The New York Sophist

Two days ago, someone asked me what my favorite American historical text was. It wasn’t that weird of a question: This is the time of year where I start to plan out my next semester’s courses and figure out the themes I want to teach.

Something that has been on my mind since the Amy Comey Barrett hearings has been the position of Constitutional Originalism. Although made fun of endlessly by the left – mostly revealing the shallow nature of political conversation these days – I am much more intrigued by the nature of this position as a hermeneutic. How do you read this ancient document? Surely you can’t just read it like you are this post? Can you read it like an older book, “Oh that was a good view for back then, but now . . .” – How are you determining that it was a good view? I have so many endless questions about this hermeneutic, and I have to resist the urge to buy a bunch of books on it and just lose myself in figuring it out.

I assume it’s a hermeneutic, but it’s more likely a practice. Joseph Ellis in his recent book American Dialogue: The Founders and Us shows that there is no such thing as being able to read these ancient documents without the practice of engaging the archive and positioning one’s read among the documents that exist there. Although we can never know the minds of the founders, we have many of their expressions of belief, feeling, and attitude about things, and we can assign convincing motives to them that will then apply to other matters. His book is masterful in how to use archival documents to create contemporary arguments.

Originalism, if it makes any sense at all, would be a practice in continuous re-reading of the archive. I doubt that’s what most originalist justices do. Re-reading is a notoriously unstable and threatening practice that people whose credibility rest on them being THE interpreters of something would not be willing to accept. Credibility of the Supreme Court is based on them being the last word, not one word among many (perhaps one of the best reasons we shouldn’t have a Supreme Court under democratic governance, which, is many things but most commonly ‘some words among other words’).

One of the themes I thought about teaching my debate class under would be the Constitution. Read the Federalist Papers (not all of them), Ellis’s book, and perhaps some of the originalist stuff (conservative and progressive texts on originalism [yes, there are progressive originalists]). Traditionally I have just taught the course based on examining the Presidential Debates, Malcolm X’s debate at Oxford Union, James Baldwin’s debate with Wiliam F. Buckley, Jr. at Cambridge Union, and John Quincy Adams’s many debates in the House on the question of abolition. Could still do this course, but would cut the Presidential Debate part out I think. Maybe wishful thinking that the Commission on Presidential Debates will be irrelevant after this election.

So I have been thinking about this list, here it is in no particular order:

The Federalist Papers

Who wouldn’t love a collection of arguments aimed at the public about why the Constitution is a really good idea and not a trick to enforce tyranny and absolute rule on everyone? These were all published in New York newspapers, and well, like we see today, the Federalists had the upper hand because their opponents didn’t own as many great newspapers as the Federalists did. All of them are great, but there are a few standouts, notably 10 and 51, but I’m sure you’ll put your favorites in the comments. A great way to teach this is to have students read the Constitution without the Bill of Rights, since those were not a part of the document being debated – they came along after ratification, and mostly due to the work of James Madison.

Notes on the State of Virginia

The only reason I like this collection of really, really weird observations about Virginia is that they reveal what a messed up person Thomas Jefferson was. Imagine being smart enough to understand the deep connections to scientifically gathered data to agriculture and national/global politics, but also being able to predict the hazards and benefits of a globalized economy. Now imagine you can see all that, but you can’t accept for one second that your slaves are human beings. What a mind?

Common Sense

Thomas Paine was a madman. Not only did he write this document knowing full well that if the revolution didn’t happen or was lost he’d be executed, that wasn’t enough for him. Later on he wrote Age of Reason, an argument against Christian thought in governance while waiting to be executed for being a foreigner involved in the French Revolution. I think I’d be a bit distracted. Anyway, Common Sense is fantastic, making a direct, public argument for why the colonies have a unique duty to resist British rule as they are one of the last safeguards of the concept of liberty (not just liberty, but the concept of it, which is a pretty cool argument).

Civil Disobedience

Henry Thoreau, according to all scholars, was an edgelord, but even edgelords sometimes have a really good point. This is pretty far removed from the earlier documents (which really don’t have that clean of a temporal relationship) but probably wouldn’t exist without the historical sediment of all the rhetoric of the earlier documents. Thoreau writes masterfully here on the duty we have to not obey or follow unjust laws, and that resistance can be many things. Would be nice to assign students to re-write the argument in the contemporary context of police violence and America’s role internationally in making many people’s lives miserable so we can have cheap sneakers.

