Review of The Motion’s debate on whether religion is a harm or good to society


I had the opportunity to attend a debate held by The Motion in New York on Wednesday, here’s my commentary about the round. I am sorry the recording is not great quality, but I made it as good as I could! Next time I’ll get closer to the speakers. 

The Motion is an amazing community organizaztion that is doing the hard and important work of providing a place and some space for people to practice the hard art of deliberation, argument, and oral persuasion. This is something that even universities have trouble providing. The Motion has done an excellent job of offering a great place in which to do this important work. I already look forward to the next one. 

Below is my overall audio commentary for the debate if you care to listen to that as well. Here are my thoughts:

First Speaker for Proposition

The speaker set up a comparative case, which is an interesting way to frame this debate. The metaphor that kept appearing throughout the debate – and in the meta-commentary of the moderator – was that this was like a “trial.” Was religion guilty or not-guilty of . . .something. But the first speaker’s comments indicate another path to evaluating the debate. He argues that religion has been used to justify the greatest evils perpetuated by people against people. The second half of his speech is used to argue that any good that religion accomplishes in the world is done better by secular organizations.

It’s a good strategy to indict and then try to head-off the argument, “Well yes but they do such good” with some alternative. The only thing missing here was the case-study. A case study helps the audience ground your argument with some specific story from the world. For example, the speaker could make the argument that secular organizations to it better, then provide a story about a secular organization that came in and served a community better than the religious organization that had been there. Also, the power of narrative can play into things here: A story about someone who was failed by a religious organization that tried to help and one about a secular organization would have gone a long way.

 

First Speaker for Opposition

After the set up we get from the previous speaker, this speaker oddly chose to ignore nearly everything that was said and discuss a very specific and detailed rubric for the audience to determine a winner in the debate. He narrowed the entire decision to the question of whether or not religion is beneficial to the oppressed, and warned the audience not to decide based on an atrocity scorecard. I do think this second point is quite good, but should have been the opening line of this speech. Instead, the speaker quickly departed from this line of reasoning into a very detailed list of instructions to the audience of what to do and what not to do when deciding the debate.

In debating, one of the most important tasks you have as a speaker is what I call disruption. You need to create some static in the clarity of the picture of the world provided by the other side. They are trying to tell a story about how things are, and you need to raise doubt about that story’s coherence or realism. Better yet is if you can simply provide opportunities for the audience to raise those issues on their own. In the first case, it depends on your credibility as a speaker; in the second case it does not – the audience becomes a co-author in the story you are telling and is less likely to disagree with what they have come up with on their own.

There were several opportunities to disrupt the tale of the proposition. Most notably is the assumption that using religion as a justification for atrocity makes religion atrocious. This undermines the first half of what proposition offered. Secondly, it should be mentioned that if secular organizations do such a good job, where are the examples of them outshining religious ones?

Instead, the speaker makes only one response – that religion is a catalyst for secular aid work. This has the unfortunate effect of allowing the audience to read that religion, even at its best, is merely an aid or motive to the actual good done in the world by secular groups. The argument should be something along the lines that a world with flawed religion is a much better world than one with no religion at all. The argument of inspiration that is offered precludes this position from being established.

The speaker ends with some examples of times religion helped oppressed people. But the speaker has never explained why the debate should be limited to this very small realm. This is something I see quite a bit in debates where the speaker mistakes an example for a paradigm. The example is only an instance that needs to be placed into a larger narrative. In this case, the narrative was outshined by the possibilities of the example. Religion didn’t just help the oppressed people but became a symbol for who they were (identity) and what they could accomplish (agency).

 

Second Speaker – Proposition Side

The third speaker overall, second for the proposition, did a couple of stylistic things that at first glance don’t seem important, but when engaging in debate are incredibly powerful tools that help the audience move toward your point of view.


The first is a powerful introduction – the speaker started off with a quote that reoriented the debate like a breeze on a hot day. Always consider the start of a debate speech to be a chance to cleanse the intellectual palate so the audience can appreciate the flavors of what you are bringing to the debate.

Secondly he used the rhetorical form of repetition, noted for its power in influencing minds by some of the earliest Greek thinkers on rhetoric. His repetition of “think about” and the concern creates a buffet of reasons the audience can choose to align with for this side of the motion. Repetition has the power of a cadence – we get swept up in it as it dissolves our resistance to the ideas.

