Thank You for Arguing (Revised and Updated)

by Jay Heinrichs

  Phronesis means more than good judgment; it also means having experience with the problem. So, the second thing you want to hear after “That depends” is a tale of a comparable experience. Suppose my mother began to think a shirt wasn’t such a good idea but that the pool table was too expensive.

  Argument Tool

  COMPARABLE EXPERIENCE: The practically wise persuader shows examples from his own life.

  MOM: What about that bocce set over there?

  PRACTICALLY WISE SALESMAN: That depends on your lawn. I’ve played with that same set, and the balls go all over the place if you have any stones or rough spots.

  The practically wise salesman should also figure out whom the gift is really for. Father’s Day may just be an excuse for my mother to buy a toy for herself. In which case the sale gets a whole lot easier.

  Argument Tool

  SUSSING OUT THE REAL ISSUE: A trustworthy persuader sees your actual needs even if you haven’t mentioned them.

  Phronesis makes an especially good persuasion detector when you don’t know where the sweet spot is—when you know too little about an issue, or have no idea what you want to spend. To determine whether you can trust the speaker’s judgment, ask: has the guy figured out your needs—your real needs, that is? One of the most important traits of practical wisdom is “sussing” ability—the knack of determining what the issue is really about. Ideally, you want a pathologist like Greg House, the best TV doctor with the worst bedside manner. House homes in on the patient’s real problem, and he does it with an infallible accuracy that can come only from scriptwriters. In one episode, a patient with bright orange skin comes in complaining of back spasms.

  TRY THIS IN SIZING UP A PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE

  If the candidate touts experience that’s less than germane, and makes it analogous to the presidency, vote for someone else. Abraham Lincoln often spoke of rural life, but he didn’t describe the White House as a log cabin. Nor did he see the position of president as a corporate lawyer. His experience contributed to his practical wisdom; it didn’t dictate his decisions.

  HOUSE: Unfortunately, you have a deeper problem. Your wife is having an affair.

  ORANGE GUY: What?

  HOUSE: You’re orange, you moron! It’s one thing for you not to notice, but if your wife hasn’t picked up on the fact that her husband has changed color, she’s just not paying attention. By the way, do you consume just a ridiculous amount of carrots and megadose vitamins?

  [Guy nods.]

  HOUSE: The carrots turn you yellow, the niacin turns you red. Get some finger paints and do the math. And get a good lawyer.

  The patient defines the issue as back spasms from a golf injury. House produces a bigger issue: any wife who doesn’t notice her husband turning into a carrot must be cheating on him. While the American Medical Association might not appreciate his Sherlockian deduction, House shows the greatest phronesis abilities a persuader can have: to figure out what the audience really needs, and what the issue really is.

  The Right Mean People

  Even if you’re not buying anything and you’re not in an argument, ethos principles can come in handy to size up a stranger. Suppose you evaluate an applicant for a management job. Use what you learned in the last chapter and this one; if her disinterest, virtue, and street smarts seem intact, chances are you found the right person.

  Disinterest (caring). She should talk about what she can do for your company, not what your company can do for her.

  Virtue (cause). She should hit the sweet spot for the job: aggressive but not too, sufficiently independent but able to take orders. And her choices should lie within the mean, as Aristotle would say. In other words, her personality should embody the company’s; that’s the cause part. How does she describe the company’s future? Does her strategy lie within the corporate sweet spot—risk-taking but not too? Creative but practical?

  Practical wisdom (craft). Any candidate should have the right experience; you don’t need rhetoric to tell you that. But how do you think she will use that experience? Is she stuck in the rut of her own background? Suppose she’s a top saleswoman being considered for a vice presidency; the aggressive, elbows-out style that got her where she is may hurt her in management, where she has to get cooperation and teamwork out of her people.

  College admissions officers might use the same criteria to evaluate young applicants. Think how caring, cause, and craft might work to produce the ideal liberal arts student. Does he reflect the institution’s values—or is he too zealous about them? What kind of education will fulfill his potential and make him useful?

  Now let’s talk relationships. You know those cheesy online quizzes where you measure your compatibility with your lover? Ethos can do that much better.

  Persuasion Alert

  So how do you know you can trust me, the author? What if I just spun all these principles in a way that makes me look trustworthy? Boy, are you a tough customer. There’s a reading list in the back.

  Caring. Do you share the same needs, and interpret them the same way? Good. But does your beloved consider your happiness second to his or her own? Then you have a serious disinterest problem. Mates can be disinterested only if they’re willing to sacrifice their own needs to that of the relationship—in other words, if the relationship’s stability is of greater value than their individual needs. You often hear about newlyweds’ territorial problems. That’s just another way of saying their caring is out of whack.

