Richard Dawkins: How I Persuade People Who Disagree with Me

Sometimes you’re not trying to persuade the person that people think you’re trying
to persuade.
What you’re actually doing is trying to persuade lots of other people at the same
time.
I’ve spent my whole life as an educator, as a scientific educator at Oxford and at
Oxford we have a rather unique system: a tutorial system where every student gets a one hour
one-on-one tutorial each week with a tutor.
And I had this as an undergraduate, which I absolutely loved, and then throughout my
career I was a tutor.
So I would have student after student after student coming into my room, spending an hour
with me; they would produce an essay, we will talk about it, and I would be trying to, we
would have a conversation.
So I got very practiced in the art of persuading people of scientific things.
And I think this may show itself in my writing the discipline of putting yourself in the
shoes of the reader, of the other person, asking yourself all the time: “What could
be misunderstood here?
In what way might my words be misconstrued?
How could I... this person is not really getting it, I can see it from their face that they’re
puzzled, maybe an analogy would help, maybe a metaphor would help.”
So I suppose the only general thing I can think is put yourself in the position of your
audience, try to see where they’re coming from sympathetically and, um, argue your case
in a way that should resonate with them.
There is a difference between persuading a single individual, which is what I was talking
about in the case of an Oxford tutorial, and persuading a whole audience who are, say,
reading a book or listening to perhaps a radio program where sometimes—I’ve done quite
frequently in America—I’ve done shows where there’s a phone in and people phone
in and ask me questions or have an argument with me.
And there I have sometimes given up, I have to confess this I have sometimes given up
on the quest to persuade the person who is arguing with me I might regard them as a lost
cause, but I’m conscious of the fact that thousands of other people are listening in,
and the way I handle my argument with the one person who—maybe say a Young Earth creationist—who
is beyond redemption and clearly they aren’t going to believe anything I say.
Nevertheless the method that I argue with them maybe a total failure as far as persuading
them is concerned, but nevertheless may persuade thousands of other people who are listening
in.
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Richard Dawkins: How I Persuade People Who Disagree with Me

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