Thank You for Arguing (Revised and Updated)

by Jay Heinrichs

  But there’s something bigger to concession. It’s essential to what I call agreeability. By arguing without appearing to argue, agreeability takes anger out of confrontation. And it helps change a fight into an argument. Agreeability requires getting inside your opponent’s head. You may find that argumentative brain a pretty messy place. But every head has its attractive parts. Which is the greatest thing about concession and agreeability: ultimately, it’s an act of sympathy.

  Pathos: Start with the Audience’s Mood

  Argument Tool

  SYMPATHY: Share your listeners’ mood.

  Sympathize—align yourself with your listener’s pathos. Don’t contradict or deny the mood; instead, rhetorical sympathy shows its concern, proving, as President George H. W. Bush put it, “I care.” So when you face that angry man, look stern and concerned; do not shout, “Whoa, decaf!” When a little girl looks sad, sympathy means looking sad, too; it does not mean chirping, “Cheer up!”

  This reaction to the audience’s feelings can serve as a baseline, letting them see your own emotions change as you make your point. Cicero hinted that the great orator transforms himself into an emotional role model, showing the audience how it should feel.

  LITTLE GIRL: I lost my balloon!

  YOU: Awww, did you?

  [Little girl cries louder.]

  YOU (still trying to look sad while yelling over the crying): What’s that you’re holding?

  LITTLE GIRL: My mom gave me a dinosaur.

  YOU (cheering up): A dinosaur!

  Being a naturally sympathetic type, my wife is especially good at conceding moods. She has a way of playing my emotion back so intensely that I’m embarrassed I felt that way. I once returned home from work angry that my employer had done nothing to recognize an award my magazine had won.

  TRY THIS AT WORK

  Oversympathizing makes someone’s mood seem ridiculous without actually ridiculing it. When a staffer complains about his workspace, say, “Let’s take this straight to the top.” Watch his mood change from whiny to nervous. Of course, you could have an Alice’s Restaurant–style backfire. Arlo Guthrie yelled, “I wanna kill! Kill!” when he registered for the draft, and they pinned a medal on him. You’ll see more of this technique, called the “backfire,” later on.

  DOROTHY SR.: Not a thing? Not even a group email congratulating you?

  ME: No…

  DOROTHY SR.: They have no idea what a good thing they have in you.

  ME: Well…

  DOROTHY SR.: An email wouldn’t be enough! They should give you a bonus.

  ME: It wasn’t that big an award.

  She agreed with me so much that I found myself siding with my lousy employer. I believe her sympathy was genuine, but its effect was the same as if she had applied all her rhetorical skill to make me feel better. And I did feel better, if a bit sheepish.

  And then there’s the concession side of ethos, called decorum. This is the most important jujitsu of all, which is why the whole next chapter is devoted to it.

  The Tools

  “Thus use your frog,” Izaak Walton says in The Compleat Angler. “Put your hook through his mouth, and out at his gills…and in so doing use him as though you loved him.” That pretty much sums up this chapter, which teaches you to use your audience as though you loved it. All of these tools require understanding your opponent and sympathizing with your audience.

  Logos. Argument by logic. The first logical tactic we covered was concession, using the opponent’s argument to your own advantage.

  Pathos. Argument by emotion. The most important pathetic tactic is sympathy, registering concern for your audience’s emotions and then changing the mood to suit your argument.

  Ethos. Argument by character. Aristotle called this the most important appeal of all—even more than logos.

  Logic, emotion, and character are the megatools of rhetoric. You’re about to learn specific ways to wield each one. Read on.

  5. Get Them to Like You

  EMINEM’S RULES OF DECORUM

  The agreeable side of ethos

  He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god. —ARISTOTLE

  Argument Tool

  DECORUM: Your audiences find you agreeable if you meet their expectations.

  An agreeable ethos matches the audience’s expectations for a leader’s tone, appearance, and manners. The ancient Romans coined a word to describe this kind of character-based agreeability: decorum. The concept is far more interesting than the mandatory politesse of Emily Post and Miss Manners. Rhetorical decorum is the art of fitting in—not just in polite company but everywhere, from the office to the neighborhood bar. This is why salespeople wear terrific shoes, and why a sixteen-year-old girl will sneak out of the house to get a navel ring. She fits herself into a social microhabitat that happens to exclude her mortified parents.

  Meanings

  Ethos in Greek originally meant “habitat”—the environment animals and people live in. This makes no sense until you think about the meaning of “ethics” (a direct etymological descendant of ethos). An ethical person fits her audience’s rules and values the same way a penguin fits the peculiar habitat of an iceberg. Ethos has to do with a person’s ability to fit in with a group’s expectations.

  Actually, the Latin word decorum meant “fit,” as in “suitable.” In argument, as in evolution, survival belongs to the fittest. The elite of every society large and small, from the playground to the boardroom, are the product of survival of the decorous.

