An interesting journey...

I tried to post this last night at a somewhat decent hour too, but it didn't show up in class today so I guess I will give this another try and hope for the best. Here are the first few paragraphs of my paper. Be kind.

“Pack your bags, we’re headed for Ramageland!” That is a phrase I do not want to hear, it is a journey I want no part of, yet I am all aboard for better or worse. My travels began unwillingly and filled with frustration. I entered into this trip apprehensively, the first mention of this place seemed to strike fear into all its passengers. I was nervous from the start of this excursion. Yet, that fateful Wednesday afternoon I picked up my ticket and entered into the world of Ramage.
The journey began slowly, each page seemed to take hours to get through. Finally, that first bridge was crossed and yet I still knew nothing of rhetoric or what it meant. I wanted a definition, something substantial and all I got was meaningless words. The introduction presented the first part of our sightseeing tour through the world of rhetoric that is featured predominantly in Ramageland, it gave us the skeptic’s viewpoint first- “The Anti-Rhetoric Spokesperson: Four Reasons for Abolishing Rhetoric”. I stopped and surveyed the view in shock, what kind of place presents its negative aspects before illustrating the positive ones? That certainly grabbed my attention, it hooked me. “Rhetoric is a pseudoscience. Rhetoric ‘panders to the masses’, ‘it is amoral,’ and it ‘encourages agnostic behavior’ (Ramage 2-6). I was overwhelmed by the reasoning being presented, it was in those four reason that we began to see Ramage’s taste for vocabulary. I did not know many of these words, so in my travels I learned several new ones. Pander means “to cater to the lower tastes and desires of others or exploit their weaknesses” (dictionary.com). Therefore when Ramage states that rhetoric panders to the masses he means that rhetoric helps the masses in their desire to exploit other’s weaknesses as well as to take advantage of the weakness of the masses themselves. Which after thinking about it, it can be true. I have learned that rhetoric is mainly a tool for persuasion and that can be used for both good and evil. Rhetoric is often used by politicians and others who want you to think as they do.
Rhetoric was also described as amoral. I did not know that word either, so back to Dictionary.com I went (a place I visited often on this trip) and discovered that amoral meant “having no moral standards, restraints, or principles; unaware of or indifferent to questions of right or wrong.” I started to think because according to the Anti-Rhetoric people “rhetoric has, in sum, no scruple against “proving” any claim no matter how logically in defensive or morally repugnant” (6). The German philosopher, Hegel, says “He must be a poor creature who cannot advance a good reason for everything, even for what is worst and depraved” (6). And I came to the conclusion that it’s true, rhetoric has no ethics. It can’t because it is a tool of persuasion and if used correctly it can make people believe anything whether it is right or wrong. This also goes along with the fourth reason for abolishing rhetoric, that it promotes agnostic behavior. Agnostics do not believe in certain things that several other people believe in, to put it in layman’s terms. Rhetoric does promote agnostic behavior because they can utilize it to convince others that they are correct. The Anti-Rhetoric supporters can utilize rhetoric as an instrumental part of their campaign of convincing the masses that their viewpoint is the only way of thinking.