The New York Sophist

Rhetoric historians – I know you are reading. Please let me know what the analogue is to this issue? I beg you, I need to read some of the historical material.

Rhetoric has been ruined by the Institutional Rhetoricians. By this I mean rhetoricians who think NCA is more important than rhetoric; that NCA represents rhetoric; that NCA can provide a good accounting or defense of rhetoric; that think NCA doesn’t exist as a function of rhetoric.

J.M. O’Neill founded the discipline using rhetoric to craft a professional role of speech teachers at the University level. He did this not because he was an NCA officer, went to legislative assembly, or any of that bullshit. He was able to do it because he was an artist, his medium being debate.

We cannot lose rhetoric to the institutional jockeys. Many of the people are interested in power, status, authority – but above all that they are interested in having a substantive role. The mark of the institutional rhetorician is the person who has intense anxiety about what Kenneth Burke labeled “the paradox of substance.” They cannot ever feel comfortable with the label “rhetor” or “rhetorician” because they don’t like having to defend it and explain it – something rhetoricians and rhetors delight in. Instead they invent and lie. They call themselves “political scholars,” “legal scholars,” “scholars of race and gender,” or whatever the title de jour might be.

Instead, why not say you are a scholar of rhetoric and you study race? Or gender? Or trans-politics? Or anything! Why not that? Because they are lazy and they do not want to have the discussion about rhetoric one more time.

The field is in that conversation and that articulation every time. Every time we articulate what rhetoric is to someone, someone who might not have been lucky enough to encounter it before running into us, we breathe new life into the field. We renew it and we welcome more into it. The power of it is that we can articulate, without constraint the importance of examining whatever issue it is that we wish to study and discuss. No other field has that latitude. None.

But that’s not all. Rhetoric has the capacity to instruct others how to talk about what matters in ways that bend other people, that transform matter, that alter what matters to them. It’s a teaching art, and many institutional rhetoricians resent having to teach that. Instead they want to be admired; they want to be the smartest person in the classroom saying the smartest thing about race, politics, the first amendment, whatever they love. Instead of opening the tent wide and inviting others to become advocates – effective advocates for issues – they would like to keep the group small and keep the spotlight on the few people who they think “have it right.”

Grasping to hold onto a slippery rock like NCA for your identity is kind of sad – reminds me of Ralph Ellison’s essay The Little Man at Chehaw Station where he talks about how we hang onto the rocks of tribal identity when we fear the phoenix that results from the combination of various identities. This is a great way to think about “the paradox of substance,” and one that Ellison would approve of, after all he and Burke were friends.

Why do rhetoricians scramble for the stable when the unstable and the shady are their home? I’ll end with a quote:

“The Sophist runs away into the darkness of that which is not, which he has had practice dealing with, and he is hard to see because the place is so dark.” ~ Plato, Sophist (254a) trans. Christopher Tindale (I think).

The Sophist might not be your identity as a rhetorician, but one thing is certain about them – you can call them whatever you wish but they were people who were interested in teaching others how to speak, relate, and create meaning within their community. That’s admirable. They didn’t flee to the institutions of Athens; they used them to riff off of to create the words that would create the meanings that were valuable to their students and their audiences.

Still thinking about what makes bad teaching/good teaching. I found this atrocious lecture from “debate coaches” supposedly teaching the best and brightest young debaters at an exclusive “forum” for debate at Emory University.

The Barkley Forum doesn’t seem to have any quality control standards. We get a route lecture that is thin, vapid, and incorrect by most people’s read of the things that these two are teaching (“teaching”) about.

It’s sad to me. I see the immediate sediment of people who think that their tournament debating experience has made them more intelligent, more educated, more well-read, more brilliant than other people in the population. This means that when they instruct people on one of the most “complex” forms of tournament debate argument they feel they have to really dumb it down so that the regular people, the uninitiated, can understand the complicated nature of what is going on here.

Instead, debate should teach humility, respect for doxa, respect for people’s daily thinking, and try to improve it in some way – or at least call attention to it. A good kritik lecture would be to set up the scene: You are debating with a group of people about public assistance, welfare, unemployment, whatever it might be. One of the people in the group is making arguments that are good but their tone and the terms they use to describe those who are on public assistance is offensive – they are speaking about them like they are a disease, like they are animals. What should the response be?

That’s all you need to start off an educational conversation about kritik arguments. But these two clowns treat it like it’s some kind of precious and holy discourse that can only be understood through an incredibly bad reading of the ancient world. I don’t think this lecturer has ever read or probably heard about the essential books for discussing the sophistic situation in Athens. It’s so bad that I wouldn’t even call it an interpretation, I would call it plain ignorance.

The most incredible thing is that Emory put this video out for the public to see, clearly unaware at the incredibly poor teaching in the video, the ridiculous interpretation of quite interesting/serious/well researched subjects, and the demeaning way that philosophical argument is being characterized to high school (I’m assuming) students who make philosophical arguments all day, every day with teachers, friends, and family.

The ignorance of hubris here is astounding. And it’s one of the many reasons why I dislike debate coaches, never liked being called one, and think that debate coaches and tournaments have obliterated any value that comes from a serious study of debating.

Known as the “grease trap” or “drip tray” or “Spill tray” of employment, the University Athletic department is one of the things that needs to be eliminated from the university in totality.

