"Persuasion Beyond Logic: The Importance of Rhetorical Training for Military Officers"
About the AuthorMegan McIntyre is a PhD student at the University of South Florida where she works as Mentoring Coordinator for the University's First Year Composition program. Her research interests include writing pedagogy and practice as well as the intersections of rhetoric, writing, ethics, and politics. ContentsDonald Rumsfeld and Operation Iraqi Freedom Winning Hearts & Minds: The Way Forward in Afghanistan Rhetorical Training & Effective Intercultural Communication |
Rhetorical Training and Effective Intercultural CommunicationThe renewed attention to persuasion as an integral part of Petraeus’ strategy moving forward in Afghanistan necessitates an educational focus on persuasive, responsible intercultural communication as part of officers’ training protocols. In the Spring 2005 issue of Military Review, Colonel Maxie McFarland argues that communication will be far more integral to the success of a COIN strategy than combat. “Working with diverse cultures in their home element,” he argues, “is more a matter of finesse, diplomacy, and communication than the direct application of coercive power” (62). Because of the importance of communicative action in irregular conflicts, it will be necessary for all military and civilian personnel, not just officers and other leaders, to be skilled in communication and persuasion. As Timothy Cunnigham argues in his 2010 article in Joint Force Quarterly, “military and civilian agencies must co-opt the skills of nearly all personnel charged with carrying out disparate aspects of a mission or specific policy” (111). Educating actors at all levels of the military is necessary, Cunningham argues, in order “to meet the exigencies of tomorrow’s highly complex communication environment[;] there can be no distinction between actor and communicator and no separation between functions” (Cunningham 114). Because personnel at all levels will be tasked with dealing with locals, communication must be connected to the cultural training mandatory for soldiers in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. Communication is a complicated task even outside of a conflict zone. Inside a conflict zone, especially one with an unfamiliar culture and customs, communication becomes an even more complicated proposition. In such a situation, according to Allison Abbe and Standley Halpin “sociocultural factors affect every level of engagement…from the interpersonal interactions while negotiating with local leaders, military advisers training their counterparts, to group and societal engagements during strategic communication and influence operations” (20). Every interaction a soldier has in a country is mediated by communication and governed by cultural rules and norms. Intercultural Inquiry: Linda Flowers and the Importance of Situated KnowledgeUnderstanding these rules and norms is key, but understanding the ways in which intercultural communication differs from more traditional communication within our own groups is equally important. One model for better engaging in ethical intercultural communication comes from Linda Flowers. In her 2003 article “Talking across Difference: Intercultural Rhetoric and the Search for Situated Knowledge,” Flowers suggests that a translation model of intercultural discursive practices, in which interlocutors from outside a particular culture attempt to translate those cultural practices into practices that make sense in their own cultural context, fails to offer a balanced and ultimately successful cultural encounter. Instead, Flowers suggests “an intercultural rhetoric based on inquiry” (40). This model is “a deliberate meaning-making activity” in which “difference is not read as a problem” that must be solved through re-appropriation or translation of that difference. Instead, difference constructs “situated knowledge,” which can be “sought out as a resource for constructing more grounded and actionable understanding” (40). Flowers’s recognition of the limitations of traditional approaches of intercultural communication is echoed by Abbe and Halpin in their 2010 report in the Army War College’s Parameters. Abbe and Halpin suggest that traditional communication strategies “reflect a general bias assuming that other nationalities are much like Americans, a critical assumption that needs to be addressed in culture training” (22). Understanding situated knowledge, which cannot be translated from one cultural context to another but must rather be understood as a product of a culture’s history and practices, is a foundational part of Flowers's model of intercultural communication. Understanding situated knowledge is also a highly rhetorical endeavor. By transforming what had been “silent knowledge” into a “generous interpretative resource," made possible by people "reveal[ing] more of the richly contextualized stories behind the story at work in their own meaning making,” military and civilian personnel in theatres of war might discover important tactical and operational information (Flowers 42). Such a scenario is only possible, however, if these soldiers, contractors, and diplomats are fluent in the language and customs of the target group and well versed in the rhetorical methods of persuasion. Such a scenario also requires, however, an expanded view of what rhetoric is and is capable of. For Aristotle, as I have noted, rhetoric was a matter of seeing all the available means of persuasion. This certainly offers a useful way of thinking about rhetoric in intercultural situations, but Aristotle’s definition is incomplete in some ways. Like Aristotle, Isocrates describes rhetoric as tool of persuasion, but he suggests rhetoric is useful for more than persuasion. Near the beginning of Antidosis, Isocrates argues that rhetoric is the faculty with which “we both contend against others on matters which are open to dispute,” but it is also a method through which we can “seek light for ourselves on things which are unknown” (327). Rhetoric is more than a persuasive tool; it is an epistemological one. If we add to these definitions Flowers’s definition of rhetoric, we might come to see the ways in which rhetoric can function beyond its caricature as mere manipulation. In the same article in which she lays out a new way of thinking about intercultural communication, Flowers offers her own way of seeing rhetorical activity: it is “the art of constructing knowledge in the face of uncertainty, of building best cases and consensus in situations that call for judgment” (Flowers 43). Because the world is not constructed by facts alone, because meaning-making and action require us to consider intangible, immeasurable factors, logical reasoning is insufficient for making judgments, and so rhetoric allows us to function even in the most uncertain situations. Returning to Flowers’s model of intercultural inquiry, then, we find an expanded role for rhetoric in intercultural communication situations. In this form, rhetoric acts as a tool capable of mediating genuine interactions and allows the speaker to view the interaction as “not just an event” but as “a social/cultural activity shaped by the forces of history and material reality, ideology, and cognition” (42). Indeed, “intercultural rhetoric operates, by definition and by choice, in a space where discourse practices and complex networks of situated knowledge are known to differ,” and it views these difference as the most appropriate foundation for shared knowledge (43). And a range of rhetorical tools, including persuasion, allow speakers to address the “multiple – and inevitably contradictory – agendas, from self-expression to advocacy to collaborative understanding” at work in these communication situations (44). This expanded view of intercultural communication and inquiry fits neatly within the military’s current view of cultural training. In his 2005 discussion of cultural education, for example, Colonel McFarland notes that “the emerging importance of cultural identity and its inherent frictions make it imperative for soldiers and leaders—military and civilian—to understand societal and cultural norms of populaces in which they operate and function” (62). These norms can then be used, McFarland argues, “as tools for shaping operations and the effects they expect to achieve” (62). Like Colonel McFarland, Abbe and Halpin (2010) suggest that cultural knowledge must be contextual and fully integrated into soldiers’ understanding of the larger strategic mission: “culture is best taught as a factor across full-spectrum operations, an enabler supporting other capabilities, rather than an ‘a la carte’ supplement to conventional warfighter knowledge and skills” (30). According to all of these authors, cultural knowledge cannot be separated from cultural communication or decision making. Instead, according to Flowers’s discussion, intercultural communication and inquiry offer ways to navigate and even utilize the very cultural differences that currently seem so problematic in Iraq and Afghanistan. |