Tom Friedman: The Gorgias of National Greatness

Tom Friedman-bashing being apparently the sport of the day, The Other McCain demonstrates the distinction between himself and a sophist like Freidman:

The unfortunate fact that an argument may be both superficially persuasive and fundamentally wrong constitutes an eternal temptation to the minds of those people who permit their admiration of literary excellence to overcome their common sense.



Go read David Brooks’ infamous 1997 ode to “national greatness” and you will find no shortage of literary skill. Clear away the superficial eloquence, however, and you recognize that Brooks is arguing on behalf of the same sort of big-government, guns-and-butter, welfare/warfare state agenda that led LBJ into the political/policy debacle of the Great Society, the Dien Bien Phu of 20th-century American liberalism.

In Plato's dialogues, Socrates preaches against Gorgias and his ilk for exactly this reason: their ability to make the weaker argument appear the stronger (that the Thirty Tyrants handed Socrates his cup of hemlock for a similar charge is a perfectly classical irony). For his part, Gorgias wrote of nothing as consistently as the power of language to distort the mind and enflame the heart. Whenever I read the Sophits, I am struck by how post-modern they sound, how easily their arguments work in an academic format.

The Reason post that McCain hangs his deconstruction on has great fun pointing and laughing at Friedman's endless repetition of himself, especially his current obsession with "nation-building at home" (because we don't have a nation at home now). It's tempting to ascribe this tedium to a) blundering stupidty, or b) sheer laziness. But more likely Friedman knows exactly what he's doing, and knows that if he says "nation-building at home" enough times, people will decide that it means something. And to Aristotle, persuading people to think or do something means the rhetorician has succeeded.