This speech had good information too – about the happiest countries in the world and the UN report on religious extremist violence – but this information was never slotted into a story, it was just handed to us, like a flyer as we walk by (and we all know how well that works).

There was a confusing (at least for me) argument at the end about how communism is an ideology while atheism is not. I think that both of these concepts (communism and atheism) are so vast that there’s plenty of room for both to be an ideology or not. What the argument needs to do is contextualize both in the terms of “good of society.” For example, I might say “There’s plenty of space for both atheism and communism to do good and harm, but let’s look at what happens when we incorporate both into society as ideology.” This story then can paint a picture for the audience of either one, and show that the harms of communism are not necessarily the harms of atheism.

Second Speaker for the opposition

What a great command of great thinkers and quotes this speaker had. The style he chose to present his arguments really helped their side a lot. This speaker, much more than any other, used the enthymeme, an argument type described by Aristotle as one that leaves the completion of the thought up to the audience. For example, when directly responding to the arguments about slavery, the speaker spoke about John Brown and the Third Great Awakening. He never said, “So therefore, we see two historical examples of religion adjusting society toward the good.” This doesn’t need to be said; it’s better if the audience makes the conclusion themselves. Some think of the enthymeme as an argument that unwittingly recruits the audience as a co-conspirator, making it very unlikely they will disagree with arguments that they have unwittingly helped construct.

The speaker pointed out the only error in his argument himself – he quoted Hayek, that without theory, facts are silent. I think that the speaker needed a grand narrative of the history of religion in social justice radicalism, particularly in the United States (as that was where most of his powerful examples originated). A narrative frame can be a theory – an approach to understanding why facts matter. Facts are not reasons on their own. Without a frame, they spin like tops, going wherever their own energy takes them and falling when we least expect it. This lack of narrative framing is a small issue to pick on due to the compelling delivery of the speaker, which was appreciated by everyone in the audience, no matter their opinion on the motion.

The Crossfire

The crossfire was not as informative as I expected it to be as both sides played a very cautious game with the questions and answers. There are a couple of good opportunities that came up in the crossfire that were missed because of the cautious game that everyone played.

First for proposition – in the struggle to distance atheism from communism, a lot is lost that is beneficial for atheism if you admit that it has a lot of flaws. Anything can become a dangerous tool of oppression. The difference is that secularism has built-in critical tools to check back this overzealous use of it as a weapon. Religion encourages this use. If this had been capitalized upon, it would sway the debate toward their side pretty easily. But I think that these debaters were interested in a defensive game. The problem is that you cannot debate to “not lose.” If you do, you won’t win. Persuasion must be high energy and it must be assertive. People don’t get energized to endorse you if there’s nothing wrong with what you are saying. They get energized when you provide vision and articulate reasons why you are right.

For opposition – The continual return to the strange rubric of “only in cases of oppression” was a waste of time. This is irrelevant to how the audience is thinking about the debate. They are interested in a large judgement. You can win that religion is helpful to the oppressed and still have the audience vote against you. They probably agree with this statement, but it doesn’t help them find reasons to support the side of the motion you are representing. There was a mention of Nietzsche during crossfire, which has the potential to be another winning approach. Religion helps us deal with uncertainty by forcing us to continuously struggle with faith. Nietzsche believed that God was dead, but this meant that values have to be derived from our own selves. The struggle with faith is one of these places. Values dictated from on high are no longer going to do it. Religion provides practice in faith which allows people to wrangle with uncertainty in life in better ways than secularism can provide.

More robust questioning would be good, ways to get the other side to explain their position a bit more would help the audience.

The Final Statements  

Proposition –

Great to speak to the idea of a God who is with us in all situations. Unfortunately, this wasn’t laid out against all the claims of the other side because of the strange obsession with proving to us the uncontroversial point that religion helps those who are oppressed improve their life.

If a point does not seem controversial, it probably isn’t a good thing to talk about in a debate.

 

Oppositionn First Closing Speaker

This speech started off with some strange claims about how legally people had to be religious which explains why religion stimulated many discoveries. This strange point was contrasted with a better point near the end which was the metric of taking action – we must have a perspective that allows us to act in the face of oppression. Now the speaker should add the reasons why religion discourages this sort of action.

