Winslo, Luke. Classy Morality Uncovering Hidden

Winslow, Luke. “Classy Morality: The Rhetoric of Joel Osteen” Uncovering Hidden Rhetorics: Social Issues in Disguise. Ed. Barry Brummett. Sage: Los Angeles. 2008.

“Power is often obtained and reinforced through the evaluations and judgments we make about the people around us” (123).
Perception is the key to power. It’s how people perceive each other, a situation, etc. It’s how we identify with the people to whom we are attempting to relate. How does this relate to Burke’s theory of identity? Does it?

“Class is another criterion we often use to make judgments about other people” (123). =A & E

“But another benefit that is rarely openly acknowledged is the assignment of higher moral status to the upper class. In the same way that we connect good looks with intelligence, we make moral judgments based on class standing. This allows class standing to represent much more than wealth” (124).
Very prominent within conduct books. The elite wrote them, using their class standing as backing for their own morality and the lower classes purchased or read them in order to imitate the upper classes. This gave a feeling of not only raising one’s class standing, but gave one the feeling of taking on the “morally correct” way of approaching the social.

“as a society we would prefer to avoid the class issue. bell hooks, in her book Where We Stand, argues that, nowadays we would rather talk about race and gender than class” (125). =E

Is that because we find race and gender more pertinent or is it because as scholars people tend to feel that they have elevated their “class” standing, and do not want to disrupt that?

“The best way to understand form is to think about it as a consistent structure or pattern found in the language of text (Burke, Counter-Statement 31) (127). =E & M
This whole idea of class as morality is great. I find that I think it will help reinforce my argument.