TRY THIS WHEN YOU RUN FOR OFFICE
If you find it difficult to blend in with your audience, delight in it. Because Jimmy Carter’s presidency didn’t go so well, we forget what a great campaigner he was. He would wear conservative suits and sweeten them with his broad smile. Decorum is an aspect of sympathy. You don’t have to be your audience; just be deeply sympathetic to it.
As it happened, Joe had the wisdom of a Zen master. He told me to look for guys wearing the most expensive-looking shoes—not so I could imitate the shoes, mind you; I couldn’t afford them. Their suits would also be out of my reach. But he said I could mimic the colors and patterns in their shirts and ties.
Actually, I’m paraphrasing. Joe put it more cryptically.
JOE: Look for the guy with the best shoes, but don’t buy the shoes. Buy the colors.
Useful Figure
The this-not-that figure is called a dialysis: “Don’t buy the shoes. Buy the colors.” People take your wisdom more seriously if you put it cryptically; it’s the idiot savant approach. But perhaps you don’t wish to be an idiot savant.
Every man should have a clothier like Joe. He became my fashion consultant for years, even though he rocked my confidence by including Captain Kangaroo among his clients. I’m not joking. While looking at a suit in the mirror, I saw Bob Keeshan—the Captain—enter the store. He had the kids’ show when I was little, and he hadn’t changed much in forty years. Same bad haircut, even. Bad hair is decorous on a kiddie show, but not in a clothing store.
CAPTAIN KANGAROO: Wondering whether to buy it?
TRY THIS IN A PRESENTATION
If you have to address more than one audience, make two outlines: one for the content, and the other for the occasions. List the people who should be at each occasion, with a chart for what they believe and expect. Adjust your speech accordingly.
ME: [Nods, suddenly feeling five]
CAPTAIN KANGAROO: Well, if you’d be willing to wear that suit every single day for a year without getting tired of it, then buy it.
I bought it. But when I gave Joe my credit card I looked down at the Captain’s shoes. They were terrible—some sort of loafer deal. The suit turned out okay, but I never wanted to wear it daily. The Captain was wrong. So was the comte de Buffon, the man who first said, “Style makes the man.” It doesn’t. Style makes the occasion.
Basketball Decorum in Afghanistan
Besides knowing how to dress, a decorous persuader has to know how to adapt her language to the particular occasion. This is especially important in business. A PowerPoint presentation needs a sophisticated sense of decorum, because the speaker may be delivering versions of it to several different audiences.
First, she might give it to her department head while sitting on the edge of the conference table and talking blue, with phrases like “If this doesn’t work, we’re screwed” or “The bleeps in accounting need to support us on this.”
Next comes the presentation to the vice president. Some blunt or even crude language might be appropriate, but sitting on the edge of the table isn’t. She sits at the table, establishing eye contact before looking up at the screen and hitting the buttons of her remote.
When she speaks to the COO, she stands, wearing her best suit and speaking as though she doesn’t see the big boss check messages on his BlackBerry and flip through the paper “leave-behind” version of the presentation.
On each occasion she behaves appropriately, the way the people in the room expect her to behave—not necessarily the way the audience itself behaves. If our presenter acted as rudely as the COO, she would get pink-slipped in no time.
TRY THIS WITH YOUR WRITING
Besides checking your spelling and grammar, go over your emails and memos for decorum. Are you meeting your audience’s expectations? Exceeding them?
Naturally, the same adaptive rule applies to politics. A good politician changes his language, behavior, and even his dress to suit the expectations of particular audiences. But decorum is a lot trickier in politics than in business. An executive can have a truly private life, while for a politician the personal is definitely political. The public doesn’t expect the president of the United States to canoodle with an intern; up until recently, it was scandalous even to get a divorce.
Senator Bob Packwood learned the personal-is-political lesson the hard way, with a decorum disaster that wrecked his career. One of the most effective feminists on Capitol Hill, the Oregon Republican championed women’s rights legislation. But back in 1992 word got out that he was chasing female staff around his desk; the civil rights hero turned out to be a total horndog. Although he was a great public servant for women, his lack of decorum showed how he really felt about them. Persuasion requires sympathy. His rotten behavior made him unpersuasive. In politics, persuasion is power; so, bereft of political capital, he eventually resigned. More recently, several women accused Senator Al Franken of inappropriate behavior—allegations of unwanted kissing, a humiliating photo, a squeeze on the waist, and the like. Some of the allegations turned out to be inaccurate, but by then it was too late. Franken had resigned. In the two decades since Bob Packwood’s disgrace, the behavioral bar for men had been set considerably higher, at least among liberals.
