Correcting People

 One of my ongoing debates with a friend, which I've described on this blog before, concerns our long-standing difference of opinion on the topic of the appropriateness of "feedback." He is of the view that, if you catch someone making a mistake or committing an error, you should instantly apprise them of it. After all, he argues, are you not doing them a favor in doing so—because you are saving them from the fate of having to walk around with a false belief? 

I, meanwhile, am of what I prefer to call the Ken Jennings school of thought on the issue—based on a quote the Jeopardy star once delivered on a podcast. The Jennings view is that it is rude—an undesirable and unattractive personal trait—to correct people or point out to them that they are wrong. Even if one thinks or knows that they are wrong, therefore, one should pretend not to notice the fact. 

Now, my friend may appear to have a better point. After all, if you know someone who is going around in error—I gave the example in the earlier post of a coworker whose shirt you notice is on backward—then are you not exposing them to greater long-term embarrassment by not pointing it out to them, since they will then be walking around the office all day like that, even if you are sparing them the short-term shame of immediate correction? So, whose feelings are you really protecting? 

There is force in this argument. But I—and, possibly, Ken—could rejoin with greater force that the instant correction is likely to backfire. It is therefore wrong on tactical grounds. The argument for avoiding long-term embarrassment only works, after all, if it is truly the case that people will instantly act on your feedback in order to correct the error. What if, though, this is not a realistic assessment of human nature? What if, upon people being corrected, they are much more likely to double down on their original mistake in order to avoid the shame of admitting they were wrong? 

It is a commonplace observation, after all, that people seldom change their minds immediately upon being shown the facts that contradict their pet theory. Most will stubbornly cling to their original viewpoint, and merely resent you for disagreeing with them. The stronger your refutation of their error, meanwhile, the more they will hate you for it—and consequently, the more they will reject the new, amended belief you are trying to thrust upon them. For, as the elder Samuel Butler writes in Hudibras: "He that complies against his will,/ Is of his own opinion still[.]"

Consequently, if one really wishes to change someone's mind, one needs to do so in a way that makes them think they knew the truth all along, and that no one had to correct them. I cited Alexander Pope to this effect in the earlier blog post, in a line from his Essay on Criticism: "Blunt truths more mischief than nice falsehoods do, [...] Men must be taught as if you taught them not,/ And things unknown proposed as things forgot." So, I said to my friend—invoking the quote—take that! No one wants your feedback and corrections!

My friend, however, could easily retort (and did) that he does not recognize the words of Alexander Pope to be binding. A poem has persuasive authority, perhaps, but it hardly constitutes precedent in this district. And so, I was forced to go off grumbling, frustrated beyond belief that I was going to have to be required to provide actual evidence of my viewpoint, rather than the congenial observations of dead writers and commentators on the human condition. 

Or would I? For, in my reading today, I came across a line on this subject from a writer so authoritative that even my friend may have to accept his quotations as binding. How many times, after all, has my friend told me that Benjamin Franklin is one of his "personal heroes"? And yet, in getting around to reading the Founding Father's classic and genre-defining Autobiography, I find him unmistakably taking my (and Ken Jennings') side on this whole "feedback" dispute. 

It is a frequent refrain in Franklin's memoir, after all, that trying to contradict people—even when they are wrong—never leads to a real change of heart. He describes himself as someone who was prone to being "disputatious" and self-righteous as a young man, and his autobiography is in part the story of his gradual progress toward overcoming this disagreeable trait. Eventually, having tamed the desire in himself to correct others and to be proven right all the time, Franklin comes to approve the following general maxims for interpersonal conversation: 

A "disputacious [sic] turn," he writes, "is apt to become a very bad Habit [...] by the Contradiction that is necessary to bring it into practice." To paraphrase the lines that follow: one should not go around telling people to their face they are wrong; one should instead try to lead them to the truth by subtler means—because these will ultimately prove more genuinely persuasive in the long run. 

