Black Lives Matter and the Rhetoric of Revolution (Commentary) – By Mark T. Mitchell (Real Clear Politics) / Oct 11 2020
In classical Greece, the sophists were practitioners of the art of rhetoric. They took pride in their ability to persuade audiences to embrace any position. They could, as one boasted, “make the weaker argument appear the stronger.” Ancient sophists employed their rhetorical skills to dominate others rather than lead them to truth.
Modern sophists, Hannah Arendt argued, take this a step further: “The most striking difference between ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality.” In other words, modern sophists are revolutionaries and not merely manipulators of language. They are not primarily seeking to win an argument through deception; instead, they are true believers seeking to dismantle the world and replace it with an artificial creation of their own.
A case in point is Black Lives Matter. The name itself is a stroke of rhetorical genius, roughly akin to the question: Have you stopped beating your wife? To answer either “yes” or “no” is perilous. So, too, with BLM. Consider the minefield implied in the question: Do you support Black Lives Matter? Any decent person will agree with the literal meaning of the phrase itself, “black lives matter” — but it takes serious and thoughtful effort to affirm that, while of course black lives matter, the organization called Black Lives Matter is a neo-Marxist movement intent on the fundamental transformation of society. The rhetorical power of the name makes such parsing difficult. It also induces an element of fear, for to oppose Black Lives Matter opens one to the criticism that he denies the truth that black lives matter. The two are emphatically not the same, but the rhetorical conflation makes separating them difficult, potentially dangerous — and absolutely necessary.
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