Laying the Groundwork

This site is called Rhetoric for the Renaissance Man, so in letting you know what we’ll be doing here, I thought it might help to start with what I mean by that title, then explain a bit about who this site might appeal to (and might not), who I am and what has driven me to put this together, and lastly, a brief overview of the kinds of things we’ll dive into as we go.

Who Is the Renaissance Man?

The Renaissance Man is both a figure of history, describing multi-talented figures like Leonardo Da Vinci, Giordano Bruno, John Dee, and others, but also an aspirational, iconic figure of today. When we call someone “a Renaissance Man” these days, we don’t tend to mean that he has completed the Quadrivium and the Trivium, mastered the Art of Memory, and is an accomplished painter and sculptor besides (though, likely we’d be better off if we had more fellows like that). Instead, when we use the term, we hearken to the ideal that these past masters demonstrated through their many talents: to strive for excellence across many fields, not only because excellence in each of those fields is worthwhile separately, but because excellence in any field makes you better at every field, and these effects compound. A writer who can paint is a better painter and writer, but if he also learns to sculpt, now he is an even better painter, writer, and sculptor.

So, the Renaissance Man pursues excellence, arête, in all that he does, not as separate endeavors, but as one great work – the holistic cultivation of his mind, body, and spirit.

What is Rhetoric?

Rhetoric is the classical art of getting your way through the spoken or written word – what today we might be more likely to call “persuasive communication.” From very nearly its earliest days as a formal discipline in the West, it has been recognized that Rhetoric is a multi-faceted art: Aristotle divided the three pillars of effective rhetoric as logos, ethos, and pathos (logic, credibility, and emotion). So, you cannot expect to effectively convince people to see things your way if you only rely on facts and reason, nor only on your past credibility, nor only on appeals to emotion, at least not consistently, but rather, you must consider all three in any case you try to make. There’s also another factor that complicates what Rhetoric is and how to do it well: it’s not only about you. It’s also about your audience. What do they want? care about? find credible? get worked up about?

What all of this means is that rhetoric actually makes for a fantastic gateway into the many fields a Renaissance Man might wish to dive into. Logic, mathematics, economics, political theory, and other fields to understand and craft reasonable arguments that adequately account for the facts. Ethics, philosophy, history, anthropology, and others to understand what it is that makes a man credible to others, and how to cultivate that. Psychology, literature, art, and music to understand what stirs human emotions.

And then, when it comes time to actually use your rhetoric, there’s an audience there to put it all to the test. Theory and abstractions must find a tangible, practical form. Your hypotheses about what your audience will find convincing, compelling, and resonant will be put to the test and you will learn the truth. This is a far more efficient and effective way to learn about the world and yourself than just sitting in your room reading and journaling (not that you shouldn’t sit in your room reading and journaling – it’s just that you shouldn’t just do those things). Best of all, as you test what works and what doesn’t work, as you get better at judging what your audience wants and needs to hear if they’re to change their minds, take a particular course of action, or feel a certain way about things, your ability to get what you want out of life will dramatically increase.

Who Is This Site For?

As I’ve put this site together, I’ve had in mind an “ideal reader,” and I thought it might be helpful to spell that out so you can see how well it matches up with yourself and what you want. If not everything in this description resonates, you’re certainly welcome to stay, but if none of it does, you might be in the wrong place, and I wish you well spending your time in some way more valuable to you.

This site is for ambitious young men who want to learn how to ethically achieve great things, especially by means of persuasive communication (but not only that).

(Ladies, y’all are welcome to stay if you like, of course, but I think a lot about my style and the kinds of things I have to recommend will just “land” with more guys than gals.)

If you are wondering if you’re one of these ambitious young men, let me ask you: are you hungry for the opportunity and permission to be ambitious, to reach for great things, to build something? Not to struggle and grind for empty stand-ins for achievement: Money and Job titles. Degrees and Certificates. Likes and Shares. No, to build. A business, an institution, a movement. Something that will allow you to live and demonstrate your values through your work, something that will make life and the world better for the folks that you care about. And then they will reward you with those things, not as ends in themselves, but as the fruits of the higher ends you have pursued instead. If that’s what you mean by “ambitious,” then I’m talking to you.

And if you want to build something, and you feel like the typical paths shown to you as options won’t let you do that, there’s a good chance you’ve noticed there’s something off about most of the default paths to success. The need to specialize in ever-more obscure niches of niches of niches. An expectation to learn and use an ever-growing, but also somehow ever-changing set of digital tools that purport to make your job easier but just leave you feeling busier and more hassled. And the requirement to follow precise, mechanistic procedures, under the watchful eye of “expert” managers and bureaucrats, within the confines of miles of red tape. If you look at this hyper-specialized, over-technicalized, and turbo-managerialized lifestyle and think “isn’t there a better way?” then this site is for you.

Who Is This Site Not For?

On the other hand, if you’re looking for a way to get rich quick, whether by coming up with a superficially appealing product or conning people with your silver tongue, this site is not for you. We’ll be too busy working out our values, how those can inform our personal and professional goals, and then putting in the long, likely slow, work to make that happen.

If you’re just looking for a random grab bag of “how to communicate better” or “how to persuade people” ‘tricks,’ then again, this site isn’t for you. Here, we present any techniques or approaches as part of a unified whole, something that relates to and must be considered in light of all of the other pieces. You can’t talk about persuasion without talking about goals without talking about ethics without talking about values.

