The New York Sophist

Everyone seems to love this article about what might be wrong with Obama. Many people, who are quite smart, are posting and re-posting this all across Facebook.

I read it, and I think the author, a psychology professor from Emory, is also worried about this. But as a psychologist, the most obvious explanation never appears in the article.

The obvious explanation is: I’m smart and I feel duped by words. I’m smart, I am not supposed to fall prey to eloquence. I’m smart, I know how to choose good leaders, so Obama must have changed.

Sorry folks. He hasn’t changed. If there’s one thing Obama is, he’s a perfect master of opportunity. Here’s the key quote from the New York Times essay:

Those of us who were bewitched by his eloquence on the campaign trail chose to ignore some disquieting aspects of his biography: that he had accomplished very little before he ran for president, having never run a business or a state; that he had a singularly unremarkable career as a law professor, publishing nothing in 12 years at the University of Chicago other than an autobiography; and that, before joining the United States Senate, he had voted “present” (instead of “yea” or “nay”) 130 times, sometimes dodging difficult issues.

This is evidence that the person who we have elected has all the great skills of a low ranking executive in a major corporation. Stay low. Stay quiet. Don’t rock the boat. Keep up appearances. And when the chance comes to make yourself look good in an nonthreatening manner, do it.

The cross posting, and reposting of this essay is a classic reaction-formation.  My intelligent facebook friends just can’t accept that they made a bad choice and all the evidence was there. But, but, I am a critical thinker! How could I be duped by mere words?

They can’t accept that they are the victims of rhetoric.

Rhetoric, which appears zero times in Westen’s essay, is the culprit here. Obama is a fantastic rhetorical strategist. He knows just what to say to get elected. He also knows just what to say to his opponents and the country to be re-elected.  He also knows that no matter how disappointed you are with him, you will not vote for his Republican opponent, because you like them less. He’s got it figured out, and he knows that lukewarm policy, no matter how much you don’t like it you will figure out how to accept it.

Obama is a master of the dark side of rhetoric, the part we don’t like to talk about that much, but is still very much a part of us. Reason and rationality’s attraction is that we can achieve a level of smartness that allows us to become immune to “mere” language. If we develop critical thinking, if we teach better reasoning, we will release the hold of pretty words over our minds. Reason’s great victory is rhetorical: We believe very much in the story told by the tradition of logic and reason (and shame on Westen for not doing one Google search on narrative theory before writing his essay. Where’s Lakoff? Johnson? White?). We believe in the rhetoric of reason and logic. We are right back where we started.

There is a more charitable read than just “Obama is a sorcerer of dark words.” The more charitable read is that rhetoric is running the whole show. We are all prisoners of its power, including Obama. He was duped by his own words, we were duped by them, in short: Humans are creatures who are duped by words, only to swear by words they won’t be duped again. We are stuck, but we are stuck in the environment that makes us human. More appropriately: We are stuck in the environment that makes us make us human. It gives us all the tools to persuade, to calm, to excite, to dupe, to reason, and yes, to make reaction-formations about our regrets.

Once we can figure out how to accept being at the mercy of language we will be better off politically. This is not a call for better detection equipment among people – that sad, tired, “See through deception” plea we get from fields like psychology and philosophy. What we need is pedagogy of comfort that we are adrift at sea, at the mercy of the tides and waves, but that this is our home, our natural environment.

But the simple explanation of the “evil word sorcerer” is just too tempting. One last quote to point out the obvious skilled rhetor Obama is:

A somewhat less charitable explanation is that we are a nation that is being held hostage not just by an extremist Republican Party but also by a president who either does not know what he believes or is willing to take whatever position he thinks will lead to his re-election. Perhaps those of us who were so enthralled with the magnificent story he told in “Dreams From My Father” appended a chapter at the end that wasn’t there — the chapter in which he resolves his identity and comes to know who he is and what he believes in.

Surely Westen doesn’t hold the sophomoric belief that Obama’s book was “more true” than Obama’s political actions? Surely Westen understands that Obama’s book was written for, and bought by, people who already wanted to believe in Obama. The book was written to make money, and to communicate ideas to a group of people who were already, albeit fractionally, united behind Obama. That chapter doesn’t appear now because it is not rhetorically useful – why tell a story that doesn’t help you with your opponents? That story is for the sappy liberals, while the Reagan stuff is for the sappy conservatives (hint: there is no escape from sappiness, I have recently learned).

