SPOILER ALERT: If you have not seen The Princess Bride then do not read this if you don't want plot twists
exposed. In addition, what's your problem?! Go watch it. It is a
great movie that gets better and better every time you see it.
Inigo Montoyo is part of a group that
has kidnapped the Princess Buttercup. Westley chases them down in the
guise of the Dread Pirate Roberts. Vizzini, the leader of the
kidnappers, cuts the rope that Westley is using to climb the Cliffs
of Insanity in an effort to kill him. It doesn't work, and Westley
continues to defy all things conceivable in his pursuit of his true
love Buttercup. Vizzini and the giant Fezzik take Buttercup away,
and Inigo waits behind to kill Westley. (With his left hand, it is
the only way it will be a challenge)
Inigo gets impatient and looks over the
cliff edge at Westley climbing and hollers down to him, “Hello
there! Slow going?”
And here we see one of my favorite
aspects of Westley's engagement style. His answer is, “Look I don't
mean to be rude, but this is not as easy as it looks so I'd
appreciate it if you wouldn't distract me.”
Inigo apologizes to which Wesley
responds with a polite, “Thank you.”
Westley gives us a model of something
important; how we start a conversation matters. Throughout the film,
most of the people that Westley encounters intend to kill him, but he
rarely lets that fact impact his impossible cordiality and manners.
Inigo is admittedly only waiting around to kill him, and yet Westley
still sees no value in rudeness. He is polite to the albino in the Pit of Despair and cleverly charming to Humperdink after he and Buttercup emerge from the Fire Swamp.
Angry questioners often rear their
heads during the Q&A portion of a presentation. Sometimes I see
them stewing during my talk, glaring at me with their arms crossed.
They can be both insulting and embarrassingly wrong in their
arguments.
One young woman recently stood up,
crossed her arms, and said in an aggressive tone, “If you can't
trust me with a choice, how can you trust me with a child?” The
audience of 400 students immediately got restless and ramped up their
emotions to match hers.
Bad attitudes left unchecked can infect
a conversation from the outset. Our goal is to dial down emotions and
replace them with thoughtful arguments. We must intentionally
communicate respect with tone, words, and even our body language. We
tend to mirror the gestures of the people with whom we are talking,
Try it some time. Start touching your face and the people you are
talking to will often do the same. Cross your arms and they will do
the same. This young lady injected hostility into the discussion and
it immediately transformed the audience.
I studied martial arts for years. One
aspect of training was deescalation; how to avoid a fight. Body
language and position are crucial to successful deescalation. Viccini
holds a dagger to Buttercup's throat and Westley approaches with his
hands open in front of his body. That is exactly what we were taught
in training. Hands out, open, and in front of you. Slide toward
angles that would be difficult for people to hit you from while
assuring them you do not want to fight. It's amazing the impact this
simple technique has on angry and aggressive people. I have seen
someone seemingly intent on violence get confused, calm down, and
then just walk away.
In deescalation, the correct posture
communicates three key messages. (1) I don't want to fight, but I
won't cower away. This is important because the person hoping to
scare you or bully you sees that it won't work without you having to
immediately match his rage in order to get that point across. (2) It
communicates that I don't want to fight, but I do know how to if you
force the point. Sliding into bad attack angle is key to delivering
this message. Most untrained fighters want to load up and throw a
haymaker. When you slide into a place they have trouble accomplishing
this from, a person who genuinely wants to hit you will usually
attempt to move to a better position. The more you move him into a
bad place the more he begins to understand you know how fighting
works. This is not a welcome message. (3) Finally, all of this sets
you up to be in a good position from which you can defend yourself should it
become necessary.
Obviously these techniques do not
directly apply to arguing. It would be bizarre to position yourself
to physically strike those who disagree with you, but the correct
body language combined with a gracious start accomplishes many of the
same goals.
Back to our angry student; I
immediately asked the audience to please quiet down a bit with my
hands in front of me and open. I informed the audience that I wanted
to respectfully answer her and that would be hard to do so without
their help. This calmed the audience down. I then repeated her
question and asked her if I correctly understood her. She confirmed
that I did. I affirmed that I absolutely respect and trust her with
all sorts of choices, but that we seem to disagree on the nature of
the choice in question. By this time, the audience was respectfully
listening and her arms were uncrossed and open. Perhaps in response
to the openness that I brought to our conversation, or perhaps she
just relaxed a little, but the end result was the same. Our pleasant
and respectful exchange was up and running.
Some students approached me after the
most hostile Q&A audience I ever talked with. They said the
following, “That was great. So many people just tell us what to
think and that we are wrong. So many people seem to be lecturing us.
You talked to us, laid out a case for your position, and challenged
us to think about it. You even told those pro-choice students the
best people to read to see counter arguments to the position you
argued. From the beginning you were respectful.” (Emphasis
mine)
Next, we will talk about Westley's
respect during confrontations and his willingness to recognize the
good points of those with whom he is locked in a life or death
struggle. Or in Westley terms, “Truly you have a dizzying
intellect.”
(Post Script: The rest of my
answer to that young woman went as follows: I asked her if she
thought it would be OK for her to choose to walk across the room and
seize any item she wanted from one of her classmates. She objected
that this wasn't the same thing as abortion. I pointed out that she
is correct in that, but I wasn't claiming it was. I simply wanted to
determine if she thought that taking anything she wanted from a
classmate was something she could choose to do. She said no that
would be stealing. I said I agree that taking in that sense falls
into the moral category of stealing. And now we both recognize that
there are choices that we cannot legitimately make due to the moral
nature of those choices. There are reasonable limits on what we can
do even with and to our own bodies. So both of us respect the
legitimate free choices of others while recognizing that some choices
are not legitimately ours to make, like the choices to steal or rape
someone. What we do not agree on is whether abortion is a legitimate
choice or whether it falls into the category of those choices that
ought to be reasonably restricted. I pointed out that I used science
and philosophy to make the case that abortion is objectively immoral.
If she wished to counter those arguments she needed to address the
scientific identification of the unborn as human beings from
fertilization or the philosophical case identifying them as morally
valuable. I pointed out that David Boonin offered what I think are
the best arguments for her side in his book A Defense of Abortion. As
much as I learn from Boonin, I still think the counter arguments
offered by philosophers like Kaczor and Beckwith ultimately carry the
day, but she was free to make up her own mind on that. I closed by
cautioning that what both sides can't do is replace the hard work of
arguing and understanding each other with slogans.)