If you don’t much care about seeking your own flourishing, and that of those around you, through cultivating virtues, you’re in the wrong place. I don’t have hard and fast ideas on which virtues you cultivate, there’s room for reasonable people to come to different conclusions, but I think that everything else you’ll find here falls apart without a foundation of virtues.

Lastly, if your only interest in rhetoric is the power it might grant you over others, as an end of itself, then this is definitely not the right site for you. As the old saying goes, power makes a good servant, but a terrible master. One of the reasons virtues and values are so fundamental to what we’ll talk about here is because everything else is, basically, a tool for getting yourself more power. Setting better goals makes you more powerful. Being more productive makes you more powerful. Being more persuasive makes you more powerful. And any time you have power, you have to consider ethics, because ethics without power are toothless, but power without ethics is monstrous.

Who Am I, and Where Did All This Come From?

So, who the heck am I to share this stuff with you? My name is Jeff Russell, and currently, I teach business communication skills at both the undergraduate and masters levels. Before I tell you a bit of my background, though, I want to share the insight that started me on the path of creating this site.

You see, I realized one day that I was literally a sophist. If you’re not familiar, the “sophists” were teachers of rhetoric in ancient Greece right before and during the time of the great, classical philosophers. They arose as public assemblies became more important in more city-states, and so the ability to speak persuasively was in high demand, and these guys purported to teach that. They also tended to hold to the position that “I just teach how to convince people, not what you should or shouldn’t try to convince them of.”

Now, if you’ve heard the word before but didn’t know the history, you might be wondering why these days it tends to have a fairly negative connotation. Well, the short answer is because Socrates hated these guys. He thought that the “morally neutral” stance they took was not only un-admirable, but also philosophically incoherent, so he spent a lot of time tearing into these guys (see Plato’s Gorgias for one). Now, modern scholars are a bit less down on the pre-Socratic sophists than most in the past were, following Socrates’s lead, but I have to admit, the realization that that’s basically what I do wasn’t exactly a pleasant one.

On the other hand, I do actually think there’s value in learning how to more effectively speak, write, and otherwise communicate – it makes you more effective at everything else you want to do. And obviously I don’t think it’s bad or wrong to have goals or want to be effective at them. So, then the idea occurred to me: what if I were to figure out how to be an “anti-sophist sophist?” A teacher of rhetoric who does not feign indifference to what ends his arts are put to, but instead tries to make the cultivation of character an integral part of those arts.

And so, that’s what I’m here to try to do. I fell in love with the Classical emphasis on virtue and excellence as a Classics major in college. I tried to put that into action by joining the Army, where I was an Airborne Infantryman. Then, I went to business school and discovered an interdisciplinary approach that could actually make some money, which I did as a digital strategy consultant and executive coach. Realizing that the part of my work I liked the best was helping others grow their skills and get better, I became a lecturer at a prestigious university. Along the way, at each step in that winding path, I learned things and had insights that I have kept with me, but at each one, I also realized some things that I can’t stand and want nothing to do with, and both of those things have helped me to clarify my values and the virtues I try to live by.

What You’ll Find on This Site

One of the best aspects of discussing things from/for the point of view of the Renaissance Man is the great variety it allows for in relevant topics, so over time, this site may end up with material from very far afield (as a sampler, the books I’m reading or have most recently read have been an ecology textbook, an Austrian-School analysis of the comparative economic impacts of monarchy and democracy, and a hard-boiled detective novel). That said, the core topics that we’ll flesh out first, and that will most likely get the most ongoing attention, are the following:

• Values & Ethics: Getting clear on what we actually want and need out of life, and what kind of character traits we need to practice to help us get them and still be able to look ourselves in the mirror. This lays the groundwork for everything else: what’s worth learning, what goals are worth going after, and so on.
• Learning: If we want to apply knowledge from multiple fields, we first have to learn those fields. There are more and less effective methods for learning, and some useful strategies for prioritizing what to learn and how much work to put into it, depending on how much depth you need. Learning is how you get the “raw material” for everything else will cover – strategic insights, productivity techniques, examples of good speaking and writing, and so forth.
• Strategy: Figuring out how best to use the means at your disposal to achieve the ends that you want, all while dealing with various kinds of uncertainty. Rhetoric itself, the actual speaking and writing, is a means, so it helps to have a clear end to turn it toward.
• Getting Things Done: Once you have your big picture goals and what steps you need to follow to reach them, you have to actually, you know, do the work. All too often we either put off work, or do the less-important but easier or more pressing stuff, and having some tools to keep you focused on getting the things done that need doing can make you more likely to achieve your strategies.
• Persuasion: Often, getting things done requires convincing others to help you, and some concepts and techniques for persuasion apply equally well to speaking and writing.
• Speaking Well: The original meaning of “rhetoric:” public speaking. Even in a highly digital world, the ability to stand in front of a room full of people and speak with confidence and style is a very powerful tool in your toolkit.
• Writing Well: Writing well is arguably more important than ever now that so many are relying on digital tools to produce a facsimile of writing for them. Good writing is good thinking, and often, you can get to much deeper, more polished insights in writing than you can in speaking.
• Leadership: Lastly, if you want to build something with much scale, you will likely need to involve other people, and once you have a team, you need to step up and be a leader. I’m skeptical that leadership can be “taught,” but I do think it can be cultivated, and teaching can help the willing student figure out how to go about cultivating it, so we’ll try to cover some of that.