Sean O’Quigley reflecting on his recent experiences visting St. John’s University in Queens, New York
One of the unique things we did with them while they were here was ask them to conduct a workshop in the Irish Times Debating format. This format is virtually unknown outside of Ireland, and in that respect I thought it mirrored American formats such as L-D or Policy debating. This national style was exposed to many in the WUDC community at Cork Worlds where it was used as the Master’s format. I didn’t see any of those rounds so the format was still a mystery to me. This workshop was held in the Empire State Building at the King’s College, Manhattan for students from both institutions. About twenty students showed up, which was a pretty good crowd considering it was a Tuesday night.
The workshop began with a lecture in three parts: Basic rules and expectations of the format, argumentation in the format, and considerations of style in Irish Times debate. It was excellent instruction, and I enjoyed every moment of it. The audience asked many questions and the format of the lecture was open, conversational and interactive.
It seems to me the reason that Irish Times debating isn’t practiced outside of Ireland (that I know of) is because the format is too public. This is the opposite issue that faces American debating formats which are too private in their perspective. This is an odd problem to have: How could a format that enacts the openly stated goals of WUDC be less popular than the BP style? It is because of its reliance on audience reaction during the debate. The audience response as the debaters argue is something that all three Irish champions highlighted during the lecture. This reaction is used as a litmus for the judges in determining how to count the argument in the context of the debate. Arguments that get good response such as applause or cheers have hit the center of the debate for this crowd, and should be scored high. Laughter and other humor counts for style which is also a vital part of the contest. Most BP happens without an audience, or an audience of other practitioners of the art who are usually quiet as they evaluate and consider elimination rounds in terms of their own practices, for example thinking “How would I make that argument?” or “How would I respond to that?” The presence of the lay audience tends to keep the judges balanced in such considerations, rewarding those whose careful appeal to the universal audience during invention is reflected through the reaction of the crowd.
What was most interesting to me during the workshop were the comparisons of BP to the Irish Times format. The comparison was familiar in the sense that BP was discussed as a technical format, something that was much more driven by “shorthand” or “catch-phrases” about concepts and ideas that wouldn’t require explanation to the BP familiar audience. I was surprised by this observation due to my own bias that BP really avoids this sort of codified speech, plus my familiarity with the highly coded policy debate shorthand which makes BP look absolutely simple.
I believe that this sort of codification is an important issue to watch. The result of the use of these phrases is an acceleration toward rewarding teams that are creative toward the logical combinations possible given the use of shorthand explanations. This shuts out the idea of a lay audience as the judge, and even more dangerously, uses a bit of smoke and mirrors to convince us that the BP judge and the BP format are unproblematically accessing daily persuasive forms. This is dangerous because by definition it persuades us no vigilance of our discourse is necessary.
On the opposite side, an Irish Times debater is constantly vigilant of his or her discourse as he or she knows the audience reaction must be taken into account with each utterance. This immediacy encourages a speaking style that must be directed at the commonplaces that would be safest. The debater might be tempted that the judges (who are all previous winners) would understand a complicated, shorthanded argument strategy, but they must couch it in terms with which the present audience could and would identify. This disciplinary situation though has weaknesses, as it’s hard to imagine inventive and imaginative arguments based on critical theory gaining much support or even any minor approach by a debater in this format. This is a similar problem in BP where the risk reward ratio for critical argumentation is so low that one should just forget about these approaches entirely.
But there is still a lot of room for creativity in the Irish Times format specifically
The workshop lasted about four hours, but at the end of it conversations continued about the debate and about the issues raised. It was an experience that made me wonder what other formats are out there that I am missing out on. The appeal of Irish Times debating is the appeal of public debating in general, and the great demand that I think exists out there for people to see some quality debating that relies on advocacy instead of the recitation of facts. This made me feel there might be a good market out there for an Irish Times format public debate series in New York City. I hope to explore this idea over the summer.
