effect, suppress the minority vote.
This is a prime example of what MacIntyre is expressing when he says,
“The modern political process is not reality […] it conceals the arbitrariness of the will and power at work in its resolution.” — Alasdair MacIntyre
Under the guise of protecting the rights of Americans to hold free and fair elections, Republicans were able to camouflage their true intent, at least effectively enough to pass stricter voter ID laws in fifteen different U.S. states between 2005 and 2016.
Peaceful protest
MacIntyre points out that, while protest may bring awareness to important causes, it is likely the people hearing the messages shared are predominately those who already agree with the arguments made.
MacIntyre further argues, “protest is now almost entirely that negative phenomenon which characteristically occurs as a reaction to the alleged invasion of someone’s rights in the name of someone else’s utility”.
In the same vein as the discussion on rights, protest is used under the guise of protecting the rights of a person or group of people, yet is more often a thinly veiled act of protest against someone or something. Although he wrote After Virtue in 1984, these statements ring truer today than ever in my lifetime.
To use a modern example, in September 2023 we witnessed a nation-wide protest called the One Million March for Children, which organized protest marches across Canada, including Manitoba. The name alone betrays a rhetorical weapon being wielded to justify this anti-LGBTQ protest. It’s framed, not as a march against comprehensive sex education in public schools, but as a movement to ostensibly “protect” children.
Using the same tactics as the American GOP, this group uses emotivism via incendiary language, inflammatory rhetoric, and loaded terms to incite fear and outrage. Just as autocratic leaders “foment public hysteria to justify an emergency action”, the One Million March for Children sought to scare parents into supporting their mission.
Events advertising the marches used phrases such as “indoctrination”, “gender ideology”, “over-sexualizing children”, and “grooming” — even resorting to calling people who support the rights of 2s+LGBTQIA youth “pedophiles”. They used the slogans “leave our kids alone” and “hands off our kids”.
The One Million March for Children has a clear anti-LGBTQ agenda, but these beliefs are not as widely accepted as they used to be. Instead of overtly protesting against comprehensive sexual education which includes discussions of homosexuality and issues impacting transgender youth, the organizers had to create a crisis, one which they claim threatens to harm innocent children.
Just as crises facilitate abuse of power and increase public support for the government, the One Million March for Children required a crisis of their own in order to rally forces against this fabricated danger.
This is what MacIntyre would say offers a “rhetoric which serves to conceal behind the masks of morality what are in fact the preferences of arbitrary will and desire”.
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