Of Pandemics and Pecuniary Problems: A Rhetorical Ecology at Work
Life is a series of decisions. That’s an oft-repeated cliché, but for good reason. From what we eat for breakfast to which career we pursue, the courses of our lives are dictated by our responses to the situations we encounter. But how much agency do we really possess when making these decisions? Is our response — like Muckelbauer’s sunflower — dictated by the situation itself, preconditioned by what George Kennedy calls a “rhetorical code”?[1] How do our arguments come into play? These questions strike at the very heart of huge philosophical (dare I say theological?) concepts like free will and individual choice, but their answers can be observed in the choices we make in our own lives — like, say, my choice to change schools last summer. My ‘decision’ to transfer to WWU was no decision at all. My mother didn’t persuade me to change schools by herself, and I didn’t make the decision based on my own preferences. Rather, I existed in a kind of ecosystem made up of distinct actors which ensured that I would be persuadable (vulnerable, as Jenny Rice would say) when facing my mother’s reasoning.[2] To see this ecosystem at work, we have to travel all the way back to the pre-lockdown wonderland that was the winter of 2020.
In mid-March, I returned home from Trinity Western University in Langley, BC, fearing that impending border closings would strand me in Canada. Still, I had every intention of returning when the health crisis had ended (as evidenced by the twenty-one overdue library books sitting in my room). As the pandemic dragged on, it became clear to me that a quick return to campus was unlikely, and that future semesters would consist of Zoom sessions and Moodle discussion forums. Having chosen that school because of its campus and tight-knit student community, the prospect of a year spent exclusively online undermined my entire rationale for attending.
The seismic shift of pandemic learning was exacerbated by pre-existing economic factors. The first was the tuition assistance program offered by my job, which was only valid for schools in the USA — a fact I discovered too late, while registering for classes at TWU in Fall 2019. I also discovered that the cost of attending WWU as a commuter was less than half of what I was paying at TWU, making it difficult to justify paying so high a price for the same quality of online education. The seeds of doubt and economic insecurity had been sown long before the pandemic, but a global health crisis proved to be fertile soil for my uncertainty.
With the stage set for persuasion, in strode my mother. While on a relaxing, routine walk down our neighborhood streets, she brought up the idea of transferring to WWU, using both family ties (my sister was currently attending, and my maternal grandfather was an alumnus) and the aforementioned economic reasons. She also brought up my previous decision to switch majors from chemistry to history, arguing that I should consider going to a cheaper school since my new degree path was less lucrative than the STEM career I had originally planned on pursuing. I was hesitant at first, but a few weeks of budgeting and introspection led me to begin the transfer process later that summer.
Now, after reading all that, you may be thinking, “gee, it sure sounds like your mom’s argument convinced you to make your choice.” But her argument was only successful because the conditions I listed before had already made me open to the idea of transferring. It wasn’t some sudden, mind-blowing epiphany that my mother had pushed me to; instead, her argument merely highlighted the ways that I was already being persuaded by my situation, validating the doubts I was already harboring. On their own, my mother’s efforts at persuasion would have been fruitless. Yet she and I existed within an ecosystem — the pandemic, budgeting issues, my change in major — which was actively compelling me to transfer, lending a certain gravity to her reasoning that would not have existed otherwise. There were no decisive actors here, but variations within the system created one of Laurie Gries’ “charged moments” of persuasion.[3]
“But wait,” you might say, “if our arguments are useless without environmental factors, does that mean we’re less important than our ecosystem?” On the contrary, I’m saying that our arguments are part of this ecosystem. My mother and these other actors were codependent parts of this particular instance of persuasion — if one was missing, there would have been no persuasion at all, and I’d still be racking up student debt at TWU.
[1] George Kennedy, “A Hoot in the Dark: The Evolution of General Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25 no. 1 (1992), 7–8. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40238276?origin=JSTOR-pdf.; John Muckelbauer, “Implicit Paradigms of Rhetoric: Aristotelian, Cultural, and Heliotropic,” Rhetoric Through Everyday Things, ed. Scott Barnett and Casey Boyle (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2016), 30–41.
[2] Lynda Walsh, Nathaniel A. Rivers, Jenny Rice, Laurie E. Gries, Jennifer L. Bay, Thomas Rickert & Carolyn R. Miller, “Forum: Bruno Latour on Rhetoric,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 47 no. 5 (2017), 435–436, DOI: 10.1080/02773945.2017.1369822.
[3] Walsh, et al, “Forum: Bruno Latour on Rhetoric,” 434.
