Bluto’s ethos is not all bad, however. His interest is their interest, particularly their interest for revenge.
BLUTO: I’m not gonna take this. Wormer, he’s a dead man! Marmalard, dead!
He wants what they want, and once Otter gives them a plan, they all pull together to sabotage the homecoming parade—a successful consensus. (According to the credits, Bluto eventually becomes a U.S. senator, understandably.) In short, he has plenty of selfless goodwill; Otter makes up for Bluto’s lack of practical wisdom; and as for virtue, well, as you saw with decorum, almost anything can seem good and proper, depending on the occasion.
Before you can persuade, you must mine your most precious resource: the audience. You have seen how much depends on the audience. Persuasion starts with understanding what they believe, sympathizing with their feelings, and fitting in with their expectations—characteristics of logos, pathos, and ethos. All right, so Bluto clearly believes in what his brothers believe in: nothing. Well, anarchy, at any rate. He has the same feeling of wounded pride and injustice. He not only fits in, he personally bestowed names on each of the freshmen. He has the whole package of logos, pathos, and ethos, right?
Not exactly. He suffers a major ethos malfunction here. It’s not enough simply to blend in with the brothers. Before they follow Bluto, they have to consider him worth following.
When you seem to share your audience’s values—to represent the same cause—they believe you will apply those values to whatever choice you help them make. If evangelical Protestants think you want to do what Jesus would do, they probably will find you trustworthy. If an environmentalist considers you earth-centric, she will respect your thinking about the proposed new power plant. But sharing your audience’s values is not sufficient. They also have to believe that you know the right thing to do at that particular moment. While an evangelical Christian will respect you for trying to do what Jesus would do, he still won’t let you remove his appendix.
Argument Tool
PRACTICAL WISDOM: The audience thinks you know your craft, and can solve the problem at hand. Aristotle’s word for this kind of wisdom is phronesis.
This kind of trust is where practical wisdom comes in. The audience should consider you a sensible person, as well as sufficiently knowledgeable to deal with the problem at hand. In other words, they believe you know your particular craft. When you remove an appendix, a medical degree proves your craft more than your knowledge of the Bible does.
Practical wisdom entails the sort of common sense that can get things done. A persuader who shows it tends to be more Edison than Einstein, more Han Solo than Yoda. Look at past presidents, and you can see what Aristotle meant. John Adams, Herbert Hoover, and Jimmy Carter were among our most intellectually endowed presidents. They were also among the least effective, being gifted with more IQ than political craftsmanship.
Businesspeople and doctors tend to have plenty of phronesis. Make a lot of money, and you must be good at the practical skills of running a business. (Or you’re a crook, which means you’re good at being a crook.) That’s why voters often favor political candidates who are successful businesspeople and doctors. Competence is persuasive. Of course, being good at one profession doesn’t necessarily mean being good at another. A good way to attack the practical wisdom of a candidate is to show that his experience doesn’t relate to the job of running a government. Tom Hanks used a phronesis argument when he counseled against a politically inexperienced candidate for office.
HANKS: It’s kind of like if you have a horrible, painful tooth, and you need a root canal. Who are you going to see? A guy who says, “Oh, I think I can figure that out, how to do a root canal for you. Lay down.” Or are you going to see somebody who’s done six thousand of them?
You get the sense that Hanks respects doctors, but wouldn’t necessarily have voted for a doctor for president, either.
Though having a degree on the wall counts, craft does not entail looking up decisions in books, or sticking to universal truths. It’s an instinct for making the right decision on every occasion. Pure eggheads lack it. When we think of the Apollo space program, we rarely picture the rocket scientists. We remember a failed mission, Apollo 13, when three guys jury-rigged their spaceship and got back to earth alive. They were among the most highly trained people ever to leave the ground, but they had little training in the repair of carbon dioxide scrubbers. Still, they were able to combine instructions from the ground with their skill as first-class tinkerers. That’s craft: flexibly wise leadership. All great leaders have it.
Strict rule followers lack it. Straitlaced Captain William Bligh’s command of the Bounty was mediocre, to put it mildly, but after mutineers left him and eighteen men in a twenty-three-foot launch, he pulled off one of the greatest feats of navigation in history, steering an open boat more than thirty-six hundred nautical miles to safety. When he led by following rules, he failed; when he applied his navigational craftsmanship to solve a practical problem, he became a hero. He finally showed practical wisdom.
To get an audience to trust your decision, you can use three techniques.
Show off your experience. If you debate a war and you’re a veteran yourself, bring it up. “I’ve been in battle,” you say. “I know what it’s like.” In an argument, experience usually trumps book learning. And it is fine to brag about experiences, rather than yourself. Even God did that with Job. Rather than call himself a great guy, God mentioned all the feats he had accomplished, like inventing the whale.
