TRY THIS WITH A BIGOT
You can’t talk a prejudiced person directly out of a prejudice. But you can dissuade him from its harmful results. If he says, “All foreign Arabs in the United States should have their green cards taken away,” talk about a specific person who would be affected, and describe values that you all have in common.
What could he have done differently? Maybe nothing. But a clue lies in the informal language Lincoln used before he won the presidency. Friends said he loved darkie jokes and even saw fit to use the n-word now and then. That sounds terrible now, but keep in mind the culture at the time. Only the most extreme liberal whites took offense at racist jokes, and Lincoln’s opposition to slavery put him in a small minority. To stop its expansion and eventually end it altogether, he needed to win over more than a few racists. He did that with rhetorical virtue—he talked the audience’s talk. Many disliked his party’s antislavery platform, but they liked him. Whether Lincoln actually was a racist or not doesn’t matter rhetorically; his outward attitude was an effective ethos gambit.
Here we find ourselves back in the realm of decorum, but of a special kind. This decorum has nothing to do with clothing or table manners. It has to do with the ability to match the audience’s beliefs. Lincoln made his audience well disposed toward him; emancipation was easier to accept coming from a racist than from one of those insufferable abolitionists up in liberal Massachusetts. If he had sermonized about racial equality the way they did, he never would have become president.
Clearly, if you want to pack your own ethos with persuasive virtue, you need to determine your audience’s values and then appear to live up to them—even if your audience is a single sullen teenager. Suppose you want the living room music turned down, only this time your adversary is a sixteen-year-old instead of a spouse. A kid that age values independence more than anything; if you simply issued an order, your ethos would do nothing for you, because you would simply prove to the kid that you never let him make his own choices. To dodge that rap, you could give him a choice:
YOU: Would you mind turning that down? Or would you rather switch to headphones?
Otherwise, you could appeal directly to a different value, the passion that most kids have for fairness:
YOU: How about giving me a chance to play my own music? Do you like Lynyrd Skynyrd?
In the workplace, values tend toward money and growth. Show a single-minded dedication to profit, and you gain business virtue. If the boss is a law-abiding type who values playing by the rules, then a straitlaced ethical approach to profit makes you even more rhetorically virtuous. But if you worked for one of the top investment firms before the 2008 financial meltdown, obeying the rules would have made you unvirtuous. The top brass considered cutting ethical corners to be perfectly kosher. Not that you should have broken the law yourself, of course. But an atmosphere like that requires a Lincolnesque kind of virtue right at the start of the wrongdoing—talking the talk while tripping up the bad guys.
Classic Hits
AYE CANDY: In Rome, political candidates symbolized their pure virtue by wearing white togas; candidus means “white” in Latin, which is why “candidates” and “candy” (made of white sugar) share the same “candid” root. “Candid,” in fact, used to mean “openminded.” The Federalist often addresses the “candid reader.”
YOU: Let’s not wait for the regulators to screw us up. They’ll come in sooner or later. We should get the accountants in here right away and straighten this thing out. Do it ourselves.
Admittedly, it would take thousands of Lincolnesque arguments like that to stop a Wall Street collapse. But what little persuasive virtue you display within the company has to start with the company’s idea of virtue. So you present your argument from principles the corporate culture endorses, such as pragmatism and financial gain, rather than those they don’t, like conscience or the law. You don’t want to stand apart from your colleagues. You want the audience to consider you the epitome of the company “us,” so you turn the regulators into “them”—the judgmental types who’ll screw everything up.
This isn’t so easy. Virtue is complicated. You may find yourself trying to persuade two audiences at the same time, each with different values, joining different causes. Many years ago, I took over a college alumni magazine and turned a deficit into a profit by increasing advertising revenue. I never received a raise beyond cost-of-living increases. I couldn’t understand what I was doing wrong until I saw the situation rhetorically: what was virtuous in a private company didn’t help in academia. I was acting businesslike, while academics valued scholarship. My magazine, with its class notes and stories about life on campus, definitely wasn’t scholarly. My cause was making alumni feel welcome in a rapidly changing institution. The faculty’s cause was the advancement of knowledge. The values clashed when a faculty dean asked me to publish a professor’s article in German.
ME: Why German?
DEAN: To send a message.
ME: But what if hardly anyone can read the message?
DEAN: You don’t get it, do you?
Persuasion Alert
A common if ham-handed ethos enhancer: overwhelm the audience with examples of your erudition. An easily cowed audience will take your word for it rather than challenge your individual points. But I have a different motive for tossing you all these tools. Rhetoric is as much about awareness and attitude as it is about technique. Don’t worry about knowing each tool. (At any rate, you’ll find a list at the end of each chapter and in the back of the book.) Just read on, and you’ll gain an instinct for persuasion that will take you further than any set of tools.
