Ethos is an attitude.
Your rhetorical character comes from your audience’s impression, not your saintliness.
This is my Uncle Ward, Arlington Ward de Canizares Jr.
I never met him; he died at age 22 high over the English Channel on Easter Sunday, 1944. Ward was a top student in high school, a good boy who kept a commonplace book full of inspiring and patriotic passages from the books he loved. He was a skilled outdoorsman; his trout hangs in my writing cabin.
Ward volunteered for the Army Air Corps right out of college and was named head cadet in flight school. The Army sent him to Cambridge, England, where he dated the local girls between missions. He still found time to write to his mother every day. I have his letters with me. They contain the sort of exciting scenes of aerial dogfights that would terrify a mother—diving his heavy, slow, nearly indestructible P-47 unto the agile Messerschmitt 109s, swiveling his head for planes that suddenly emerged from the clouds. Ward had a gift for writing, and also for dogfighting; he shot down two, and possibly three, enemy planes.
In his last letter, dated Sunday, April 9, 1944, he told his mother he had to fly another mission, but he assured her that he still planned to attend Easter Mass at the local Anglican church.
That afternoon, Ward flew across the English Channel with two wing mates. He helped to down one German and disabled two others. As they turned back for England, Ward saw that he was dangerously low on fuel. Suddenly a Messerschmitt came shooting from behind, and Ward heard the group's leader radio to stay on course; his wing mates would try to deal with the problem.
Ward refused the order and turned with the enemy, drawing his fire so his mates could get a good shot. The German peeled off in retreat, and the two pilots got behind Ward and headed toward England.
They droned over the Channel until Ward's engine cut off. His fuel was gone, he radioed. He was bailing out. He yanked the plane's ejection lever, the cockpit cover flew off, and an explosive charge launched him into the air. Sprung into the slipstream, he smacked into the tail and dropped two miles into the Channel, where a waiting rescue launch pulled him out of the water. He was dead before he fell. His body lay in the Army coroner's office in Cambridge, England, while my grandfather played organ in the Easter service at St. David's Church in Wayne.
I don’t tell you this story to brag about my heroic genes. I wasn’t a top student, never got that good at fishing, haven’t defended my country in battle, and wrote my mother, Ward’s younger sister, once a week at most.
Instead, Ward’s story offers an ideal illustration of rhetorical ethos, or the character projected to an audience. Was Ward actually perfect? If he had aged into an old man, would I have liked him?
In rhetorical terms, that hardly matters. My family believed he was perfect. Every Friday evening, Dad would drive my mother and their four kids to Wayne, Pennsylvania, for dinner at my grandfather’s house. (My grandmother died before I was born; family legend has it that she never recovered from the loss of her boy.) Ward’s large oil portrait, showing him in his army uniform, hung on the wall facing Grandaddy. I wrote about this scene for the New York Times (gift link).
But Ward’s ideal ethos certainly didn’t reflect the entire man. He was human. He undoubtedly had flaws, despite my mother’s reluctance to tell me what they were. (I was an annoying kid.)
Rhetorical character is never a person’s whole, imperfect, actual character. Even actual saints haven’t all been saintly. St. Angela of Foligno was rumored to have murdered her family to free herself up for her religious career. Grouchy St. Jerome was infamous for his intolerance of fellow sinners. St. Nicholas reportedly boxed the ears of a heretic. (That last may be myth, but I love the idea of a pugilistic Santa.) In short…
Ethos is an attitude. It’s the audience’s belief in who you are—whether you’re a good person who shares their values, wants what’s good for them, and has a practical solution to their problem.
When I was Ward’s age, I dropped out of graduate school and nervously interviewed for conservation magazines in Washington, D.C. “Just be yourself,” a friend advised. I thought: “Terrible idea.” I would never have hired the real me. The real me would have admitted that my entire environmental experience consisted of picketing a nuclear power plant in Vermont, which I had done only so I could hang out with a girl I had a crush on. No way was I going to project that sort of ethos.
This didn’t mean pretending I was Uncle Ward. In this and future posts, I’ll talk about the ways to stay honest while projecting the right kind of ethos for various audiences.
Ethos is one of Aristotle’s three “appeals” of rhetoric, the other two being logos and pathos. We tend to get all three wrong.
Ethos isn’t about being yourself. It’s about making an audience believe in an admirable character.
Logos isn’t all about logic. It’s about using, and changing, your audience’s beliefs and expectations. Even fallacies aren’t off-limits in rhetoric.
Pathos isn’t all about empathy. It’s about using, and changing, your audience’s emotions.
If you’re troubled by the ethics of rhetoric, see this earlier post. (The short version: You should be troubled.)
Back to ethos: Aristotle named three essential characteristics of an ideal leader. He named them eunoia (disinterest), phronesis (practical wisdom or knowhow), and arete (virtue).
Disinterest: Self-sacrifice represents eunoia’s highest value. Uncle Ward sacrificed his life to save his wingmates.
Practical wisdom: Ward mastered the controls of a notorious difficult airplane. Phronesis at its best. (See this post for more on practical wisdom.)
Virtue: The word comes from the Latin vir, meaning man. Ward, a delicate-looking young man with translucent skin and slightly bulging eyes, looked masculine enough in his leather flight jacket. But virtue doesn’t own a gender. I cover that in this post.
Of all the tools of rhetoric, disinterest tends to confuse us the most. Even many dictionaries don’t know the difference between disinterest and uninterest. A disinterested person isn’t bored or apathetic; instead, she has no dog in the hunt, no stake in the game. You don’t want an NFL referee who’s a passionate booster of one team; an arbiter should be disinterested. To use a term that has tragically lost its meaning, you want that referee to be candid.
In financial terms, “interest” is your share in the stake of an investment. If you don’t own an account in that bank, then you’re literally disinterested.
Our loss of disinterest and candor messes up our diets and politics. We follow the highly interested health advice of unscienced celebrities like Kylie Jenner and Jay-Z and even buy their branded foods. We vote for wealthy people because they’re wealthy; and good for them if the election makes them even wealthier.
When a politician resigns “in order to spend time with my family,” we consider him to be selfless. He’s a family man, sacrificing his career (or his mistress and prosecutors) for his loved ones! John Adams, who spent months away from his beloved Abigail in service to his country, is fulminating in his grave. Because of our amnesia over the concept of disinterest, eunoia counts as the weakest of all three ethos characteristics today.
Stick around for the stronger ones: practical wisdom and virtue. (Foreshadow: rhetorical virtue is rarely all that virtuous.)
