TRY THIS IN A POLITICAL ARGUMENT
Many debates divide between morals and the advantageous. In politics, the advantageous usually wins in the long run (statecraft is a selfish art). If you believe in military action to depose violent dictators, for example, argue the morals of your side, but spend more time showing how your country would benefit. You’re more likely to win your point.
Unfortunately, most parents base their arguments on what they want—such as strong bones and healthy bodies. That sounds like Esperanto to two-year-old ears. You want strong bones. She doesn’t. What does the kid want? What is to her advantage? And is it worth the trouble of choking down a bowl of oatmeal? That’s the stuff of logos.
My friend Annie had a logos problem during a recent presidential campaign. Annie grew up in Ohio and now lives on the East Coast. A passionate Democrat, she called all the Ohioans she knew to try to tilt the state. Her former college roommate turned out to be her toughest customer. After chatting about the weather and their families (weather is topic one in the Midwest), Annie segued into politics.
ANNIE: So, Kath, who are you going to vote for in November?
KATHY: Oh, I’ll vote Republican, I guess.
ANNIE: Kathy, you need to know some reasons I think that would be a mistake.
She ran through a list of problems with the Republicans. Annie was well prepared for this call: logical, concise…
KATHY: I don’t want my taxes to go up.
ANNIE: But those tax cuts are causing the deficit to spin out of control!
Argument Tool
BABBLING: What Aristotle calls an arguer’s tendency to repeat himself over and over. This reveals the bedrock of your audience’s opinion.
KATHY: I just don’t want my taxes to go up.
ANNIE: But they won’t go up. All the Democrats want is to let the tax cuts on the rich expire. Let’s face it, Kathy, you’re married to a lawyer who makes a godawful amount of money.
KATHY (doing perfect stone wall impression): If the Democrats get elected, my taxes will go up. And I just don’t want them to.
An unpersuadable audience tends to repeat the same rationale over and over. Is it a good rationale? Doesn’t matter. Kathy has made her mind up. She can’t be persuaded.
Or can she?
Cracking Good Clichés
Before you begin an argument, first determine what your audience is thinking. You need to know its beliefs and values, the views it holds in common. The common sense of your audience is square one—the beginning point of your argument. To shift people’s point of view, start from their position, not yours. In rhetoric, we call this spot a commonplace—a viewpoint your audience holds in common. You can use it as your argument’s jumping-off point.
Argument Tool
THE COMMONPLACE: Use it as the jumping-off point of your argument.
We equate a commonplace with a cliché, but the term once had a broader connotation. The rhetorical commonplace is a short-form expression of common sense or public opinion. It can range from a political belief (all people are created equal) to a practical matter (it’s cheaper to buy in bulk). Commonplaces represent beliefs or rules of thumb, not facts; people are created equal only if you agree on the definitions for “created” and “equal,” and it’s not always cheaper to buy in bulk. A commonplace is not just anything that pops into a person’s head, however. “I’m hungry” does not represent a commonplace. But “When I’m hungry, I eat right away” is a commonplace, as is “When I’m hungry, that’s good; it means I’m burning fat.” Different groups (such as healthy eaters and dieters) have different commonplaces. In fact, people identify with their groups through the groups’ commonplaces. These attitudes, beliefs, and values also determine a person’s self-identity—the assumptions and outlook on the world that define an individual. We will delve into identity later; right now, let’s look at the commonplace as the starting point of rhetorical logic.
TRY THIS WITH A PUBLIC ISSUE
Rhetorical framing is all about commonplaces. If you can define an issue in language that’s familiar and comfortable to your audience, you will capture the higher ground. What does your audience hold most dear: Safety or risk? Lifestyle or savings? Education or instinct? See Chapter 12 for more on framing.
Meanings
Rhetoric loves geographical metaphors. Besides the commonplace, there’s the topic. The word comes from the Greek word topos, meaning “place.” “Topic” and “topography” share this same root; both offer points of view.
TRY THIS IN A COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS
Suppose you want to encourage students graduating from an elite private liberal arts college to enlist in the military. Use the audience’s commonplaces, not the military’s. Instead of “A strong nation is a peaceful nation,” say, “Our armed forces can use independent, critical thinkers.”
A commonplace takes advantage of the way humans process information. When you spot your friend Bob, your nervous system fires up common networks of synapses. This neural shortcut saves your brain from having to identify Bob’s hair, then his eyes, then his nose, then his mouth. When the signals come in for Bob’s face, the set of neurons associated with that face all light up at once. Bob! A commonplace works the same way. I say, “The early bird catches the worm,” and you instantly know that I refer to the habit of waking up before most people. It’s an argument shortcut that skips what prevailing wisdom already agrees with: “People who get out of bed earlier than the average Joe tend to have more success in life blah blah blah.”