Packwood and Franken had maybe been true to themselves. After all, Franken had had a fine career as a clownish comedian on Saturday Night Live, and when he was a senator he looked like he was just playing senator. He probably thought that his behavior conveyed more humor than harassment. But compared to the reaction of his victims and constituents, his intentions are irrelevant. Persuasion doesn’t depend on being true to yourself. It depends on being true to your audience.
That may sound dishonest and cynical, especially in our society. Suppose I don’t choose to be politically correct myself. Why can’t I just speak from my sexist or racist heart? My audience (especially women and people of color) may not like what I say, but they should respect my honesty, right? And if they don’t like it? Well, I’m just being true to myself.
Persuasion Alert
I risk sounding preachy here, which would be extremely indecorous. But I need to counter the attitude most of us bring to persuasion. “The last thing we need these days is manipulation,” people often say to me. So I throw Afghans and senators into the mix to show argument’s civic virtue. It results in peace, love, freedom, and mastery of your fellow beings. What more could you want?
But here’s the thing: persuasion isn’t about me. It’s about the beliefs and expectations of my audience. Because we undervalue persuasion, decorum seems to put us at a disadvantage. When everyone around us acts like a jerk, why should we behave? As you have seen, though, fitting in—rightly understood—is a source of rhetorical strength, not weakness. Decorum gives people a sense of group identity, a resource that rhetoric loves to exploit. Get the group to identify with you and you have won half the persuasive battle.
Besides, being true to your audience can be downright noble. Decorum counts even more in the Senate than it does in other places, because so much is at stake. When one person addresses the other as “the distinguished senator from the commonwealth of Massachusetts,” he is not merely following tradition; he is maintaining a high state of decorum so that a minor violation won’t end up in a political squabble or—what the founders feared most—civil war.
You will find exceptional decorum in places where the consequences of indecorous behavior are the most dire. Anthropologists say that basketball in the more remote parts of Afghanistan, where missionaries introduced it long ago, may be the politest game on earth. Personal fouls are virtually unheard of, because touching another man could lead to a blood feud.
In short, people who stick to their guns are the ignoble ones. Decorum is the better part of valor.
The Tools
We now get to the meat of ethos—the tools that turn
you into a credible leader. In the next chapter you’ll learn how to define your character for an audience. But the first step is fitting in.
Decorum. Argument by character starts with your audience’s love. You earn it through decorum, which Cicero listed first among the ethical tactics.
6. Make Them Listen
THE LINCOLN GAMBIT
Converting character into a tool of persuasion
The argument which is made by a man’s life is of more weight than that which is furnished by words. —ISOCRATES
Cicero said you want your audience to be receptive—sitting still and not throwing anything at you. Beyond that, they should be attentive—willing to listen closely to what you have to say. And most important of all, they should like and trust you. All three require argument by character. This chapter will delve deeper into the techniques of ethos.
Argument Tool
THE PERFECT AUDIENCE: Receptive, attentive, and well disposed toward you.
According to Aristotle, people have to be able to trust your judgment as well as your essential goodness.
They may think you’re a terrific person, but they won’t follow you if they think you will lead them off a cliff. Likable knuckleheads make bad leaders. Your audience also has to consider you a good person who wants to do the right thing and will not use them for your own nefarious purposes.
All of which boils down to Aristotle’s three essential qualities of a persuasive ethos:
Virtue, or cause. The audience believes you share their values.
Practical wisdom, or craft. You appear to know the right thing to do on every occasion.
Disinterest. This means not lack of interest but lack of bias; you seem to be impartial, caring only about the audience’s interests rather than your own.
Assuming that you think I’m a good person who knows what he talks about and whose only desire is to make you more persuasive, let’s take a closer look at those three traits. We begin with that strange, highly subjective quality called virtue. As you shall see, persuasive virtue strays from the virtue of Mom and Dad—or Moses and Abraham, for that matter.
Argument Tool
THE THREE TRAITS OF PERSUASIVE LEADERSHIP: Virtue, practical wisdom, disinterest
TRY THIS IF YOU’RE FORGETFUL
Think of the ethos traits as “C3”: cause, craft, caring.
Donald Trump’s Impeccable Virtue
TRY THIS WITH YOUR RÉSUMÉ
Edit your résumé by ethos instead of chronology. Think of the company you would most want to work for, and describe how you stand for the same things the company does (cause), list your relevant knowledge and experience (craft), and show how hard you work as a team player (caring). Now redo the résumé chronologically. It should be ethically persuasive now.
What defines a virtuous woman (assuming anyone still uses “virtuous” and “woman” in the same sentence)? Self-sacrificing loyalty to husband and children? Inviolate chastity? No wonder you rarely hear “virtue” mentioned in daily conversation. Now, a virtuous man, on the other hand, is…
Persuasion Alert
Interrupting yourself (“Hey, pal…”) to address a different audience, even a virtual one, keeps your original audience on its toes.