Westen, noted psychologist that he is, is a sucker for the counter-transference. His “patient” is working out things for him in his own confused political sensibility. He wants to believe that the patient is who he wants him to be, not accepting him for who he is. His “treatment” of Obama is a “treatment” to fix Obama back to what Westen wants him to be. Developing a pedagogy of reason that accepts our helplessness is not the most attractive project, but necessary if we are to build a savvy, functional politics for the future.

We are all suckers though, just like Westen. In a symbolic universe made by our own hands, we can’t help but be. What we lack isn’t a good, clear story or a politician who “knows what he believes.” What is needed is a way of accepting our symbolic prison, becoming comfortable with it, and figuring out a way to stop this senseless binary of words vs. reality.

Or perhaps I am committing a performative contradiction. Perhaps in the symbolic order we are trapped in a quantum singularity, and mistake our days old reflection at the event horizon for a rescue ship.

Everyone seems to love this article about what might be wrong with Obama. Many people, who are quite smart, are posting and re-posting this all across Facebook.

I read it, and I think the author, a psychology professor from Emory, is also worried about this. But as a psychologist, the most obvious explanation never appears in the article.

The obvious explanation is: I’m smart and I feel duped by words. I’m smart, I am not supposed to fall prey to eloquence. I’m smart, I know how to choose good leaders, so Obama must have changed.

Sorry folks. He hasn’t changed. If there’s one thing Obama is, he’s a perfect master of opportunity. Here’s the key quote from the New York Times essay:

Those of us who were bewitched by his eloquence on the campaign trail chose to ignore some disquieting aspects of his biography: that he had accomplished very little before he ran for president, having never run a business or a state; that he had a singularly unremarkable career as a law professor, publishing nothing in 12 years at the University of Chicago other than an autobiography; and that, before joining the United States Senate, he had voted “present” (instead of “yea” or “nay”) 130 times, sometimes dodging difficult issues.

This is evidence that the person who we have elected has all the great skills of a low ranking executive in a major corporation. Stay low. Stay quiet. Don’t rock the boat. Keep up appearances. And when the chance comes to make yourself look good in an nonthreatening manner, do it.

The cross posting, and reposting of this essay is a classic reaction-formation.  My intelligent facebook friends just can’t accept that they made a bad choice and all the evidence was there. But, but, I am a critical thinker! How could I be duped by mere words?

They can’t accept that they are the victims of rhetoric.

Rhetoric, which appears zero times in Westen’s essay, is the culprit here. Obama is a fantastic rhetorical strategist. He knows just what to say to get elected. He also knows just what to say to his opponents and the country to be re-elected.  He also knows that no matter how disappointed you are with him, you will not vote for his Republican opponent, because you like them less. He’s got it figured out, and he knows that lukewarm policy, no matter how much you don’t like it you will figure out how to accept it.

Obama is a master of the dark side of rhetoric, the part we don’t like to talk about that much, but is still very much a part of us. Reason and rationality’s attraction is that we can achieve a level of smartness that allows us to become immune to “mere” language. If we develop critical thinking, if we teach better reasoning, we will release the hold of pretty words over our minds. Reason’s great victory is rhetorical: We believe very much in the story told by the tradition of logic and reason (and shame on Westen for not doing one Google search on narrative theory before writing his essay. Where’s Lakoff? Johnson? White?). We believe in the rhetoric of reason and logic. We are right back where we started.

There is a more charitable read than just “Obama is a sorcerer of dark words.” The more charitable read is that rhetoric is running the whole show. We are all prisoners of its power, including Obama. He was duped by his own words, we were duped by them, in short: Humans are creatures who are duped by words, only to swear by words they won’t be duped again. We are stuck, but we are stuck in the environment that makes us human. More appropriately: We are stuck in the environment that makes us make us human. It gives us all the tools to persuade, to calm, to excite, to dupe, to reason, and yes, to make reaction-formations about our regrets.

Once we can figure out how to accept being at the mercy of language we will be better off politically. This is not a call for better detection equipment among people – that sad, tired, “See through deception” plea we get from fields like psychology and philosophy. What we need is pedagogy of comfort that we are adrift at sea, at the mercy of the tides and waves, but that this is our home, our natural environment.

But the simple explanation of the “evil word sorcerer” is just too tempting. One last quote to point out the obvious skilled rhetor Obama is:

A somewhat less charitable explanation is that we are a nation that is being held hostage not just by an extremist Republican Party but also by a president who either does not know what he believes or is willing to take whatever position he thinks will lead to his re-election. Perhaps those of us who were so enthralled with the magnificent story he told in “Dreams From My Father” appended a chapter at the end that wasn’t there — the chapter in which he resolves his identity and comes to know who he is and what he believes in.

