Recently, as I was teaching class, I used the term ethos and a student raised his hand to question what the term meant. When I said, "Well, it's something like the character of the writer/speaker," he responded with another good question: "Why not just say 'character,' then?"
The simple answer would be that although ethos is about the "character" of the speaker, it also about more. That definition simply won't suffice for our purposes. Consider the following passage taken from an opinion column in Newsweek:
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Victoria Will, Princeton sophomore, is in her dormitory room noodling on her computer when it says, "ding." Glancing at its screen, she says, matter-of-factly, "Bettina is sending me a message." Ms. Will's father, assuming Bettina is a friend e-mailing from another college, asks, "Where is Bettina?" Ms. Will points to the wall in front of her: "Next door." Why, asks her father, doesn't Bettina just walk the 10 feet to Ms. Will's room? Ms. Will's answer, a look of bemused condescension, expresses her opinion that the question betrays an antiquated person's incomprehension of the New. How much does all this new stuff matter? Have new information and communication technologies really produced a "new economy" and "changed everything"? George F. Will, "Wow! Or Maybe Just
Sort Of" |
What can we tell about the "character" of the speaker? Well, if we don't know George Will (either personally or from reading several of his columns which appear usually twice per month in Newsweek), then we have to look to his text. What we find there is someone skeptical of contemporary technology, at least at it is being deployed by the "young," like his daughter Victoria. Which isn't to say that Will is a Luddite. Certainly, that's a big jump to make just from this excerpt. However, look at how he writes about his daughter, "Ms. Will." That distance from the subject of discussion seems to carry with it a certain amount of mocking or sarcasm, which becomes clearer as Will asks the question about Bettina just walking "10 feet" to his daughter's dorm room.
In this passage, the ethos that George Will establishes for himself isn't so much about "expertise" on technology or the projected "laziness" of Victoria and Bettina. Rather, through mocking these two women and their behavior, he establishes himself as someone who wouldn't do what they've done, who wouldn't use expensive technology (computers and the Internet) for something more easily or thriftily accomplished by walking "10 feet." What Will does here isn't just about "character," but about his stance as a thinker and consequently as a writer. Likewise, we as readers — even in this short excerpt — may begin to identify with Will and his philosophy, or we may go the opposite route and identify with Victoria and Bettina. However, we can be pretty sure that Will wants us to see his ethos as someone who can speak to the issue at hand, not as some old fogey who can't abide change.
Now, consider the following opening paragraph from a CD review in Spin magazine:
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The problem wasn't that Rage Against the Machine fought authority and authority always won. It's that the fight always seemed so one-sided – like Edward Norton kicking his own ass in Fight Club. With 1999's The Battle of Los Angeles, Rage perfected a bruising, precise rap-metal that didn't slight either side of the hyphen. But on the way from the record store to the revolution, Limp Bizkit et al. hijacked Rage's mandate, convincing bitter, apolitical white kids that they were the wretched of the earth. Citing a breakdown of the band's decision-making process (collectivist speak for "creative differences"), possibly weary of the struggle, frontman Zach de la Rocha quit the machine in October 2000, promising to keep hope alive with a hip-hop solo record. Machine 2, Rage 0. Alex Pappademas, Review of Rage
Against the Machine's "Renegades" |
In this excerpt, Pappademas establishes his credentials to speak about Rage Against the Machine through his knowledge of what the band has recorded, how these recordings have been part of a larger music industry movement in the 1990s, and how the personal lives of the band members have had an effect on Rage itself. Whereas Will tried to dis-identify himself from his daughter and her friend by mocking their use of technology, here, Pappademas tries to identify with the Rage fan who would likely have seen a movie like Fight Club, who would know Edward Norton was major star in the film, and who would, as well, know Limp Bizkit and perhaps even be annoyed by their music. Likewise, this fan would know their discography and would probably be concerned about Zach de la Rocha's decision to leave the band.
These short excerpts indicate perhaps one of the most important ways writers (whom we'll refer to as rhetors from now on) persuade their audience of something. Although many people would argue that the writer doesn't matter, we know that how writers characterize themselves in non-fiction prose says a great deal about how we as readers should feel about the subject. Therefore, the ethical appeal can be very effective as a persuasive strategy.