That’s the list I came up with but I am sure there are many others that I could add here if I thought more about it, but that was my initial reaction. Some other ones that really matter would be Leaves of Grass and of course Adams’s Lectures on Rhetoric which might make fragmentary appearances in any course.

I think an examination of America as a country that was founded on really intense, high-stakes debates would be a nice contrast to all the calls for civility, logic, and empathy that we are seeing from people who really should know better. People don’t have long public debates about things that they aren’t passionate about, and our feelings have just as much right to expression as the cleanest logical formulation. Argumentation and debate are human activities after all.

This seems to be a good track to start the week. Roxanne Emery is one of my very favorite singers. Kind of a dark song if you really listen to the lyrics, but most dance music has pretty sad themes now that I think of it.

This week is halfway full of meetings and other obligations, and the second half is pretty empty. Well, not exactly empty, but full of grading.

Grading is one of these things that isn’t so bad once you realize you are there to help the students gain another understanding of their words. You aren’t correcting it, or calling it bad, but showing them another way to understand their own understandings.

Grading is more evaluation and comment than anything else. There’s an ongoing grumble in higher education these days about assessment, and how assessment is not grading. Professors don’t like that because for the most part they really enjoy holding power over students, and assessment requires you to stand alongside students and look at the work together.

At least that’s what I think it requires, but there might be as many ways to assess as grade. I just use grades to get the students to do something productive, and try out new things with their writing and speaking. Assessment is much broader than “did you follow my rules?” It’s more along the lines of, “what can you do?”

Grading is very, very hard to start, but once you are in it, it’s super enjoyable. I really like reading and listening to student work. I wonder if they like reading and hearing my comments as much? Grading is such a personal thing – people tend to take the grades you give them personally – so there’s not a lot of space for a comfortable conversation about them. I wonder if that could be altered in some way.

The biggest issue facing the Tournament Debate Regime around the world is that they willfully exclude the educational perspective and also work to exclude educators from participating in the creation and administration of debate events.

The biggest shock during the pandemic is that debate tournaments continued, unimpeded through online means. There was no discussion and no questioning of whether or not the form of debate should alter in ways that take advantage of the online environment.

Instead, the tournament regime framed the situation as a loss, and worked out an extreme conservative solution which appears, at best, ridiculous. The speaking style of BP is inappropriate nearly anywhere in the world except an empty classroom on a weekend, but this is revealed even more plainly on Zoom.

An unavoidable principle of rhetoric is adaptation. One adapts to the context and the audience as an ethic. This ethic has at its aim to offer the perspective of the speaker in a way that allows for maximum access by those listening. But all of this is tossed by the tournament regime, whose entire goal has to be to determine who is going to win the context. There really must not be any other goal. Winning is good because it’s winning is the only operating principle that I can see from where I’m sitting.

A great way to understand this problem is through the process of how topics are chosen for tournaments. The values of novelty and shock are held above the values of reflection, reconsideration, and research.

I didn’t mean for there to be an alliteration there, but I’m happy it happened!

The people putting together debate topics and administering tournaments are competitively successful people. This is the root of their status in the debate world. They have to simultaneously be able to determine winners, create winners through coaching, and indicate they have a “special ability” in creating winning arguments. This last one is the root of topic framing problems.

The best way for a tournament regime member to prove this is to frame a ridiculous motion that 1) has never been set before and 2) involves a lot of complicated concepts that are marked as both intellectual and special.

The motives here are not educational, but professional. The motions are not designed to help others learn about argumentation and rhetoric, but help everyone realize why the motion setter has the position that they do. There’s no consideration for others and how to help others improve their understanding of how argument “works.” The attitude among the tournament regime is that education happens elsewhere (“they should know about this already” – by what standard?), that this prepares them for difficult “out rounds” (again, a reference to the motion setter’s glorious past victories and their specialized knowledge), and that we need reduction and clarity in order to declare a winner (quite literally the only thing that the tournament regime values in terms of the art of debating).