TRY THIS WITH SOMEONE IN AUTHORITY
Chances are, when you ask the person in charge for something special, she’ll recite the rules and tell you she can’t make exceptions. Instead, start the conversation by praising her craft: “I’ve heard wonderful things about you. They say you treat everyone as an individual, not as some dough in a cookie cutter.” Even if she sees right through your flattery, she’ll be reluctant to contradict it.
Bend the rules. Be Captain Bligh the navigator, not Captain Bligh the martinet. If the rules don’t apply, don’t apply them—unless ignoring the rules violates the audience’s values. Indiana Jones showed some craft when a master swordsman attacked him with a scimitar. The man advanced with all the complex skill of a fencer, and Jones wearily shot him with his pistol. The rules didn’t apply. How does that work in real life?
SPOUSE: This book says that after three months we shouldn’t let the baby sleep in our bed.
YOU: Too bad. The kid wants it. We want it.
SPOUSE: Yeah, but the writer says the separation will just get more difficult later.
YOU: So we should kick the kid out to make things easier?
SPOUSE: When do you think she should sleep in her own crib?
YOU: When she’s old enough to reason with.
SPOUSE: You’re still not old enough to reason with.
TRY THIS WITH A PROPOSAL
Every proposal should have three parts (not necessarily in this order): payoffs, doability, and superiority. Describe the benefits of your choice, make it seem easy to do, and show how it beats the other options. You might even keep your audience in suspense, not telling them your choice until you have dealt with the alternatives. Rhetoric is most effective when it leads an audience to make up their own minds.
Nonetheless, you’re the one showing your craft. Of course, if the decision proves a disaster, then you may want to check your practical wisdom.
Seem to take the middle course. The ancient Greeks had far more respect for moderation than our culture does. But humans in every era instinctively prefer a decision that lies midway between extremes. In an argument, it helps to make the audience think your adversary’s position is an extreme one. (I once heard a congressional candidate call his opponent an “extreme moderate,” whatever that means.) If the school board wants to increase the education budget
by 8 percent, and opponents say taxes are already too high, you can gain credibility by proposing a 3 percent increase. Presidents use the middle-course tactic when they choose a running mate with more extreme opinions than their own—Nixon with Agnew, Clinton with Gore, Bush with Cheney, Obama with Biden. (Trump is an exception to everything.) Their vice presidents allowed them to look moderate even when their own politics strayed from the center of American opinion.
Cheney’s aggressive stance on the treatment of suspected terrorists, for example, gave Bush some breathing room on the Iraq War. Bush appeared to be balancing a variety of opinions in the White House; any policy to the left of Cheney’s hawkishness—even a full-scale invasion—seemed relatively moderate.
If you have children, you can use the middle-course technique by playing good parent–bad parent. Suppose bedtime has slid later and later on weekends, and you want to get the kid to bed a half hour earlier.
BAD PARENT: Okay, time for bed. Chop-chop!
KID: But it’s nine o’clock! I usually stay up till ten on Fridays.
GOOD PARENT: Custom’s a pretty weak reason. Got a better argument?
KID: I wake up later on Saturdays. I’ll get just as much sleep.
GOOD PARENT: All right, that’s legitimate. We’ll let you stay up a half hour later.
The kid may not like it, but she may well comply with the decision.
All three techniques—touting your experience, bending the rules, and taking the middle course—can help if you have more than one child. My wife and I made a pact with each other when our kids were little: we would not try to treat them equally. We would love them equally but avoid applying the rules consistently. We’d deal with each situation separately. At least the kids might learn practical wisdom on their own.
DOROTHY JR.: May I sit with my friends at the football game?
DOROTHY SR.: I guess so. Let’s meet up at halftime, though.
GEORGE: Can I sit with my friends?
ME: May I…
GEORGE: May I sit with my friends?
ME: No.
GEORGE: But you let Dorothy…
ME: She’s older.
GEORGE: You let her sit with her friends when she was my age. It’s unfair!
ME: It certainly is. But a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
DOROTHY JR.: Then you should be consistent.
She knows I love a smart aleck. Nonetheless, Machiavelli said that inconsistency is a useful leadership tool—it keeps the ruler’s subjects off guard. I had my reasons: girls mature more quickly than boys do, and I doubted that George was ready to sit without adults. But Machiavelli was not just being cynical. My children knew they could count on me to make decisions, not just enforce rules. That made them listen more closely, if only because they had no idea what would come out of my mouth. While I lacked much virtue in their eyes, they saw me as practically wise in anything that didn’t involve moving parts.
The Tools
We’re still talking about the ways to use the appearance of wisdom to persuade. The crafty rhetorician seems to have the right combination of book learning and practical experience, both knowledge and know-how.
Techniques for enhancing your practical wisdom:
Show off your experience.
Bend the rules.