It would be easy to get people interested. What exists now for competitive public debate options? I would put Irish Times format debating up against the rather stale and unenergized format of Intelligence Squared any day. I think it is more dynamic than Intelligence Squared, which has all the markings of a press conference or TV news talk show rather than a debate with people who practice advocacy instead of truth-seeking or fact-finding. The journalistic model doesn’t serve public deliberation very well at all. Without passion, you have a positivist discourse that only teases at a robust public argumentation norm where people can really see an embodied idea take life on a stage for a bit and compare it to their own lived ideas of what is best for society.
In the end, the students really enjoyed the debating. I think the format has a bright future outside of Ireland, as long as we can push past the fear that appealing to the audience is somehow bad, deceptive, or an accommodation to poor thought. The more technical debate gets, the more it removes itself from other people which in the end will remove the practice of debate from things important and relevant to daily life.
It’s been a bit over two weeks since I’ve returned home from a debate workshop I gave in Ukraine at two Universities there. The workshops were successful by everyone’s standard. I haven’t written about it yet because quite honestly I wasn’t sure what to say. This workshop was very different from my normal debate-teaching experience, and for a while I thought I wouldn’t. I didn’t know what to say about it. I thought I would eventually type up a very generic assessment of it and move along, but I am still digesting it. I believe it to have been perhaps the most important workshop I’ve done in a long time because it reminded me of how much more I need to do to become a good teacher.
My friend suggested I leave this post at that – “I have nothing to say” or “I am uncertain of what to say.” My version of that would have been what you’ve been experiencing if you have visited here recently. Silence. But it has been a productive reflection, not in the sense that anything has been generated, but instead that things have been refreshed and realigned.
I hate to admit it, but my attitude until my trip to Ukraine was one destined for correction. It is best described by Chogyam Trungpa in his book Sahambhala as the “cocoon.” This is the attitude we often take on when we are comfortable in where we are. We surround ourselves with a familiarity that breeds a confidence that discourages us from thinking there’s more to do, see, or explore. This attitude is dangerous as it makes us sleepy and comfortable. This leads to a stagnation in thought and action that easily looks like the result of good and hard work. As Trungpa writes:
In the cocoon there is no dance: no walking, or breathing, not even a wink of the yes. It is comfortable and sleepy: an intense and very familiar home. In the world of the cocoon, such things as spring cleaning have never been known. We feel that it is too much work, too much trouble, to clean it up. We would prefer to go back to sleep. (161)
Trungpa is arguing metaphorically of course. This attitude brought on by the surrounding of oneself with the familiar and comfortable as a replacement for the unknown and new is avoidance behavior for recalcitrance. It can be quite scary to have to approach the new. We couch those fears in patterns that provide a sense of stability. There is a creative and engaged way of doing that, and there is the cocoon way – the replacement of that risk of the new with the familiar and comfortable as if they were external reality. The sleepiness is a sort of attitude, or approach that can often be read as either a boredom, or perhaps a snootiness.
I was overly satisfied with where I was, and had developed this cocoon mentality. My expression of it was a sort of indifference and annoyance that I felt somewhat justified about, but was really justifying a comfortable shell of distance I was putting between myself and what I could sense as a need for the new. As Trungpa writes, “Usually when you are delighted about something, you develop a thick skin and you feel smug. You say to yourself, ‘I’m so delighted to be here.’ That is just self-affirmation.” (63). This is exactly where I was in my mind waiting on my flight to board. I felt as if there was little more to do than to go through the motions of teaching debate and rhetoric, which would impress others, and then I would be on my way to another destination. In the local region, I had an attitude of withdrawal, where I wanted to just passively drift along in the current rather than help to improve things. This was a result of a fear of responsibility, I think, but I couched it in pedagogical terms. I wanted less to do with larger responsibility to have more time with my students during tournaments.