Now I think I get it. While I valued profit and service to the readers, he valued scholarship and flattering the all-important faculty. If I had treated my job more rhetorically and published an occasional research paper, on-campus scholars would have found me more virtuous. My pay probably would have improved. And the magazine would have been read by tens and tens of alumni.
Nonetheless, the dean was getting at an important aspect of virtue. It’s the key element of identity—of what makes a person feel unique, or a member of a group feel like he belongs. That sense of identity can sometimes lead to behavior that outsiders think of as unvirtuous. Or just plain stupid. People were mystified after Jon Krakauer’s bestselling book, Into Thin Air, came out. A tale about amateurs dying on Mount Everest, the book was supposed to warn off inexperienced climbers from making the attempt. And yet, the number of applicants for permits to climb the mountain soared in the years after the book came out. Irrational? Definitely. But when you see it from a rhetorical point of view, it makes sense. To a type-A, beat-any-challenge person, danger can be a virtue. To an Austin “Danger is my middle name” Powers type, the deaths on Everest only made the mountain more alluring.
In fact, whenever you see an individual or group acting irrationally—while passionately defending their irrational behavior—look for virtue.
TRY THIS WITH YOUR EMPLOYER
Write down a personal mission statement. Why are you working? What are your motives, both selfish and noble? Now compare your mission statement with your employer’s (or write your employer’s yourself if his is meaningless). Is it a reasonably close match? Otherwise, follow the directions on this page for redoing your résumé.
The Eddie Haskell Ploy
It’s not hard to pump up your rhetorical virtue for a particular audience. I will give you a few ideas, but the essential point is to fashion yourself into an exemplar of their values. You want to look like a good person—“good,” that is, in their eyes.
Argument Tool
BRAGGING: Use it only if your audience appreciates boastful hyperbole in the mode of Muhammad Ali.
The most red-blooded American technique is simply to brag about all the good things you have done. Or you can get someone to brag for y
ou. You can arouse sympathy by revealing an appealing flaw (we’ll get to that). Or, when you find yourself on the wrong side, you can switch.
While bragging is the easiest way to show how great you are, it doesn’t always work. God, for his part, bragged to great effect in the book of Job.
Satan bets God that the most worshipful man on earth would curse God’s name if his life were miserable. “You’re on,” says God, who wipes out Job’s cow and she-asses, kills his ten children, and, when Job continues to praise his name, allows Satan to give him loathsome sores from head to foot. Job finally yells to heaven.
JOB: Why are you punishing me? At least let me argue my case. If you do, you’ll have to stop with the killing and the boils.
It may have been the bravest thing ever said by a man with raging dermatitis. But then a whirlwind appears out of nowhere and speaks in God’s voice.
GOD: Answer me this. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Can you rule the heavens? And the whale: who do you think made it? What makes you think you even know enough to argue with me?
Argument Tool
CHARACTER REFERENCE: Get others to do your bragging for you.
Job backs right down. You don’t mess with God’s ethos. The Lord has virtue to spare; in fact, he constitutes virtue. Unless you happen to be a god, though—or at least someone with enough power to give a State of the Union address—reciting your résumé is not the most effective way to enhance your ethos.
TRY THIS IN A MEETING
Suppose your group decided to revamp its website and give it powerful new features. You worked at a dot-com briefly and would love to take over the Web content. Instead of bragging about your experience, use a shill. Get an ally to ask you in the meeting, “Didn’t you work at an Internet company?”
Aristotle said that character references beat your own bragging. Back when John McCain ran for president against Barack Obama, he rarely talked about his heroism as a prisoner in Vietnam. But many others did. Similarly, a couple who make a pact to tag-team their teenager gain a mutually enhanced ethos. Have one talk up the other’s virtue.
FATHER: Mind turning that down?
KID: You never let me play my music!
MOTHER: Your father gave you that stereo.
Argument Tool
TACTICAL FLAW: Reveal a weakness that wins sympathy or shows the sacrifice you have made for the cause.
Then there is the tactical flaw: reveal some defect that shows your dedication to the audience’s values. George Washington was the unequaled master of this device. Late in the Revolutionary War, his officers grew frustrated by the Continental Congress’s delays in paying them, and they threatened mutiny. Washington requested a meeting and showed up with a congressional resolution that ensured immediate pay. He pulled the document from his pocket and then fumbled with his spectacles.
WASHINGTON: Forgive me, gentlemen, for my eyes have grown dim in the service of my country.
The men burst into tears and swore their fealty to the chief. It was a sentimental time. And it was George Washington, for crying out loud. His officers considered him to be God and Caesar rolled up in one.
Though you probably don’t happen to be the father of your country, you can use the same technique to recover from a mistake. Turn it into a tactical flaw by attributing your error to something noble. Imagine you sent a memo to everyone in your office, only to find that you screwed up your figures by a decimal point or two.