You probably would avoid a cliché such as the early bird except to annoy your children. Fine. A commonplace doesn’t need a cliché. The concept—rising early holds moral and practical superiority over rising late—constitutes a commonplace on its own. When most CEOs discuss their schedule, they brag about getting up early more than they do about working late. American public opinion strongly favors early rising, making it a commonplace.
Filmmakers use commonplaces, clichéd and otherwise, as a shorthand to express character without unnecessary dialogue or explication. A two-day beard and a glass of whiskey connote an alcoholic. A movie hero will take a beating stoically and then wince when a woman dabs him with antiseptic—an efficient way of showing the big lug’s sensitive side. We make fun of devices like these, and they can betray lazy directing, but by playing to shared assumptions about people and things, the director can establish a movie’s characters and themes without taxing our attention span.
Conversational commonplaces offer the same efficiency; they let us cut to the topical chase and bring us closer as a group. In my family, for instance, we value an occasional obscenity, so long as one utters it skillfully. Instead of saying “Yes” or “Well, all right” to my children, I say sweetly, “You do whatever the hell you want, sweetheart.” My children picked it up at an early age. That was our commonplace, and—bizarre as it would seem to a family with more conventional verbal taboos—it raised a smile whenever one of us said it. Of course, there are those outside our family who object to that sort of thing; one of them was Dorothy Jr.’s nursery school teacher, who informed me that my daughter had answered a request to share a toy with “You do whatever the hell you want, sweetheart.” It was a Heinrichs commonplace, not one shared by the nursery school.
Argument Tool
THE COMMONPLACE LABEL: When politicians speak of labeling, they really mean the application of commonplaces to legislation, bumper stickers, and talk radio.
Not every commonplace is all that benign (assuming you think teaching vulgarities to small children to be benign). An evil twin lies in the stereotype. “Three black guys came up to me last night” will spark a different image in many Americans’ minds than “Three Frenchwomen came up to me last night.” We should also recognize commonplaces that corporations and campaigns use on us. Ancient rhetoricians would applaud most o
f the labels Republicans and Democrats have attached to policies and legislation: “Death taxes” instead of inheritance taxes. DREAMERS, a tortured acronym for undocumented Americans who immigrated as children. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act instead of “government insurance.” No Child Left Behind, for the law pushed by George W. Bush to boost both funding and testing in education. USA Freedom Act, signed by Barack Obama, another long acronym that permitted mass surveillance of Americans with some regulation. Each of these phrases represented a prefab consensus. Our culture loves the idea of affordable care, would hate to see a kid left behind, um, somewhere; and who would dare go against freedom, against kids dreaming about a bright future, or for taxing somebody just for dying? All these are commonplaces: our shared notions of what’s advantageous for our society. They help define our peculiar culture and our identity as enlightened twenty-first-century citizens.
The same phrases may not have worked in a different setting. The ancient Spartans, who practiced infanticide, may have interpreted “no child left behind” in an alarming way. The French may wonder why marriage needs protecting. Similarly, when the British Empire was at its height, its citizens may not have enjoyed the label “Iraqi freedom.” Those are American commonplaces. They help define Americans as Americans. And any politician who fails to get on board risks looking un-American.
We Got Commonplaces in River City
To persuade an audience, it helps to know the commonplaces it already uses. Suppose you want a group of conservatives to support low-cost housing in your city. “Marriage needs protection” would be an excellent commonplace to start. Keep the family together and foster the culture of ownership. (Another commonplace!)
Listen for the commonplaces. If your audience refers to her volunteer work as a “journey,” then you know she views the ordinary activities of life in terms of adventure and growth (and that she will not shrink from a cliché).
If she refers to “kids these days,” it is extremely unlikely that your audience enjoys rap music.
If she says, “It’s not PC to say this, but…,” then she probably holds cultural nuance in low regard.
Argument Tool
THE REJECTION: An audience will often say no in the form of a commonplace. You now have your new starting ground—provided you can continue the argument.
Do you share these opinions? If not, no rhetorical rule says you have to pretend to. But every commonplace offers a potential jumping-off point. Professor Harold Hill stood on the “kids these days” platform to sell band instruments in The Music Man. Playing off parents’ concern about wayward youth, Hill coined a slogan: “We got trouble in River City.”
An audience’s commonplaces are easy to find, because you hear them frequently. When someone rejects your argument, she usually does it with a commonplace. Take Kathy, for instance. Hers is hard to miss: Democrats raise taxes. Taxes taxes taxes. She favors the Republicans because she believes their promise to keep taxes down. Indeed, Democrats tend to be more pro-tax than Republicans—a commonplace in politics. If you’re a Democrat, you doubtless have a great rebuttal, but that doesn’t matter. The audience, Kathy, believes Republicans will keep taxes down, while the Dems will raise them. She will stand her ground, and that ground is her commonplace. Annie made a mistake when she argued against it:
ANNIE: The Republicans will increase the deficit! The Democrats won’t raise taxes!