I was headed for what I now describe as pedagogical hubris. I developed this term to describe the particular sort of “tragedy” that occurs when one uses pedagogical justification for selfish or self-affirming purposes. I use tragedy as a way to ground the experience with the term hubris, but it’s not a tragic end in the traditional sense. the tragedy is the recognition of what potential has been lost through such lazy and comfortable self-deception.
I taught at two great groups of students. Most of my time was spent at The Institute of International Relations, Kyiv National Taras Shevchenko Univeristy where I had a blast. The workshop would go for a couple of hours, then I would move on to Kiyv Mohyla Academy for a second workshop that would last about the same amount of time. It wasn’t anything specific about what I was doing, but I think it was individual interactions with the students that made me realize that something was off, that I was enclosed in a bit of darkness, and that I needed to move out of that.
Hubris came mostly at night when questions such as “Why did I come here?” “What am I supposed to be doing here?” were met with silence from my usually very quick-to-respond mind. The hubris crept up on me slowly until a moment where I realized that I had fully failed to understand Paulo Friere’s re-imagining of the role of the teacher. I thought I had understood banking education, why it was a failure, and why teacher/student, student/teacher relationships replace it. I had no idea how deep that re-imagining could be, or how deep it should be. I was too comfortable to let anyone in fully with the status of a potential teacher. I was too smug to accept that I could learn things that would have me sitting here re-imagining my relationship to a field I felt I had a good sense and good mastery. Too many strange things took place there for me to ignore how lazy I’d become as a so-called master of the art.
There is a great Zen saying – “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.” Taking off from JFK I thought I only lived in the latter half of this idiom. Now back and digesting the experience, I realize how true the idiom is, but how false my sense of my role is in all of this debate stuff. The idiom was just as true for me as I flew toward Kiev, but I was the unknowingly ready student.
The whole experience was well designed to put me in my place. From the slippery streets that forced me to re-learn how to walk somewhat to the dissonance of being in a city with palimpsest upon palimpsest of identities piled on top of it, to the brilliant and demanding students who were so ready to stretch their debate muscle, it made me feel very humble and very inadequate to the task of debate teaching. However I realized that I must get better at it. This blog is something that I should use toward that end, as well as careful consideration of what the point of what we do is.
This picture is of the snowy path I walked up and down every day, several times a day. Instead of reviewing what I would do the next day or how I thought the students were progressing, I merely used this time, carefully walking on the ice, to dialogue with myself about the larger function of these sorts of workshops. Am I bringing something, making something, or taking something? What is the proper mixture here? The silence was quite helpful as the snow fell around me. I had a good chance every day to consider my pedagogy. Near the end of the trip I was beside myself and my old ideas that I wouldn’t or shouldn’t do many of these trainings after this one. I realized how essential they are to me and how key interaction with student/teachers and between the two titles are to the core of pedagogy, which has to be “generation.” Something comes of it, but not production with its overtones of consumerism and materiality. Generation seems a better term as it begins growth among and within everyone participating in the workshop, in spite of and because of role, assumptions and level of interaction.
It was an amazing time. I learned a lot, the most I think about myself, and my relationship to teaching that I’ve had in many years. And I can’t wait to return. I wondered if I ever would for a while – it was such an intense experience I felt it should be left alone as a singularity. However, after a fantastic workshop with the visiting Irish Times debaters, we went to a bar selected by a student which had this street sign in front of it.
Yes this is from out in front of the bar in New York. So apparently either fate is tracking my path through the world with very obvious and funny coincidences, or this was some sort of “sign” that I’m not quite done with Ukrainian debate. I prefer the latter interpretation.
And if you’ve read this far you realize that I should have just put “I am not sure what to say.” Thanks to my friend who suggested it an thanks to my new friend who sparked this reconsideration.
For the past couple of weeks I have been spending a lot of time thinking and reading about debate and argumentation – the western, rhetorical tradition, as well as the teaching methods and history of the conventions of Buddhism. I am starting work on a long-term project that attempts to separate the practice of debate from western rational thought, formal logic, and reason in an attempt to re-connect it to the aesthetic, imaginative, and spiritual side of communication.
