Scattered colleges and universities still teach rhetoric—in fact, the art is rapidly gaining popularity among undergraduates—but outside academia we forgot it almost entirely. What a thing to lose. Imagine stumbling upon Newton’s law of gravity and meeting face-to-face with the forces that drive the universe. Or imagine coming across Freud for the first time and suddenly becoming aware of the unconscious, where your id, ego, and superego conduct their silent arguments.
I wrote this book for that reason: to lead you through this ill-known world of argument and welcome you to the Persuasive Elect. Along the way you’ll enhance your image with Aristotle’s three traits of credible leadership: virtue, disinterest, and practical wisdom. You’ll find yourself using logic as a convincing tool, smacking down fallacies and building airtight assertions. Aristotle’s principles will also help you decide which medium—text? phone? skywriting?—works best for each message. You will discover a simple strategy to get an argument unstuck when it bogs down in accusation and anger.
And that’s just the beginning. The pages to come contain more than a hundred “argument tools” borrowed from ancient texts and adapted to modern situations, along with suggestions for trying the techniques at home, school, or work, or in your community. You will see when logic works best, and when you should lean on an emotional strategy. You’ll acquire mind-molding figures of speech and ready-made tactics, including Aristotle’s irresistible enthymeme, a neat bundle of logic that I find easier to use than pronounce. You’ll see how to actually benefit from your own screw-ups. And you’ll discover the most compelling tools of all in your audience’s own self-identity.
TRY THIS IN A PRESENTATION
The Romans were using the “But wait, there’s more” pitch a couple of millennia before infomercials. They gave it a delectable name: dirimens copulatio, meaning “a joining that interrupts.” It’s a form of amplification, an essential rhetorical tactic that turns up the volume as you speak. In a presentation, you can amplify by layering your points: “Not only do we have this, but we also…”
By the end of the book you will have mastered the rhetorical tricks for making an audience eager to listen. People still love a well-delivered talk; the top professional speakers charge more per person than a Bruce Springsteen concert. I devote a whole chapter to Cicero’s elegant five-step method for constructing a speech—invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery—a system that has served the greatest orators for the past two thousand years.
Great argument does not always mean elaborate speech, though. The most effective rhetoric disguises its art. And so I’ll reveal a rhetorical device for implanting opinions in people’s heads through sheer sleight of tongue.
Besides all these practical tools, rhetoric offers a grander, metaphysical payoff: it jolts you into a fresh new perspective on the human condition. After it awakens you to the argument all around, the world will never seem the same.
I myself am living proof.
My Perfectly Rhetorical Day
To see just how pervasive argument is, I recently attempted a whole day without persuasion—free of advertising, politics, family squabbles, or any psychological manipulation whatsoever. No one would persuade me, and I would avoid persuading them. Heck, I wouldn’t even let myself persuade myself. Nobody, not even I, would tell me what to do.
If anyone could consider himself qualified for the experiment, a confirmed hermit like me could. I work for myself; indeed, having dropped out of a career in journalism and publishing, I work by myself, in a cabin a considerable distance from my house. I live in a tiny village in northern New England, a region that boasts the most persuasion-resistant humans on the planet. Advertisers have nightmares about people like me: no TV, no smartphone, dial-up Internet. I’m commercial-free, a walking NPR, my own individual, persuasion-immune man.
As if.
My wristwatch alarm goes off at six. I normally use it to coax myself out of bed, but now I ignore it. I stare up at the ceiling, where the smoke detector blinks reassuringly. If the smoke alarm detected smoke, it would alarm, rousing the heaviest sleeper. The philosopher Aristotle would approve of the smoke detector’s rhetoric; he understood the power of emotion as a motivator.
For the time being, the detector has nothing to say. But my cat does. She jumps on the bed and sticks her nose in my armpit. As reliable as my watch and twice as annoying, the cat persuades remarkably well for ten dumb pounds of fur. Instead of words she uses gesture and tone of voice—potent ingredients of argument.
