The New York Sophist

After last night’s performance, many of us are wondering about the state of our politics and our leaders. We are worried about the state of political discourse in the United States. We are experiencing, or have experienced alienation from close friends and dear family members over acerbic speech. And the debate, the Nationally televised, globally watched Presidential debates for many, I think, was an oasis, a respite – or at least a break from the burning speech we are all immersed in.

Unfortunately what Trump and Biden gave us was little more than a High School interp competition dramatic reading of your Aunt’s Facebook feed. People are stunned, they are disappointed, and worst of all, they are doubting the value of debate, of democratic deliberation, and have added the event to a long list of recent reasons to abandon political speech, conversation, and discussion completely. These two clowns are not the death of democracy, but unwillingness to share your political views with others sure is. They are the ushers showing us to our seats for the last show, closing night.

The Presidential debates though, historically, are not, and never have been some shining beacon of excellent debate, or even for that matter, excellent American discourse. The Presidential debates have always lagged and followed behind the best speech, simply because they are reflections of what works for us in argument and debate. And we do not practice these things, nor do we teach them formally. The Presidential debates are more a reflection of the state of argumentative discourse in society rather than a guidepost. They always have been.

Maybe we’d be better off without them.

The Presidential debates in their current form are the work of two tectonic American political figures: Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic Governor of New York, who ran for President against Dwight Eisenhower, and Newton Minow, a staffer on Stevenson’s campaign as well as on Carter’s and Kennedy’s as well. He served as one of our earliest FCC chairs in the 1960s where he is already famous for describing television as a “vast wasteland” in a speech he gave to Congress.

Stevenson’s motives were good – he believed that America needed a national conversation about the issues between the two parties, and that television was the best medium to do it. Television was underused for politics primarily because of Federal law. The 1934 Federal Communications Act explicitly required all broadcasters to provide the same number of minutes to every candidate they give time to. So if you allowed one political speech, you have to allow all the candidates the same thing, same length, no matter how irrelevant they are. Professor Ryan Neville-Shephard has a fantastic essay on how frustrating this law was for television producers of the time.

Stevenson had been deeply involved in this frustrating situation running against a powerful incumbent in Eisenhower. He appealed to Congress to enact a law, or laws, that would force the networks to provide time to the two parties to have a national program where issues could be discussed. Interestingly, Stevenson never advocated for debates, per se. They were certainly an option, but Stevenson’s goal was to give access to voters to see an engagement on important issues to help them become more informed voters.

Congress disagreed. They didn’t change the law at all, but granted a one year reprieve of the Communications Act’s demand for “equal time.” CBS offered the Republican and Democratic parties the space for 3 events, which Senator Kennedy and Vice President Nixon happily accepted (both men were extremely comfortable in public address/debate situations). The debates were watched by a large number of people – we don’t really know how many, but we do know that telephone calls were significantly down during the debates. An interesting marker that shows how one kind of communication can silence another.

Stevenson somewhat got his wish there, but it wouldn’t be until 1976 that Presidential debate would return in this way. A loophole in the Communications Act allowed for political speech if it was a “bona-fide” news event and the networks were covering it. Both parties turned to the League of Women Voters to be responsible for hosting debates and inviting the parties, while the parties negotiated the rules around questions, journalists, time limits, set decor, lighting, and everything else, including the setting of the thermostat in the room.

Stevenson’s idea, stripped down was to improve and increase the national political conversation by providing discourse from the leading candidates in a technological form that would reach people. He believed he was improving the quality of political discourse, decision making, and the like.

Did last night’s debate come close to any of his goals?

When was the last Presidential debate you remember that did such a thing?

After the League of Women Voters started to upset the two major parties with some of the decisions they were making, and showing that they were not the best organization to host a massive top-level political event like this, the parties turned to creating a research committee to investigate how to move forward with debates. Newton Minow was asked to be a leader in that research, and the result of that study (as well as another one being conducted simultaneously) was the formation of the Commission on Presidential Debates. The two parties agreed on the formation, and it was done – as a non-profit organization, they could host debates that the media could cover without worrying about equal time.

The Commission’s goals are straightforward: To create nonpartisan debates via a bipartisan commission (although no members of the commission have active political commitments, they all have served in partisan roles), to fundraise to sponsor and set up the debates, to educate voters, and to support democracy through providing access to reasoned discourse.

That’s sort of my phrasing. Here’s what they say:

The CPD was formed to ensure that the voting public has the opportunity to see the leading candidates debate during the general election campaign.