The pace and timing of the tournament also encourages this hard sports attitude to it rather than the values of education, which require time, conversation, reading, reflection, and production of texts in order to provide multiple points of assessment on whether someone is reaching understanding. All of this is dismissed in global debate; this is a test of your extant abilities and no more. And even that fails: The standards are non-existent for what those tests would be; one simply has to “be good” at debate to then have some ability to influence the content.

A more educational model of debating would not allow those who are competitively successful anywhere near the design of the event. The event should be designed around topics that are accessible, controversial, and allow for moments of reflection on the art of rhetoric, argumentation, and debate. Some of that will be lack of familiarity with various topic areas, of course. But that’s different than the tournament regime’s standard refrain: “They didn’t know about this?? Oh my God. . .”

The relationship between research, knowledge, and articulation is the value of participating in debate. This only happens through repetition, reflection, reiteration, and research (alliteration won’t leave me be today). These things are devalued in contemporary global debate because they do not serve the tournament regime’s goals: Determine winners clearly and efficiently over the course of 48 to 72 hours. It’s incredibly disappointing that the move to online debating due to the pandemic did not raise any reflective questions about the express or implicit goals of debate, the structure of the tournament as the monopoly method for participating in debate, or the innovations in speech and thought that could be included to make a more robust and interesting event.

Educators have the perspective of development, not the celebration of the developed. Debate programs struggle for support from Universities because they are obviously not related to the university project – the closest metaphor is sports. Sports programs at the university are celebrations of the “already good” people that can be recruited to play sports in the name of the university. This is the root of the tournament model, a form that is designed to quickly and efficiently determine who is best.

Compare this to the classroom or department at the university where students are taught the practice of how to determine and justify what should be best. The rubric is under inquiry at the same time as the matter for consideration. Debate, at least the rhetorical model of it, operates under the same principles. It is not truth-seeking; it is not fact-seeking – it is seeking what counts as fact and truth and understanding why those rubrics exist. To get a degree in literature, for example, is not just to understand what works of literature are best, but the genealogy of the determination as to what counts as the best in the first place. In comparison, tournament regime participants tend to believe the rules of determining who won a debate fell from the sky.

This involves covering and re-covering “old” issues as a principle of education. This doesn’t make for exciting debate contests, but it makes for exciting conversation about argument innovation and argument that can produce moments where we aren’t sure whether something is best. That question begging moment forces a return to the conversation about the rubric, which develops it. Without the attitude toward development, such moments are dismissed as “losing” arguments, and the tournament rolls forward. After all, there’s no reward for innovation if one wants to be invited to convene and create future tournament events. It’s a conservative operation of copying what previous winners have done in order to be in the position to indicate, through obscure novel motions, that they have special insight into how debate works. This perverse system means that the more debate you are successful at, the less reflection you engage in, and the more certain you can be about things you have very little experience or exposure to – mainly critical controversies around the globe.

Without the presence of education-minded people, tournament debate will be exactly what we don’t need: A system of events that give participants a way to show off what they already know, and judge others for what they don’t know. Without a practice of reconsideration and humility, tournament debate is not educational in a way that serves the creation of participants in democratic governance.

Ok so poking around and procrastinating, I learned that the person placed in charge of publishing the Constitutional Convention of 1787 debate transcripts was John Quincy Adams. Mr. Rhetoric himself from the 19th century was ordered to edit and publish them in 1818. This guy really loved words. I wonder if I could teach a class just on him and all the stuff he wrote, plus his pretty clever (and incredible) speeches about abolition on the floor of the House. I bet I could design that course and teach it.

These days, I’m thinking a lot more about preparing and teaching courses as online packages. There are so many essays out there about passive income and ways to develop helpful courses for people on different topics and charge them some amount of money to take the course. It’s not for credit; I don’t think any of them really offer any sort of accreditation for completing the course. It’s more like self-help or self-improvement kind of stuff.

I am pretty sure I could put together a decent public speaking course, but I think it would be lost in the noise. I think I’ll put together something like “transformational oratory” or something instead to capture people who don’t just want to speak in corporate boardrooms, but maybe want to influence people in many different situations. Most public speaking stuff assumes a work environment, which is pretty pathetic.

Oratory has been lost in this exchange. Maybe Adams’s return isn’t just an accidental find. Maybe it’s time to bring him to the foreground again and really think about what public speaking and oratory can be.

A return to the standard formulation of political speech at the highest levels of government seems to be the message I got from yesterday’s event.

