Was it Something I Said?

I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately to how to communicate better with people who disagree with me. Since that includes about 98 percent of the world, I have plenty of opportunities for practice.

Food Fight

About a year ago I attended a meeting of small business owners organized by the National Federation of Independent Business of Illinois. Sitting at my table during lunch was the chairman of a small manufacturing company and a woman who worked for the state’s department of economic development.

The conversation drifted to state programs aimed at helping small businesses. The businessman proudly reported how state grants were enabling him to train and hire relatively unskilled workers at his factory. I asked him, politely I thought, why he thought that he had a right to tax me to pay the cost of training his workers. From his reaction, you would have thought I had flipped my breast of chicken across the table and into his lap.

He was creating jobs, he said, and the state has an interest in helping people create jobs. The Heartland Institute creates jobs, I said, but we don’t ask him to pay for our work. He said he was putting to work people who otherwise would be dependent on welfare. I said that was great, but plenty of businesses are willing to do the same without subsidies. If he thought he was doing charitable work, why not get tax-exempt status and seek voluntary contributions?

While the businessman hyper-ventilated, the lady from the economic development department entered the conversation. I think she mistook my principled opposition to subsidies for envy, and suggested that Heartland apply for its own training grants. I don’t want a subsidy, I said, don’t you get it? No, they didn’t.

Trying to find some kind of common ground, I asked if either of them had heard of Friedrich Hayek or his book, The Road to Serfdom. Neither had.

I explained that Hayek, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, tried to warn post-World War II intellectuals that using government force to achieve small and seemingly innocuous ends would take us irresistibly down the road to fascism and totalitarianism. By this time the meeting had ended and people were milling about talking. I was leaning over the table, trying to be heard over the noise of the crowd.

After a few minutes, the government lady said, “why are you so angry?” I’m not angry, I said, I’m just trying to explain . . . . “Then why are you shouting?” she asked. “I’m not shouting,” I shouted. Bewildered, trapped, and wounded, I slumped back into my chair. “You have some unresolved conflicts,” said the government lady, giving the knife in my stomach a painful twist. The businessman grunted his agreement, and together they walked away, no doubt planning their next grant application.

Somehow I knew I hadn’t changed their minds.

I’m Greener than You Are

In case you think I’m a hopelessly bad communicator, I have another story showing I sometimes get it right.

I was in California to record a 30-minute interview based on my book, Eco-Sanity: A Common-Sense Guide to Environmentalism. The host was an extremely liberal environmentalist. From our brief conversation beforehand, I knew she thought I was a horrible, anti-environment yuppy fronting for big corporations. What to do?

When I arrived, she gawked for a moment at my khakis, hiking boots, and green shirt from The Gap. She recovered and, with her finger poised over the start button of her tape recorder, said “let’s begin.” I said hold on, wait a minute, let’s talk first. Have you ever gone backpacking in the Boundary Waters area of northern Minnesota? No, but a friend of hers had and said it was great. Well, I said, I once spent three weeks up there and it just blew my mind!

We talked for 20 minutes about backpacking in Minnesota, Maine, and Michigan; about the geodesic dome my wife and I built in Wisconsin; about our honeymoon on the Ice Age Trail in central Wisconsin; and about the time a bear nearly had me for a late-night snack one night when I was camping alone and without a flashlight.

By the time she finally started her tape recorder, I had won her over. Her introduction went something like this: “I have with me a very unusual guest. He’s written a book that challenges a lot of what we as environmentalists believe, but he’s one of us. I think he has some very important things to say.”

It was a great interview.

How About Some Pomobabble?

My search for a better way to communicate led me to read Modernization and Postmodernization by Ronald Inglehart. The book came highly recommended by Newt Gingrich, who I think is also looking for better ways to communicate. Corporate government affairs people are studying it carefully for clues on how to market to Generation X.

Inglehart claims that, around 1990, a majority of people in the U.S. and other advanced industrial societies ranked “post-modern” or “post-materialist” values above “modern” or “materialist” values. In third place and rapidly disappearing are “traditional” values. Examples of these different values appear below.

While I can embrace a few of the values identified as “post-modern,” most of my values show up in the “traditional” and “materialist” columns. Still, knowing what other people value can help steer me away from arguments likely to alienate them, and can suggest ways to cloak my real values in the jargon of post-modernism–what one writer recently labeled “pomobabble.” But I’m not convinced the strategy will work in the long run.

I’m skeptical of the polling data Inglehart cites. People may say they respect “imagination” more than “reason, “ but do they call a poet or a plumber to fix a leaking pipe? Do they support “sexual freedom” for their spouses? If they have employees, do they allow them to “take their employment for granted”? I don’t think so.

Do the so-called post-modern values actually control behavior, or are they just sound bites and slang expressions, superficially appealing to a bored, affluent, and media-drenched population? Genuine values drive conduct, but “post-modern” values don’t seem to drive much more than television commercials for beer, cars, and sports shoes.

There’s another reason to doubt Inglehart’s work: The guy’s political philosophy is looney. He quotes Marx about three times per page, hates religious people, and thinks laissez faire capitalism–the brief period in our history of extraordinary economic growth, social mobility, and invention–was a horrible thing properly extinguished by regulations. It’s pretty easy to guess which column in the box contains his values.

Old Advice Is Good Advice

For many years, I’ve kept at my desk a one-page listing of the 30 principles presented in Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Originally published in 1936 and revised in 1981, the classic still lives up to its title.

Carnegie gives twelve principles to “win people to your way of thinking”; nine principles to “be a leader”; three “fundamental techniques in handling people”; and six ways to “make people like you.” Some may seem obvious, like “smile” and “make the other person feel important.” Others are clever, like “give the other person a fine reputation to live up to.” All of them are sure to make you a better person, not just a more persuasive communicator.

The most difficult of Carnegie’s principles for me to follow, alas, is Principle 1: “The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.”

P.S. For a one-page listing of Carnegie’s 30 principles, click here.