  Decorum tells the audience, “Do as I say and as I do.” The speaker can sound like a higher collective voice of his audience, a walking, talking consensus. This does not necessarily mean acting like your audience. For one thing, it helps to dress slightly better than the average member. Adults sometimes commit a decorum crime when they deal with children. Speaking baby talk to a three-year-old does not just look idiotic to fellow grown-ups; the three-year-old also sees you as an idiot.

  We think of decorum as a fussy, impractical art, but the manuals the ancients wrote on decorum—covering voice control, gestures, clothing, and timing, as well as manners—touted the same themes as a modern bestseller, combining the contents of How to Dress for Success, Martha Stewart, Emily Post, and The One-Minute Manager. A couple of thousand years after the Romans invented it, modern rhetorician Kenneth Burke declared that decorum is “perhaps the simplest case of persuasion.” He went on to offer a good inventory of decorous skills: “You persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his.”

  Burke wrote that in 1950, by the way—back when it was perfectly decorous to refer to a person as “a man,” a usage that most people today would consider rude. Does that mean we grow more polite every year? Few people over eighteen seem to think so. But that doesn’t mean we have grown ruder, either. Every era has its rules; humans continuously adapt those rules to changes in the social environment. Men used to wear coat and tie to the movies, but they also smoked in the theater.

  Speaking of movies, my mother was fourteen when Gone with the Wind came to the local theater in Wayne, Pennsylvania. Rhett Butler’s profanity was all the buzz back then. Mom was looking forward to hearing someone actually curse in a movie, but when the time came for “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” the audience gasped and whispered so much that she never heard it. “The line was quite a shocker,” she said many years later.

  These days every middle school student talks like a sailor. Score one for the superior politesse of my mother’s generation. On the other hand, when Mom watched Gone with the Wind, she had to sit in the balcony; she went with the family’s cook, who was black. Eve
n in suburban Philadelphia, back in 1939, while Gone with the Wind reminisced about the chivalrous South, theaters banned “coloreds” from the good seats.

  TRY THIS IN AN INVASION

  It may seem obvious that discretion is the better part of decorum, but someone should have told the Pentagon. It didn’t begin training substantial numbers of officers in Iraqi decorum until three years after the Iraq invasion. Force let us win on points, but it failed to win commitment from the locals.

  What are manners but the ways we treat one another? People who complain about “political correctness” may just be lamenting inevitable change in the social environment. Sure, some people love to enforce manners; every culture has its bluenoses who take decorum to the point of rudeness—bluenoses on the left who get offended at an ethnic joke, and bluenoses on the right who practically faint when someone wishes them “happy holidays” instead of “merry Christmas.” But more than manners are at stake here. We’re talking about a critical persuasive tool.

  Decorum follows the audience’s rules. If you find yourself in a fundamentalist church, you do not lecture the parishioners about the etymology of “holiday”; you wish them a merry Christmas. If you attend a faculty meeting on an Ivy League campus, you do not roll your eyes and snort when somebody refers to “people of color.” You sit there and look pious. Of course, no law says you have to be decorous. Away from talk radio and the more diversity-mad college campuses, it’s a free country. Go ahead and tell it like it is. But you cannot be indecorous and persuasive at the same time. The two are mutually exclusive.

  Deliberative argument is not about the truth, it’s about choices, and persuasive decorum changes to match the audience. When in Rome, do as the Romans do, but when you’re not in Rome, doing as the Romans do might get you in trouble. Decorum can make the difference between persuading an audience and getting thrown out by it.

  One of the greatest decorum scenes in movie history graces the climax of 8 Mile, Eminem’s semiautobiography. He gets talked into a competition at a dance club in downtown Detroit where hip-hop artists (orators, if you will) take turns insulting each other. The audience chooses the winner by applause. Eventually, the contest comes down to two people: Eminem and a sullen-looking black guy. (Well, not as sullen as Eminem. Nobody can be that sullen.) Eminem wears proper attire: stupid skullcap, clothes a few sizes too big, and as much bling as he can afford. If he showed up dressed like Cary Grant, he would look terrific—to you and me. But the dance club crowd would find him wildly indecorous.

  Clothing is the least of his decorum problems, though. He happens to be white, and everyone else in the room is black. Eminem nonetheless manages to devastate his adversary by revealing a nasty little secret: this putative gangbanger attended a prep school! All the poor guy’s hip-hop manners are pointless, because the audience finds them phony. Eminem, that foul-mouthed master of decorum, blends in better with an inner-city crowd than his black opponent does.

  Was My Fly Down?

  As Cicero said, decorum that works for one persuader may not work for another, even in front of the same people. Before you begin to argue, ask yourself, What do they expect?—and mean it. To move people away from their current opinion, you need to make them feel comfortable with you.

  This is more difficult than it sounds. When I worked in Greensboro, North Carolina, I carried a coffee mug with large black type that said “Piss Off.” People loved it in New York, but it didn’t get the same reception in Greensboro. No one said anything until I started gesturing with it in a meeting with potential clients. Luckily they thought it was funny, but my boss told me to switch cups. Not so funny was the bumper sticker of an entry-level editor I hired right out of college. The sticker advertised a local rock band by claiming that it violated “Your Honor Student.” Some employees complained. When I casually advised the young woman to ditch the bumper sticker, her reaction surprised me.

