Thank You for Arguing (Revised and Updated)

by Jay Heinrichs

  Alexander Hamilton. Embarrassing virtue fail. He wrote a pamphlet denying charges of corruption, with the excuse that he was being blackmailed by his mistress’s husband. (If you saw the musical, you know the story.)

  Marie Antoinette. Major caring breakdown. Instead of making her constituents believe that their interest was her sole concern, she let her ethos suffer with that quote about cake.

  Hamlet. No craft whatever. He follows a ghost’s directions. No wonder his girlfriend cops it.

  You can see by now that your ethos counts more than any other aspect of rhetoric because it puts your audience in the ideal state of persuadability. Cicero said you want them to be attentive, trusting, and willing to be persuaded. They’re more likely to be interested if they find you worth their attention. The trusting part goes with the ethical territory of cause, craft, and caring. As for their willingness to be persuaded, you want them to consider you a role model—the essence of leadership. And where does this attitude come from? The same perceived traits: cause, craft, and caring.

  Honest Abe’s Shameless Trick

  While your audience must think you have these noble attributes, that does not mean you must have them in reality. Even if you are chock-full of virtue, street smarts, and selflessness, if your audience doesn’t believe that you are, then you have a character problem. Your soul may rise to heaven but your ethos sucks. On the other hand, every character has its flaws, which is where the rhetorical trickery comes in.

  The best trick of all: make it seem you have no tricks.

  One of the chief rhetoricians of the early Roman Empire, a Spaniard named Quintilian, explained, “A speaker might choose to feign helplessness by pretending to be uncertain how to begin or proceed with his speech. This makes him appear, not so much as a skilled master of rhetoric, but as an honest man.”

  The Romans called the technique dubitatio, as in “dubious.” Abraham Lincoln was a wizard at dubitatio. He used it to help him get elected president. A lawyer and two-term former congressman who had lost a race for a Senate seat, Lincoln was a political nobody in the winter of 1860, when he traveled east to explore a bid for the presidency. What he lacked in background, he made worse in appearance: freakishly big hands, aerodynamic cheeks, a western rube’s accent. And when he addressed New York’s elite in its premier athenaeum, the Cooper Union, he did nothing to raise expectations. Speaking in his characteristic harsh whine, he warned the crowd that they weren’t about to hear anything new. Absolutely brilliant.

  Argument Tool

  DUBITATIO: Don’t look tricky. Seem to be in doubt about what to say.

  TRY THIS IF YOU’RE A NERVOUS SPEAKER

  Don’t try to calm your butterflies; use them. Keep in mind that an audience will sympathize with a clumsy speaker—it’s a first-rate tactical flaw. And employ just one technique: gradually speak louder. You will sound as if you’re gaining confidence from the sheer rightness of your speech’s contents. I have used this tool myself (sometimes out of sheer stage fright), and it works.

  What was brilliant? The speech, for one thing. It segued into a first-class summary of the nation’s problems and how to fix them. It was rational and lawyerly. His dubious opening set his highbrow audience up, not just by lowering expectations but also by conveying absolute sincerity. The speech was a smash. Without it, Lincoln likely “would never have been nominated, much less elected, to the presidency that November,” according to Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer.

  Modern persuasion research confirms Quintilian’s dubious theory: a knowledgeable audience tends to sympathize with a clumsy speaker and even mentally argue his case for him. Dubitatio also lowers expectations and causes opponents to “misunderestimate” you, as George W. Bush (a master of dubitatio) put it. Lincoln’s country-bumpkin image disguised a brilliant political analyst who could speak lucidly about the issues. His ethos made the audience trust his sincerity while doubting his intellect—until he showed them his intellect.

  You can use the same technique without being a Lincoln. When you give a talk to a group, begin hesitantly, and gradually get smoother as you go. Speakers often think they have to grab the audience’s attention right off the bat. Not necessarily; most people start with an attention span of at least five minutes. Just make sure your pauses don’t stretch too far. Legend has it that a Dartmouth president known for his thoughtful silences gave a speech at MIT with such a long hiatus that the host finally felt compelled to nudge him. He promptly fell to the floor; the podium apparently had been propping him up. He wasn’t thoughtful, he was dead. Still, as long as you and your audience have a heartbeat, a slow beginning works better than the classic opening joke.

  You can use a subtler form of dubitatio in a one-on-one argument. It works like this: when your partner finishes talking, look down. Speak softly and slowly until you’re ready to make your main point. Then stare intently into the eyes of the other person. Get the technique right, and it can convey passionate sincerity. My son will testify to this form of personal dubitatio. I had described it to him a year or so back when I was researching Quintilian, and forgot I ever mentioned it; then, several weeks ago, he came home from school looking pleased with himself.

  GEORGE: I tried that thing you told me about.

  ME: What thing?

  GEORGE: That—I forget what you called it. The thing where you look down until you make your point and, blam! Stare into her eyes.

  ME: Her eyes? What were you telling her?

  GEORGE: None of your business.

  ME: None of my…?

  GEORGE: We were just talking politics, Dad. You have a dirty mind.

