Despite our attempts at “everyone’s a winner” in the U.S., we still have a competitive mentality that seems like it’s engrained into our DNA. We have contests for everything (hotdog eating anyone?), and reward people who come in first, oftentimes disregarding anyone who comes after. I think this is why grasping the whole concept of Nyaya is pretty difficult for some Western rhetoricians. Politicians aren’t talking with the hope that we’ll all “see together,” coming to a consensus about something while discussing it and asking questions; they want to win. While they may seem like they care about what the public has to say, in reality, their own beliefs trump everyone else’s. I don’t think it’s entirely fair for anyone to hold this against them. So much of our culture is based on individuality and self-expression, from the clothes we wear to the food we eat; it could be argued that we’re making a statement about ourselves every single day, deliberate or not.

I also think it’s hard for Western rhetoricians to imagine an argument that doesn’t incorporate generalities, that focuses on the here and now (in Nyaya, “this fire, this mountain, not all mountains and fires). While arguments may be based on specific situations or people, oftentimes general ideas squeeze their way into statements. For example, in an LA Times piece from Sunday about education policy, Diane Ravitch doesn’t stick just to the specifics. She says things like, “Most studies have found that charters, on average, are no better than public schools,” and “Most charters choose their students by lottery” (http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-ravitch14-2010mar14,0,2024751.story 1). Here generalizations may be subtle amongst her particulars, but they’re still key points of her argument that she’s hoping will enable her to hit a homerun with her audience. She’s not hoping solely for discussion; she’s hoping to win people over.

The Nyaya-Sutras further reinforced my ideas about why this style of rhetoric is so hard to understand. Maybe I misinterpreted the reading, but I got the impression that an identical statement can mean a variety of things depending on how it’s used. The example with the sound and the pot was explained to have so many different meanings, even though the structure of the statement changed very little or not at all. I had a hard time wrapping my mind around this. I realize that context, intonation, and punctuation can all impact the meaning of different sentences in English, but are our comparisons really as flexible as the sound and the pot one was made to be in this reading? Can we really manipulate one statement so that it’s applicable in more than a handful of situations? Isn’t our rhetoric more concerned with using statements that only work for one argument? If a comparison can be used in a variety of situations, wouldn’t this make the rhetorician appear unoriginal or unintelligent? Would the general Persian rhetorical style really work in Western culture?