The nonpartisan, voter education goal of the CPD’s debates is to afford the members of the public an opportunity to sharpen their views, in a focused debate format, of the leading candidates for President and Vice President of the United States. The CPD’s approach to candidate selection has been driven by this goal.

These goals seem like good ones, if you think that the only way people can access candidates is by television. These goals are better achieved through the internet, through podcasting or netcasting, and through other means such as writing or social media. Who doesn’t get a chance to see the leading candidates?

If the goals are to sharpen the views of the public and to make sure that the electorate is exposed to the candidates, the question is why have a debate at all?

Last nights debate didn’t show us the candidates, it only showed us their aspect when they are performing in a timed, goofy event run by a newsreader. That’s not who they are.

It didn’t sharpen views, it raised frustration and anger. What point of the debate is supposed to improve my views, my understanding, my ability to navigate the landscape of national controversy?

We can change this and we need to. We need to abandon this whole project. The Commisssion’s obsession with hosting debates without knowing the first thing about what makes a debate valuable or what a debate is properly used for is a level of staggering ignorance. They can accomplish all of their goals better, and more ethically without being obsessed with hosting these terrible events.

Educators across the country assign students to watch the Presidential Debates and write about them. This destroys any chance of young people being anything but cynical or having the lowest bar imaginable for political discourse. Worse than that, these events teach us that speech doesn’t matter. That argument doesn’t matter. The reality is elsewhere; this is a cynical performance. Kamala Harris sums up this attitude toward debate perfectly here, where she laughs at Steven Colbert’s question because it assumes that debate matters.

This is the attitude that is being taught by debates. And yes, debate’s primary function is to teach. It teaches us what matters and what doesn’t, what valuable speech looks like and doesn’t, and who we can interrupt and who we can’t. It teaches us what reasoning looks like for human beings engaged in the world, and it teaches us how to think along side and with others, particularly those who we disagree with. But to Senator Harris, they are nothing but a punchline; a stupid event you have to do to be in politics. This is the legacy of the Commission’s incredible gap of research or knowledge in terms of debate education. They simply aren’t interested in consulting scholars on it.

We need to abandon these events and demand something else. We do not need exposure to candidates; we have too much. We do not need exchange of talking points; we swim in that. What we need is actual, legitimate debate that distances us from our daily exchanges and makes us reassess our connections and convictions, makes us think about our candidates in the light of how they question one another and respond to big questions, and how they see the country, themselves, and in effect, us. Such a discourse is a tall-order but if we publish, share, canvas, and convince others we might just get as lucky as Stevenson and get some movement away from these events to something that would actually help us.

In the next post, I’ll discuss the idea of “actual debate” in relation to the model of Presidential debates offered by the commission.

I’ve been talking a lot about writing process with a friend, from the start of composition and generation of ideas to the way that a thesis gets mapped out, or at least how I do it.

So through these conversations about something totally unrelated to this post, I’ve been thinking that most ideas for an essay or for a video or whatever I’m trying to make are best thought of in terms of 3 movements that move through the idea through different perspectives.

Rhetoric, debate, argumentation are all perspectives that when looked through at an idea reveal something we were unable to see before (or even something we create through looking differently).

I’ve talked and written about the importance of the presence of uncertainty in life and how rhetorically it’s a powerful resource for invention. There are other things to explore here, like uncertainty in relation to the audience (Universal Audience theory could benefit from this), delivery, and discussions about proof/evidence.

As a starting point, through this three movement process I’m playing with I’ve come up with the following way to approach the subject of how to teach uncertainty:

1. Strategies to avoid seeing uncertainty as a problem to address via total elimination (perhaps the only way to deal with it that we are taught?).
2. How to use uncertainty as a site for rhetorical invention and generation of ideas without the requirement that uncertainty efface itself in order to achieve this.
3. How to create uncertainty out of rhetorical situations where the controversy or audiences feel there are very clear reasons and positions out there – making uncertainty out of the tools and materials that indicate certainty (not just for fun but for important rhetorical epistemic impact).

I think these are movements of the same argument – that uncertainty is important, teachable, not to be eliminated, and an important part of life. This allows a sort of managed way to write about it (which is also a way to think about it and think through it).

It’s always usually at the 1/3 of the semester mark that I start to think about the class I’d rather be teaching, rather than the one that I am actually teaching. I keep a notebook of all these ideas for future ways to organize and orient the class, but these ideas never look very good when doing course planning.

I took this great picture today that I sent to my sister as it represents the combination of something she loves with something she despises.