Appear to take the middle course.
8. Show You Care
QUINTILIAN’S USEFUL DOUBT
Using selflessness for personal gain
To be not as eloquent would be more eloquent.
—CHRISTOPH MARTIN WIELAND
The third ethos asset, which Aristotle called “disinterested goodwill,” combines selflessness and likability. I think of the tool as “caring,” like a friend picking up the dinner tab. The benevolent persuader shares everything with his audience: riches, effort, values, and mood. He feels their pain and makes them believe he has nothing personal at stake. In other words, he shows himself to be “disinterested”—free of any special interest.
Meanings
Libertas originally meant both “freedom” and “frankness.” Free people—those who weren’t beholden to a source of income—could speak freely because they were “disinterested.” Free to care for others instead of themselves. Free to make choices for the greater good, instead of their own.
Most people use “disinterest” and “uninterest” interchangeably today. But in earlier times, a reputation for selflessness determined whether a politician got elected. In The Federalist, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay not only wrote anonymous letters in favor of the proposed new Constitution; they were so eager to disguise their “interest” that they pretended to have missed the Convention in the first place. Hamilton and colleagues would have wondered at our preference for billionaires; the founders considered rich people the most “interested” of all. Eighteenth-century leaders were extremely anxious to show their disinterest; a number of them even gave away their fortunes and bankrupted themselves. (Boy, did they ever care.) This passion for disinterest continued through the early nineteenth century, when politicians clamored to claim an impoverished childhood in a log cabin. The up-by-the-bootstraps story showed a man’s ability to make it on his own, beholden to no one.
Although our society has mostly forgotten the original meaning of the word, disinterest can still work for you. I’ll show some tricks, but the main point is to make your audience believe in your selflessness—by seeming either wholly objective or nobly self-sacrificing.
Cicero mentioned an excellent tactic to hype your objectivity: seem to deal reluctantly with something you are really eager to prove. Make it sound as if you reached your opinion only after confronting overwhelming evidence. This is what Hamilton and Madison did in The Federalist. It also works for a teenager who wants to borrow his father’s car.
Argument Tool
THE RELUCTANT CONCLUSION: Act as though you felt compelled to reach your conclusion, despite your own desires.
KID: You know, I’d just as soon walk my date to the movie. The theater is only three miles from her house, and there are sidewalks at least a third of the way. But her dad says no.
FATHER: So you want to borrow my car.
KID: No, I want you to call her father. Tell him I can protect her against assailants, and I’ll have a cellphone in case she’s hit by a truck.
Excellent goodwill, kid. Your interest lies in walking, not driving; you make it your dad’s interest to loan you his car. If Dad isn’t a complete fool, he’ll laugh at this ruse—and lend you the car. Either way, you move the issue away from interest to the girl’s safety.
You can apply the same method yourself. Simply claim you used to hold your opponent’s position.
HE: I’m against capital punishment. The government shouldn’t be in the death business.
YOU: Yeah, I was against capital punishment, too, because of the chance of executing an innocent person. But now that DNA testing has become almost universal, I’m convinced that we could avoid that problem.
What a fair-minded person you are! You once believed what your opponent believed, but found yourself overwhelmed by sheer logic. This approach helps you disguise changing the issue from a values question to a practical one—from government-sponsored killing to avoiding mistakes.
Another caring technique: act as if the choice you advocate hurts you personally.
YOU: The company probably won’t give me credit for this idea, boss, but I’m still willing to put in the hours to make it work. It’s just too good to ignore.
Or:
YOU: Look, kid, I hate Brussels sprouts, too. But I’ve learned to eat them because they make me smart.
How Bluto Became a U.S. Senator
Look
at leadership breakdowns in real life and you see the same ethos principles, or lack of them.
Persuasion Alert
Can I really place Carter and Nixon in the same unvirtuous boat? Sure. In rhetorical terms, both men lacked virtue.
Persuasion Alert
I’m making a double point here. Marie Antoinette didn’t actually say “Let them eat cake”; her enemies planted the quote. But her lousy ethos made it believable. An argument rests on what the audience believes, not on what is true.
Jimmy Carter. By making a “national malaise” speech, he failed in rhetorical virtue. (He didn’t actually use the word “malaise,” but he did talk about “a growing doubt in the meaning of our own lives.”) Carter’s speech went against the nation’s values; it even argued against consumerism. This is America. The French have malaises, not us. We don’t even have problems—they’re opportunities! Opportunities to consume!
Richard Nixon. Another virtue, or cause, failure. Watergate violated the American notion of fair play.
Herbert Hoover. Failure of craft. He followed the rules of traditional economics and tried to balance the budget during a depression. Roosevelt showed craft when he broke the old rules, promoted deficit spending, and became a hero.
Thank You for Arguing (Revised and Updated) Page 9