Right now my focus is on the teaching device known as the Kung-An (J. Koan). It is my belief that the pedagogical principles behind the use of Koans in Buddhist teaching can be applied to how one approaches motions in debate. One should think of the motion like a Koan.
The major change is one of mental approach. Instead of seeing the motion and thinking “What are the arguments I can win on that are related to the motion,” the debate comes as an aesthetic response to what you are presented in the terms of the motion. You articulate a response to the motion that does not seek to use it as an instrument to win its own particularities. You instead articulate persuasive belief that the motion will serve as an example.
A Koan is designed to separate you from the limits of reason, rational, and logical thinking. But this, from the point of view of a rhetorician, is merely a transition into another type of discourse. Zen and Ch’an masters are not looking for the correct answer, for a check box when they are evaluating what students say when responding to a Koan. They are looking for a much deeper understanding, something away from the discourses of predictable, limited, everyday thought.
This is not to say it’s way out there. Instead, it is rooted in the experiences of the everyday, but articulates these experiences and this information differently. It attempts to flip the standard position of master and student on its head. Why not approach the motion in this manner: It is an example of the obvious, persuasive understanding that you advocate?
This might be a bit esoteric, so let’s ground it with some analysis of what Zen and Ch’an masters look for to determine if a monk has reached satori, or enlightenment. Did they provide the sort of answer that distinguishes them as “getting it?” Here are some of the principles of evaluation gleaned from literary analysis of Koan dialogues by T. Griffith Foulk in the essay “The Form and Function of Koan Literature: A Historical Overview”:
1. “The ‘awakened’ person naturally refuses to occupy the position of disciple, whose commentary is ipso facto ‘deluded.’ He insists rather on seizing and holding the position of master in the dialogue, which means that he must be prepared not only to comment on the root case, but to pass critical judgment on his teacher’ remarks as well when the teacher tries the usual gambit of putting him in his place. The confidence to stand one’s ground in this situation comes from understanding the basic message of Chou-chou’s ‘not’ (and many other Ch’an/Zen dialogues) which is simply that words and signs utterly fail to convey the true dharma.” (41)
The origin of the term Koan is a legal one, meaning “public case” – something like the modern practice of stare decisis, where case law is commented upon to point out its validity or to apply it to a contemporary legal question. So one can think of Koans, at least in their origin, as an argumentation game – can you provide a commentary that both re-explains this idea anew, while keeping in tone with the previous ruling? This spiritual stare decisis is the pedagogical tool of the master to see if the student is “getting it” – are they awake? Are they making sense within the “rules” of Ch’an? And finally, are they making a valuable contribution with their words to the understanding of those who hear? Are they making an impact on the thought of those who are listening? For the koan test is not mere mental gaming, but an important step in the training of the mind for the direct transformation of the world into something better. It is not necessary to describe the similarity to debate that is apparent here.
The koan in question here is the famous Chou-Chou koan: Does a dog have a buddha nature? To which Chou-Chou replied, “Not!” This is the root of the koan, but a response must keep in mind what the audience expects to hear.
Foulk points out that the first step is to “stand one’s ground,” to occupy the position of the teacher, and to speak with confidence. What is important for my analogy between koans and motions here, is that the confidence stems fro understanding the “basic message” of the koan and making sure all your remarks are relevant to that.
How frequent is it to see a debate where the “basic message” is not only lost, but since it is absent, the speaker fails to perform even the most basic elements of confidence? Confidence comes not from what you think you know, but from your approach to the motion. Do you allow the basics of the motion to inform your speech, or do you allow your confrontation with the motion to determine your speech? Which would the monk choose?