For her this represents an uholy combination of much loved Harry Potter with the all-consuming horror of Legos which never fail to appear in her visual or physical presence anytime she is at home.

Assigning students to find images out there in their daily lives that represent something frustrating, impossible to accept, or other sorts of “aporia-istic” combinations might be a fun assignment. It also encourages them to look around in their daily lives in a new and different way. And this might be the purpose/function of education.

This isn’t the only thing you could do with this assignment, of course. You could assign a number of different kinds of photos and then the speech becomes “how do you account for this photo being representative of/an example of/or an instance of that concept or idea?”

This could be a number of words but it could also be quotes, aphorisms, and other things that, when placed by a photo, require some articulation. It is a good exercise in reason-giving, and a great exercise in what counts as evidence. These concepts are considered to be obvious to most students, i.e. “we’ll you know, it’s just an example of it.” or “it’s a fact.” In order to avoid these space-fillers and work on the development of reason-giving discourse assignments that are a bit off from the everyday kinds of topics might be required.

Again, public speaking is composition, which should be obvious by now. But what might be more challenging to accept is that evidence and reasons are composition. We compose evidence; we compose reasons and reason giving. This is particularly hard to accept in our current political climate.

One of my most read essays is one that was unanimously rejected from every editor who has had a look at it. I’ve imagined re-writing it recently in order to make it a bit more publishable. I figure since it’s circulated a bit it might be able to find a journal home for a while, before the next iteration of it comes along (there’s always another iteration of everything you write).

For now the paper lives happily here. It gets a lot of traffic every few months. I think that this original paper has some good thoughts in it, but I think I’d like to expand the argument to consider debate itself as a singularity, not as a matter of fact but as a matter of useful pedagogical metaphor. For example, the black hole, the most popular singularity out there (or perhaps the most familiar to people) isn’t a “real” thing or even observable, but is a mathematical model and an astronomical certainty in that way. Perhaps the discourse of debate can be thought of in the same way – we can only represent debate via a very particular sort of discourse (think legal rhetoric) and we can model it, but natural debates are not observable, they do not indicate themselves or take place like other discursive phenomena, but they certainly do exist because we can “prove them” by modeling them.

I think this is a very useful idea for a better distinction between argumentation and debate, usually lumped together in textbooks, textbook titles (as these books rarely teach anything on the cover properly), courses that we offer, and even in the professional speech of rhetoricians who probably should know to take care when lining up types of discourse as synonyms. I think a distinction between argumentation and debate is necessary and have worked to establish that distinction at my university with two separate courses in it. I want to further push the envelope by offering more composition within both too, as I feel these are modes of composition not just “angry, loud persuasive speeches” as so many of my colleagues appear to consider them through the way they are taught and written about in pedagogy.

There is also this other idea of the computer or internet singularity, the point where the artificial computer generated world is indistinguishable from “nature” and becomes the natural world for all intents and purposes. This might be a bit harder to think through. Perhaps it is useful to use debate as the singularity point for this, the point where we realize there’s no such thing as natural language, that language stands in for nature and the singularity begins and ends when we learn to speak, or when we accept speech as part of our lives (two very different points if you have ever been around children, many of which understand language, how to do it, and understand you but are very suspicious of getting too involved in speech – the smart kids really). That’s going to take some more thinking through, but might produce something worth reading.

Not a big fan of the livestreamed class, but I did one anyway yesterday.

I don’t really care for the livestream as there’s a lot of stuff that gets in the way of teaching here.

Typically I could do a 10 to 15 minute video on a reading and be fine with it. But the livestream is more like a traditional classroom. You could have 2 or 3 hours and not get through half the readings.

The goal, of course, is not to just get through the readings but to make sure the students understand the readings and can do something with them. The “something they do” should be a bit more than “get them” or “explain them back to you.” What we want them to do is incorporate them into a third, different perspective, something that has been created out of the teacher the reading and the position they bring to it from their lives.

The livestream allows for that but the interaction isn’t really there. I think I get better student interaction from the asynchronous videos. There they can write a comment about it to me privately and we can discuss it. That might limit what the other students can get out of the exchange, but I often ask students to post their questions on the Discord or other discussion board in order to answer it there for the whole class.

A live stream also must be broken up to be useful later. Haven’t done that yet, but not really sure how to do it because of how the stream turned out. If I just make some shorter videos, it might be better.

Maybe the livestream is like office hours? Hang out, publicly think and talk, see who comes by?

An archive of thinking out loud about the readings with some engagement and some interlocutors might be good.

Tomorrow I plan to make a bunch of asynchronous videos so we’ll see how they compare.