 

Opposition Second Closing Speaker

I think this speech tried to do too much. As a closing speech it should be a birds-eye view of the issues. There was some of that closer to the end of the speech where the speaker discussed the “cosmopolitan context” of secularism along with materiality. Bringing this forward as the thesis of the last speech, the speaker could have provided a nice rubic to judge the role of religion in society. If a cosmopolitan context cannot exist with religion then a choice must be made. But if they can coexist, the discussion is whether one dilutes the other. Might be best to assume a cosmopolitan order and speak as if that was a given. The final point should be that religion adds necessary value to cosmopolitanism that it cannot do without.

Proposition Second Closing Speaker

This speech was quite scattershot and had a lot of powerful personal narratives that should have been in the first speech he delivered. These stories feel like extra information when they are provided at the end. I think they are very powerful framing devices to help ask a central question that proposition wants the audience to think about: Would such violent incidents happen if people had no access to a supernatural order of things? If they were not the instruments of enforcement of a higher spiritual law?

As I said above, I think the idea that atheism is not an ideology is a less powerful argument than saying atheism is an ideology just like religion except for the fact that it as ethical and reasonable checks to it becoming a hegemonic force like religion. Rationality and reason can be just as terrible as Christianity in the wrong hands, but at least secularist thinking has some ways to make sure this doesn’t happen. Religion encourages this result.

Illegal Tender

Bob Dylan, well known music troll, trolled the Nobel Prize committee by barely accepting his award for literature and then delivering a speech quite late that was nearly as odd as the speech Donald Trump gave on innauguration day. The two speeches are odd because they seem to get that there are expectations for the speech – all speeches have this. By expectations, I mean that for audiences is it way more important that a speech do things with words rather than say particular words or make particular claims. This is how you can tell the difference between a journalist and a rhetorical scholar: Journalists always talk about what was said, what they should have said, and what’s really going on. Rhetorical scholars talk about what the speech did or didn’t do, and how it was crafted to do something. We’re not that interested in the particular truth or factacity of the content, mainly because it really doesn’t matter compared to the relationship of the rhetoric to the audience, and vice versa. 

Anyway, that was a bit of a tangent. I’m not going to compare Dylan’s speech to Trump’s anymore than that. The point is that speeches are meant to do things, to meet particular expectations, and when they don’t do that, people get really upset no matter how true, factual, or good the content might be.

Bob Dylan has been accused of plagiarising or at least getting the major content of his Nobel speech from Spark Notes on the different literature he was praising. The Slate piece does a good job of lining up the suspicious passages with the original Spark Notes’ content (seems reasonable to think that Slate writers would have their old Spark Notes still readily available) to create a case of circumstance. 

The best part of this article is the bottom section where Slate asks some professors what they think of Dylan’s speech. These professors happily contribute to the increasingly present and popular attitude that college, and professors, are fairly irrelevant to the world by pointing out that Dylan would get no credit for turning something like that in as an assignment.

Really? It’s Bob Dylan first of all. Secondly, he has a Nobel Prize for Literature. Thirdly, what he says, whatever inspired it, is going to reach a massive audience of people that will be interested in his assemblage of things regardless of where he found them. Perhaps the fact that these professors so easily strip away context, ethos, situation, and exigence is the root of the sentiment that professors are not in touch with society, or are eccentric, or what have you.

Rhetorically, the speech is pretty brilliant for a couple of reasons. First is this great rhetorical device Dylan uses by praising the literature he likes in these very simple sort of terms. So simple in fact, they take on the rhetorical valence of synopsis, or summary. This is the connection to Spark Notes right here – he sounds like he’s giving a short summary, because he is. 

Dylan is quite brilliant in this address not only because of the content but because he’s turning it in “late” – this is also a part of the performance. It comes when he wants it to arrive. He provides his own views of “literature” that are limited and over simplistic. But the part that the professors miss in their comments is the part that should be front and center: 

By listening to all the early folk artists and singing the songs yourself, you pick up the vernacular. You internalize it. You sing it in the ragtime blues, work songs, Georgia sea shanties, Appalachian ballads and cowboy songs. You hear all the finer points, and you learn the details.

Here Dylan makes a direct case for what the professors consider plagiarism. He picks up the songs and plays them himself, as if they were his own. Such a pedagogy is not unfamiliar to the university (except for the professors-as-cops who absolutely love nailing students for plagiarism) where even in things like music or art students are encouraged to copy. 

More importantly, borrowing is a mode of rhetorical invention that Dylan considers to be literature, or responsible for the texts that he created that are now being termed “literature.” In his letter of acceptance delivered to the Nobel Committee by the U.S. Ambassador to Sweden, Dylan makes the point that he had never asked himself the question “Is my music literature?” until after he received the notice of the award. 