  While dubitatio isn’t exactly a household word, it’s a close relation to a term that marketers use a lot these days: “authenticity.” In an age of Photoshopped models, Auto-Tuned singers, and computer-generated movies, audiences increasingly value any content that looks genuine. I got a harsh reminder of this trend when I began producing persuasion videos over my website, ArgueLab.com. Thinking no one would be interested in seeing my uncomfortable mug on their screen, I hired Christina Fox, a bright young woman who had acting experience, and had her read from scripts I wrote. I created my own music soundtrack and edited the videos carefully using a complicated program. While Christina did a wonderful job, the videos got little attention. In frustration, I just pointed my smartphone at myself, spoke without a script, and edited the thing with a crude, entry-level program. The video attracted five times the audience of the fancy ones. I made more of these just-me-talking videos, and the audience kept growing. While other factors may have been involved, I believe that authenticity made the biggest difference. I’m clearly not ready for YouTube prime time. In some of those videos it’s obvious that I’d rather be playing outside. The camera hates me, and the feeling is mutual. Dubitatio at work.

  Classic Hits

  BUSH TALKED LIKE A GREEK: Literati of every generation have bemoaned the decline of fine language. But even in ancient Greece, audiences trusted plainspoken leaders more than skilled ones. They said that fancy talk made a speaker sound “Asian,” and preferred the “pure” Greek of Athens.

  Authenticity lies at the heart of rhetorical character. As marketers quickly discovered, authenticity can be faked. Ethos works best when it disguises its own trickery, even to the point of deliberate ineptness. Blue-staters laughed at George W. Bush’s Bushisms, and that made red-staters love him all the more. (In fact, a lot more lay with the president’s rhetoric than mere syntactical clumsiness, as you shall see in a few chapters.) Look at the most successful comedians, from Dave Chappelle to Ellen DeGeneres: their intelligence gets leavened with a big dollop of pratfall fallibility. For your own ethos to be credible, your audience must not notice your rhetoric’s inner workings. This does not mean just “being yourself.” It may require the opposite. In argument, you don’t rest on your personality and reputation, you perfor
m them. Ethos is not karma; you can start afresh with your cause, craft, and caring in every argument.

  Does this seem unethical? Not in the original sense of ethos. Paying attention to the attitude of your audience, sharing their trials and values, makes you agreeable—both literally and figuratively. You’re not manipulating…well, all right, you are manipulating them. But you’re also sharing. In Chapter 9, where we deal with pathos, we’re into even bigger big-time caring.

  Rhetorical caring, that is—like real caring, only better.

  The Tools

  Caring, or “disinterest,” is the appearance of having only the best interest of your audience at heart—even to the point of sacrificing for the good of the others. Its tools:

  The reluctant conclusion. Act as if you reached your conclusion only because of its overwhelming rightness.

  The personal sacrifice. Claim that the choice will help your audience more than it will help you; even better, maintain that you’ll actually suffer from the decision.

  Dubitatio. Show doubt in your own rhetorical skill. The plainspoken, seemingly ingenuous speaker is the trickiest of them all, being the most believable.

  Authenticity. Make your audience think you’re for real, just being your genuine lovable self.

  9. Control the Mood

  THE AQUINAS MANEUVER

  The most persuasive emotions, at your service

  The Oratour may lead his hearers which way he list, and draw them to what affection he will: he may make them to be angry, to be pleased, to laugh, to weepe, and lament: to loue, to abhorre, and loath. —HENRY PEACHAM

  If you know an imperfect child, you may find this familiar: many years ago, just as I was withdrawing money in the lobby of a Hanover, New Hampshire, bank, my three-year-old daughter chose to throw a temper tantrum, screaming and writhing on the floor while a couple of matrons looked on in disgust. (Their children had been perfect, apparently.) I forget what triggered the outburst by Dorothy Jr.—now a socially respectable registered nurse—but I gave her a disappointed look and said, “That argument won’t work, sweetheart. It isn’t pathetic enough.”

  She blinked a couple of times and picked herself off the floor.

  “What did you say to her?” one of the ladies asked.

  Meanings

  Pathos means more than just “feelings” in the emotional sense. It also has to do with physical sensations—what a person feels or, more precisely, suffers. (The Greeks were into suffering.) Hence the medical term “pathology,” the study of diseases.

  I explained that I was a passionate devotee of classical rhetoric. Dorothy had learned almost from birth that a good persuader doesn’t merely express her own emotions; she manipulates the feelings of her audience. Me, in other words.

  LADY: But did you say she wasn’t pathetic enough?

  ME (lamely): That’s a technical term. It worked, didn’t it?

  Back when people knew their rhetoric, “pathetic” was a compliment; my daughter knew that the persuader bears the burden not just of proof but of emotion as well. As long as she tried to persuade me, her feelings didn’t count. Only mine did. An argument can’t be rhetorically pathetic unless it’s sympathetic.

  You don’t hear much about sympathy anymore. Empathy entails experiencing other people’s feelings like Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Deanna Troi, the half-Betazoid psychologist on the Enterprise. An empath like Commander Troi suffers when other creatures suffer. Empathy is huge these days. A recent study by Sesame Workshop, the organization behind Sesame Street, found that parents and teachers both prefer empathy over good grades in kids.

