Rhetoric, for Ill

A review of The Language of Evil, by Guy Doza. (Canbury, 2025)

We hear the call from time to time: If only the masses knew the tricks of speechwriters and other professional communicators, they wouldn’t fall for them so frequently. And a more rhetorically savvy society would be a more democratic society. 

Leaders of the European speechwriting community are particularly enthusiastic about this idea: British speechwriter Simon Lancaster gave a big TEDx Talk on this theme a few years ago. European Speechwriters Network founder Brian Jenner often talks about founding schools to bring back more widespread teaching of rhetoric. And now rhetoric teacher Guy Doza has a new book whose jacket promises: “In a ‘post-truth’ age where simplified messages overpower sophisticated ones, The Language of Evil equips readers to spot the same tricks and techniques being deployed now.”

So we can do what?

Doza, a friend with an effervescent personality and great wit, sent me this book knowing full well, as he wrote in a message last week, that I am “the man who says there are already too many books on rhetoric!” He knows that, because I said it in the opening of my review of Doza’s last book, How to Apologise for Killing a Cat. I liked that book, as it turned out, and concluded that indeed we did need one more book on rhetoric. But I said nothing about two!

The thing is, I doubt the ability of eloquent experts like Lancaster, Jenner and Doza to reach large enough audiences with their rhetoric lessons, however well crafted and entertaining. Do you know how few people read books—let alone books on abstract subjects like communication?

I’m also skeptical of the notion that even people who understand how rhetoric works won’t fall prey to silver-tongued leaders’ wiles. There’s no bigger mark than a salesperson, and convening events for speechwriters has taught me that masters of rhetoric are plenty susceptible to well-crafted charms of the spoken word. At speechwriters’ conferences, the most wizened scribes laugh easily, cry easily and are as easily convinced of an agreeable idea as anyone else. (I think many of them would admit, it’s partly why they come.)

I know, because I have done some of the convincing. For instance, in talks to audiences of speechwriters and other communicators on every corner of the globe, I have portrayed speeches as a civilizing, uplifting, essentially wholesome social ritual. In the course of these talks, I played video excerpts of speeches by leaders who most of us admire, that galvanized audiences to defeat the Nazis, to put aside differences, to support children’s public television, to overcome racism: to do what Robert F. Kennedy told us (in a speech) that the Greeks advised: “To tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.”

I quoted an Australian speechwriter named Lucinda Holdforth, who wrote in her own rhetoric book, Leading Lines: “Perhaps it is because there is some rough magic in the communal experience of listening, and a grace that comes with giving an individual the opportunity to speak their considered thoughts aloud in the welcoming presence of others. We come together to breathe in tandem, to experience our own responses and feelings alongside each other—and sometimes, if we are lucky, and if the speaker speaks truly, in deep connection with each other. We come together like this because to speak freely and to listen attentively is to be human; to express a core human capacity and a central democratic freedom.”

The speech would be pandering, if I didn’t believe it so desperately myself. My fervent sincerity must have come across, because all the times I delivered that little speechwriting stump speech, I can only remember one critical word about my thesis. It didn’t come during the Q&A or in post-conference drinks. I heard through the grapevine that an old professor in the back of the room grumbled angrily about my portrayal of speeches as mere agents of good. When, to his way of thinking, spoken words are as amoral and potentially dangerous as guns. (Or teeth, as the comic Norm Macdonald once said in explaining why he sometimes bit his tongue: “They’ll bite anything, my teeth, they don’t care. Could be a pork sandwich, could be my tongue. What do they care, they just bite. That’s all they know.”)

The professor was absolutely right, of course. The gleeful people giggling and whooping it up at those rollicking Trump rallies: Aren’t they, too, experiencing Holdforth’s “rough magic in the communal experience of listening”? “Breathing in tandem,” connecting with one another and having their own feelings of democratic freedom? We can read a book on how disingenuous leaders of the past manipulated others, or we can just turn on C-SPAN and feel the gropey hands-on trauma of the manipulation itself, by the leaders we’ve elected.

The Language of Evil is simultaneously scholarly and lively and easily digestible (if not pleasant to the taste). Doza takes ‘em on one by one, in 16 chapters beginning with Julius Caesar and ending with Saddam Hussein. Some readers will quibble with some of Doza’s choices. Does Indira Gandhi really belong in the same table of contents with Joseph Stalin? Some of these folks are more familiar than others. Ranavalona I, I had to look up. She was the brutal queen of Madagascar—and, now we know, also the queen of elenchus, the use of serial rhetorical questions in speeches.

But the question nags: What are we supposed to do with this information?

I suppose it’s natural for me to resist a book that focuses on the crimes rhetoric has helped tyrants commit. My company is actually called Pro Rhetoric, LLC. My customers create powerful rhetoric for leaders of all stripes. In my role as editor and publisher of Vital Speeches of the Day and also as founder of the Professional Speechwriters Association, I think I do more potential good by showcasing contemporary examples of rhetoric our community can admire, and showing well-meaning speechwriters how to do likewise, for worthy leaders, in order to theoretically galvanize audiences for fruitful causes. 

Guy Doza has a similar opportunity with the long and hugely promising career rolling out ahead of him—he’s still in his mid-30s!—and I hope he proudly puts The Language of Evil on the shelf behind him, and embarks on a (yet another!) book, working title: Better Angels: How Leaders Use Rhetoric to Tame the Savageness of Man and Make Gentle the Life of This World. 

***

And at our invitation, Guy Doza responds:

Ironically, one of the most famous quotes attributed to Napoleon is: “History is a set of lies agreed upon.” In that spirit, history has indeed agreed upon who should be its villains: the chosen monsters who wield the language of evil. But if you look closely, you might spot that same language dripping from the tongues of ordinary people, democratically elected leaders, and (of course) primary school teachers.

If it’s true that the words we use affect the world around us, perhaps there’s value in looking back at the damage caused in the not-so-distant past.