Shouldn't we persuade with truth and facts?

Oh, absolutely! But Aristotle pointed out that we don't have to.

Whenever someone uses the word “should,” I see a good soul pushing a rope. Politicians should talk civilly! Our snot-nosed Tik Tok addicted children should speak perfect grammar! And we all should persuade each other with actually true facts and factually true truth.

From your lips to God’s ears.

Wait: Do we know in fact that God has ears, or am I violating a divine truth by even asking that question? When I use that expression flippantly, aren’t I being ironic, and isn’t irony a trope that relies on misrepresentation—a form of lying?  

Why, strike me dumb.

I was thinking this early morning about facts, truth, and persuasion after getting an email from Patrick Gibbons, a Soulbender (i.e., subscriber) who teaches communications at Notre Dame’s Mendoza School of Business. In a class on writing persuasively, Patrick shows a slide breaking down the three essential “appeals” of rhetoric:

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Ethos — one’s perceived character

Logos — the quality of one’s argument (can be fact- or truth-free)

Pathos — one’s emotional appeal

Blending these artfully, and generally in this order, makes for successful arguments.

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That slide raised some hackles in one onlooker. Can an argument really be “fact- or truth-free”? Shouldn’t everyone use verifiable facts and cleave to truthful statements?

From your lips to God’s ears.

But let’s start with the truth. Isn’t truth just a matter of belief? After all, one person’s capital-t Truth is another’s naive religion or crazy political theory. Most evangelical Christians believe that the End Times will come only after Israel’s political boundaries reflect God’s promise to Abraham (Genesis 13:15): “all the land that you can see.” If I try to talk those evangelicals into supporting an independent Palestine within that God-granted territory, should I use their truth, or mine?  

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When Thomas Jefferson showed his first draft of the Declaration of Independence to Benjamin Franklin, the text began:

We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable.

Franklin (oh, how I love that man) shortened the passage while desanctifying it:

We hold these truths to be self-evident.

Why didn’t that wonderful editor shorten the sentence even more?

These truths are self-evident.

That’s because Franklin knew that truths are a matter of belief. We mortals can’t know them; we can only believe them. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are truths to most of us today; but back in the eighteenth century, most people didn’t believe in them.

Now, what about facts? John Adams called them “stubborn things.” In 1770, when he defended the British soldiers who had opened fire on American colonists in the Boston Massacre, he noted that facts are facts.

“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

No matter how we feel about a situation, our political leanings and our emotions can’t turn a fact into anything else. Facts are facts. But long before Adams, the philosopher Aristotle wrote that while facts are real, only belief persuades. Because of our “sorry human nature,” as he put it, our trust in the source trumps actuality. Adams’s “inclinations” may not alter the facts, but they can determine whether we persuade someone.

For instance, two-thirds of Americans believe that violent crime is higher than ever. A similar majority are certain that political violence has gone way up recently. Show people statistics proving that these beliefs are wrong, and you’ll lose your audience. Facts that challenge beliefs rarely win over an audience. Try convincing young mothers that their school-age children are much safer today than most of us were at that age, and prepare to bear their motherly rage.

Why? Let’s start with where we get facts in the first place. The ones you and I trust come mostly from science, government, journalism, and our own lived experience. All of these sources—except for the last one—have faced increasing doubt. Few people understand that the latest science is the least trustworthy; witness the confusing advice of medical experts during Covid. Journalism suffers from the perception of bias. As for government, well, do we have to go there? What’s worse, our lives are spent increasingly online, where news events get repeated to us enough to become apparent reality. We read about a school shooting over and over, to the point where it seems like every child is in mortal danger. Much of our lived experience is virtual experience.

Aristotle pointed out that when you like and trust the source, you’re much more likely to believe its “truth” and follow its choices. Witness George W. Bush immediately after 911. An extremely unpopular president on September 10, by September 12 his approval rating was in the 80s. That’s because he played the role of the leader the nation desperately needed, standing on the rubble pile with a bullhorn and saying…what? It didn’t matter. He looked like a decisive leader. A visibly powerful ethos. We ended up invading the wrong country because our leader told us this was where the terrorists and WMDs were. The “facts” in Iraq proved to be false, but most of us believed them because we trusted their source.

Any ambitious kid who wants to save the world can learn the ways to acquire a trustworthy ethos: seem like you know what you’re doing, that you have the audience’s own interests at heart, and that you share and uphold the audience’s own values. Obviously, these qualities should be real. But they don’t have to be. The audience just needs to believe in you. It’s up to you to persuade ethically; but rhetoric is a dark art. The magic works regardless of your good or evil intentions.

Besides, while facts can help us make better choices, Aristotle realized that truth and logic don’t necessarily bring about the best outcome. The best choices often end badly. Instead of focusing entirely on facts and “truth,” we’d do better if we monitored our tenses.

• Future-tense, “deliberative” argument presents a choice that promise the best outcome for the audience. This was Aristotle’s favorite rhetoric; he believed that politicians should use it exclusively.

• When our rhetoric dwells on the past (“forensic” rhetoric), we tend to focus on crime and punishment rather than on choices that fix things and make things better.

• Present-tense rhetoric (“demonstrative”) has to do with values—right vs. wrong, good people vs. bad, our Truth versus their evil delusion. This leads to the tribalism we see today.

Our choice of rhetoric—future, past, present—has little to do with facts and truth. But it can make all the difference in our mutual decisions, or our avoidance of making decisions. Witness Congress, where facts go to die.

Or witness a car commercial showing a beautiful woman next to a muscle car that only a testosterone-challenged man would buy. The image implies a perfectly logical, fact-free syllogism:

Babes go for men who own a muscle car.

This is a muscle car. Therefore,

If you buy this car, you will get laid.

Hey, it stands to reason: a $200,000 car cures celibacy. You just gotta believe.