  So what’s the difference between empathy and sympathy? Empathy is like a Vulcan mind-meld—or emotion-meld, to be precise. A sad kid makes you sad. A happy kid makes you smile. Sympathy, on the other hand, means perfectly understanding the kid’s emotion without necessarily feeling it.

  Sympathy is more rhetorical than empathy. An empath feels. A sympathetic person (oh, heck, let’s call him a sympath) finds ways to change the other’s emotion. Or to use it—usually for the other person’s benefit. Empathy shares feelings. Sympathy cares about feelings. While it’s understandable to prefer an empath to a sympath, I’d rather have a sympath for a therapist. Wouldn’t you? I mean, wouldn’t you want your shrink to understand your emotional problem and work on fixing it? Or do you prefer some half-Betazoid wetting her uniform with her own tears?

  Still, rhetoric lies in tricky ethical territory. If you’re going to be reading people’s emotions, you should be doing it for good. The tools of pathos work just as well for evil.

  Classic Hits

  IT’LL FEEL GREAT WHEN I STOP HITTING YOU: We don’t count physical hurt as an emotion these days, but many Greeks thought that pain was the secret to all emotions. The good passions, like joy, were the absence of pain. This fun bunch called themselves the Stoics.

  The Perfectly Pathetic Tale

  Done properly, the ancient Sophists said, pathos affects an audience’s judgment. Recent neurological research has confirmed their theory: the seat of the emotions, the limbic system, tends to overpower the more rational parts of the brain. As Aristotle observed, reality looks different under different emotions; a change for the better, for example, can look bad to a depressed man. Protagoras, a famous Sophist, said that food tastes bitter to an invalid and the opposite to a healthy person. “While the doctor makes changes with drugs,” he said, “the Sophist does it with words.”

  Words can indeed act like a drug, though to paraphrase Homer Simpson, what works even more like a drug is drugs. Aristotle, that rational old soul, preferred to modify people’s emotions through their beliefs. Emotions actually come from belief, he said—about what we value, what we think we know, and what we expect. Aristotle didn’t separate pathos entirely from rhetorical logic. It may sound strange to combine the emotional with the rational, but rhetoric does precisely that.

  Take fear. Suppose I made you believe that your heart might stop right now, even while you read this. It could happen; in the susceptible victim, the slightest fear could trigger an arrhythmia that sets off an electrochemical storm within your heart muscle. It could start to beat wildly out of sync, destroying critical tissue and causing you to clutch your chest and die.

  That didn’t scare you, did it? Your disbelief kept you from fear. Emotion comes from experience and expectation—what your audience believes has happened, or will take place in the future. The more vividly you give the audience the sensations of an experience, the greater the emotion you can arouse.

  Suppose you wanted to make me angry at your next-door neighbor. You could tell me what a jerk she is—that she flirts in front of her husband and watches bad TV. None of this would make me angry at her. You describe her personality; you fail to evoke an experience. To make me angry, give me a vivid description of a specific outrage.

  YOU: She called the Boy Scouts a fascist organization.

  ME: Well, she’s entitled to her—

  YOU: On Halloween? When my little boy comes to her stoop wearing his older brother’s uniform?

  ME: How do you—

  YOU: I was there. When he started to cry, she said, “If you turn out to be gay, you’ll be glad you met me.” Then she looked straight at me and slammed the door.

  Argument Tool

  STORYTELLING: The best way to change an audience’s mood. Make it directly involve you or your audience.

  That would make me angry at the neighbor. You re-created a dramatic scene, making me see it through your eyes. This works much better than name-calling. You made me believe the woman did something mean to an innocent little boy.

  TRY THIS IN FRONT OF AN AUDIENCE

  You already know that audiences love anecdotes. But if you want to put them in a particular mood, don’t just te
ll a personal story; tell one that gives them a thrill of recognition. Suppose you advocate a new senior center. Invoke guilt by talking about a lonely elderly relative who lost her husband; she begs you to visit more often, but you have a full-time job and home responsibilities. Say, “This may sound familiar.” Comedians use this technique all the time, because emotions are linked to the familiar.

  When you want to change someone’s mood, tell a story. Don’t engage in name-calling. Don’t rant. Aristotle said that one of the most effective mood changers is a detailed narrative. The more vivid you make the story, the more it seems like a real experience, and the more your audience will think it could happen again. You give them a vicarious experience, and an expectation that it could happen to them.

  How Webster Made the Chief Justice Cry

  Besides storytelling, pathos depends on self-control. A persuader who apparently struggles to hold back her emotions will get better results than one who displays her emotions all over the floor of a bank. My daughter’s temper tantrum showed the danger of pouring it on too much; she already knew Cicero’s dictum that a good pathetic argument is understated. When you argue emotionally, speak simply. People in the middle of a strong emotion rarely use elaborate speech. The most emotional words of all have just four letters. Less is more, and in pathetic terms, less evokes more.