Umberto Eco: The Wolf and the Lamb
Umberto Eco’s new collection of essays, entitled “Turning back the clock: hot wars and media populism,” is a mixed bag. Some of the essays are so specific to particular moments in Italian politics that they are hard for Americans to understand. Some are fun and amusing but aren’t of much lasting interest. Some, however, are masterpieces of the genre.
One of the best essays is called “The wolf and the lamb: The rhetoric of oppression.” The centerpiece of the essay is the fable of the wolf and the lamb who happened to approach a river at the same time, looking for a drink. The wolf accuses the lamb of various offences, including muddying the water of the stream, all of which the lamb rhetorically refutes (the lamb is actually downstream of the wolf, for example). Having lost the rhetorical battle, the wolf goes ahead and devours the lamb anyway. Eco then goes on to discuss the various types of political discourse that is the political equivalent, including the United States’ series of arguments justifying an Iraq war that had already been decided on.
I thought about this as I read Dana Milbank’s excellent piece in the Washington Post this AM. Milbank describes the absurd series of arguments used by a set of Republicans to argue that: 1.) Barack Obama is not born in the United States (there’s a claim his Hawaiian birth certificate is fake, which pisses me off as it looks just as real as my Hawaiian birth certificate!), 2.) if he were born in the United States he still isn’t eligible for presidency (a murky vague claim that because he could have technically claimed dual US-Kenyan citizenship, that invalidates his citizen rights as a natural born US citizens), and 3.) if he were eligible he’s too morally corrupt for the job. This seems to me the same rhetorical trick of the wolf, or at least a similar one: the outcome (vehement opposition to Obama) is determined prior to the rhetorical argument. Maybe lawyers and PR men are comfortable with this state of affairs, but scientists are not- if debate is not between two sides who are willing to honestly consider that they are wrong, it’s not scientific, and it’s not much of a debate.
