How to win arguments and influence debate

Unlike its regional neighbours, and reflecting its Western origins, Australia has a political culture that revels in robust polemical exchange.

But in an age when virtually every other area of human activity – from how to succeed in the boardroom, to how to succeed in bed, to how to live in perfect health till the day you die – has received saturation coverage, remarkably little attention has been given to the strategies and techniques of polemical debate.

In a modest attempt to repair the omission, and in particular to help beginners avoid a long and tedious process of reinventing the wheel, here are a few suggestions based on the trials and errors of my own experience.

RULE 1: Forget about trying to convert your adversary. In any serious polemical confrontation (as opposed to genuine intellectual discourse) the chances of success on this score are so remote as to exclude it as a rational objective. On the very rare occasions when it does happen, it will be because the person converted has already and independently come to harbour serious doubts concerning his existing position and is teetering on the edge of defection. This will be due, more often than not, to some outrageous action by his own side or some shocking revelation: Witness the effect on members of communist parties in the West of the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 and Khrushchev's 1956 speech denouncing Stalinism. Then, but only then, a particular argument or example may provide the catalyst to complete the process.

RULE 2: Pay great attention to the agenda of the debate. He who defines the issues, and determines their priority, is already well on the way to winning. That is why, to take a current example, there has been such a determined attempt since September 11 to contest the initial definition of the issue as one of terrorism and to make American arrogance or globalisation the issue. See also the continuing struggle to determine whether the Tampa issue is to be defined as a humanitarian refugee issue or in terms of the integrity of controls over borders and an orderly process of selection for entry. It is essential, too, to resist semantic aggression – to prevent your opponents from imposing their language and concepts on the debate, and always to use terms that reflect your own values, traditions and interests.

Again, consider the use of terms like racist, genocide and elite; and the selective and asymmetrical use of labels like "conservative" and "right-wing" (try to remember the last time you heard someone described on the ABC as "socialist" or "left-wing"). Carelessness or misplaced tolerance in this respect can be enormously costly.

RULE 3: Preaching to the converted, far from being a superfluous activity, is vital. Preachers do it every Sunday. The strengthening of the commitment, intellectual performance and morale of those already on your side is an essential task, both in order to bind them more securely to the cause and to make them more effective exponents of it. As religious movements in earlier times, and the anti-Vietnam war and civil-rights movements more recently, have shown, conviction and dedication are enormous assets, often more than compensating for lack of numbers. On the negative side, one of the most embarrassing experiences in a polemical exchange is to have one's case misrepresented and mangled by one's own supporters.

RULE 4: Never forget the uncommitted: almost invariably they constitute the vast majority. This may seem obvious, but in the excitement of combat and lust for polemical kill the uncommitted are often overlooked. The encounter becomes an end in itself rather than a means of influencing wider opinion. Yet what works best in throwing opponents off balance – cleverness, originality, pugnacity, ridicule – is often counterproductive with the neutral or undecided, who are more likely to be impressed by good sense, decency and fairness.

RULE 5: Be aware that, at least potentially, you are always addressing multiple audiences. Decide whether on a particular occasion, you want to make a broad appeal to many different groups, which will usually involve compromise and restraint in presentation, or to make a sharply focused pitch to a particular audience, even at the risk of alienating others. Either decision – or one to strike some sort of balance between the two – may be right, depending on circumstances; the important thing is to know what you are about. Politicians understand this readily and usually sacrifice impact on a limited group for breadth of appeal, which is one reason their utterances so often appear anodyne and bland. On the other hand, intellectuals – who tend to regard all who are not intellectuals as unimportant, and to equate compromise with sin – are particularly bad in this respect. Which is why their victories are so often Pyrrhic in character.

