Logic has nothing to do with having a kid.

Illogical advice to a wannabe grandfather.

I’ve been going through my old blog, Figarospeech.com, to dredge up old Q&A’s from subscribers. Having recently visited my granddaughter in Dallas, this one struck a chord:

I’m kinda desperate for grandchildren. How can I persuade, without annoying, my two engaged sons?

Let’s start with the secret of persuasion:

IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU.

Rhetoric, the art of persuasion, is all about your “audience,”—what they believe, expect, and want. So let’s slide into their heads and see what they’re probably thinking…

“WE’RE NOT EVEN MARRIED YET!!”

And…

“THIS IS A TERRIBLE TIME TO HAVE A KID.”

You could answer with flawless logic.

“There’s never been a good time.”

Humans were having babies, surrounded by eager predators, even before our species left Africa. Mothers popped out children in ancient Greece while island nations busily slaughtered each other. They were getting pregnant during the Black Death.

Yeah, maybe the connection between copulation and pregnancy was considered fake news until relatively recently. And “family planning” was an oxymoron until the invention of latex and pharma.

Then along came the Fifties, when my generation were hiding under our desks to wait for nuclear annihilation. Yet my heedless parents went ahead and produced me and my siblings.

Even if you ignore the fact that humans proliferated in far more horrible times, the very act of deliberately getting pregnant makes little logical sense. Most of us don’t need to produce extra hands on the farm, being as how most of us don’t live on family farms. So why would you risk bankruptcy and sacrifice years of leisure time for the sake of some unborn stranger?

All of which makes a good logical rebuttal to the argument against having a kid.

By some fluke of luck (and my wife’s kind genes), and Dorothy Junior turned me into a father. A son, George, came a few years later, and today Dorothy Senior and I are grandparents.

But Aristotle, Mr. Logic himself, said that logic rarely persuades. Instead, try this:

TIE YOUR PERSUASION TO YOUR SON’S IDENTITIES.

In my last posts, I talked about Aristotle’s concept of the soul. It’s a forrm of identity that you can use to talk yourself into anything. Other people’s souls are also fair game in rhetoric. If you can tap into their deepest sense of self, you can talk them into anything—possibly even to consider propagating the species.

When the family gets together for the holidays…

1. Pour the wine. (You want your audience in a persuadable state called cognitive ease.)

2. Tell your sons how proud you are of them. “Look how you turned out!” “The world is a better place with you young men in it.”

3. Say that, despite all your hard work and ambition, the greatest thing you’ve ever done was to get their mother pregnant. (Don’t put it this way if it grosses them out.) With one loving act, you had two boys who made you into your greatest role: a father.

Your boys might see right through this argument.

“So you’re telling us to have a grandkid.”

That’s OK! You’ve planted a seed. (Not a literal one. That’s their job.) You’ve held up a mirror to two good men who have blessed their father by being born.

Babies create fathers. Maybe someday, without too hard a sell (again, no pun intended), these two creators can have babies that make them fathers.

And lo, despite the state of the world, there will be fruitfulness and multiplication.