2. Foulk’s second criteria he describes as a reversal of, “the prohibition against the interpretation of koans as symbol systems. All authoritative commentary, as modeled in the discourse records and koan collections, is grounded in the principle that the language of the old cases is figurative and the actions they report are symbolic. Clever commentary may acknowledge and play with the literal meaning of a saying, but it must never fail to interpret and respond to the figurative meaning. By the same token, the comments themselves must be couched in indirect speech. The real sin of intellectualism or discursive thought does not consist in the act of interpretation, as Ch’an/Zen masters like to pretend, but in the expression of one’s interpretation in direct, expository language.” (41)
This is going to be controversial, but I believe this means that we should treat motions as if they were open. Why? Too often, the debater is imprisoned by the directness and simplicity of the motion – they merely argue what they think the motion logically includes. But with the first step in mind, with basic understanding and the confidence of the teacher in mind, why not approach the motion as something that is the base, not the telos, of one’s argumentation. The “sin of intellectualism” might not apply to debaters, but perhaps it does in altered form – nobody likes a debate that sounds “debate-y.” People like a debate that sounds persuasive. They like speakers that clearly make their point and back it up with interesting, relevant words. They like someone who speaks with the sound and appearance of the master. The sin of direct language, as Foulk puts it, is an indictment of directness. There is something to be said about stylistic remarks, the use of metaphor, analogy, and narrative, and the richness of the persuasive moment that is not served when one attempts to speak like an equation. Logic is in service to the debater, reason and rationality are too, but how often are they mutated into the end result of a speech? Treating the motion as open allows you to use it as an example for your points, and argue something that the example would prove. This will help debaters access those larger principles, values, and ideas that good debates revolve around.
3. “Finally, the satori that gives one master over koans is traditionally expressed in statements to the effect that tone will never again be tricked or sucked in by the words of the patriarchs, which is to say, by the koan genre itself. . . Not to be sucked in is to realize that the words could not possibly embody or convey awakening, and that their imputed profundity is actually a function of the literary frame in which they appear. To fully master the koan genre, in other words, one must realize that it is in fact a literary genre with a distinct set of structures and rules, and furthermore that it is a product of the poetic and philosophical imagination.” (41)
The final step indicates to the master that the student realizes that truth is always an “arm’s length” away. This is the realization that the requirements of form, genre, and appropriateness deserve due deference no matter what the arguments in the debate become. I have written about this idea before, which I call the “Righteous Four” – and here in the koan tradition, there is nothing above, nothing superior, to the format of the koan interview. Why would this be valuable?
One speculative answer is that the training must be specific. If one is dealing with something as important and precious as enlightenment, one better not ignore the things that make human judgment possible – things like culture, community norms, and the like. In rhetoric, these are the most important considerations: Appropriateness, Decorum, and Timeliness (or Timing). They make meaningful speech possible. And when one only has limited words to convey what should be felt, believed, or done, what could be more important?
Debate is a game, debate is not a game. Both things are true here. Deference to the genre helps us realize the limits in both statements. It helps us understand the interconnectivity. Opposites become essential to each other. Like the yin-yang we find debate as advocacy training and debate as competitive intellectual game. The same is true for the koan – at once school exercise/graduation requirement and what you will be doing for the rest of your life as a zen master. There is no distinction between the exam and the practice – and I feel debate, as a training for the public intellectual, or the intelligent, caring civic-minded person, should be no different.
I feel the comparison is valuable and opens a different understanding of how to approach debating. It is an essential part of the task of recognizing the often discarded side of debate as aesthetic, cultural, human practice. Without it, we are left with a mere language game that encourages corruption under the guise of objective truth seeking.
I find it very strange that there are still critiques that are alive and well of the practice of the art of debate. You would think that in an era of tea parties, conservative talk (shout?) radio, and a collection of some of the most incapable public officials in the art of justification, explanation and argument that these criticisms would be diminished to the point where they are, at the least, back-burnered in the face of our crumbling ability to advocate our feelings, thoughts, and beliefs to one another.