TRY THIS IN A PROPOSAL
If your idea has been used elsewhere, describe its success in vivid detail as though the audience itself had accomplished it. Show how much more skill and resources your plan dedicates to the idea. Then feel free to use your favorite cliché, e.g., “It’s a slam dunk.”
I resist stoically. No cat is going to boss me around this morning.
The watch beeps again. I wear a Timex Ironman, whose name comes from a self-abusive athletic event; presumably, if the watch works for a masochist who subjects it to two miles of swimming, a hundred miles of biking, and 26.2 miles of running all in one day, it would work for someone like me who spends his lunch hour walking strenuously down to the brook to see if there are any fish. The ancient Romans would call the Ironman’s brand appeal argumentum a fortiori, “argument from strength.” Its logic goes like this: if something works the hard way, it’s more likely to work the easy way. Advertisers favor the argument from strength. Years ago, Life cereal ran an ad with little Mikey the fussy eater. His two older brothers tested the cereal on him, figuring that if Mikey liked it, anybody would. And he liked it! An argumentum a fortiori cereal ad. My Ironman watch’s own argument from strength does not affect me, however. I bought it because it was practical. Remember, I’m advertising-immune.
TRY THIS AT HOME
If you’re appalled at the notion of manipulating your loved ones, try using pure logic—no emotions, no hidden tactics, no references to your authority or the sacrifices you make. Do it for a whole day, and you may be surprised by a rising level of anger in your family. Persuasion is a great pacifier.
But its beeping is driving me crazy. Here I’m not even up yet and I already contemplate emotional appeals from a cat and a smoke detector along with a wristwatch argument from strength. Wrenching myself out of bed, I say to the mirror what I tell it every morning: “Don’t take any crap from anyone.”
The cat bites me on the heel. I grab my towel and go fix its breakfast. Five minutes later I’m out of toothpaste and arguing with my son. Not a good start to my experiment, but I’ll chalk it up to what scientists euphemistically call an “artifact” (translation: boneheaded mistake) and move on. I make coffee, grab a pen, and begin writing ostentatiously in a notebook. This does little good in the literary sense—I can barely read my own scribble before coffee—but it produces wonderful rhetorical results: when my wife sees me writing, she often brings me breakfast.
Did I just violate my own experiment? Shielding the notebook from view, I write a grocery list. There. That counts as writing.
Dorothy returned to full-time work after I quit my job. The deal was that I would take over the cooking, but she loves to see her husband as the inspired author and herself as the able enabler. My wife is a babe, and many babes go for inspired authors. Of course, she might be persuading me: by acting as the kind of babe who goes for inspired authors, she turns me on. Desire underlies the most insidious, and enjoyable, forms of argument.
We live in a tangled, dark world of persuasion. A used car salesman once seduced me out of fifteen grand. My family and I had just moved to Connecticut, and I needed cheap transportation. It had been a tough move; I was out of sorts. The man at the car lot had me pegged before I said a word. He pointed to a humble-looking Ford Taurus sedan, suggested a test drive, and as soon as I buckled in he said, “Want to see P. T. Barnum’s grave?” Of cours
e I did.
The place was awesome. We had to stop for peacocks, and brilliant-green feral Peruvian parrots squawked in the branches of a huge fir tree. Opposite Barnum’s impressive monument stood General Tom Thumb’s marker with a life-sized statue of the twenty-six-inch millionaire. Enthralled by our test drive, I did everything else the salesman suggested, and he suggested I buy the Ford. It was a lemon.
He sized me up and changed my mood; he beguiled me, and to tell you the truth, I enjoyed it. I had some misgivings the next morning, but no regrets. It was a consensual act.
TRY THIS AT WORK
You can use desire—the nonsexual kind—in a presentation. Will your plan increase efficiency? Get your audience to lust after it; paint a vision of actually taking lunch hours and seeing their families more.
