I’m guessing I would have been without toothpaste. Hearing me imply he was a bad son, George would have done his best to confirm that reputation. The past wouldn’t get me toothpaste. Neither would the present. Only the future will get my teeth clean.
Girl Versus Turkey
A husband and wife debate over whether to invest more in stocks or in bonds.
HE: Let’s get aggressive with growth stocks.
SHE: The experts predict the market will tank this year. I say we stay conservative.
Why argue? Because they can’t predict the economic future. They can only take their best guess today. What would that argument look like in the present tense?
HE: My dad always said blue chips are the way to go. That’s the right kind of investment.
SHE: Well, that’s just wrong. My astrologer says blue chips are evil.
The same couple argues over whether to provide orthodontia for their ten-year-old.
SHE: Straight teeth will be good for his self-esteem.
HE: Yeah, but if we put the money into a college fund, we’ll have a debt-free college graduate.
SHE: A bucktoothed college graduate.
TRY THIS IN A MEETING
Hold your tongue until well into the discussion. If an argument bogs down in the past or present tense, switch it to the future. “You’re all making good points, but how are we going to…?” Make sure that question defines the issue in a way that’s favorable to your side.
Is there a right choice? Maybe. But they don’t know what it is and have to make a decision nonetheless. These questions deal with probabilities, not facts or values.
Suppose your uncle Randy decides to divorce your aunt on their thirtieth anniversary so he can marry a surfing instructor he met at Club Med. You have two issues here, one moral and the other practical. The moral issue is inarguable by our definition. Your uncle is either wrong or right. You could remind him that he is breaking a wonderful woman’s heart, but you would be sermonizing, not arguing. You could threaten to bar him from Thanksgiving dinner, but that would be coercion, not argument—assuming he would prefer your turkey to a cruise buffet with his Club Med hottie.
The practical, debatable issue in your uncle’s case deals with the likely consequences of ditching your aunt for the trophy wife.
YOU: She’ll leave you within the year, and you’ll be lonely and miserable forever.
UNCLE: No she won’t. And a young woman will make me feel younger, which means I’ll live longer.
Argument Tool
SPOT THE INARGUABLE: It’s what is permanent, necessary, or undeniably true. If you think your opponent is wrong—if it ain’t necessarily so—then try to assess what the audience believes. You can challenge a belief, but deliberative argument prefers to use beliefs to persuasion’s advantage.
Which prediction is true? Neither of you has a clue. But Uncle Randy might persuade you that he has good practical reasons for remarrying. Will he ever convince you that he is morally in the right? Not a chance. Morals are inarguable in deliberative rhetoric.
Argument’s Rule Number One: Never debate the undebatable. Instead, focus on your goals. The next chapter tells you how to achieve them.
The Tools
We expect our arguments to accomplish something. You want a debate to settle an issue, with everyone walking away in agreement—with you. This is hard to achieve if no one can get beyond who is right or wrong, good or bad. Why do so many arguments end up in accusation and name-calling?
The answer may seem silly, but it’s crucial: most arguments take place in the wrong tense. Choose the right tense. If you want your audience to make a choice, focus on the future. Tenses are so important that Aristotle assigned a whole branch of rhetoric to each one. We’ll get into tenses in much greater detail in the chapters to come. You’ll see how you can use values to win an argument about choices. Meanwhile, remember these tools:
Control the issue. Do you want to fix blame? Define who meets or abuses your common values? Or get your audience to make a choice? The most productive arguments use choice as their central issue. Don’t let a debate swerve heedlessly into values or guilt. Keep it focused on choices that solve a problem to your audience’s (and your) advantage.
Control the clock. Keep your argument in the right tense. In a debate over choices, make sure it turns to the future.
4. Soften Them Up
CHARACTER, LOGIC, EMOTION
The strangely triumphant art of agreeability
Audi partem alteram. Hear the other side. —ST. AUGUSTINE
At the age of seven, my son, George, insisted on wearing shorts to school in the middle of winter. We live in icy New Hampshire, where playground snow has all the fluffy goodness of ground glass. My wife launched the argument in the classic family manner: “You talk to him,” she said.
So I talked to him. Being a student of rhetoric, I employed Aristotle’s three most powerful tools of persuasion:
Argument by character
Argument by logic
Argument by emotion
In this chapter you will see how each of these tools works, and you’ll gain some techniques—the persuasive use of decorum, argument jujitsu, tactical sympathy—that will put you well on the way to becoming an argument adept.
The first thing I used on George was argument by character: I gave him my stern father act.
ME: You have to wear pants, and that’s final.
GEORGE: Why?
ME: Because I told you to, that’s why.
But he just looked at me with tears in his eyes. Next, I tried reasoning with him, using argument by logic.