  Cause. Do you share the same values? Think about which ones will crop up in most of your arguments. And what do you and your lover consider “moderate” behavior? In every aspect of your relationship, what seems extreme? In Annie Hall, Woody Allen and Diane Keaton go to separate analysts and talk about their relationship. Each analyst asks how often they have sex.

  HE: Hardly ever. About three times a week.

  SHE: All the time. About three times a week.

  Persuasion Alert

  Aren’t the ethos traits just supposed to make you look trustworthy? Rhetorically, yes. But we’re on the defensive right now, and our job is to measure the gap between your lover’s rhetorical ability and how much you can actually trust the person.

  This is no mere communication problem, it’s a rhetorical one—a matter of virtue. Their sweet spots lie too far apart. Aristotle’s definition of virtue, “a matter of choice, lying in a mean,” really makes sense here. The mean is your sweet spot on every issue.

  Craft. Aristotle said that phronesis is the skill of dealing with probability—what is likely to happen, and what’s the best decision under the circumstances. This combines two skills: the ability to predict, based on the evidence, and that of making decisions that produce the greatest probability of happiness. A partner should neither make things up as he goes nor be a rigid rule follower. Watch how your significant other responds to a problem you both face. Does your lover apply rules to everything? Does he or she think every choice constitutes a values question? If your lover asks what Jesus would do with whose turn it is to cook, you may have problems. (As far as we know, Jesus didn’t leave any recipes.)

  I can offer a personal example. When my wife and I decided to have children, we faced that classic choice of professional couples: Which one of us, if either, would stay home? I had this fantasy of playing the househusband, caring for the theoretical children and writing while they took their long, simultaneous naps. My wife was better organized, had superior social skills, and earned a higher salary as a fundraiser; I figured she would make most of the money. The problem was that Dorothy also had more domestic ability than I did. My idea of cooking was to throw raw hamburger into a pot of canned soup and call it stew. The other problem was that my wife hated her job.

  All that was decided one morning in a startling way, at least for me, when Dorothy came into the kit
chen.

  DOROTHY SR.: I hate asking people for money.

  ME: Boy, are you in the wrong profession.

  I hadn’t had my coffee, or I would have shut up right there. Instead, I asked what I thought was a rhetorical question.

  ME: Why don’t you quit?

  She threw her arms around me and gave notice that very day. Two weeks later, our household income dropped by more than half. Dorothy had not seen my question as rhetorical. She didn’t get a job, and I didn’t write full-time, for the next twenty years. (She has now returned to being a fundraiser, and loves it.)

  Now, you could interpret my response to her complaint as both a success and a failure of practical wisdom. On the positive side, I had applied a value we shared in common—that people who hated their jobs shouldn’t work in them if they could help it—to the particular situation. On the flip side, neither one of us actually deliberated over the decision, and one sign of phronesis is the ability to deliberate—to consider both sides of a question.

  It could be that Dorothy didn’t have much faith in my own craft, though she denies it. Maybe she knew that we both would be happier if I worked full-time and she reared the kids. She was right, of course. Plus she not only got what she wanted, she gave me the satisfaction of having proposed it in the first place. If she did that on purpose, it was with a time-honored technique: making me believe that her choice was really mine.

  The Tools

  Virtue (cause) and disinterest (caring) are only two legs of the ethos stool. A candidate may be the most pious, goodhearted, selfless woman who ever ran for mayor in your town, but she’ll make a lousy mayor if she can’t fix the potholes. Here’s how to assess a person’s practical wisdom (craft):

  The “that depends” filter. Does the persuader want to know the exact nature of your problem? Or is she spouting a one-size-fits-all choice?

  Comparable experience. This may seem painfully obvious, but it seems to escape voters regularly. How many times have we chosen the rich guy over the guy who’s actually been in politics? Comparable experience is less obvious when someone tries to sell you something. Then the question is, where did they get their information? From using the product themselves, or from company training?

  “Sussing” ability. Can the persuader cut to the chase of an issue?

  19. Deal with a Bully

  SOCRATES’ SMILE

  The devastating power of agreeability

  We are by long odds the most ill-mannered nation, civilized or savage, that exists on the planet today. —ARISTOTLE

  Bullies are everywhere, including in some unexpected places, from Instagram to the Thanksgiving table. There are the traditional playground bullies who steal kids’ lunch money and give a shove in the lunchroom line. Then you have the online mean girls, fanboys, and gamers who make life miserable for anyone who doesn’t fit in their strict little affinity groups; we’ll call them tribal bullies. The tribalists’ nasty close cousins are the body-shaming bullies who post pictures of fat people. Related to them are the vigilante bullies, the mobs who used to carry out lynchings and now harass and punish anyone they declare to be evildoers—seemingly careless mothers, unpatriotic athletes, irreligious country music stars, criminal suspects. Workplace bullies get their coworkers and underlings laughing at vulnerable colleagues for their dress or accent or ideas. Of course there are the despotic bullies, power-mad heads of government who, like Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, barrel-bomb their own citizens. And then there are the less obvious, more insidious bullies: the visiting uncle who won’t stop talking about political correctness while telling unfunny jokes about powerless groups.

