Identity

I just spent much of my synthesis paper talking about how identity helps us create the rhetorical filter through which we view the world. Ramage brings up this idea for me, again, in chapter 3. I spoke heavily about how the decisions that we make have the capacity to change everything about our identity, and Ramage speaks to this as well. I feel that it is beyond true that our decisions shape us every bit as much as our appearance, upbringing, hometown, schooling, and everything that we are born into, "Absent a fixed order that assigns everything a value, meanwhile, we are free to construct and choose our identities; but with that freedom comes the necessity of evaluating and negotiating our options. Which means in turn that our beliefs, values, relationships, status, and all the things that matter most deeply to us are also subject to negotiation and evaluation" (70). I feel that because these sorts of things matter most to us, we are inherently shaped by them.

While we are shaped by these facets of our identities, more often than not we are inclined to identify with the majority. We often identify with the majority, even when it goes against our actual beliefs for fear of rejection. Here Ramage brings in rhetoric and its persuasive power. Society holds the belief that everyone should conform to the majority, and when people do not they are shunned for it. Ramage points out "when the dominant belief systems attempt either to ignore alternative belief systems or to coerce them into compliance with their own, they pay a very high price" (70). A divide gets created between the two opposing viewpoints and we need rhetoric to reconcile that divide. Rhetoric gives us a means of finding some middle ground between the two sides. Rhetoric allows people that stand on opposite shores of an issue some sort of way for agreement, "Truth for rhetoric is a public matter requiring agreement among people" (71). This makes me think of politics and how difficult it is for our House and Senate to agree on anything because the two different parties struggle to find some sort of agreement. If rhetoric were properly employed in politics, and both parties recognized that there are rights and wrongs on both sides and came to a compromise for the betterment of the whole country and not their singular party, then the divide between the two could be lessened. In the same way, this could help people reconcile differences between the things that people value and understanding each other. If rhetoric was properly employed in personal situations, we could more easily compromise and understand where other people are coming from. This would also reconcile the differences between the majority and minority beliefs and identities.

I know I focused mostly on the early part of Chapter 3 and sort of neglected the rest, but given that my mind has been captivated by identity for the majority of the last few weeks, it only seemed fitting to keep talking about it.

Also, I just remembered that I forgot to take a look at the prompt for the first post of the week, so I'm going to touch on that stuff right now! Sorry team! Okay, so rhetoric as a way of persuasion and argumentation. Well, in my mind, when I think of rhetoric as a way of arguing or persuading another party, my mind always goes back to politics and personal altercations. Often politics and personal altercations are driven by the fact that two people or parties see things in two opposite ways, and they can't make the other party understand where they are coming from. Both parties are set in their beliefs and intend to make the other party see things their way. When thinking about rhetoric as a way of persuasion rather than a way of looking at the world, seems to me as if we are saying the act of using rhetoric is persuading someone to see a point. I think I realized, in reading this that rhetoric is not just a way of looking at the world, but also a way of persuading and arguing. I feel like all semester I have spent my time ignoring the idea that rhetoric is persuasion because that sounds so simple and manipulative. Yet in ignoring that, I had to come to the realization (doing this reading) that I can't ignore that fact about rhetoric. Rhetoric isn't only a way of looking at the world, it is also a way of arguing and persuading--and that's not a bad thing!