Persuade xor Discover

September 2009

When meeting people you don't know very well, the convention is
to seem extra friendly. You smile and say "pleased to meet you,"
whether you are or not. There's nothing dishonest about this.
Everyone knows that these little social lies aren't meant
to be taken literally, just as everyone knows that
"Can you pass the salt?" is only grammatically a question.

I'm perfectly willing to smile and say "pleased to meet you"
when meeting new people. But there is another set of
customs for being ingratiating in print that are not so
harmless.

The reason there's a convention of being ingratiating in print
is that most essays are written to persuade.
And as any politician could tell
you, the way to persuade people is not just to baldly state the
facts. You have to add a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine
go down.

For example, a politician announcing the cancellation of
a government program will not merely say "The
program is canceled." That would seem offensively
curt. Instead he'll spend most of his time talking about the
noble effort made by the people who worked on it.

The reason these conventions are more dangerous is that they
interact with the ideas. Saying "pleased to meet you" is just
something you prepend to a conversation, but the sort of spin
added by politicians is woven through it. We're starting to
move from social lies to real lies.

Here's an example of a paragraph from an essay I wrote about
labor unions. As written,
it tends to offend people who like unions.

People who think the labor movement was the creation of heroic
union organizers have a problem to explain: why are unions shrinking
now? The best they can do is fall back on the default explanation
of people living in fallen civilizations. Our ancestors were
giants. The workers of the early twentieth century must have had
a moral courage that's lacking today.

Now here's the same paragraph rewritten to please instead of
offending them:

Early union organizers made heroic sacrifices to improve conditions
for workers. But though
labor unions are shrinking now, it's not because present union
leaders are any less courageous. An employer couldn't get away
with hiring thugs to beat up union leaders today, but if they
did, I see no reason to believe today's union leaders would shrink
from the challenge. So I think it would be a mistake to attribute
the decline of unions to some kind of decline in the people who
run them. Early union leaders were heroic, certainly, but we
should not suppose that if unions have declined, it's because
present union leaders are somehow inferior. The cause must be
external.
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