Why?

University athletics is like an addictive drug to the administration. They see it as easy mode, a way to attract tuition-paying students to the university and attract donations from wealthy alumni. These elements are unhealthy and damaging to a University ecosystem. Students who choose to go to a university for the sports team diminish the quality of instruction and education overall for all their peers. Furthermore, they receive a degree and dilute the power and respect for that degree once they go out into the world and show that the university accepts them. It’s better to not rely on that stream of revenue at all.

Alumni who have become wealthy have done so not via merit, because nobody becomes wealthy via merit. They also didn’t do it by following the rules – that is also not how it’s ever accomplished. By accident they have achieved a high level of success, making one decision instead of another, or moving an investment here or there. Most of it is just taking advantage of a market opportunity, something that a degree has a very, very low percentage in assisting. The idea that they became wealthy because of their degree is a non sequitur. It’s never researched very hard by any university.

Relying on these two sources of revenue makes the University lazy. It doesn’t have to look in the mirror and say, “What is our social value? What good do we bring to the world?” Instead, they define the good through alumni donations and new student applications. We are popular; we have wealthy alumns; we must be good. A more challenging approach would be to try to run a university without sports, and without taking money earmarked for sports.

A university without athletics will survive the coming superstorm of admissions and enrollment. Gen Z students don’t care about the athletic team except as a distant sort of entertainment when desperate. Instead they are interested in trying to help the world, trying to understand others, and genuinely learn something. This is quite a bit different from the Boomers and the Gen Xers that are funding intercollegiate athletics now out of a sense of masculine desperation as they age.

A university that would eliminate athletics would thrive, avoiding all the oversight and expenses of having these terrible athletic coaches, staff, and players on campus. They would be able to angle those resources toward study and collaboration spaces. They would be able to focus on the hard question of what to learn and why. No more nonsense. The university is often now the program that athletics sponsors. What the hell are we doing?

I thought the class would be great. Why was it so bad?

First of all, what’s a bad class? Definitions abound! I would say for me a bad class means:

1. I could have talked more in depth about the material adding deeper value to it but didn’t.
2. I didn’t connect the material to the students on the terms and ideas they were thinking about or brought into the classroom.
3. I didn’t conclude with a question or something for them to take with them as they left the class.

I should have prepared differently. I should have spent more time thinking about the material, which was very familiar to me. The death of good teaching is familiarity, either perceived or actual, with the material for the class. What I typically do is I meditate with the material meaning I try to think about it as if I were looking at it the way the students might. Then I try to write down, on paper, some of the major ideas I want to communicate about the topic/readings. I leave a lot of time at the end for the students to question or add in what they thought was meaningful.

Today I typed up my notes the night before and didn’t print them. I didn’t read them over just before class. I also read the material a couple of days ago. Not a great look.

I should stick to the plan and keep doing what works. Students are a mess these days – COVID and looming global disaster don’t make one eager and positive to think about tough ideas for the future that might not come. Still, I believe that offering a high-quality class every time can help them see the value even given this generally reasonable attitude about humanities courses.

There’s no reason to listen to debate coaches when they are interviewed by the media on Presidential debates or any election debates.

The reason is obvious: Collegiate or High-School debate has no connection to political debating. Debate coaches love attention and love being in the media. The reason they are trusted on these matters is because of one of the most basic and oldest fallacies in the world – equivocation.

Aristotle identified equivocation as one of his “Sophistic Refutations” – a work that was read by philosophers and others as a way of discounting the techniques of the Sophists, but it’s not clear that he meant to do that. Equivocation as a fallacy is when you use a word when you know that the audience will think of it with a different definition than you have.

Debate coaches, when they are asked by the media about these election debates use the term “debate” meaning that what we are about to see in the political debate is the same as what the college and high school debate coaches do. The debate coaches never correct them.

They never attempt to complicate the relationship between what they do and what we see in election debates. They also never attempt to really disambiguate what they do from political debate in a way that would benefit them in terms of why they should be heard; why their opinion on the debate matters. They just pretend that what they are familiar with is exactly what we see in the national political debates.

This is a huge missed opportunity. Debate coaches could use this moment to promote what they do, an attempt to improve national debate quality. They could also speak to how terrible the debates are for anyone looking to make a decision using them as a guide. They could also use the gap between what they do and what we see as evidence that debate education is necessary, powerful, and valuable to improve the quality of discourse in the United States.

An easy way in, that you’ll never hear a debate coach say in the media would be to talk about how both participants in the debate would have record low scores in a competition with high school or university students. They wouldn’t even move the needle. The discourse we get from the political sphere is abysmal compared to what the nation’s young people expect as a minimal buy in for being a decent debate speech.

You won’t hear that. You’ll hear self-serving discourse from these coaches, pretending that they are experts on these terrible political debates. They will only use the opportunity to make themselves look like experts, and they will only share their own personal political opinions. This doesn’t help Americans or other viewers understand the debate, but definitely fits in with a number of other journalists or commentators who share their views. What’s missed is the opportunity to educate people on the understanding of debate. There are different ways to structure and set up debates, and not all debates are equal. A higher standard of debate is what is on the line, and these selfish people can’t be bothered to tell the journalists that the model is bad and there could be a better one.