The major point here is that Dylan’s rhetorical mode is that of combination, collage, sampling, and retooling – it’s always been that way in his music. Instead of meeting the demand of the “fans” of the Nobel Prize by crafting some new and independent thought about the brilliance of global literature, music, or something, he provided what he has always done, recast and rework the sounds that are already out there. Dylan is very much aware of the impossibility – and the horror – of the “new thing.” The English professor, limited to the classroom, a space where she or he can use power over others to discipline them into modes of writing and producing, valorizes this “newness” to the point of pursuing students who plagiarize to the point of expulsion. 

The metaphor of disciplinary plagiarism reminds me of countries that have unstable currencies and pass laws banning the use of foreign, stable currencies for transactions. Nobody listens or cares, and it just winds up hurting the government. In most daily interaction, people will use the foreign currency because it has value. Only in official circumstances will they follow the rules. Such a situation has a very large risk of further declining the value of the local currency, at least attitudnally, since now there is another reason to discount it.

Plagiarism is the most limited mode of engagement one can have with a text. In the university it is seen as little more than arbitrary discipline at best, and at worst is seen by students as an impossible demand to create something new. If “newness” was the academic standard, we’d all be unemployed. But the thrill of enforcing rules and demonstrating power is pleasurable and addictive. 

Instead of this mode of engagement, it would have been nice to see some deeper, more critical response with Dylan’s speech “as literature” or “as exemplar of the literature that Nobel is honoring him for making.” instead, professors seize the opportunity to display their irrelevant power instead of perform the important academic mode of “professing:” “Here is, in passionate detail, why intellectual work matters.” Instead what we get is “rules is rules.” Pathetic. 

Plagiarism, if taught at all, should be taught as a rhetorical mode of the academy, where one tips one’s hat to those who have inspired her. This is the opposite of hip-hop or other sorts of musical sampling where the onus is on the listener to be conversant enough with the literature to “get it,” to smile and nod when the sample appears, understanding what the rhetor/rapper is doing. Academia is the opposite, where the audience smiles and nods when they see the blatant footnote, or the citation marring the fluidity of the text. It can also be thought of as cooking, where at some restaurants the list of ingredients and their sources are provided (the vegetables come from such-and-such farm in this nearby city; the beef is grass fed from this ranch, etc.)  Such “sourcing” builds credibility for sure but more importantly it provides the aesthetic boundaries for the joyful and valuable experience to occur – nobody would want to attend a football game where there were no lines painted on the ground or goal posts set. Without those things, the experience is not apprehended, cannot be apprehended as such and the joy, the value, is an impossibility. This is why plagiarism is punished, because it makes the value, the joy, the benefit of the work an impossibility. 

But so many professors love to be cops it will never be taught this way. The near sexual thrill of “nailing students to the wall” for challenging the authority of the professor is too much joy to give up, especially if it means spreading that joy around. Professors are special; they won’t let you forget it!

 

 

Blood Diamond

 

 

Responses to violence against government officials are perfect opportunities to recast the violence of the normal political process as peaceful, non-violent, productive, natural, and normal. Paul Ryan’s response to the shooting of congresspeople engaged in baseball practice is a masterful example of the power of rhetoric to craft a world where there is only one possible response to the event, and that response reifies a world where politics, as they appear in material and social form, are the inevitable natural extension of oh-so-good-and-noble humanity. Such moves risk Burkean debunking. But Ryan, by “converting upwards” is able to transform the normal legal violence of the House of Representatives and the U.S. Government into the only possible oppositional stance toward violence that caring human beings can take. 

Examining the situation with some loose Burkean terms, we can see the scene and the event are perfect for Ryan’s task. Arguably nothing is more perfectly American than Members of Congress practicing baseball at sunrise for an upcoming charity game. The shooter believed he was attacking corrupt elements of the government, eliminating a disease. By choosing this scene and event for his attack, he was obviously attacking America. Scene is an easy one for Ryan to use for his defense of House-based violence as healthy and normal, as opposed to shootouts on baseball diamonds. 

This is seen as not only a national site of amusement, but not a political scene at all – never mind that a former staffer of a congressman who is now an executive for Tyson Chicken was present at the practice. He certainly wasn’t playing baseball. His presence suggests the “normal” operation of the political system, with “insider baseball” present at actual baseball without any sense of irony whatsoever. Ryan points us to a photo of Democrats praying as important for his thoughts today – and why not? The other “team” – literally and figuratively – has put aside its differences in order to support those who were attacked. It’s just a game after all; there are more important considerations than politics/baseball here. 