ME: Pants will keep your legs from chapping. You’ll feel a lot better.
GEORGE: But I want to wear shorts.
So I resorted to manipulating his emotions. Following Cicero, who claimed that humor was one of the most persuasive of all rhetorical passions, I hiked up my pant legs and pranced around.
ME: Doh-de-doh, look at me, here I go off to work wearing shorts…Don’t I look stupid?
GEORGE: Yes. [Continues to pull shorts on.]
ME: So why do you insist on wearing shorts yourself?
GEORGE: Because I don’t look stupid. And they’re my legs. I don’t mind if they get chaffed.
ME: Chapped.
Superior vocabulary and all, I seemed to be losing my case. Besides, George was making his first genuine attempt to argue instead of cry. So I decided to let him win this one.
Useful Figure
These two sentences (“Good idea? I believe it was”) form a figure of speech called a hypophora, which asks a rhetorical question and then immediately answers it. The hypophora allows you to anticipate the audience’s skepticism and nip it in the bud. For some reason, the word means “carrying below” in Greek.
ME: All right. You can wear shorts in school if your mother and I can clear it with the authorities. But you have to put your snow pants on when you go outside. Deal?
GEORGE: Deal.
He happily fetched his snow pants, and I called the school. A few weeks later the principal declared George’s birthday Shorts Day; she even showed up in culottes herself. It was mid-February. Was that a good idea? For the sake of argument, and agreement, I believe it was.
Aristotle’s Big Three
I used my best arguments by character, logic, and emotion. So, how did George still manage to beat me? By using the same tools. I did it on purpose, and he did it instinctively. Aristotle called them logos, ethos, and pathos, and so will I, because the meanings of the Greek versions are richer than those of the English versions. Together they form the three basic tools of rhetoric.
Logos is argument by logic. If arguments were children, logos would be th
e brainy one, the big sister who gets top grades in high school. Logos isn’t just about following rules of logic; it’s a set of techniques that use what the audience is thinking.
Argument Tool
ETHOS: Argument by character.
Argument Tool
LOGOS: Argument by logic.
Ethos, or argument by character, employs the persuader’s personality, reputation, and ability to look trustworthy. (While logos sweats over its GPA, ethos gets elected class president.) In rhetoric, a sterling reputation is more than just good; it’s persuasive. I taught my children that lying isn’t just wrong, it’s unpersuasive. An audience is more likely to believe a trustworthy persuader, and to accept his argument. “A person’s life persuades better than his word,” said one of Aristotle’s contemporaries. This remains true today. Rhetoric shows how to shine a flattering light on your life.
Argument Tool
PATHOS: Argument by emotion. A successful persuader must learn how to read the audience’s emotions.
Then you have pathos, or argument by emotion, the sibling the others disrespect but who gets away with everything. Logicians and language snobs hate pathos, but Aristotle himself—the man who invented logic—recognized its usefulness. You can persuade someone logically, but as we saw in Chapter 3, getting him out of his chair to act on it takes something more combustible.
Logos, ethos, and pathos appeal to the brain, gut, and heart of your audience. While our brain tries to sort the facts, our gut tells us whether we can trust the other person, and our heart makes us want to do something about it. They form the essence of effective persuasion.
TRY THIS BEFORE AN IMPORTANT MEETING
If you want to get a commitment out of the meeting, take stock of your proposal’s logos, pathos, and ethos: Do my points make logical sense? Will the people in the room trust what I say? How can I get them fired up for my proposal at the end?
George instinctively used all three to counter my own arguments. His ethos put mine in check:
ME: You have to wear pants because I told you to.
GEORGE: They’re my legs.
His logos also canceled mine out, even if his medical terminology didn’t:
ME: Pants will make your legs feel better.
GEORGE: I don’t mind if they get chaffed.
Finally, I found his pathos irresistible. When he was little, the kid would actually stick his lower lip out when he tried not to cry. Cicero loved this technique—not the lip part, but the appearance of struggling for self-control. It serves to amplify the mood in the room. Cicero also said a genuine emotion persuades more than a faked one, and George’s tears certainly were genuine. Trying not to cry just made his eyes well up more.
I wish I could say my pathos was as effective, but George failed to think it funny when I hiked my pants up. He just agreed that I looked stupid. I had been studying rhetoric pretty intensively at that point, and to be thrown to the mat by a seven-year-old was humiliating. So was facing my wife afterward.
DOROTHY SR.: So did you talk to him?
ME: Yeah, I handled it.
George picked that moment to walk into the room with his shorts on.
DOROTHY SR.: Then why is he wearing shorts?
GEORGE: We made a deal!
DOROTHY SR.: A deal. Which somehow allows him to wear shorts to school.
ME: I told you, I handled it.
