The difference between rhetoric and propaganda

Should we avoid manipulating people? Yes! No!

Back when I was maintaining my Figarospeech website, I received a question from a teacher named Josh M. To my shame, I never answered it until now. The difference between rhetoric and propaganda gets to the dark heart of the liberal art. Until we understand the tricky ethics, you and I can’t fully tap into the power of words.

This morning, my students and I fell into a conversation about the difference between rhetoric and propaganda.

Earlier in class, in introducing rhetoric, I stressed that its negative modern use was not fair or accurate (and, further, was often used by people using clever rhetorical tools, themselves) but when another student later called something propaganda, I corrected him and said that propaganda was a negative term.

Naturally, one clever student noticed the difference and asked why one thing was not supposed to be negative and something else was. I explained that rhetoric is the art of persuasion and that propaganda is the insistence on agreement, intended to shortcut thinking, rather than to invite it. Many were unconvinced and uncertain.

Am I way off? Is there more that I could use to help my students see the difference?

I love it when a student asks, “Isn’t manipulation a bad thing?” Not that it’s an easy question. Seduction certainly is bad when the seduced person regrets it next morning.

But is it bad to manipulate the poor soul who’s standing on a ledge ready to jump? The Founders used rhetoric—an art every one of them had studied—to help create a republic, and they structured a government that depended on deliberative persuasion.

Still, what do these examples have to do with propaganda?

This question calls for the good book, the Oxford English Dictionary. One really cannot consider oneself a true word nerd until one is registered on OED.com. (Your public library should give you access.) According to the OED, the word “propaganda” first meant evangelism. The Roman Catholic church used it around 1623 when it created a college to train missionary priests, named Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, or Congregation for the Propaganda of Faith. Latin being the lingua franca of the time, the church simply used the Latin gerund for “propagate”—to spread the Gospel, the good news of Christ. Did the young priests learn how to manipulate foreign peoples into become Christian? You bet they did. Rhetoric was the primary means. Was this a bad thing? The Vatican certainly didn’t think so. It believed it was saving souls. Talking them off the ledge of sin.

But…yeah. If you dispute the ends, then you have to see the means as less than pure. It didn’t take terribly long before “propaganda” took on its negative baggage. By 1790, an English writer was referring pejoratively to “disciples of the propaganda at Paris.” In 1800, the anti-federalist newspaper Aurora blasted the “illuminati” behind the “propaganda” in Delaware.

(Sidetrack: The Illuminati were a group founded in 1776 in Bavaria. Members dedicated themselves to liberal Enlightenment principles including rational science, separation of church and state, and human rights. Naturally, the Bavarian government outlawed the Illuminati, and the Roman Catholic Church persecuted them. While the Illuminati no longer exist as an Enlightenment-inspired organization, fancy conspiracy theories about them continue to spread. See the caption to the photo, below.)

One connotation of “propaganda” remains: It requires propagating. The OED defines the term as “the systematic dissemination of information, esp. in a biased or misleading way, in order to promote a particular cause or point of view, often a political agenda.”

President George W. Bush rightly believed that the most effective propaganda entails constant repetition:

“See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in…to kind of catapult the propaganda.”

Is that different from rhetoric? You could say that propaganda is a kind of rhetoric. It’s the black sheep of the rhetorical herd. In posts to come, we’ll explore all species, including evil seduction, lifesaving methods, motivational language, and parenting.

In short: Is rhetoric propaganda? It can be. But if you’re not systematically spreading your biased information (sorry, Mr. Musk), it’s just rhetoric.

The Great Seal, ratified by the Continental Congress in 1782. “He approves of the undertakings.” And, “A new order of the ages,” a line stolen from Virgil. The eye is the eye of Providence, shining over a pyramid representing the (human) undertakings. The pyramid’s 13 layers represent either the 13 colonies or the 13 bloodlines of the Illuminati, depending on how crazy you are.