Crowley and Fundamentalism

After last week's class, which I apologize for possibly dragging into the territory of Crowley's emotional tone, I ended up trying to figure out why I'd gotten so worked up about a book whose politics and tenets I basically agreed with. My personal views would be much more closely aligned with Crowley's than with the fundamentalist rhetors in her book, and, it follows, I would like to learn rhetorical strategies that would help me to dissuade them, and to help create the civil discourse of her title.

At some point, I realized that the fundamentalist v. liberal dichotomy that shapes much of the book is exactly what turned me away from fundamentalism, that, as a kid at the height of the grunge era, I learned to tune out arguments centered around the need to convert the wayward to keep them from destroying our version of the world, perpetuated by many of the same fundamentalist rhetors cited in the book. Toward a Civil Discourse doesn't inspire flashbacks :), but it does strive to inspire a sense of urgency about what Court refers to in class as the culture wars, and to do so using the tactics of fundamentalism . . . I think.

Jeff Rice, in his introduction to the blog carnival, discusses the book's "heavy-handed lament" of the strong presence of fundamentalist literature and rhetoric in our media, and Crowley's response to his post makes the distinction between wanting to silence fundamentalist rhetoric and wanting to dissuade the fundamentalist rhetors. She's working to establish a way of persuading fundamentalists to hang up their guns, so to speak, and doing so in ways that, as Donna pointed out, tie ancient and postmodern rhetoric together. The idea of restoring emotion to rhetoric, of framing appeals to passion rather than attempting to divorce it from reason, makes a great deal of sense, and perfectly explains the rhetoric of Crowley's book.

She means for us to feel an urgent call to action, to gird up our rhetorics and head into the public arena, which she sees as threatened by fundamentalist rhetors. Again, I think I agree; my job as a rhetorician is to persuade, and she offers a great technique for doing so: finding the marginalized members of fundamentalist groups, whose sense of disempowerment may keep them from feeling completely locked into the ideology. As a teacher of rhetoric, I wonder how to incorporate Crowley's ideas, aside from stressing to students the need for pathos.