Which leads us to argument’s grand prize: the consensus. It means more than just an agreement, much more than a compromise. The consensus represents an audience’s commonsense thinking. In fact, it is a common sense, a shared faith in a choice—the decision or action you want. And this is where emotional persuasion comes in. As St. Augustine knew, faith requires emotion.
Persuasion is manipulation, manipulation is half of argument, and therefore many of us understandably shy from it. But even Aristotle, that logical old soul, believed in the curative powers of persuasion. Logic alone will rarely get people to do anything. They have to desire the act. You may not like persuasion’s manipulative aspects; still, it beats fighting, which is what we usually mistake for argument.
Birds Do It…
Meanwhile, my experiment gets more dubious by the moment. I’m leaving the bathroom when Dorothy puts a plate of eggs on the table, shrugs into her suit jacket, and kisses me goodbye. “Don’t forget, I’ll be home late—I’m having heavy hors d’oeuvres at the reception tonight,” she says, and leaves for her fundraising job at a law school. (Fundraising and law. Could it get more rhetorical?)
I turn to George. “So, want to have dinner with me or on campus tonight?” George attends a boarding school as a day student. He hates the food there.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I’ll call you from school.”
I want to work late and don’t feel like cooking, but I’m loath to have George think my work takes priority over him. “Okay,” I say, adding with as much enthusiasm as I can fake, “we’ll have stew!”
“Ugh,” says George, right on cue. He hates my stew even more than school food. The odds of my cooking tonight have just gone way down.
TRY THIS AFTER YOU’RE PUT ON HOLD
This works with most bureaucrats. Pretend you have all the time in the world, and present your choice as the lesser of two evils. They either cut you a break or waste more time with you. Functionaries, like water, follow the path of least resistance.
Oops, as that fine rhetorician Britney Spears put it, I did it again. And so goes my day. In my cabin office, I email editors with flattering explanations for missing their deadlines. (I’m just trying to live up to their high standards!) I put off calling Sears to complain about a $147 bill for replacing a screw in our oven. When I do call eventually, I’ll take my time explaining the situation. Giving me a break on the bill will cost less than dealing with me any further.
At noon, I grab some lunch and head outside for a walk. A small pile of fox scat lies atop a large granite rock. Mine, the fox says with the scat. This spot belongs to me. Territorial creatures, such as foxes and suburbanites, use complicated signals to mark off terrain and discourage intruders—musk, fences, scat, marriage licenses, footprints, alarm systems…Argument is in our nature, literally.
TRY THIS IN A PRESENTATION
Present a decision with a chiasmus by using a mirror image of your first choice: “Either we control expenses or let expenses control us.”
Persuasion Alert
Whoa there. A presidential chiasmus drove people into the Peace Corps? I use one of the more persuasive ways to cheat in logic—because B follows A, A caused B. I call it the Chanticleer fallacy, after the rooster who thought his crowing made the sun come up.
A mockingbird sings a pretty little tune that warns rivals off its turf. Without a pause it does the same thing in reverse, rendering a figure of speech called chiasmus. This crisscross figure repeats a phrase with its mirror image: “You can take a boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of a boy.” “I wasted time, and now time doth waste me.” Our culture underrates figures, but only because most of us lack the rhetorical savvy to wield them. They can yield surprising power. John F. Kennedy deployed a chiasmus during his inaugural address—“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”—and thousands joined the Peace Corps. I fell in love with figures, and even launched a website, Figarospeech.com, devoted to them. Figures add polish to a memo or paper, and in day-to-day conversation they can supply ready wit to the most tedious conversations.
The phone is ringing when I get back to my cabin. It’s George calling to say he plans to eat at school. (Yes!) So I work late, rewarding myself now and then by playing computer pinball. I find I can sit still for longer stretches with game breaks. Is this persuasion? I suppose it is. My non-rhetorical day turned out to be pretty darn rhetorical, but nonetheless agreeable.
