September 2009When meeting people you don't know very well, the convention isto 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 meantto 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 soharmless.The reason there's a convention of being ingratiating in printis that most essays are written to persuade.And as any politician could tellyou, the way to persuade people is not just to baldly state thefacts. You have to add a spoonful of sugar to make the medicinego down.For example, a politician announcing the cancellation of a government program will not merely say "Theprogram is canceled." That would seem offensivelycurt. Instead he'll spend most of his time talking about thenoble effort made by the people who worked on it.The reason these conventions are more dangerous is that theyinteract with the ideas. Saying "pleased to meet you" is justsomething you prepend to a conversation, but the sort of spin added by politicians is woven through it. We're starting tomove from social lies to real lies.Here's an example of a paragraph from an essay I wrote aboutlabor 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 ofoffending 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.[1]It makes the same point: that it can't have been the personalqualities of early union organizers that made unions successful,but must have been some external factor, or otherwise present-dayunion leaders would have to be inferior people. But written thisway it seems like a defense of present-day union organizers ratherthan an attack on early ones. That makes it more persuasive topeople who like unions, because it seems sympathetic to their cause.I believe everything I wrote in the second version. Early unionleaders did make heroic sacrifices. Andpresent union leaders probably would rise to the occasion ifnecessary. People tend to; I'm skeptical about the idea of "thegreatest generation." [2]If I believe everything I said in the second version, why didn't Iwrite it that way? Why offend people needlessly?Because I'd rather offend people than pander to them, and if you write about controversial topics you have to choose one or the other. The degree ofcourage of past or present union leaders is beside the point; allthat matters for the argument is that they're the same.But if you want to pleasepeople who are mistaken, you can't simply tell the truth. You'realways going to have to add some sort of padding to protect theirmisconceptions from bumping against reality.Most writers do. Most writers write to persuade, if only out ofhabit or politeness. But I don't write to persuade; I write tofigure out. I write to persuade a hypothetical perfectly unbiasedreader.Since the custom is to write to persuade the actual reader, someonewho doesn't will seem arrogant. In fact, worse than arrogant: sincereaders are used to essays that try to please someone, an essaythat displeases one side in a dispute reads as an attempt to panderto the other. To a lot of pro-union readers, the first paragraphsounds like the sort of thing a right-wing radio talk show hostwould say to stir up his followers. But it's not. Something thatcurtly contradicts one's beliefs can be hard to distinguish from apartisan attack on them, but though they can end up in the sameplace they come from different sources.Would it be so bad to add a few extra words, to make people feelbetter? Maybe not. Maybe I'm excessively attached to conciseness.I write code the same way I write essays, making pass after passlooking for anything I can cut. But I have a legitimate reason fordoing this. You don't know what the ideas are until you get themdown to the fewest words. [3]The danger of the second paragraphis not merely that it's longer. It's that you start to lie toyourself. The ideas start to get mixed together with the spinyou've added to get them past the readers' misconceptions.I think the goal of an essay should be to discover surprising things. That's my goal, at least.And most surprising means most different from what people currentlybelieve. So writing to persuade and writing to discover arediametrically opposed. The more your conclusions disagree withreaders' present beliefs, the more effort you'll have to expend onselling your ideas rather than having them. As you accelerate,this drag increases, till eventually you reach a point where 100%of your energy is devoted to overcoming it and you can't go anyfaster.It's hard enough to overcome one's own misconceptions without havingto think about how to get the resulting ideas past other people's.I worry that if I wrote to persuade, I'd start to shy away unconsciouslyfrom ideas I knew would be hard to sell. When I notice somethingsurprising, it's usually very faint at first. There's nothing morethan a slight stirring of discomfort. I don't want anything to getin the way of noticing it consciously.Notes[1]I had a strange feeling of being back in high school writingthis. To get a good grade you had to both write the sort of piouscrap you were expected to, but also seem to be writing with conviction.The solution was a kind of method acting. It was revoltinglyfamiliar to slip back into it.[2]Exercise for the reader:rephrase that thought to please the same people the first versionwould offend.[3]Come to think of it, there is one way in which I deliberatelypander to readers, because it doesn't change the number of words:I switch person. This flattering distinction seems so natural tothe average reader that they probably don't notice even when Iswitch in mid-sentence, though you tend to notice when it's doneas conspicuously as this.Thanks to Jessica Livingston and Robert Morrisfor reading drafts of this.Note: An earlier version of this essay began by talkingabout why people dislike Michael Arrington. I now believe thatwas mistaken, and that most people don't dislike him for thesame reason I did when I first met him, but simply becausehe writes about controversial things.