Surely Westen doesn’t hold the sophomoric belief that Obama’s book was “more true” than Obama’s political actions? Surely Westen understands that Obama’s book was written for, and bought by, people who already wanted to believe in Obama. The book was written to make money, and to communicate ideas to a group of people who were already, albeit fractionally, united behind Obama. That chapter doesn’t appear now because it is not rhetorically useful – why tell a story that doesn’t help you with your opponents? That story is for the sappy liberals, while the Reagan stuff is for the sappy conservatives (hint: there is no escape from sappiness, I have recently learned).

Westen, noted psychologist that he is, is a sucker for the counter-transference. His “patient” is working out things for him in his own confused political sensibility. He wants to believe that the patient is who he wants him to be, not accepting him for who he is. His “treatment” of Obama is a “treatment” to fix Obama back to what Westen wants him to be. Developing a pedagogy of reason that accepts our helplessness is not the most attractive project, but necessary if we are to build a savvy, functional politics for the future.

We are all suckers though, just like Westen. In a symbolic universe made by our own hands, we can’t help but be. What we lack isn’t a good, clear story or a politician who “knows what he believes.” What is needed is a way of accepting our symbolic prison, becoming comfortable with it, and figuring out a way to stop this senseless binary of words vs. reality.

Or perhaps I am committing a performative contradiction. Perhaps in the symbolic order we are trapped in a quantum singularity, and mistake our days old reflection at the event horizon for a rescue ship.

So far, so great! This is my first time attending the NCA Alta Argumentation conference, and it’s living up to what people have told me about it.

This conference is really good so far. Wish you were here. If you aren’t, don’t fret – I’m trying to tweet some bits of interesting information I get from each panel as often as I can. If you like, you can follow me on Twitter – the feed is just down on the right hand side of this page.

So far we have heard a very interesting keynote from Thomas Houlihan about the unfulfilled promise of argumentation studies. Tonight there was also a plenary, or showcase panel about Informal Logic, or the Canadian brand of argumentation scholarship.

The panel was the best explication of Informal Logic that I have heard. It was very well done, and very clear. Sometimes it’s difficult to pick up on the nuances, but this panel did it quite well.

I have audio recordings of both, and I am planning to record most everything that I attend. Watch this space for some audio files that you should be able to play from within the page. they are quite long, but worth a listen. I will start posting those tomorrow, I think.

So far, so great! This is my first time attending the NCA Alta Argumentation conference, and it’s living up to what people have told me about it.

This conference is really good so far. Wish you were here. If you aren’t, don’t fret – I’m trying to tweet some bits of interesting information I get from each panel as often as I can. If you like, you can follow me on Twitter – the feed is just down on the right hand side of this page.

So far we have heard a very interesting keynote from Thomas Houlihan about the unfulfilled promise of argumentation studies. Tonight there was also a plenary, or showcase panel about Informal Logic, or the Canadian brand of argumentation scholarship.

The panel was the best explication of Informal Logic that I have heard. It was very well done, and very clear. Sometimes it’s difficult to pick up on the nuances, but this panel did it quite well.

I have audio recordings of both, and I am planning to record most everything that I attend. Watch this space for some audio files that you should be able to play from within the page. they are quite long, but worth a listen. I will start posting those tomorrow, I think.

There’s a nice hybrid on my desk – Green Mountain Blueberry coffee in a UNT coffee mug. The combination, apparently, has driven me to the keyboard to put down some of the thoughts that have been rattling around in my head for the past 3 weeks.

In a previous debate incarnation, blueberry coffee was a powerful potion. I remember getting it from the University of Vermont campus bookstore, in that branded paper cup, with that untreated wood stirrer that resembled a misplaced part of a balsa wood airplane.

I’d go to my classroom and things would already be somewhat underway. After the midpoint of the institute, the students pretty much ran the show (or so it seemed to me). Going about reading, cutting, arranging, and discussing, there wasn’t much for me to do except be there with them in the swirl. At the start of instruction there is a lot more direct stuff for me to do. Usually I taught those who had only seen or participated in 1 debate before. It was a great challenge, and I miss it, even more acutely when drinking this coffee in the late July weather.