What if she chose to agree with it instead?
ANNIE: Oh, I know what you mean. The taxes I pay are unbelievable!
Useful Figure
The anadiplosis (“She will stand her ground, and that ground…”) builds one thought on top of another by taking the last word of a clause and using it to begin the next clause. Ben Franklin uses it famously: “For want of a shoe the horse was lost, for want of a horse the rider was lost…” It turns your argument into an unstoppable juggernaut of logic.
Here she jumps onto the commonplace instead of running away from it. Next, she expands her argumentative territory by adding the politicians-are-all-alike truism.
ANNIE: You know what, though? Mine are high and we have a Republican governor and legislature. They’re all alike, aren’t they, Kath?
Having established her proof, Annie can now push a little bit.
ANNIE: I’ll tell you what, Kathy. Both parties promise they won’t raise taxes. I want you to do something for me. I’ll email you a link to a website that talks about what the deficit will do to your taxes. Will you look at it for me?
TRY THIS BEFORE A JOB INTERVIEW
When you do your Web research on a prospective employer, don’t just delve into facts and history. Google the CEO and write down the catchwords he uses. The top leader often defines the personality, the ethos, of an organization. Now try to think up a few bumper stickers using these catchwords as commonplaces (“Hire Mary for Value-Driven Management”). You’ll get a feel for the company’s lingo and tone, even if you don’t blatantly repeat the phrases themselves.
Would that work? Maybe. Pitching it in terms of a personal favor can’t hurt. A phone call out of the blue may not be the right occasion to launch a political discussion, but at least it would be a discussion, instead of the yes-it-is, no-it-isn’t kind of squabble they actually had. With a little deft rhetoric, when they hang up, they remain friends.
Commonplaces are the sort of things everybody knows. What makes them clichés is that they get repeated until we’re sick of them. Nonetheless, commonplaces are useful to track. When you stop hearing one, you know that the common ground of public opinion is beginning to shift. If you want to keep close track of maxims that serve politics, just follow the opinion polls. After 9/11, you heard a lot of political language with “safety” and “security” in it, and the election turned on a cautious maxim: “Don’t switch horses in midstream.”
After four years without a major terrorist attack on the homeland, however, we increasingly heard a maxim about putting limits on security: “Americans have a right to privacy in their own home.”
Tips from the Ancients
WHY JEFFERSON DIDN’T BLOG: Starting with the Renaissance, students kept commonplace books—collections of practical wisdom that they could use in arguments. Rhetoricians taught how to organize the material, which could be original or copied from someone else’s wisdom. Thomas Jefferson kept commonplace books all his life, and they nicely reveal the public attitudes of his day.
Not everyone subscribes to the prevailing maxims. Almost half of Americans would have been happy to switch presidents in midstream, and supporters of a ban on Muslim immigration aren’t necessarily going to use the commonplace “We’re a nation of immigrants.”
Still, maxims help you follow
TRY THIS WITH A NEW BOSS
Again, Google the boss to get a sense of her commonplaces. Now place them side by side with her predecessor’s commonplaces. Put “value-driven management” next to “employee-empowered management,” for example. The first phrase tends to describe a company managed from the top down, while the second is more likely to emphasize teamwork and bottom-up decision-making. The comparison will tell you a lot about the changes the new boss will bring in values and style—and give you logical ammunition in future meetings.
trends in values, such as puritanism versus libertarianism. You can almost set your epochal clock by this particular values pendulum. Who but aging hippies say “It’s your thing” anymore? Remember the song? “It’s your thing / Do what you want to do / I can’t tell you who to sock it to.”
That was a solid-gold maxim a few decades ago, an age that saw soaring crime, abortion, and divorce rates. By the early 1990s, understandably, it wasn’t your thing anymore. Doing what you wanted to do was not accepted wisdom. Instead, people began to use an opposing maxim—“It’s about values”—meaning “I sure as heck can tell you who to sock it
to, and I’m lobbying Congress to criminalize socking it to the wrong people.” Libertarian stock went down, and puritan stock went up. And then, in the past decade, libertarianism came to the fore, marijuana got itself legalized, gay marriage became a thing, and politics imposed fewer restrictions on whom you could sock it to. So it will go forever—with any luck.
When commonplaces clash, arguments begin.
The Tools
Public opinion “is held in reverence,” said Mark Twain. “It settles everything. Some think it is the Voice of God.” The original definition of “audience” had the same pious tone. It meant a hearing before a king or nobleman. The first audience, in other words, was a judge. According to Aristotle, it still is. Your audience judges whether your opinion is the right one.
Only we’re talking deliberative argument, not a court of law. So the statute books don’t determine the outcome; the audience’s own beliefs, values, and naked self-interest do. To persuade them, you offer a prize: the advantageous, which is the promise that your choice will give the judges what they value.
Thank You for Arguing (Revised and Updated) Page 14