‘N WERELD WORD INSTAND GEHOU DEUR VIER DINGE......

DIE GELEERDHEID VAN DIE WYSE,

DIE REGVERDIGHEID VAN DIE VERNAMES,

DIE GEBEDE VAN DIE REGVERDIGES,

DIE MOED VAN DIE DAPPERES (Frank Herbert, Dune) 

The Southern Point: Rhetorically Speaking                                                                                                                                                                      The U.S. Senate Chamber, 1850 – Robert Whitechurc                                                                                                                                                  A world is supported by four things…the learning                                                                                                                                                         of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of                                                                                                                                                        the righteous and the valor of the brave. 

But all of  these are as nothing…without a ruler who knows the art of ruling. Make that the science of your tradition! (-Frank Herbert, Dune)

  The Old South was far ahead of the New World Order.  What it lacked in technological development, it made up for in a concrete understanding of human nature that was grounded in reality. That reality was firmly rooted in two principles based upon experiential observation: the existence of ineradicable distinctions between different races and the danger of concentrating power in one unitary source that could arbitrarily determine the outcome of local domestic issues from afar. Indeed it may be stated unequivocally, that American civilization cannot truly go forward at all if its interpretation of human relationships and psychology deniesthese two points. It is for this reason that the philosophic fountainhead of resistance to the New World Order in the United States must inevitably begin with an endorsement of Southern rhetoric.

The term “rhetoric” has come to mean one of two things in contemporary culture: artificial speech or dishonest propaganda. This is a sorry state of affairs. It represents, in part, the overwhelming distortion that a purely nominal and positivistic machine age has introduced into human discourse.  The ancients had a much more elevated conception of the term, viewing it as a necessary analogue to the process of dialectic. Rhetoric was the high art of persuasion and the power of a particular style. Elsewhere I have addressed the polarization between the scientific and poetic modes of discourse and the need for redressing a balance between the two. The original ideal concept of rhetoric represents another evolutionary component of the poetic mode, a category that I previously dubbed the Bardic Dynamic.