Two flatulent practices relating to the posing of questions have characterized political discourse in recent years, to
the disbenefit of the polity.
(1)
Particularly associated with Donald Rumsfeld, though the maneuver
antedates him, is posing ‘questions’ to oneself and immediately answering
them. Thus, let P and Q be
propositions: instead of saying
simply
P. Not-Q
the rhetorician draws it out into a monologue masquerading
as a dialogue:
Is P true? Sure it is! Is Q true?
Absolutely not!
The advantages to the speaker are:
(a) He gets to choose the ‘questions’, irrespective of whether
anyone is interested in them or whether anyone would phrase the question in
that manner. As a result,
they are invariably softball ‘questions’.
(b) He gets to dwell in a bubble of his own voice. Reporters, voters, maiden aunts, all
fade into a kind of Meinongian subsistence; and the Dialectic collapses to a trivial instantiation in
the palaver of a single man.
Disadvantages to the audience include:
(c) There is usually a substantive concern whether some proposition P be
true, or what to do about it, or the like. Yet by this slight-of-tongue, the bloviator poses instead
some verbally related but substantively etiolated variant P-prime, and addresses
that instead, thereby providing no real information or analysis, but leaving
the impression that he has addressed P.
(d) You have to listen to twice as much verbiage as for a
straightforward “P” -- ten pounds of rhetoric in a five-pound bag. And in time it gets freaking annoying.
(2) In
politically pre-sanitized settings like “town-halls” and related social
Spectacles, an array of voters, carefully selected to represent each of the
pressure groups to be pandered to, is permitted to pose a simple-minded,
vaguely worded question, thus pushing a given button on the candidate’s library
of prerecorded on-message speechlets. But in a new development, the politician moves to
snuggle-up to said Potemkin voter, with an enthusastic
“Great
question !!”
before launching in to her canned response.
The practice, repeated ad
nauseam (cf. SNL’s parody of
Hillary Clinton’s use of this and similar maneuvers, in their satire of the
Presidential ‘debates’), is distressing
even apart from its smarminess. For the sort of low-info voter who most needs to
be buttered-up and flattered, is least in position to actually pose a “great
question”, or even a probing or pointed one. Nor will, say, a scientist giving
carefully-prepared, expert testimony on a complex subject be patronized from the Congressional
panel with a “Great question!”
The domains of “Great question!” and great questions, are virtually
mutually exclusive.
Note: The
catchphrase “Great question!” is characteristically contemporary; but the maneuvre is of longer
date. Speaking to a group,
Nixon would react to the most
elementary question as if he was
hearing it for the first time. He
would ponder a bit, congratulate the questioner on his originality, then give the answer he had given hundreds of times before, complete with some figures and a
quotation, as the citizen
listened in utter awe.
-- Stephen Ambrose, Nixon: the Triumph of a Politician 1962-1972 (1989), p. 139
-- Stephen Ambrose, Nixon: the Triumph of a Politician 1962-1972 (1989), p. 139
~
And now, by an unhallowed congressus of these two tricks --
by Beelzebub out of Medusa -- comes the Great Rhetorical Question. One came up this morning on NPR.
A Republican senator was touting Trump’s intention to
(i) Increase spending (e.g. on infrastructure and defense)
and
(ii) Decrease taxes,
while
(iii) Holding down the deficit.
Now, this nation has been down that road many times before,
both in speechifying and in practice;
so apart from the apparent logical incompatibility among those three
desiderata, there is a track-record here, for anyone who cares to examine
it. That, however, is beyond
the capacity of most pop journalists practicing today, as well as the
attention-span of the average voter. The substitute for critical inquiry, is a mere
statement of undifferentiated unwillingness to be convinced -- the lazy-man’s
lo-cal substitute for genuine skepticism (anatomized here). In this case, the reporter’s
Clarence-Darrow move was simply to ask, again, how (i)-(iii) might cohere. But the politician was ready for
it:
“Yes -- How can we address the problem of doing the things that need to be
done, while holding the line on the deficit, without addressing the question of Entitlements? -- Great question!”
That may or may not be a Great Question, but the reporter
had not posed it; the rhetorician
was congratulating himself. And in so doing,
bait-and-switched the subject from the incompatibility of (i)-(iii) to the
problem of those pesky Entitlements.
A perfectly legitimate subject of debate, but here snuck-in via a side
door.
~
The considerations above recall to mind what,
for Europeans, must be the original Potemkin-“question” scam: to wit, the Socratic dialogue.
The scenario has been solemnly sanctified, countless times over many years decades centuries. The method has been dignified with the
title maieutic (etymologically relating to widwifery), whereby the savant
or solon, by adroit interrogation, draws forth from the naïve listener (like a
tapeworm from the bowel) innate knowledge
such that all might marvel that he hath.
As a build-up, this is terrific, only… You actually read the
texts, and what you see is Socrates holding forth, more or less commendably,
and harvesting the plaudits of uncomprehending minions or yes-men.
Thus, a demonstration of the Urysohn Metrization Theorem, via the Socratic method.
Socrates: Let us, therefore, consider any
topological space whatsoever, so that it have a countable basis. You agree?
Minion: Sho’ nuff, boss!
Socrates: And may we not further
stipulate, that said space be regular? -- Surely that is not too much to ask!
Minion: True dat, Socrates!!
Socrates: Whence it follows that, our space being regular, for any
point thereof, we may define a continuous function positive at that point, but vanishing outside of a
neighborhood of that point. -- You agree?
Minion: Word up dawg, Socrates !!!!
Socrates: Whereupon we may plainly
see, that by defining an infinite series of functions from said space, to …
(Socrates drones on;
the minion dozes, but his snores are taken as assent.)
Socrates: Whereupon we may plainly
see, that our original space may be smoothly embedded into the
countably-infinite Cartesian-product of the cube, which we earlier (you do
recall this, don’t you, minion?) proved to be metrizable. This metric is inherited by our
embedded space in the subspace topology, thus proving the theorem.
Minion: U da man, Socrates !!!
Socrates (beaming upon the evidently innate insight of his pupil): Great answer !!!
Socrates (beaming upon the evidently innate insight of his pupil): Great answer !!!
Note: We
have it on good authority from the memoirs of Oxford dons, that any tutor who
attempts to apply the Socratic “method” to draw wisdom out of the maws of
wool-gathering undergraduates, comes up empty.