Hey, pal, who are you calling virtuous? The word connotes weakness and dependency—a sexist’s idea of femininity. In rhetorical terms, though, virtue means anything but. It continues to play a big role in argument; we just avoid using the term. Instead, we talk about “values.” That’s because a person who upholds the values of a group is rhetorically virtuous. This kind of persuasive virtue does not require purity of soul and universal goodness. You don’t even have to do what your heart knows is right; you simply must be seen to have the “right” values—your audience’s values, that is. Jesus Christ had the pure kind of virtue, while Julius Caesar’s was decidedly rhetorical. The audience for each man considered him virtuous.
I like to call virtue “cause,” because the virtuous character stands for something larger than himself. Virtue means more Nelson Mandela than Polly Purebread. It means embodying the values of a group or a nation. Or (since we’re talking rhetoric), seeming to embody them.
It’s an old trick; the Greeks played many variations on this theme.
Useful Figure
The litotes (“didn’t exactly adore”) understates a point ironically. It has fallen out of favor in our hyperbolic times, but makes for a more sophisticated kind of speech.
Meanings
“Virtue” may sound schoolmarmish to our ears. But the Greek arete and the Roman virtus meant “manliness”—good sportsmanship, respect for values, and all-around nobility. This makes sense when you translate arete as “cause,” standing for certain values or meeting high standards.
This is where values come into deliberative argument—not as a subject of debate but as a tool of ethos. Values change from audience to audience. Donald Trump’s fans liked shoot-from-the-hip talk—which made him a paragon of virtue to his fans. He lost virtue only when his audience expanded to include people who didn’t exactly adore his style of decorum.
Members of the same family can have different ideas of virtue. Dorothy Jr. proved that on a family hike some years ago. The forest road on the way to the trailhead had washed out in a recent storm, lengthening an already long hike by two miles. My daughter values comfort and sense above all else; George and I believe that meeting a pointless challenge outweighs her values. (Dorothy Sr. puts herself on Dorothy Jr.’s side, but she hikes nonetheless because she likes it.)
We voted on whether to turn around at the washout, and Dorothy Jr. lost. She went along as gracefully as an independent twelve-year-old can, until we were a mile from our car, when she suddenly ran ahead and disappeared around a turn.
ME: She knows she’s not supposed to do that.
DOROTHY SR.: It’s only a mile, and she has the best sense of direction in the family. Now, if you were to run ahead, I’d be worried.
ME: Very funny. But my pack has her raingear, and it’s already starting to drizzle. She’ll just have to stand there freezing in the parking lot until we come. Serves her right.
DOROTHY SR.: Not really.
ME: Why?
DOROTHY SR.: She has the car keys.
When we arrived at the car half an hour later, Dorothy Jr. was happily locked inside with the stereo blasting. I knocked on the window.
ME: Fun’s over. Unlock the car.
DOROTHY JR. (mouthing over the music): Say you’re sorry.
ME: I’m sorry? You’re the one who…
She unlocked the car, because she saw me say, “I’m sorry.” It was probably for the best; an apology was the only way I could get her to let us in, other than a credible threat—the rhetorical “argument by the stick.” There was no persuading her any other way; lacking her idea of virtue, I wasn’t persuasive. In her eyes, I was just wrong. (As you’ll see in Chapter 22, however, in many cases apologizing can actually harm your virtue.)
Families are bad enough. When values differ, another group’s behavior can seem downright bizarre. The House of Representatives mystified Europeans when it impeached Bill Clinton simply because he messed around with an intern and lied about it. Shortly before the impeachment hearings, both the wife and the mistress of François Mitterrand had attended the former French president’s funeral. The French didn’t understand Americans’ insistence on sexual loyalty in a leader; to the French, an affair adds to a powerful man’s ethos. And lying about your mistress is an affaire d’honneur.
Persuasion Alert
If attaching values to audiences sounds like relativism, you’re in good philosophical company; Plato certainly thought it did. But the point of rhetoric isn’t to transform you into a better person—or a worse one, for that matter�
��but to make you argue more effectively.
What seems ethical to you, in other words, can hurt a person’s ethos. Atticus Finch, the southern lawyer in To Kill a Mockingbird, seems utterly virtuous when we watch him on DVD. The townsfolk in the movie think he is, too, until he strays from the values of 1930s white southern culture by defending a black man charged with raping a white woman. While we consider Finch even more virtuous for that selfless act of pro bono lawyering (my wife almost swoons when Gregory Peck leans in toward the jury), the more Finch does the right thing, the more his rhetorical virtue declines. Without the respect of many townsfolk, he loses persuasive power, along with the case. Finch stood for something, a larger cause. But in the eyes of his racist, Old South audience, it was the wrong cause.
Thank You for Arguing (Revised and Updated) Page 7