RULE 6: Be prepared to go around the block many times. When you have a good point to make, keep repeating it. Success in ideological polemics is very much a matter of staying power and will. Communists used to understand this rule very well and practised it to excess.
Western politicians vary in respect to it – Tony Blair is always "on message" and John Howard is not afraid of being repetitious. Again, intellectuals, who put a high professional premium on novelty and originality and have a great fear of being thought boring by their peers, have greater difficulties. They might consider pinning on their study walls a passage from Saul Bellow's Mr Sammler's Planet: "It is sometimes necessary to repeat what all know. All mapmakers should place the Mississippi in the same location and avoid originality. It may be boring, but one has to know where it is. We cannot have the Mississippi flowing toward the Rockies, just for a change." They might also put up, alongside this, Wellington's remark at Waterloo: "Hard pounding this, gentlemen; let's see who will pound longest."

RULE 7: Shave with Occam's razor. Knowing what you can afford to give away is one of the great arts of polemic. It is truly astonishing how often experienced polemicists will expend time and energy defending what is irrelevant or peripheral to their case. Thus, if one wishes to defend the proposition that the US is the freest and most creative country in the world, there is no need to deny that it is also a violent society, any more than it was once necessary to contest that Hitler built good roads or that Mussolini made the trains run on time in order to establish their evilness. Practising polemical economy narrows the area you have to defend and gives you more time or space to concentrate on what is really essential to your case.

RULE 8: Be very careful in your use of examples and historical analogies. More often than not, their illustrative value is outweighed by their distracting effect. People will tend to concentrate on the factual content of the particular episode referred to, the validity of your account of it or the legitimacy of analogies in general, and ignore the original point you were trying to make.

Thus, any references to the appeasement policies of the 1930s in the context of a discussion, say, of American policy towards China is likely to bring progress to an end and precipitate a prolonged wrangle over the precise circumstances of the occupation of the Rhineland or the writings of Winston Churchill. Analogies are often a powerful and persuasive way of bringing a point home.

But you should generally be economical in their use, careful in their choice and well armed to defend the ones that you do choose.

RULE 9: Avoid trading in motives as an alternative to rebutting the opposing case. Or, in Sidney Hook's words, "Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they may legitimately be impugned, answer his arguments." This admonition is routinely ignored by many Australian opinion journalists and intellectuals, for whom recourse to attributing and attacking motive is often the first step in debate. (Witness the way that much needed public discussion of Australia's aboriginal and refugee policies, and of multiculturalism generally, is inhibited and poisoned by the charges of racism readily levelled against anyone critical of the liberal orthodoxy on these issues.) Hook's advice is worth following for two reasons. First, it is the proper thing to do and you will feel better for doing it. Second, motives are irrelevant to the soundness of an argument. Anything that is said by someone whose motives are suspect or bad could equally well (and in all probability will) be uttered by someone whose motives are impeccable, and an answer will still be required. Motives can explain error, distortion and falsehood, but they cannot establish the existence of these things.

The place to discuss them is not at the beginning but at the end, when the facts have been established and error exposed.

RULE 10: Emulate the iceberg. In any polemical exchange, make sure that you know several times more about a topic than you can conceivably use or show. This is important, for one thing, because you will not know in advance what precisely you will have to use on any given occasion. Even more important, the fact that you have much in reserve (which will usually become evident through an accumulation of small touches) will give a resonance and authority to what you do use. Witness the difference between the writing of the genuinely knowledgeable and the instant experts on the Taliban.

RULE 11: Know your opposition. Always bear in mind John Stuart Mill's observation that he who knows only his own position knows little of that. Understand the position of your adversary not in a caricatured or superficial form but at its strongest, for until you have rebutted it at its strongest you have not rebutted it at all. This is a necessary condition both for developing your own position fully and attacking your opponent successfully. It was no accident that many of the most effective anti-communists were people who at one stage of their lives had been either in or very close to a communist party.

RULE 12: Before employing these or any other debating stratagems, make every effort to ensure that the position you decide to defend is intellectually, morally and politically worthy of your efforts. Being on the side of the good and the true does not guarantee success, but, other things being equal, it certainly helps.

About the Author:
Owen Harries was for 16 years the editor-in-chief of the Washington-based foreign policy journal, The National Interest. He is now a Senior Fellow with the Centre for Independent Studies.