What’s Wrong with Weird? | Commonweal Magazine

To my mind, a great translation of ineptia is “weirdness.” The “awkward” or “tedious” or “weird” speaker veers into uncomfortable topics. He can’t read the room. And it’s more than an inability to make small talk that makes one inept in this sense. The ancient rhetorical theorists often drew parallels between virtues of speech and virtues of living. Cicero explains how “from ignorance of propriety, people make mistakes not only in life but very frequently in writing.” Drawing on this parallel, he cautions how “the same style and the same thoughts must not be used in portraying every condition in life, or every rank, position, or age, and in fact a similar distinction must be made in respect of place, time, and audience.” He concludes, “the universal rule, in oratory as in life, is to consider propriety.” The rule for Cicero’s Forum Romanum is the same as the rule for the Walz family’s Thanksgiving: try not to be weird.

Like so much “common sense,” these ancient recommendations against impropriety and weirdness stand upon dominant social norms. Sometimes, however, it’s better to buck conventional manners and decorum in pursuit of worthy goals. Is it not often virtuous to bring up an uncomfortable but important topic at an otherwise pleasant dinner? In the particular case of political speech, the principle of the aptum would seem to urge politicians to forgo brave positions in favor of merely popular ones. When Cicero cautions against ineptia, he describes a politician studiously attuned to his moment, careful never to find himself out of step. Seen in that light, Cicero’s principle of decorum seems like cover for flip-flopping. Some of our most esteemed political predecessors, moreover, deserve admiration precisely for ignoring the “convenience” of those with whom they had to deal, and for being “awkward or tedious.” Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and even Jesus were not exactly easygoing, conventional types. So shouldn’t we resist the siren song of “propriety” and choose righteous weirdness instead?

These problems surrounding decorum have had a long shelf life, and inspired by these Greco-Roman authors, several modern thinkers have defended principles of propriety and convention. In An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, for instance, David Hume would position “good manners” and “politeness” among virtues like temperance and courage for facilitating “the intercourse of minds, and an undisturbed commerce and conversation.” Others took Cicero’s aptum and ineptia in more openly political directions, recommending that leaders bend to circumstance in the pursuit of expedience and even dominance. Perhaps the most notorious example is Niccolò Machiavelli. Much ink has been spilled about his reputation for cynical politicking—a willingness to say and do anything to maintain an iron grip on the levers of power. In The Prince,Machiavelli’s guidebook for Renaissance heads of state, he infamously instructs his reader to “learn how not to be good.” In Virtue Politics, James Hankins distills Machiavelli’s argument to the following precept: “Following habits of behavior, whether good or bad, as though on a kind of moral autopilot, will bring [the prince] to ruin. He must learn moral flexibility, strategic inconstancy, selective clemency, and cruelty.” Machiavelli’s cool recommendations for violence and duplicity—e.g., “men must be either caressed or wiped out”—have earned him generations of horrified detractors, among them Shakespeare, who alludes to the “murderous Machiavel.”

Like the best works of political thought, however, Machiavelli’s writings resist simplistic summary. He does not just propose a nihilist abandonment of morality. Hardly a committed sadist, Machiavelli urges his reader to avoid departing “from the good if it is possible to do so, but he should know how to enter into evil when forced by necessity.” While he praises the “inhuman cruelty” that made Hannibal “venerable and terrifying,” he nevertheless condemns the Greek tyrant Agathocles for the “inhumanity” of “betraying allies.” One can be too cruel, too inhumane, too evil. Be good when you can, he advises, but not when you can’t.

Instead of flattening Machiavelli into an apologist for thoughtless immorality, we should see him as a realist grappling with “necessity.” It’s a theme that resurfaces in his Discourses on Livy, where he argues that “the reason why men are sometimes unfortunate, sometimes fortunate, depends upon whether their behavior is in conformity with the times.” While the vocabulary is different, his arguments here should sound familiar even to those who just learned their first lessons of ancient rhetorical theory in the preceding paragraphs. Whether Machiavelli speaks of “necessity” or “the times” or “fortune,” he persistently urges rulers to adjust their political calculus—and their moral scruple—to fit their circumstances. In short, leaders need to abide by a realist politics of decorum.

To borrow a phrase from Kamala Harris, Machiavelli did not just fall out of a coconut tree. Specialists in the classical tradition have long noticed, as Michelle Zerba explains, “the essential affinity between the Machiavellian doctrine of princely fraud and the Ciceronian ethics of gentlemanly dissimulation.” The ideas of rhetorical “propriety”—attention to “circumstance,” a sense of the aptum, a knack for fitting the occasion—permeate his political and ethical maxims.When Machiavelli writes, “It is necessary that [a prince] should have a mind ready to turn itself according to the way the winds of fortune and the changing circumstances command him,” he has simply taken to heart Cicero’s “universal rule, in oratory as in life,” to consider the moment. Cicero, of course, was chiefly interested in an apt turn of phrase, while Machiavelli was also interested in the apt turn of a dagger.

There are plenty of reasons to recoil from Machiavelli’s violent realpolitik. From Stoicism to Kant’s categorical imperative, writers have made compelling arguments that we should always obey our moral obligations, not just when they are advantageous. But even if we agree with Machiavelli’s critics, he can still help us articulate the roots of our distaste for “weird” politicians. Just as ancient orators positioned the aptum as one stylistic virtue among many—clarity, adornment, proper grammar—Machiavelli similarly positions “aptitude” among other virtues like clemency and truthfulness. For rhetoricians and politicians alike, these values sit in unstable tension, and trade-offs are unavoidable. 

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