So this post is an attempt to craft a bare-bones defense for each of these major criticisms of teaching debate. Before I get into establishing and then responding to each of the criticisms, there are some really excellent background readings that will help bring the debate about debate into a clearer resolution (maybe not 1080p, but at least you will be able to see the trees in the distance as our protagonists engage with one another).
First, it is vital to read the Platonic dialogues Gorgias and Phaedrus to get a sense of the critique of teaching the art of debate at its limit and then in its more moderate form. In Gorgias we find Socrates objecting to Gorgias teaching an ability to persuade, argue and prove because it has no sense of absolute essence. It has no core to it, so it is difficult to determine if it is a good or bad art. Socrates confines “rhetorike” (as Plato calls it in the dialogue we might say “rhetoric” but the word in Attic Greek is a person not a noun; an orator, not oratory, but Plato tries to fix this with this word). In Phaedrus the need for rhetoric is acknowledged, but as in the speeches about love, only a love for true wisdom can craft proper rhetoric. In both dialogues though there is the concern with placing semblance or mere appearance in the place of the real or absolute.
Moving forward a few thousand years we find this same concern replicated in the very nice article by Hicks and Green on the controversy over switch-side debating in 1950s America. To give a brief summary, the choice of the national topic – that the US should recognize the communist government of China – forced a split between coaches who believed that good training in debate was centered around development of extant belief in students and coaches that believed that assigning sides to students regardless of personal belief was the best way to go. Of course, switch-side debating is not only the American standard now, but the international one (some of you are probably scratching your heads quite puzzled that this was even an issue in the U.S. at one time) and additionally, the idea that someone would need to believe one side or the other in order to participate effectively on a debate team is quite simply laughable to the majority of debate instructors, teachers and coaches in America today I would bet. The article shows how the idea of switch-side debate became not only the norm but an essential element in the defense of democracy. The ability to debate both sides of a question entered democratic ideology in the place of strong personal convictions about right and wrong articulated well as the cornerstone of good democratic practice.
All of the criticisms of the teaching and practice of debate can be seen better through the lenses provided by a bit of the history of this long debate. With those somewhat in mind, here are the most common critiques of debate practice – possibly the most common, they are the ones I hear pretty frequently.
1) Debate encourages people to game and toy with the ideas of others, rendering the most vital beliefs of other people as playthings.
2) Debate thwarts the ability of people to accept or entertain the beliefs of others as they are, seeing them as something that must be dissected, cut open, or like Napoleon looking at the Sphinx’s nose – target practice.
I hope these are representative and fair depictions of the criticisms. This is how I have summarized them after hearing them so frequently. I hope in the comments you might suggest alternate phrasings and alternate criticisms if you don’t think these are accurate or well formed.
1) This criticism assumes a lot.
It assumes that the game of debate, or the things learned there laterally shift over into mainstream discourse. Of course it is somewhat true that ideas are treated as instrumentality in debate. I believe though that this is a good thing. It allows for ideas that one would not normally approach to become closely understood. It also means that people have to respond to ideas they would probably ignore in daily life. Most importantly, it provides the practitioner with a wealth of perspective. Perspectives that he or she would not normally think about. Whether or not they adopt them as their own belief, I take the agnostic Gorgian position – none of my business. Gaming with ideas and views is a great way to lower the stakes and really engage these views. The recalcitrance of debate is that many views, once explored, are hard to forget. And the practitioner, although in the game doesn’t have much trouble distancing herself, will be confronted from time to time with the limits of her own beliefs outside of the forum.
