Posted 2:55 PM by Blah blah

Getting Along with People (Thoughtful)

Having been in many MANY arguments throughout my life, some where I acted like a complete jackass, I've learned a little about how to avoid arguments and get along with people. Of course I'm always failing in a small way myself and still have much to learn. But for those of you who may be quick to anger and have a love for scoring debate points, please read this.

In high school I read Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, which taught me a great lesson about persuading people. I believe that no matter stupid or wrong you may think someone's idea is, you must always show RESPECT for it and him throughout the whole discussion. From Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies:
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[H]is capacity for friendship, though appearing early in his life, was actually an acquired characteristic. He tells us in his Autobiography that as a youth he was "fond" of argument, was in fact of a "disputatious turn," a bad habit, he soon realized, "productive of disgusts and perhaps enmities where you may have occasion for friendship." He had "caught it by reading my father's books of dispute on religion. Persons of good sense, I have since observed, seldom fall into it, except lawyers, university men, and men of all sorts who have been bred at Edinburgh."

Giving up his taste for argument, he next "put on the humble enquirer." This role he learned first from an English grammar and then from Xenophon's Memorable Things of Socrates. The Socratic method reinforced his natural hunger for trapping his adversaries in positions they really did not wish to defend---"entangling them in difficulties out of which they could not extricate themselves, and so obtaining victories that neither myself nor my cause always deserved." He liked to win---he gave no quarter even in chess---but he soon saw that scoring in this fashion was pointless. It convinced no one, and it cost him friends. He then adopted "the habit of expressing myself in terms of modest diffidence," a practice he followed all his life that, one suspects, allowed a freer expression of his own desire to learn. It also helped draw men and women as well as children to him. And in time it became his natural style; what began in artfulness led him to what he really was.
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Also, see Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "Manners." Emerson is my favorite essayist:
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Defect in manners is usually the defect of fine perceptions....Moral qualities rule the world, but at short distances, the senses are despotic. The same discrimination of fit and fair runs out, if with less rigor, into all parts of life. The average spirit of the energetic class is good sense, acting under certain limitations and to certain ends. It entertains every natural gift. Social in its nature, it respects everything which tends to unite men. It delights in measure.

The love of beauty is mainly the love of measure or proportion. The person who screams, or uses the superlative degree, or converses with heat, puts whole drawing-rooms to flight. If you wish to be loved, love measure. You must have genius, or a prodigious usefulness, if you will hide the want of measure. This perception comes in to polish and perfect the parts of the social instrument. Society will pardon much to genius and special gifts, but, being in its nature a convention, it loves what is conventional, or what belongs to coming together. That makes the good and bad of manners, namely, what helps or hinders fellowship.

For, fashion is not good sense absolute, but relative; not good sense private, but good sense entertaining company. It hates corners and sharp points of character, hates quarrelsome, egotistical, solitary, and gloomy people; hates whatever can interfere with total blending of parties; whilst it values all peculiarities as in the highest degree refreshing, which can consist with good fellowship. And besides the general infusion of wit to heighten civility, the direct splendor of intellectual power is ever welcome in fine society as the costliest addition to its rule and its credit.

The dry light must shine in to adorn our festival, but it must be tempered and shaded, or that will also offend. Accuracy is essential to beauty, and quick perceptions to politeness, but not too quick perceptions. One may be too punctual and too precise. He must leave the omniscience of business at the door, when he comes into the palace of beauty.

Society loves creole natures, and sleepy, languishing manners, so that they cover sense, grace, and good-will; the air of drowsy strength, which disarms criticism; perhaps, because such a person seems to reserve himself for the best of the game, and not spend himself on surfaces; an ignoring eye, which does not see the annoyances, shifts, and inconveniences, that cloud the brow and smother the voice of the sensitive....

The secret of success in society, is a certain heartiness and sympathy. A man who is not happy in the company, cannot find any word in his memory that will fit the occasion. All his information is a little impertinent. A man who is happy there, finds in every turn of the conversation equally lucky occasions for the introduction of that which he has to say. The favorites of society, and what it calls whole souls, are able men, and of more spirit than wit, who have no uncomfortable egotism, but who exactly fill the hour and the company, contented and contenting, at a marriage or a funeral, a ball or a jury, a water-party or a shooting-match.