  NEW EDITOR: I can’t believe they complained about it!

  ME: Yeah, I know. But you’ve been living in the South for years. You know the culture better than I do.

  NEW EDITOR: It’s a freedom-of-speech issue!

  ME: No, actually, it’s not…

  NEW EDITOR: I have the right to put anything I want on my car.

  ME: That’s true.

  NEW EDITOR (uneasily): Right.

  ME: But if you can’t get along with people here, the company has the right to fire you. You own the car, but it owns your job.

  She never removed the sticker. She didn’t have to; someone removed it for her that afternoon.

  It isn’t always easy to adapt your decorum to the circumstances, even if you want to. Back when I was single and living in D.C., my younger brother came to visit me. One evening in Georgetown, center of Washington’s nightlife, we crossed M Street to hit a few bars when a Hare Krishna approached us with some scraggly-looking roses for sale. John bought one and gave it to the first pretty woman he saw, saying, “Here you go, doll.”

  “Here you go, doll”? Who did he think he was, Dean Martin?

  TRY THIS IN A NEW JOB

  When my wife resumed her career, she asked me what she should wear on casual Fridays. “Does anyone above you dress casually?” I asked. “No,” she said. “Then don’t go casually,” I said. “Always dress one step above your rank.” It worked. Within eighteen months she was promoted to vice president.

  Instead of smacking him, the woman said, “Oh, thank you!” She looked as if she wanted to kiss him, but her girlfriends dragged her across the street.

  I stared at John in astonishment.

  JOHN: What?

  ME: How did you do that?

  JOHN: Do what? Give a girl a flower?

  ME: You called her “doll.”

  JOHN: Yeah. She was cute.

  Maybe he was on to something. “Wait here,” I told him, and I jaywalked back across the street and bought another rose from the Hare Krishna just as the light changed and a crowd of bar hoppers came toward me, including several young women. I picked out a stunning blonde and thrust the rose at her just as John had done. I even tried to imitate his tone.

  ME: Here ya go, doll.

  WOMAN: Go to hell.

  She said it matter-of-factly, without any apparent rancor, the way one might say, “No thanks,” to a Hare Krishna. I’ve never stopped wondering what happened. John and I look alike—same build, same hair. At any rate, it couldn’t have been my looks, because she never looked at me. Did John have a homing instinct for the type of female who liked being called “doll”?

  More likely, the one I approached sensed my embarrassment. John is the kind of irony-free, straight-ahead guy who attracts women. I’m not, apparently. Cicero would nod his head. He taught that you can’t assume a character that strays too far from your own. What works for one can wreak disaster for the other. “Indeed,” said Cicero, “such diversity of character carries with it so great significance that suicide may be for one man a duty, for another (under the same circumstances) a crime.”

  Speak for yourself, C-man. But we get the point.

  Decorum is the art of the appropriate, and an ethos that fails to fit your actual personality is usually indecorous. People pick up on it.

  Persuasion Alert

  We have been taught that a successful persuader never admits ignorance, but the Romans saw doubt as a rhetorical device. They called it aporia: wonder openly or admit you cannot fathom a reason, and the audience will unconsciously start reasoning for you. Without even knowing it, they comfortably get inside your head.

  But being yourself doesn’t always cut it. That scene with brother John took place years ago, before the MeToo movement redefined and clarified the standards for approaching people. For one thing, I wouldn’t think of attempting an experiment like that today. And John wouldn’t either, I imagine. “D
oll” is less of a compliment than it used to be—assuming women who weren’t in old-time musicals ever took it as one. Decorum is not just about fitting in with an audience. It’s about fitting into a culture. And, as we shall see, cultures change.

  Captain Kangaroo’s Fashion Tip

  Romans wore togas, so Cicero offers little relevant advice for us on how to dress decorously. But the decorum rule of thumb applies to dress as well as everything else: look the way you think your audience will want you to look. When in doubt, use camouflage. Dress the way the average audience member dresses. Is black the common color in your office? Wear black. You want to dress slightly above your rank—wearing a jacket on a casual Friday, for instance—but not too far above (a Friday tie makes you look like a jerk in many offices). And if you’re in a persuasive situation, don’t let your clothes make a statement unless your audience will agree with it. A camo tie might serve as a witty fashion accessory in the offices of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, but the PETA people may not enjoy your indecorum.

  In all honesty, I’m not the best one to give fashion advice. I once found myself in a job that had me speaking in front of business execs as well as fellow editors. Up to that point I considered corduroy the height of male fashion. So I went to the best men’s store I could afford in New Hampshire and introduced myself to a salesman named Joe, a natty dresser who looked like the businesspeople I was meeting. I said I wanted to equip myself minimally—enough for a two-day trip—but that I’d be back once I had observed enough successful men and got a clue about what I was supposed to wear.