Remember that Kenneth Burke line I gave at the beginning of the quarter?
You persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his.
Lately I’ve been thinking about it in terms of environmentalism and perhaps you can help me out. For instance, I saw this article today, which nearly made me weep:
I was appalled by the anthropocentrism at first, but then I started to consider how these “conservationists” (a word loaded with ideological assumptions and values itself) are using identification to achieve their desired aim. If the health of future generations is too abstract for a population, there are other ways too:
Are these rhetors capitulating to the “language” of those in power, or am I giving them too much credit already? Perhaps they truly believe that the reason why we should keep animals like bears and salmon around is because if put through laboratory testing and vivisection, they might be beneficial to us? Also, how come we don’t see the point of view on BBC or CNN or FOX that a simple respect for life is reason enough to care for other species?
Grrr . . . anthropocentrism makes me misanthropic . . .
