Last Friday night my wife took me to see This Beautiful City a play based on interviews with those in and around the Evangelical movement in Colorado Springs, at the Studio Theatre. Parts of the performance reminded me of some of my work with progressive activists.
In one scene three US Air Force cadets are at a table explaining their faith and denying that they inappropriately evangelize on campus. One says they do not preach at folks by saying “I’m right and you’re wrong.” Rather they “show people the truth” and let them come to their own conclusions (or something to that effect – the quotes are probably wrong but the spirit of the thing is right). The cadets say they simply show the truth, and once seen it cannot be denied.
This sounds a lot like a lot of activists I’ve known over the years. Most folks reading this have a list of issues about which they cannot understand disagreement - most at some point say, “if they only knew what was really going on they would agree with me.”
Most of us think of ourselves as mostly reasonable most of the time. We tend to make decisions for what we think are pretty good reasons. Almost no one has a conversion based on the simple revelation of new information. This is especially true of issues that involve values, judgments, and other areas that more personal than which type of detergent to purchase. Our political decisions – from whether or not we support free trade to our political candidates of choice – fall into the former rather than the latter. We make political decisions based on internal visions of how the world works and how the issue or candidate in question fits that view.
As such, just showing the data and hoping for a conversion is bound to fail. And insisting on our truth, the rhetorical equivalent of repeating yourself louder and slower, mostly makes you look foolish and angers the person you’re talking to.
The problem isn’t fungible truth or “mere relativism.” The problem is that most issues and most people are mostly true on a lot of fronts. Free trade does, on balance, increase the wealth of the nations that engage in it, while trade barriers are on balance bad. So the truth is that free trade is good. But free trade does create winners and losers, does perpetuate a capitalist system which itself has winners and losers, and development (a result of trade) does hurt the environment. So the truth is free trade is bad. One does not deny the other.
And, of course, while truth may not be relative is it is often personally held. So even if the person who thinks they have Truth has a lie, telling them “you’re living a lie, your beliefs are misguided at best and evil at worst, join me because I’m better than you” is not likely to succeed.
Good persuasion learns what the audience believes to be true and matches the action to that belief. Rather than saying, “you’re wrong, I’m right, do this” good persuasion says “you’re right, do this.”