  While the anonymity of the Internet might make us think we’re suffering an epidemic of bullies, I’m not sure that’s true. Bullying may be in our DNA, just to balance out our better angels. I can imagine mean, aggressive Homo sapiens harassing the poor Neanderthal—a sensitive, artistic creature, according to some recent evidence—into extinction. (“You call this a bone flute? I say it’s a weapon!”)

  In these relatively civilized times, though, authorities try to control bullying with zero-tolerance school policies, updated online algorithms, and even prosecutions. Psychologists and anti-bullying experts offer workshops. The United Nations even declared May 4 Anti-Bully Day. All good things. But, humans being what they are—we just don’t have enough Neanderthal blood in us—there will always be bullies. Every time we stop one, another will pop up.

  Here’s where rhetoric comes in, though. By using the tools of persuasion, you can make bullying a little more tolerable, and maybe even stop some of it. This chapter will even show you how, under the right circumstances, you can personally benefit from a bully.

  Let’s start with that inferior subspecies of humanity, the heckler. We can learn a lot about how to handle a bully by looking at how comedians and politicians deal with their most vocal harassers.

  The Amy Schumer Takedown

  Throughout this book we’ve talked about the need to spot your persuadable audience. In the thick of a confrontation, we often mistakenly deal with the person who’s talking (or yelling). Most often, he is the least persuadable person in the room.

  Argument Tool

  AUDIENCE TARGETING: The deft persuader has good peripheral vision. When you’re being bullied or heckled, try to spot the onlookers who might sympathize with you. They’re your real audience.

  And remember how in Chapter 2 we saw how to set your goal at the beginning of an argument? We rarely win on points; and even if you do, good luck getting your opponent to admit it. (“Oh, I’m so embarrassed! Your overwhelming logic and trustworthy ethos make me see the error of my ways!”) More often, the best outcome of a disagreement is an improved relationship—if not with your opponent, then with bystanders.

  You can see both techniques—audience targeting and goal setting—in Amy Schumer’s masterful handling of hecklers. After all, a heckler is a kind of bully. He disrupts, demeans, and tries to shame the performer in front of the audience. He takes over, making the occasion all about him. Schumer, a size six in a size-two celebrity world, has faced more than her share of mean audiences. And, like any pro, she has learned how to handle them. You can see her skill during a performance in Stockholm in 2016. In the middle of her act, a young man shouted for her to expose her breasts. (Um, he didn’t say it exactly that way.) Now, Schumer had some choices. She could have simply had security throw the man right out. She could have yelled at him and given the audience a lecture on sexism. Instead, she got super friendly. Interrupting her routine, she shaded her eyes while the spotlight found the heckler. Looking as if she wanted to get to know him, Schumer asked the man what he did for a living. Sales, he said.

  Argument Tool

  VIRTUE POSE: To win over your audience, show that you’re the better person. Respond to the bully’s heckling by calmly offering a conversation later (even if you want to kill him).

  “Sales?” Schumer repeated. “How’s that working out for you? ’Cause we’re not buying it.” Not the greatest joke in the world, but its spontaneity got her a laugh. More important, Schumer gained control of the occasion, seizing the power back from the heckler. Her goal was to entertain the audience, not to express any pain. When the idiot continued to harass her, Schumer still didn’t have him ejected. First she asked the audience to vote. This got a big cheer. As security escorted the man out, Schumer said, “I already miss him!”

  Still, what does pretending to love a jerk really do? Will it make a heckler feel shame and volunteer for sensitivity training? Doubtful. But remember, a bullying occasion should not be about the bully. That’s just what the bully wants. It’s about the audience. And a bully can give you the chance to enhance your ethos to that audience.

  Which implies an excellent goal—or strategy—for dealing with a bully: be the better person. Bu
llies aren’t the greatest representatives of humanity, and at least some people in your audience may be aware of that. Make them even more aware by toning down your pathos and ramping up your ethos. Specifically, you’re revealing your virtue. By choosing to deal calmly with a bully, you show your character and, you hope, place yourself smack in the middle of your audience’s sympathies. Offer to talk face-to-face with the bully later.

  The Political Uncle

  The family equivalent of a heckler is the relative who bombs your Facebook wall with political clickbait. “[Insert politician] DESTROYS [insert opponent] with [insert stupid misleading video].” Or it’s that staple of American democracy, the political uncle: the family member who lectures everyone about politics at the dinner table. In truth, the political uncle doesn’t have to be an uncle or even a man—just anyone with a strong opinion and an inability to shut up about it.

  Useful Trope

  “The political uncle” is a kind of trope—a synecdoche, making one member stand for a whole slew of bad uncles.