The agent, another easy pitch across the plate for Ryan. The shooter, we were quickly told, was a rabid supporter of Sanders (who quickly denounced all violence within politics in a nested debunking move par excellence) as well as someone who turned to abuse as a problem-solving tool in his own life. Such a figure is unsympathetic, and clearly not a political radical, a critic of the system, or anything like that. As an opportunist, he believed that if the government would not “listen to reason” they were a problem and should be wrangled into submission. This agent is easily sub-human. Ryan uses this context in order to construct this as an attack on a family, something that we might be able to call the “national family” or “the family members that represent us.” It is brilliant to gesture toward the agent’s history as an abuser toward his family and this attack as automatically casting the congresspeople as “family.” He strongly and persuasively suggests that the House is our family as well.

This is bleeding into purpose now, which Ryan calls “a test.” The purpose of the attack was to test our basic humanity. Are we going to remain human, or strip that humanity away? This brilliant move begs the question of the presence of human caring within national politics, the House of Representatives, or the government: What would such caring look like? Would it be a bill? A rider? Does it leak out of the restrictive formal rules on debate? Ryan is persuasive though because he transcends all of that through the metaphor of “family.” He also puts the congresspeople in league with those who might have suffered from a home invasion. A criminal barged into our home, attacked us, and wants us to respond with violence, or perhaps celebrate violence.

Notice there is no discussion of the agency – a powerful rifle which the video of the shooting indicates – this is no normal hunting rifle. Not much discussion about the weapon has emerged beyond the predictable and over-simplistic smug “I told you so’s” by the NPR liberal set. It is not to Ryan’s advantage at all to discuss this as a shooting – it is an attack. It is a violent attack. In this chamber, we neither use violence, nor do we attack. These are anathema to the work done in Congress. The video captured by mobile phone linked above provides a very convincing account of the attack as being primarily about agency – about guns. The “brave” capitol police engage in a shootout with the perpetrator, and it sounds as if they are losing.

This weapon is a very powerful one and might raise questions about how it was obtained, how someone who had a history of violent behavior obtained it, and what sort of system supports such a combination of events. Instead of a speech about how we must forbid violent people from access to weapons (agent-agency) or how violent people are disturbed and require our sympathy and help (agent-purpose) we get an attack on a family that forwards the best of human feeling and thought (act-scene). All other considerations (agency, agent, etc) fall by the wayside – which allows Ryan and his colleagues conduct their own “smuggled in” violence by the normal, textual means of legislation. 

But Ryan’s simplification into this as violence – pure and simple – is all he needs in order to convince us that we have been attacked, or that our family has been attacked. This is a test. Will we pass the test? Will we continue to hold on to our humanity?

Ryan says that nobody loses their humanity when they step into that chamber. A cursory view of American legislation might confirm that its a humanity-stripping chamber for others around the world. Perhaps it is the only safe spot in order to protect one’s humanity. Perhaps they know what humanity should be?

Ryan does not really escape the problems of debunking here. If politics is the polar opposite of violence, that violence has no place in the political in any conditions (a sentiment supported by Bernie Sanders in his comments as well) then those who are not served by political discourse, or who perceive themselves excluded from political discourse, have a self-completing alternative: Violent action. This is rhetorically justified by the violent revolution this country cites as its founding moment. This is the inevitable price of smuggling in violence under another name while denouncing violence of one flavor as violence in toto. 

Ryan’s debunking of violence opens up a very clear and distinctive spot for violence in politics, especially when laws and policies are violent – from subsidies to health care to military spending, we see Foucault was right, “Politics is war by other means.” Without that admission, violence must be smuggled back into the House chamber under other terminology, further fueling a narrative of violent action. If the political system is violent but lies about that; if it won’t listen; if it has no place for those who perceive this as the truth, they will happily don the jerseys of “team violence” and engage in acts like we saw yesterday. We have a “home grown terrorist” problem, as the liberals like to call it – but this problem is one of a rhetorical relationship to violence. We must come to terms with speech as violence, with politics as violence. Ryan bought us more time to delay this confrontation, or perhaps he made us all feel comfortable in the burning building. After all it’s only a dry heat. Let’s continue or work as a family to perpetuate the best humanity has to offer.