On Ideology: Second Thoughts

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Acknowledgments

A portion of this essay is drawn from the author's upcoming book, Shadow Songs.

Notes

For a more personalized take on these issues, see Wander, “Foreword.”

For a classic treatment of this issue, see Franklyn S. Haiman's two essays on “The Rhetoric of the Streets.”

The essay, “Made in America: French Feminism in Academia” by Claire Goldberg Moses, most ably crystallizes my point here. Moses offers a humbling and quite troubling discussion of the way in which feminisms and French theory in American colleges and universities differs from what it means in France.

This was the passage that my late friend Michael Calvin McGee, in a PhD seminar at Iowa and on his website, told his students he never wanted to see quoted. He called me up to make sure that I read his rejoinder.

For a treatment on this issue after 9/11, see Wander and Lee, “Creator's Nightmare.”

In the area of nuclear waste management, for example, another difficulty discussed by Stauffacher and Moser also contributes to this delay in environmental reform: the collaboration between natural and social scientists to frame problems, identify solutions and affect policy change.

Smil provides a technically informed, refined, non-alarmist but not altogether reassuring trend analysis of looming natural and manmade disasters.

The scenes that come to mind are from movies such as Akira Kurosawa's Dreams (1990) and John Hillcoat's the Road (2009).

I am heartened by the body of work on environmental and green criticism produced in the field of communication studies to inform us, to help shape critical viewpoints, and to point to productive and ethical courses of action. The early rhetorical scholarship by Cox, Farrell and Goodnight, Schiappa and Cantrill, and Orovec comes to mind. The leading figure, especially related to nuclear discourse, is Bryan Taylor. Though not an exhaustive list, other names also come to mind: Tarla Rai Peterson, Dennis Jaehne, Kevin DeLuca, William Kinsella, Phaedra Pezzullo, Brant Short, Danielle Endres, Mark Moore, Anne Marie Todd, Gorden Mitchell, and more.

Barker worked with the British government, during two World Wars and lived through the Great Depression. His experience of global politics coupled with his classical training reveals itself in his narrative and his footnotes, where socialism is related to democratic politics in ancient Athens and the early twentieth century and in relation to oligarchic politics then and the ideology of capitalism. His classical training and the world of affairs reveals itself in his appendixes, where relevant selections from Rhetoric and Ethics are related to the Politics. Kennedy situates his translation of the Rhetoric in relation to politics, making it explicit in his subtitle, “A Theory of Civic Discourse.” The gradual decline of civic discourse in this country, its quality and its influence, is undeniable during the rise of the American Empire after the Second World War, especially during the period following the second invasion of Iraq. Thucydides' history links the decline in ancient Athens to the rise of the Athenian Empire. According to Conner, the ideological devolution reveals itself, when the various speeches are read serially and in relation to one another. This line of thought is sobering with the rise of China as a global force and the decline of Japan and the U.S., especially after 9/11, the 2008 global economic meltdown, and now 3/11 of the Great East Japan Earthquake.

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Philip C. Wander

Philip C. Wander is the Presidential Professor of Rhetoric and Communication Studies at Loyola Marymount University.