Another assumption in this criticism is one that holds some beliefs or values as real things that are somehow discounted or diminished because they are “played with.” This might be true, but the subtle nuances of good debate require one to listen, hear, and understand the intricacies of positions. Compare this to the non-practicioner, the one untrained in the arts, who “won’t hear” or refuse to engage a position that is “dead wrong.” Even if the motives are “impure” or someone is on a crusade to convert the other, the requirement of good debate – to understand the position opposite – has the risk of infecting the interlocutors thought. Engaging with the ideas of the other in an attempt to convert them over to your side paradoxically risks the entire enterprise. For every time something is explained, it is re-created. Every alteration helps to define it. And if the debater investigating the opposite position encounters a good argument, they are likely to change their own mind. There is real risk in engagement, there is no risk, and increased polarization in the refusal to engage with “deeply held” or “important” ideas of other people. Treating ideas like pieces in a game might be abhorrent, but not if the game is recognized as such, and the goal of it is training in subtleties and to value what works – understanding and engagement of the linkages within the others’ arguments.
2) This criticism is closely related to Kenneth Burke’s idea of “trained incapacity” or “occupational psychosis” – the idea that one is trained to do things and therefore out of the ability to do things, and tends to see the world in terms of their occupation, since they are always wanting to see things through that lens anyway.
I would argue that debate training is the necessary check against such an occupational psychosis. Of course, once you are trained in something it is really exciting to try to use it all over the place – young martial arts students must be carefully taught that not everything in the house deserves a kick – and debate has this training built in, generally called the “audience.” Not every trick a student discovers will always work or always apply because the audience, the judges, must be persuaded, and they have biases as to what the good argument consists of.
In the interpersonal realm, the opponent is also the audience. This changes things around so much that the person who approaches each disagreement as if it were a debate quickly runs out of friends. Debate holds above anything else that the audience must be adapted to in order to persuade. “Occupational Psychosis” in this situation becomes self-correcting. If the audience doesn’t like aggressive debate attacks, switch the discourse to something more like a discussion, or questioning.
Is it the function of debate to teach each student to treat all people as valuable? Not directly, no. But since audiences can be vastly different, with polarities one has never thought of, debate training encourages increased respect for other people as more than targets. They are sources of inspiration and information. They help one overcome difficulties in phrasing and developing arguments. Also, most debate is a humanistic endeavor, teaching that there are some common assumptions under the surface of everyone that generally mean certain forms of arguments will sway them. But that “generally” is debate’s anti-humanistic element, the element that says there is nothing so dangerous as grouping all humans together under an essential label. So in the end, the skills that teach people to possibly see all opinions as target practice also encourage serious investigation of these opinions to see what is holding them up.
What’s the alternative here? Non-engagement? Acceptance of all ideas? I think that these would be much worse. Accepting people as flawed beings is a different thing than accepting them with their flaws. The acceptance of people as flawed is not a weakness to those trained in debate. It is a source of salvation in a sense. It means that there is always a chance to convince people who are doing bad under the name of the good, or who believe in ways that harm society to change their mind. The skills that are taught in debate naively appear to be simple zero-sum games where we start with the idea that the other person is wrong. Instead, the practitioners of debate assume that nobody is right, but perhaps through discourse we can become more right. At least in this situation and this issue. And when the situation changes, we can always return, because we are all somewhat wrong, all the time.
Going around correcting others with “truth” is an activity that looks like debate, but it’s not debate that causes that. The lack of such training is what allows such behavior to occur. They take the name of debate in order to provide a false sense of fairness. But the practitioner of debate will often call her art “discussion” or “conversation” in order to ensure the debate continues. Within debate is a respect for other ideas that is essential to master in order to win. It is a much more complex symbol system than it often gets credit for. Moving away from debate training ensures more thoughtless treatment of the ideas of others than simply using them to hone complex rhetorical accumen.
Perhaps this is a bit too rough to publish, but I thought I would give it a try. Through this exercise, I noticed I used the word Practitioner to refer to students of debate rather than debater. I think this was purely accidental, but the more I think about it the more I like it. Not as flat as debater is. More on that another time.
For now, what other criticisms of debate need addressing? I am sure there are more, but these are the ones that I think are most common, and in most need of responses.