I finally knock off work and head back to the house for a shower and shave, even though this isn’t a shaving day. My wife deals with a lot of good-looking, well-dressed men, and now and then I like to make a territorial call, through grooming and clothing, to convince her she did not marry a bum. I pull on a cashmere sweater that Dorothy says makes my eyes look “bedroomy” and meet her at the door with a cold gin and tonic.
Let the persuasion begin.
OFFENSE
2. Set Your Goals
CICERO’S LIGHTBULB
Change the audience’s mood, mind, or willingness to act
Aphrodite spoke and loosened from her bosom the embroidered girdle of many colors into which all her allurements were fashioned. In it was love and in it desire and in it blandishing persuasion which steals the mind even of the wise. —HOMER
Meanings
“Debate” and “battle” share the same Latin root. Typical of those pugnacious Romans.
Back in 1974, National Lampoon published a parody comic-book version of Plato’s Republic. Socrates stands around talking philosophy with a few friends. Each time he makes a point, another guy concedes, “Yes, Socrates, very well put.” In the next frame you see an explosive “POW!!!” and the opponent goes flying through the air. Socrates wins by a knockout. The Lampoon’s Republic has some historical validity; ancient Greeks, like argumentative nerds throughout the ages, loved to imagine themselves as fighters. But even they knew the real-life difference between fighting and arguing. We should, too. We need to distinguish rhetorical argument from the blame-shifting, he-said-she-said squabbling that defines conflict today. In a fight, each disputant tries to win. In an argument, they try to win over an audience—which can comprise the onlookers, television viewers, an electorate, or each other.
This chapter will help you distinguish between an argument and a fight, and to choose what you want to get out of an argument. The distinction can determine the survival of a marriage, as the celebrated research psychologist John Gottman proved in the 1980s and 1990s. Working out of his “love lab” at the University of Washington, he and his assistants videotaped hundreds of married couples over a period of nine years, poring over every tape and entering every perceived emotion and logical point into a database. They watched hours and days and months of arguments, of couples glaring at each other and revealing embarrassing things in front of the camera. It was like a bad reality show.
When Gottman announced his findings in 1994, though, rhetoricians around the country tried not to look smug, because the data confirmed what rhetoric has claimed for several millennia. Gottm
an found that couples who stayed married over those nine years argued about as much as those who ended up in divorce. However, the successful couples went about their arguments in a different way, and with a different purpose. Rhetoricians would say they instinctively followed the basic tenets of argument.
TRY THIS WITH YOUR CAREER
The growing profession of “leadership branding coaches” teaches CEO wannabes how to embody their company. The ideal trait? Not aggression, not brains, but the ability to tell a compelling life story and make yourself desirable. Later on, you’ll see how storytelling is critical to emotional persuasion.
When some of the videotapes appeared on network television, they showed some decidedly uncomfortable moments, even among the happy couples. One successfully married husband admitted he was pathologically lazy, and his wife cheerfully agreed. Nonetheless, the couples who stayed married seemed to use their disputes to solve problems and work out differences. They showed faith in the outcome. The doomed couples, on the other hand, used their sessions to attack each other. Argument was a problem for them, not a means to a solution. The happy ones argued. The unhappy ones fought.
Much of the time, I’m guessing that the happy ones also enticed. While our culture tends to admire straight shooters, the ones who follow their gut regardless of what anyone thinks, those people rarely get their way in the end. Sure, aggressive loudmouths often win temporary victories through intimidation or simply by talking us to exhaustion, but the more subtle, eloquent approaches lead to long-term commitment. Corporate recruiters will confirm this theory. There are a few alpha types in the business world who live to bully their colleagues and stomp on the competition, but if you ask headhunters what they look for in executive material, they describe a persuader and team builder, not an aggressor.
Thank You for Arguing (Revised and Updated) Page 2