For the Greeks, character came from an individual's reputation and behavior (Crowley and Hawhee 105). So, if we were to ask about the ethos of now ex-President Bill Clinton, we would find many who would say his reported behavior in office destroyed any belief that "the people" had in his character as a husband or a leader. Likewise, if we ask others about the verbal gaffes of George W. Bush, both before he took office and during his first few months in office, we would find many who would think him dumb, perhaps even illiterate, for such gems as "Rarely is the question asked, Is our children learning?" These very public performances affected how people who watched interpreted the behavior of these two men. Interpretation, of course, implies that their performance is read through a lens that reflects both personal and collective biases in individuals. (We'll speak more about this later)
In his Rhetoric, Aristotle suggested that more important than the personal life of the speaker is the way that the speaker performs in the speech. The speaker, or writer, creates through the words he/she chooses, as well as other features of the text, a "character" that can speak to us. Again, much of this "character" depends on how different audiences assign value. Consider the following example in which a minister of the Nation of Islam speaks about the difference he perceives between the Holocaust of the Jews in WWII and the Middle Passage and enslavement of the Africans during Colonial and Antebellum times in America:
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The condition of the Black man in America
today is part and parcel, Anna Deveare Smith, Fires in the Mirror, 1993, pp. 52-55. |
Notice how this speaker's ethos can interfere with the message itself. Many readers will be turned off by the angry tone — although others would probably contend that the anger is justified because of the subject matter. Some people have been turned off by the political sentiments expresses by other members of the Nation of Islam, so these readers might believe that this speaker is fabricating his "facts" about the Middle Passage and the treatment of the enslaved in America. This excerpt from Anna Deveare Smith's Fires in the Mirror demonstrates that "facts" are often less persuasive than the ethos of the speaker.
The examples above can be parsed into demonstrating two different sorts of ethos. Situated ethos is the kind of character developed around the speaker/writer. Whenever we are dealing with writers we know, writers who have been talked about a great deal or popular figures that we encounter in the press, these writers have an established ethos that is situated in who they are and how they have been represented. For the classical rhetor, this situatedness was part of their family name and reputation. Have you ever wondered why so many places in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible contain long catalogues of family tress — so and so begat so and so and so forth? In such early Hebrew culture, family genealogy was important; they believed that the apple may not have fallen far from the tree, so a disreputable father would signal a disreputable son, and likewise, an honorable family line spoke well for the latest branch of the tree.
Invented ethos, on the other hand, is the kind of character developed "in the text," the ways that the writer's words and phrases, as well as his/her selection of examples and ideas, establish the writer's authority. That doesn't mean that this type of ethos isn't subject to the biases of the reader. We tried to make the point in the previous section that such biases always filter through in our readings, although we can learn to work against them or suspend such judgements.
The case of the most recent presidents demonstrates the continued value of these two types of ethos. With Bill Clinton, a man who came from a poor family in Arkansas and was the child of divorced and re-married parents, his situated ethos had to be worked against in order to become president. Although we tend to believe that "anyone can be president," Clinton was one of the first to actually prove this statement. But remember, he wasn't just anyone. He was a Rhodes Scholar and had a prestigious college education, one which his family couldn't have afforded without the scholarships Clinton received through hard work. To the extent that Clinton had to work harder to attend such school, his invented ethos became very persuasive to the Democratic National Convention and to a nation that wanted to believe that anyone could indeed be president.
Unlike Clinton, George W. Bush was the son of a political family — his father had been vice-President for eight years and was then President for four years before Clinton, and he had served in many political offices before that. Likewise, the Bush family was considerably more "monied" than the Clinton family. During the election, pundits made much of Bush's "hardships"; one comedy news show, The Daily Show on Comedy Central, produced a short mock-advertisement for Bush which discussed the "amazing lack of obstacles he's had to undercome." In fact, the commercial notes, George W. had such a rough childhood that he had to rely on the "Barbara Bush Scholarship" to attend Yale. The humor comes through effectively and makes an interesting appeal to an audience that might be annoyed at he privilege that George W. Bush had experienced. In this case, Bush's situated ethos — after all, he had no real control over who his parents were or how much money they had — could have worked against him. At the same time, many looked at George W. as a re-incarnation (of sorts) of his father, so one could argue that these voters cast their vote for the son as much as for the father who sired him.
These two examples are more complex than a study of ethos can explain, but we cannot underestimate the various ways that notions of ethos worked for and/or against these two Presidents of the United States. Perhaps what we should definitely recognize is that both candidates paid a great deal of money for expert rhetors to help them use their ethos to their best advantage. It would seem, of course, that both candidates got their money's worth.
Although the examples we've discussed bring up important issues like the "situatedness" or "inventedness" of ethos, they also point to how important context is for both the writer and the text. In the next section, we will discuss at length the issue kairos, what the Greeks recognized as the "opportune moment" for a particular speech or discussion. Here, we want to look at how a given context affects the ethos of the speaker.
One concern writers continually face involves where they publish their work. These different forums affect how the writer is perceived by readers. Think of different forums: an academic journal that students and university faculty use for research; a popular teen magazine that caters to the interests and needs of young girls (Teen Beat, Seventeen); a news magazine that sees its audience as educated citizens (Newsweek, Time); a business magazine that focuses its attention on financial concerns, as well as issues involved in workplace management (Business Week); a web zine for "goths"; a web site devoted to archiving materials on a particular subject. When writers publish their work in these different places, their ethos is effected. What would people think of George W. Bush if he put a discussion of his budget in Teen Beat? How seriously would we read a fifteen-year-old's argument for better allowance if we saw it in Business Week? How "reliable" do we think writer's facts are when we see them in Newsweek as opposed to when we see their work on their personal web page? These issues of context affect the way that readers bestow authority on the writer.