"I wish," Franklin opines, "wellmeaning sensible Men would not lessen their Power of doing Good by a Positive assuming Manner that seldom fails to disgust, tends to create Opposition, [etc.] For if you would inform, a positive dogmatical Manner in advancing your Sentiments, may provoke Contradiction and prevent a candid Attention." (Here's the Hudibras problem mentioned above).

And to top it all off, Franklin then goes on to quote the very same lines from Pope that caught my eye, years ago, as sage advice for how to lead people out of an error without coming across as trying to bully and hector them into changing their minds: "Men must be taught as if you taught them not,/ And things unknown proposed as things forgot." 

Now, my friend, admittedly, might decide simply to take the kernel of Franklin but discard the husk. He might say that Franklin's opposition to feedback and "correcting" people is not the part of the Founding Father he always admired. After all, the part of the Autobiography that my friend likes best is the section where Franklin lists the famous thirteen virtues that he studied in order to obtain moral perfection. My friend says he learned the same list as a child and has tried to apply them himself. 

Funnily enough, the thirteen virtues are the part of Franklin's memoir that I like the least. I wholly endorse D.H. Lawrence's delightfully scathing excoriation of them, in his section on Franklin in his book Studies in Classic American Literature. 

What is it exactly that makes the virtues so annoying? It's partly that they all seem like petty ways to advance one's own interests, rather than virtues proper—prudentially sound, maybe, but hardly the sorts of praiseworthy services to others that I would think of as genuinely moral (admittedly, one of the virtues is "justice," but Franklin places it far down on the list, and suggests practicing "industry and frugality" first, in order to then make it more possible to practice "justice" later on without sacrificing one's interests). 

These are the ethics of the mean ant, in the fable, who leaves the grasshopper to starve and freeze all winter, rather than share. Franklin's virtues are certainly not much of an ethic of self-sacrifice or generosity. They read much more like a prototype of spiritual arrogance—the kind that a friend recently told me she would always hear from conservatives in church, who would often quote a line that they mistakenly believed came from the Bible: "God helps those who help themselves." 

And yet... there is that thirteenth and final virtue on the list—the unloved and overlooked "Humility." Franklin confesses that this is the virtue that came hardest to him. It is also the one for which he was criticized by his more spiritual and unworldly neighbors when he explained to them his project of achieving moral perfection. They said: that sounds a lot like Pride. And so, Franklin set himself to cultivating humility, as the final virtue—the jewel of all the others.  

Now, humility and pride are always the last and most difficult spiritual nuts to crack. One can never be sure whether one is not really the other in disguise (as Franklin puts it, "there is perhaps no one of our natural Passions so hard to subdue as Pride. [...] For even if I could conceive that I had compleatly [sic] overcome it, I should probably [be] proud of my Humility." It is for this reason that pride is the sin that has always furnished the more fertile terrain for growing what Stella Gibbons called the "proper over-subtle flavor" that characterizes "the workings of the religious mind.")

But even if Franklin was never able to achieve true inward humility—and maybe none of us is—he at least recognized the value of it as a matter of outward politeness. In order to spare the feelings of others, one should not approach them in a spirit of visible arrogance. And here again—even in the context of expounding those thirteen virtues that my friend admires so much—Franklin plainly takes my side in the great "feedback" and "correcting" debate: 

"I made it a Rule," he writes, "to forbear all direct Contradiction to the Sentiments of others, and all positive Assertion of my own. [...] When another asserted something, that I thought an Error, I deny'd my self the Pleasure of contradicting him abruptly, and of showing immediately some Absurdity in his Proposition; and in answering I began by observing that in certain Cases or Circumstances his Opinion would be right [....] I soon found the Advantage of this Change in my Manners. [...] I had less mortification when I was found to be in the wrong, and I more easily prevail'd with others to give up their Mistakes and join with me when I happened to be in the right."

Ken Jennings would be pleased! As would Alexander Pope. As am I! And so now, let me go tell my friend how vindicated I feel by the words of his hero. I'm right! He's wrong! Hahahaha. Oh... wait.