By DONALD DeMARCO
Tact is a way of making a point without making an enemy. It is correcting a friend without bruising his ego. And we all know, or at least should know, how fragile the ego can be. Tact is being sensitive to other people’s sensitivities.
We need to be tactful so that our friends, relatives, colleagues, or associates do not remain in error. Tact is the delicate art that involves the proper balancing of respect, support, counsel, correction, and even kindness. “The greatest kindness one can render to any man,” wrote St. Thomas Aquinas, “consists in leading him to truth.” The transition from error to truth, however, is often stubbornly resisted. People, as a rule, would rather save face than face the music.
Tact, therefore, is a rescue mission, delivering a person from the darkness of error to the light of truth. Poor John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, had to abide heckling from his wife, Molly Vazeille, while he preached.
Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew is a conversion story that offers valuable lessons for many married couples. Xanthippe had the reputation for being an inveterate nag. Once, according to the legend, after severely berating her husband, Socrates, she poured water over his head. “After thunder comes rain,” was the Gadfly of Athens’ philosophical response.
According to the Bible, “A good woman is hard to find, and worth far more than diamonds. Her husband trusts her without reserve and never has reason to regret it. Never spiteful, she treats him generously all her life long” (Proverbs 31).
Hubert Horatio Humphrey Jr. appeared to have the kind of wife described in Scripture. On one occasion, in 1968, while campaigning for the presidential candidacy, he was talking on and on to the boredom and exasperation of his audience. His wife, Muriel, aware of the problem, sent a note up to the podium. “Dear,” she has written, “Remember that for a speech to be immortal it need not be eternal.”
Thus, she made his immortal words secure. Prefacing her message with the word “dear” established a loving context within which her point would be similarly received — love responding to love. The touch of humor, along with evident intelligence, no doubt got her point across without alienating her husband. A less supportive wife might have said, “Hey, motor-mouth, you are boring your audience to death, shut-up already.”
In another instance, after partying at a posh restaurant where Humphrey was lionized as the “bright, new liberal senator,” Muriel questioned her husband as they drove home. “You have to make a choice,” she said. “You can turn into a social butterfly, a Washington phony, or you can skip this sort of evening and become a good senator. You have the choice.”
Humphrey chose the latter. A tactful wife can be a great blessing.
HHH was not without humor of his own: “Behind every successful man is a proud wife and a surprised mother-in-law.” Nor was he bereft of moral wisdom: “It was once said that the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children, those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly, and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy, and the handicapped.”
In the Book of Samuel, Elkanah was a model of tactfulness toward his wife who was depressed because she had not given birth. “Hannah,” he said to his wife, “why weepest thou? And why eatest thou not? And why is thy heart grieved? Am I not better to thee than ten sons?” Elkanah’s love and patience with Hannah and the attention he lavished on her was beautiful to behold. A less loving husband might have simply said, “Snap out of it.” Elkanah’s tactfulness proved beneficial. Hannah gave birth to a boy and named him Samuel.
Communication is greatly facilitated when it is established in a ground of communion. We live in a society in which communication abounds in many forms. We are technical geniuses when it comes to passing on information, but information that is not founded in communion is easily rejected or misinterpreted. A parent’s word to a child has more impact than the most cleverly packaged bit of information that comes through the airways. One television news service boasts that it is the “most trusted” of its kind, largely because it is not trusted.
Existential philosopher Gabriel Marcel drew attention to the fact than we can feel alienated from the person sitting next us even though we can understand what he is saying. “One might say,” according to Marcel, “that what we have with this person, who is in the room, but somehow not really present to us, is communication without communion.” Marcel popularized the notion of presence to describe the sense that, in some mysterious way, I can be in communion with another human being and am not a stranger to him.
The American comedy film Lovers and Other Strangers is typical of the many Hollywood characterizations of marriage that involve spouses who are not present to each other. In the absence of this “presence,” this mutual regard, they are unable to communicate with each other and, as a result, drift apart. The language of our needs to replace the dichotomy of you and me.
Tact, at its best, is expressed between people who are present to each other. To be an object for another object is to lack this presence. Tactfulness is neither an order nor a command. It requires a certain empathy and ministers with a gentle hand. It is uplifting and never insulting. Human relationships would enjoy a quantum leap of improvement if this delicate art could be employed more frequently.
(Dr. Donald DeMarco is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University, and adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College. He is a regular columnist for St. Austin Review. His latest book, Apostles of the Culture of Life, is posted on amazon.com His forthcoming book, How to Navigate Through Life, is in production and is soon to be released.)
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