Thursaturdays with Seth #π: Small Victories

WELCOME!

To the π edition of THURSDAYS WITH SETH... SATURDAY GREEK EDITION! Why Greek? ... Why not?

Hey, bitches! Did you know that the ancient Greeks were the founders of rhetoric? What the hell is rhetoric, you ask? In a nutshell, rhetoric is the art of using language to persuade others. Someone who is a master of rhetoric can move his audience to action and unite people. It used to be a huge deal, and anyone who wanted to be a public figure had to be well-versed in rhetoric. But no longer! Arguments today leap frantically from topic to topic, comprised mainly of personal attacks and incoherent, disconnected spurts of brain juice, squirting all over the discussion. It's disgusting, I know, which is why we need to put a stop to it. It's time to...

LEARN SOME RHETORIC!

The art of persuasion has three main parts: ethos, pathos, and logos. Ethos has to do with virtue or morality. Pathos has to do with emotion and feeling. And logos has to do with logic and action. "Great," you are thinking to yourself. "Exactly what I wanted... a vocabulary lesson." Fear not, you impatient fuck! This post is to illustrate how these are used in everyday discourse so that you can effectively command arguments.

The big difference between pathos, ethos, and logos is:

TENSE

WHAT? That's right, tense. Past, present, and future.

PAST TENSE

When you are making a pathetic argument (pathetic in this context means "having to do with pathos"), you tend to operate in the past. Bringing up skeletons in someone's closet, making them feel guilty about something they did, or making them feel nostalgic about something from their past -- these all involve pathos. Most of our memories are emotionally rooted, so the past is the perfect place for pathos. Let's check out an example!

Steve: We shouldn't be at war in Iraq. American education is hurting because of the war!

Rupert: I suppose you would have opposed the US entering World War II, also?

Disregarding that Rupert hasn't actually touched on Steve's claim, Rupert is trying to make Steve rethink his position by relating it to an emotionally charged issue. If Steve knows his history, he knows about the holocaust and Adolf Hitler's disgusting regime. And perhaps by evoking those emotions from an emotionally charged past event, Rupert can get Steve to back down. Or can he?

PRESENT TENSE

Notice that Steve's statement takes place in the present tense, while Rupert is arguing in the past tense. "We shouldn't be" versus "we shouldn't have." Rupert was using Pathos, but Steve was using Ethos, the language of virtue, morality, and character -- language that takes place in the present tense. Ethos is all about what we value right now. It asks questions like "who are we?" and "are we doing the right thing?"

It is often difficult to take on an ethos statement with another ethos statement, because the values may conflict. Let's re-phrase the previous argument but keep both characters in the present, using ethos:

Steve: We shouldn't be at war in Iraq. American education is hurting because of the war!

Rupert: I'm a teacher, and trust me, Americans can't afford to stand by and watch while terrorists destroy our civilization. We need to be in Iraq. We will have to sacrifice education funding for now.

Now we're fighting values with values. Rupert says that Americans have a moral obligation to step in and intervene in Iraq. As I said, though, values vs. values doesn't work very often, as a difference in values may be the reason for the disagreement in the first place. For an ethical (involving ethos) argument to be effective, one's character should be demonstrated to be strong. In this case, Steve is probably more likely to listen to Rupert because Rupert's ethos is supercharged by his disinterest. By opposing increased funding for education in favor of military spending, Rupert demonstrates a self-sacrifice for an issue, which makes him seem to have a stronger character.

It would be far less convincing, though, if Steve were a soldier. A soldier opposing war arguing with a teacher opposing education would be an ethos gridlock, so it would then be wise to turn the conversation to...

FUTURE TENSE

This is where logos, the language of choice, operates. All choices take place in the future. Once we make a choice, it is no longer a choice; it is simply an event from the past. To appeal to someone's logos, you must appeal to the future and to their ability to change the course of their own future. While pathos asks "what happened" and ethos asks "who are we," logos asks, "what should we do?" The most constructive arguments have a very solid footing in the present. You may find that you can turn a hostile confrontation into a rather constructive, friendly one by simply turning the discussion into a conversation about the future.

Steve: We shouldn't be at war in Iraq. American education is hurting because of the war!

Rupert: I'm a teacher, and trust me, Americans can't afford to stand by and watch while terrorists destroy our civilization. We need to be in Iraq. We will have to sacrifice education funding for now.

Steve: I agree that we can't sit back and ignore terrorism, but we should fight it on a micro scale in places where terrorism is more rampant, rather than on a huge scale in a collapsed state like we are now. If we do that, our troops won't be spread so thin, and we would have more resources available to spend on education. Everyone wins!

At this point, Rupert will have to now take into consideration the choices of the future. The conversation started with ethos, but Steve flipped it into logos. Since both men are in ethos gridlock, this was a good move by Steve. Steve also demonstrated a very effective argument tool:

CONCESSION
Sometimes, in order to get an opponent to become more willing to listen to your side, you must concede some of his points. Simply refuting everything the other person says makes the discussion go nowhere fast. Instead, grant them several smaller points, and they will be more likely to give you a larger one.

At Faith Forum, for example, I used concession to get several Christians to whole-heartedly agree with me that God doesn't actually intervene with the physical world as a result of prayer. I conceded two points: that God exists and that prayer was a way to speak to God. These are central tenets of Christianity, and it would be impossible to shake someone's resolution about these beliefs. So instead of arguing over whether God exists, or even whether it's possible to talk to God, I granted them those two points and then turned the discussion to the physical outcomes of prayer. They were much more receptive and willing to listen than they would have been if I had simply said, "God doesn't exist, and you can't talk to him." The conversation would have ended right there. So I had won a small victory by getting a few people to reconsider some of their own ideas, even though those ideas were small in the big scheme of things.

Concession allows you to win the battle -- and you must remember that the war is never over. It is a never-ending stream of small battles, which you must turn into small victories (which add up to large victories). There will always be someone to persuade to your side, regardless of the circumstances. Want to get your friends to go out to a movie instead of studying? Want to seduce your spouse even though he/she has had a long day at work? Want to get someone to donate money to a cause? Want to talk yourself into getting your ass out of bed in the morning? Once you look at it from the right angle, persuasion is a required element in nearly every interaction we have with people. Master it!

The argument techniques in this blog post come from Thank You for Arguing, a clearly-written book on rhetoric by Jay Heinrichs. Buy it! Read it!