Rhetorica:
Magnanimity, Part II:
The Practice of Largesse
By Gabriel Blanchard
"With the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you again."
—Luke 6:38
The Unaccountable Testimony of Mr. P. T. Barnum
Last week, we spoke of “the doctrine of largesse”1—the idea of magnanimity that rhetoric, properly used, includes. Rather fittingly, since Lent has just begun, we must now take that theoretical principle and ask what it looks like in daily practice.
The first application lies in what the present author was taught to call our worldview (though as a rule, it operates a little less consciously than that term tends to imply). Consider the following list of statements, taking note of which ones, if any, you feel describe you tolerably well.
❧ I know I’m not perfect at it, but I try to judge everyone individually and be as fair as I can to them.
❧ I don’t expect special treatment for myself.
❧ People will believe anything nowadays, but I make a point of not accepting rumors or theories without a good reason.
❧ In dealing with others, I try to be generous and let the little things go.
❧ I have read the Sorting Through Sophistries post “Mental Solitaire,” and thought that it was pretty great.
Those of our readers who really did read our post about the Dunning-Kruger effect may already see where this is going. Regardless, we are not here merely to point out that, if we are quite truthful with ourselves, it’s likely that none of these statements are more than aspirationally true of us, if that.2 We all have pet prejudices that we like telling ourselves “don’t count” against what fair people we are; we all have unattractive habits we’d very much like special treatment for; few of us show more than the most token resistance to accepting an idea with no evidence beyond our spontaneous liking for it—and so down the list.
“Let Him That Would Be Great Among You …”
Yet this is not merely an issue of our not making the moral effort we should be in the first place. Human beings are notoriously poor judges of our own character, our own talents, and even our own motives. We do possess unique “inside information” about ourselves, and that has real value. What we tend to fail at is the follow-through that would make this really useful knowledge, by arranging it and the other things we know into a coherent, necessarily imperfect, whole, going as far as we can and no further.3
Which is normal! It’s a problem we all ought to work on, certainly; half bad habit and half blind spot, it is not normal in the sense of “desirable.” But it is normal statistically, so to speak. Those of us afflicted with this flaw need not worry that we fall far short of the human average. We may be personally horrorstricken to find our lovely selves fall short of the flattering portrait we imagined for them, but that is a different problem, of interest mainly to our egos.
Why All Conspiracy Theories Are Wrong
The first practical step, then, is a kind of humility, one that is akin to honesty; really, it is honesty. It is simply making the decision to treat our own ideas as provisional (and, when the issue of whether we actually know something or not comes up in real life, sticking to this decision—again and again and again).
It is easier to forgive an Enemy than to forgive a Friend
... there is no other
God, than that God who is the intellectual fountain of Humanity;
He who envies or calumniates: which is murder & cruelty,
Murders the Holy-one ...
... for Man is Love
As God is Love; every kindness to another is a little Death
In the Divine Image nor can Man exist but by Brotherhood ...
An immediate corollary here is an assumption that sounds obvious, but which few of us make in practice: the assumption that other people are normal. More specifically, we tend not to think of people who disagree with us, oppose us, or annoy us as normal. This is not at all exclusive to the political and religious spheres, but it is often easiest to detect there. Why is it that the first-person “our party platform” becomes the third-person “their agenda”? Why do we use things like “evangelism” or “apologetics” to promote our faith, when our rivals at the Church of St. Over-there’s (those hypocrites) can settle for “indoctrination” and “quarreling with strangers online”? Surely even English hasn’t got this many irregular verbs.
But the truth is, most people do things for much the same reasons we do. They don’t have an agenda: they are doing what they think is best or right, as far as they can see—and they only choose not to see further as much as we choose not to see further. We have similar faults to theirs, and they have similar virtues to ours. We are prone to ego, stubbornness, laziness, anxiety to be liked; and they, like we, are trying to cope with limited information, limited time, and the sheer needs of survival, all while trying to be a halfway decent human being. (This, incidentally, is why even a great apologist like C. S. Lewis never used the “there are no atheists in foxholes” argument; because it isn’t an argument—it’s a sneer. As he did say in The Four Loves, “They were desperate and they howled for help. Who wouldn’t?”)
Certain Temptations
Discussing the similarities, and especially the shared fears and vulnerabilities, between ourselves and those whom we disagree with, contains a hint at why the disagreements exist in the first place. Not everybody has access to the same information; not everybody has the same intellectual gifts; not all of us find the same kinds of argument equally persuasive. And not all evidence has a clear conclusion to offer us in the first place: a great deal of what we think and do relies on our best guess about things for which we have limited information, sometimes no information. Which is fine—as long as we’re honest about what information we do and don’t have, and don’t simply pretend ignorance (or feign indecision) because admitting to the facts wouldn’t be convenient.
There are many particulars here that it would be edifying to discuss. For instance, there is the fact that telling a person “Calm down”—no matter what their emotional demeanor is when initially told—is virtually guaranteed to make them a notch angrier than they were a moment ago (a fact which is extraordinarily funny, when investigated by experimenting on other persons than oneself). However, most of these particulars can be discovered for oneself, by seriously applying the Golden Rule. How would I feel if, sincerely believing all the things Miss B says she believes, someone accused me of X? is the form of the question; for this exercise calls specially for the imagination of “imaginative sympathy.” We are otherwise a little too prone to apply the maxim flat-footedly—like a child who wants help with his math homework thinking that the Golden Rule means he needs first to help others with their math homework. Unfortunately, reciprocity tends to be the reward only of long practice of the Golden Rule; direct, immediate reward from the person we are interacting with is rare. And like a blow in the face, there is nothing to do with that fact but take it on the chin.
But there is a problem in this code of intellectual chivalry (a gap in its armor, if you will) that requires special attention. What about people who understand the code, yet use it dishonestly? the villain who, when he sees his foe dismounting from his horse in order to keep the fight fair, takes the opportunity to stab him in the back?
1Largesse (pronounced läŕ-jĕs or läŕ-zhĕs), like grandeur, is a word English originally borrowed from French that at first simply meant “bigness” but acquired senses akin to that of μεγαλοψυχία. Now rare, its definition’s “center of gravity” settled around fiscal generosity.
2That said, we will go ahead and point that out, while we’re here. After all, Lent is no season to go around wasting ready-to-use guilt.
3Though its author Ludwig Wittgenstein would all but disown the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (the book in which he first propounded it), and though there are contexts to which it does not apply, there is nevertheless some sense in the maxim that “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
4Blake is best known for a handful of his simpler poems (like “The Tyger” or “And Did Those Feet in Ancient Time”), and for some of his paintings, engravings, and other visual art. Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (“Albion” is a poetic name for Britain) is a series of ninety-nine plates, accompanied by extensive text—the text alone fills over two hundred pages in the Penguin Classics volume William Blake: The Complete Poems—which detail much of the doctrine of Blake’s mysticism.
Gabriel Blanchard is CLT’s editor at large. He lives in Baltimore, MD.
Thank you for reading the CLT Journal. If you enjoyed this piece, you might also enjoy our series on identifying fallacies; we have posts analyzing the ship of Theseus, the distinction between moral and political rights, ad hominem appeals, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and many more.
Published on 6th March, 2025. Page image of a selection from a thirteenth-century Belgian manuscript (artist unknown) depicting a Jew and a Christian, named “Moyses” and “Petrus” respectively, holding a religious disputation.