So what if his legs looked like stalks of rhubarb when he came home? While I was moderately concerned about the state of his skin, and more apprehensive about living up to Dorothy’s expectations, neither had much to do with my personal goal: to raise persuasive children. If George was willing to put all he had into an argument, I was willing to concede. That time, I like to think, we both won. (In high school he expressed his individuality in the opposite way: he wore ties to school, and even pants.)
Logos, pathos, and ethos usually work together to win an argument, debates with argumentative seven-year-olds excepted. By using your opponent’s logic and your audience’s emotion, you can win over your audience with greater ease. You make them happy to let you control the argument.
Logos: Use the Logic in the Room
Later on, we’ll get into rhetoric’s more dramatic logical tactics and show how to bowl your audience over with your eloquence. First, though, let’s master the most powerful logos tool of all: concession. It seems more Jedi knight than Rambo, involving more self-mastery than brute force, but it lies closer to the power center of logos than rhetoric’s more grandiloquent methods. Even the most aggressive maneuvers allow room for the opponent’s ideas and the audience’s preconceptions. To persuade people—to make them desire your choice and commit to the action you want—you need all the assets in the room, and one of the best resources comes straight from your opponent’s mouth.
In the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, Calvin concedes effectively when his dad tries to teach him to ride a bike:
DAD: Look, Calvin. You’ve got to relax a little. Your balance will be better if you’re loose.
CALVIN: I can’t help it! Imminent death makes me tense! I admit it!
Clever boy. Perched atop a homicidal bike, he still manages to gain control of the argument. By agreeing that he’s tense, he shifts the issue from nerves to peril, where he has a better argument.
TRY THIS AT HOME
Aristotle said that every point has its flip side. That’s the trick to concession. When a spouse says, “We hardly ever go out anymore,” the wise mate does not spew examples of recent dates; he says, “That’s because I want you all to myself.” This response will at least buy him time to think up a credible change in tense: “But as a matter of fact, I was going to ask if you wanted to go to that new Korean restaurant.”
Salespeople love to use concession to sell you stuff. I once had a boss who came from a sales background. He proved that old habits die hard. The guy never disagreed with me, yet half the time he got me to do the opposite of what I proposed.
ME: Our research shows that readers love beautiful covers without a lot of type.
BOSS: Beautiful covers. Sure.
ME: I know that clean covers violate the usual rules for selling magazines on the newsstand, but we should test dual covers: half of them will be crammed with the usual headlines, and half of them with a big, bold image—very little type.
BOSS: Clean covers. Great idea. How’ll that affect your budget?
ME: It’ll cost a lot. I’m gambling on selling more magazines.
BOSS: So you haven’t budgeted for it.
ME: Uh, no. But I tell you, boss, I’m pretty confident about this.
BOSS: Sure. I know you are. Well, it’s a great idea. Let’s circle back to it at budget time.
ME: But that’s nine months from—
BOSS: So what else is on your agenda?
My covers never got tested. If a circle in hell is reserved for this kind of salesman, it’s a pretty darn pleasant one. And despite myself, I never stopped liking the guy. Arguments with him never felt like arguments; I would leave his office in a good mood after losing every point, and he was the one who did all the conceding.
You’ll find much the same technique if you take a class in improv. Your teachers will almost certainly school you in the practice of “Yes, and…” This entails accepting what the other person says and building on it. Imagine yourself onstage with a partner. She starts.
PARTNER: Look, the penguins are taking off from our roof!
So how do you respond? Sensibly?
YOU: They can’t be penguins. Penguins can’t fly. Plus we live in Florida. Did you mean pelicans?
You can just hear the brakes squealing on that little dialogue. Let’s try a “Yes, and…” instead.
YOU: Y
es, and it makes me so glad we built that catapult on top of our igloo.
The cool thing about this improvisational method is that it lets you nudge the conversation in a direction you want. Suppose you disagree that penguins are flying off your roof. Instead of pointing out that penguins don’t fly, simply assume a catapult.
Aren’t we being agreeable? While your conversations probably won’t take such avian flights of fancy, the same approach can work in a political argument. Politics makes an excellent test of concession, in part because the tactic is so refreshing. See if you can go through an entire discussion without overtly disagreeing with your opponent.
SHE: I’m willing to give up a little privacy so the government can keep me safe.
YOU: Safety’s important.
SHE: Not that they’re going to tap my phone.
YOU: No, you’d never rock the boat.
SHE: Of course, I’ll speak up if I disagree with what’s going on.
YOU: I know you will. And let the government keep a file on you.
You may see a little smoke come out of your friend’s ears at this point. Do not be alarmed; it’s simply a natural sign of mental gears being thrown in reverse. The Greeks loved concession for this very reason: it lets opponents talk their way right into your corner.
Thank You for Arguing (Revised and Updated) Page 5