YOU: My mistake. I wrote it late last night and didn’t want to wake the others to check the facts.
TRY THIS IF YOU’RE SHORT
When a microphone is too high for you, don’t lower it yourself. Get someone else to do it, then say, “The great thing about being short is you get good at making people do things for you.”
Of course, this strategy risks earning you the loathing of the rest of your staff, but it might work on an impressionable boss.
You can also polish your virtue by heartily supporting what the audience is for, even when that means changing your position. This technique can be tricky, so you had better use it sparingly. To avoid looking like a waffler, show how your opponent—or, better, the audience itself—gave you new information or compelling logic that made the switch inevitable to anyone with an unbiased mind. Those who stick to the former opinion in the face of such overwhelming reasons aren’t, well, reasonable.
Argument Tool
OPINION SWITCH: When an argument is doomed to go against you, heartily support the other side.
Argument Tool
THE EDDIE HASKELL PLOY: Make an inevitable decision against you look like a willing sacrifice on your part.
Otherwise, if you can get away with it, simply pretend you were for your new stand all along. I call this tool the Eddie Haskell ploy, after the kid who sucks up to his neighbor’s mom in the classic TV show Leave It to Beaver. George W. Bush made a smooth switch in opposing the Department of Homeland Security and then fighting for it when its creation seemed inevitable. He never apologized, never looked back, and few people called him a waffler. Hillary Clinton pulled a less convincing Eddie Haskell ploy when, after promoting the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal as secretary of state, she opposed it while running for president. Some people make better Eddie Haskells than others do.
TRY THIS AT HOME
The Eddie Haskell ploy can work in reverse. Your sister, a ballroom dance instructor, offers to teach your son for free. You turn her down; you couldn’t pay him to dance the rumba. You tell your son, “Aunt Sally said she’d give you free lessons, and I told her you weren’t the type.”
My own daughter used a more subtle variation of the switching-sides technique when she was in high school. Friends invited her to an unsupervised party. Aware that we would try to call the parents and then forbid her to go, Dorothy Jr. decided to use the occasion to bolster her standing with us—a sort of rhetorical sacrifice fly.
DOROTHY JR.: I’ve been invited to a big party this weekend.
ME: Where?
DOROTHY JR.: Just some kid’s house. But I’ve decided not to go. His parents won’t be there and (looking dramatically serious) there’ll probably be alcohol.
The kid had never seen Leave It to Beaver, yet she could do a dead-on Eddie Haskell. Even though I saw through the ruse, I admired it. Her virtue went way up in my eyes.
The Tools
Julius Caesar’s ethos was so great, Shakespeare said, that he could say something normally offensive, and “his countenance, like richest alchemy,” would change his rhetoric “to virtue and to worthiness.” The tools in this chapter are an alchemist’s tools; use them to change your basest words into gold.
Virtue. Rhetorical virtue is the appearance of virtue. It can spring from a truly noble person or be faked by the skillful rhetorician. Rhetoric is an agnostic art; it requires more adaptation than righteousness. You adapt to the values of your audience.
Values. The word “values” takes on a different meaning in rhetoric as well. Rhetorical values do not necessarily represent “rightness” or “truth”; they merely constitute what people value—honor, faith, steadfastness, money, toys. Support your audience’s values, and you earn the temporary trustworthiness that rhetoric calls virtue.
Among the ways to pump up your rhetorical virtue, we covered four:
Brag.
Get a witness to brag for you.
Reveal a tactical flaw.
Switch sides when the powers that be do. A variation is the Eddie Haskell ploy, which throws your support behind the inevitable. When you know you will lose, preempt your opponent by taking his side.
7. Use Your Craft
THE BELUSHI PARADIGM
The tactics of practical wisdom—the rhetorical kind
They should rule who are able to rule best. —ARISTOTLE
Now that we have mastered virtue and its main tool, decorum, we can move on to the second major element of ethos: practical wisdom, or craft. I can think of no better way to illustrate this streetwise rhetorical knowledge than Animal House. After Dean Wormer expels the fraternity, John Belushi’s Bluto addresses his brothers with a passionate oration.
BLUTO: Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no! And it ain’t over now. ’Cause when the goin’ gets tough…the tough get goin’! Who’s with me? Let’s go!
He runs from the room, and nobody moves. How come? While it could use some fact checking, the speech is not so bad. Bluto uses several time-tested logical and emotional devices: the good old rhetorical question, the popular if well-worn chiasmus (“When the going gets tough…”), and a rousing call to action. So why does it fail?
The three traits of ethos—cause, craft, and caring—show why the speech bombs. Bluto is the classic likable knucklehead; he lacks craft, the appearance of knowing what to do. He offers no idea about what should happen after he runs out. So why follow him? (He leaves a wiser character, Otter, to propose “a really futile and stupid gesture.”)
Thank You for Arguing (Revised and Updated) Page 8