Now, Aristotle wrote a famous treatise ethics known as the Nicomachean Ethics. But I want to discuss his treatise on civic rhetoric. In it he discusses three different kinds of civic rhetoric: (1) deliberative rhetoric in legislative assemblies, (2) forensic rhetoric in courts of law, and (3) epideictic rhetoric in public ceremonies involving personal and civic values (such as funeral orations).
Both Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Rabbi Sacks' Essays on Ethics involve epideictic rhetoric about personal and civic values.
I should also say that the Hebrew Bible at times features certain passages that biblical scholars refer to as lawsuits, because the passages seem to be conducted as claims and counter-claims in a court of law (Aristotle's forensic rhetoric). Of course the Hebrew Bible famously features the Mosaic law, as it is called. Incidentally, Moses is not portrayed in the Hebrew Bible as a charismatic speaker.
Make no mistake about it, Rabbi Sacks is British. But he has not neglected to study our American cultural heritage -- especially the Calvinists in New England.
In his new book The Kingdom of Speech, Tom Wolfe, who holds a Ph.D. in American studies from Yale, lists John Calvin as one of the six most influential persons in world history.
The Calvinists in New England came from East Anglia. At the time, Ramist dialectic dominated the curriculum at Cambridge University in East Anglia. Peter Ramus (1515-1572), the French logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr, was a French Calvinist.
The American Jesuit cultural historian and theorist Walter J. Ong's family ancestors left East Anglia on the same ship that brought Roger Williams to Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1631.
Almost all the college-educated men in New England in the seventeenth century were Ramists.
When Harvard College was founded in 1636, Ramist dialectic dominated the curriculum.
Rabbi Sacks says, "The early settlers were Puritans, in the Calvinist tradition, the closest Christianity came to basing its politics on the Hebrew Bible" (page 92). Elsewhere he characterizes them as steeped in the Hebrew Bible (page 290). No doubt they were steeped in the Hebrew Bible.
Rabbi Sacks notes in passing that the Gutenberg printing press emerged in Western culture in the mid-fifteenth century (pages 65 and 81).
But Rabbi Sacks does not happen to advert explicitly to Ong's massively researched book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Harvard University Press, 1958).
Rabbi Sacks also does not happen to advert explicitly to the Jewish Harvard sociologist David Riesman's widely known book The Lonely Crowd: A Study in the Changing American Character (Yale University Press, 1950). In it Riesman discusses three broad character types: (1) outer-directed (also known as tradition-directed), (2) inner-directed, and (3) other-directed. He favors inner-directed types, and he is skeptical about the then-emerging other-directed types.
Nevertheless, Rabbi Sacks uses the terminology outer-directed and inner-directed (page 179).
Because Rabbi Sacks is conspicuously a Brit, I want to quote one of the more memorable comments he makes: "England is, or was until recently, a tradition-based society" (page 92). It fell to all those British colonists in New England and elsewhere to make American culture famous for producing inner-directed persons. He credits this remarkable development to the Puritans' fascination with the Hebrew Bible.
Rabbi Sacks connects outer-directed types with shame cultures, and inner-directed types with guilt cultures. On the whole, the ancient Hebrews portrayed in the Hebrew Bible pioneered guilt culture -- amid a sea of shame cultures in the ancient world.
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