Was this a victory speech? It didn’t feel like it. It felt more like a return to the familiar and comfortable structure and cadence of professional political speech.

From my point of view, there’s nothing really exemplary or exciting about either of these speeches. They were showcases of the traditional tropes and forms you’d expect to hear from the new President and VP elect. It was a “greatest hits” of these tropes and figures, reminding me of so many previous addresses by so many other candidates.

This doesn’t mean the speeches were “bad” – they were just expected. And I’m really feeling the lag from four years of the irony that Trump provided: Every Presidential-level address you’d expect to be totally crazy, unhinged, and well – all over the place.

Novelty is a dangerous thing in speech as it can train the audience to always be looking for that novel move or content instead of what you might want them to do, and also it creates a short memory for your addresses. For Trump this works out great as he has very little in terms of policy development to offer. For Biden, novelty would be a huge threat to his policy initiatives. Harris too.

Returning to the comfort of bland political speech probably felt comfortable to most who watched and heard the speeches. It felt like there were again guideposts or guardrails in national politics. These speeches could be classified as a “return to normalcy” which might be something critics would say is totally called for. It’s also on brand for speeches that are supposedly victory speeches (although these did not feel like victory speeches for a lot of reasons in the context).

Here are the things that the speeches did that I thought were valuable:

1. Provided a sense of comfort in the articulation of a return to “normalcy” in the way they were structured, delivered, and the combination of delicious flavors we haven’t had in a while (imagine returning to grandma’s after a long absence).
2. Marked the exigency of the ballot counting being over and that the result was official and legitimate (necessary given the floating arguments about corruption without anchor point).
3. Marked the historic moment of a non-white woman about to occupy the office of Vice President. What does this mean? What will it mean? This is in order in terms of “victory” speeches (perhaps the most victory moment there) in terms of epideictic rhetoric, the only irony in the speech is that this radical historical moment was handled with very traditional, Aristotelian gloves even in terms of public address! Again not a flaw, but something to notice.

Here are the concerns I have about the speeches:

1. Reliance on the trope that we need to come together as a nation is dangerous; it was aimed at a very different America. This argument needs to alter to consider: Social media, obsession with facts as the only/ultimate arbiter of political discourse, 24 hour for-profit cable news that is partisan, and the coronavirus. Why was this not a theme of examination for both speeches? Dangerous as it address nobody except the blind Biden faithful (who will read it as “yes we won, you have to accept it” – coming together for them is nothing short of agreement). When old tropes come back around they need to be introduced or at least not show up in their 90s haircut like last night.
2. No suggestions on how to rhetorically navigate the upcoming litigation. Perhaps ignorance is not just bliss, but a good strategy – if these cases are illegitimate, should it appear in a speech? This is a great question. In my mind, ignoring the upcoming challenges might not have been smart. What would have been great here would have been a reference to “situations” where “devisive” forces might try to discredit the “accomplishment” that we “all share tonight.” Something like that would have been all that was needed, but ignoring the speculative utterances of the Trump campaign in totality just legitimizes the claim of theft from people who are sympathetic to the idea.
3. Related to this is that there’s a looming run-off election in Georgia that the upcoming Biden administration has a lot riding on. I wonder why there were not attempts to connect yesterday’s speeches about the future direction of the nation, the transformative spirit of the future, and the lofty goals and dreams of Americans in the same terms that the Georgia race for Senate was couched. They are obviously capable of this: Recall the many specific references to fracking in both the VP debate and Presidential debates. That’s too specific for my tastes for this need, but still, why not angle it a bit more? Contextualize this win in the terms of the changes we all feel that are happening to us (and also, because of us, but at the same time are inevitable no matter what we do – it’s a nice twist!).

I guess now that I’ve typed it all out, it seems to me that the speeches yesterday were a rhetorical success? I really don’t feel that way. I think the most important thing that will have to be overcome is the lack of Trumps dynamic style and clipped mode of public address, which people have come to associate with a President who is active and involved, and most importantly not a professional politician. It’s a significant challenge, and I’m pretty sure Biden and Harris will have several good ways of addressing this. But for the faithful and the haters, there’s little that could be done to change either opinion on them. That might be the biggest challenge yet: How to recover the value of changing up one’s mind.