As funding and number of debating programs across the US diminish, the University of Vermont World Debate Institute did as well. The model of the debate camp or debate institute has started to dry up. As I spent the middle weeks of July in the Dallas/Fort Worth area in Texas, the 105 degree heat plus the lack of rain (My uncle the winemaker told me the last they had was a fraction of an inch in April as we stood in his pizza oven vineyard) the drying creek beds and low rivers were a nice metaphor for the debate institute/camp narrative.

The campus of the University of North Texas in Denton. The grass is doing quite well for 102F.

There are still a few remaining camps. I had the chance to visit one by invitation of the UNT director of debate Dr. Brian Lain. Professor Lain has one of the few remaining debate camps in the country. He sees it as an opportunity to reach out to high school students in the area and provide them a high quality summer educational program. It was good to see a vibrant high school debate institute in action again. My first major debate experience was attending the Baylor University debate workshop when I was 15 years old.

Dr. Lain is running a great debate institute on campus there. I watched a high school debate for the first time in years. It reminded me of my old incarnation, back when there were 4 types of debate one could participate in. Now there are 6 (can you name the US debate formats?). When I moved to the northeast to coach at the University of Rochester, everyone did policy debate. It was wonderful. Now everyone does Worlds Style and policy debate. And it’s still wonderful, albeit different.

It would be too easy to claim the transition of the US into Worlds Style debate will mean further decline and elimination of the few debate institutes left. It’s too easy because it’s wrong. First, there is little to no evidence of a “transition” of any kind – what we find happening is programs are trying both. Among the interested, at least. Some directors are very format-centric and place one above the other. Some don’t have the resources to run a full offering of both formats (I am a combination of the two). But if a program had a strong policy format, it would be hard pressed to argue for the removal of that format to replace it with another, since all formats have problems. Replacing one with another is reminiscent of those big American cities that tore up their electric-based public transit for buses because fuel happened to be really cheap.

The debate institute, at the high school level, is weathering the expansion of Public Forum debate pretty well. It makes me think that the University debate institute could also adapt to the growth of Worlds Style. The debate institute, one of those weird and amazing contributions to debating made by Americans has a few advantages.

I like calling it the debate institute out of a sense of irony. If done well, there’s nothing very institutional about the summer debate institute. You first open the walls of the University to young people. You then put them in charge of producing a document that should serve as evidence, both for competitive debates and as evidence that they have mastered a sliver of the scholarly work available on the annual topic. The best situation is the Jacatot model a la Ranciere – both instructor and students do not know the debate topic well, and both read together, testing the quality of materials and analysis through good old fashioned question and answer.

It’s held in a University, but based on praxis – experience as/plus knowledge is the organizing principle. Everyone is a teacher, everyone is a student. There is no clear hierarchy. Students meet in whatever buildings are available to research and discuss whatever subject is of that time. There is plenty of time for students to practice speaking and performing, testing their rhetorical abilities against others. This is the ideal model for the debate institute.

I contrast this with the debate camp – an institution designed to make profit and produce product. Students are often and blissfully unaware of what they are cutting and putting together. The camp sells their labor to others who cannot afford the sticker price of attendance. The faculty are clearly faculty, and remind students frequently of their superiority with smugly-told tales of the battlefield, against opponents that students would stimulate toward pity rather than any competitive drive. Critique of debates is an opportunity for the judge to indulge in sarcastic style, ensuring the students know advancement to the highest levels of the temple is impossible. Students return to their programs and repeat this performance in their own club, as high-priests ordained by a mysterious trial at a University campus that they could not hope to enter.

It’s easy to fall into the capitalist model. Dr. Lain and I discussed this (and a ton of other things) during my time there. His model seems sustainable – he views the summer debate institute as an educational service to the high school students of the nearby metropolitan areas. This helped me think of Academic Service-Learning as something valuable for the first time. The funny thing is, this is not the narrative that Dr. Lain tells. He tells a story about the importance of good educational experiences for interested students. In the end, that’s a good narrative for all teaching.

It seems to me that the debate institute for Worlds Style is still a bit off. There are experiments – I have heard of the institute in Amsterdam in the summer, as well as several local European ones. I had the chance to teach at the Serbian institute for a bit (I got very ill in the middle of it, but it was still enjoyable). The new debate institute in Portugal has just concluded. But where are the American ones? The Eastern Debate Institute held at the University of Vermont holds great promise in my mind. As exciting is the new workshop being held at the University of La Verne in California.

I would love to hear from you if you have attended any of these institutes.