The New York Sophist

I have a debate course nearly oversubscribed starting in a week. The course is a part of the University's new committment to having social justice imbedded in the curriculum.

I'm interested to see what topics they would like to turn into motions, and off we go. I'm teaching some light policy debate theory because it really does present some nice grounding for the students to figure out how to engage one another instead of just announcing the facts. 

I'm entering the class with one question: What is social justice? Would we know it if we saw it, or is that too easy? Is it a process, a moral attitude, a policy framework - what? 

I think I'll intervene with some ideas from the de-incarceration movement as well as questions about power and the U.S. Constitution - are the rights outlined in this document a good guideline or fundamental rights? 

I hope the students find the class valuable in a University and higher education system that communicate with great clarity, daily, how little they value the transformative, creative student experience and paint a future of having the attitude of consumerism, the attitude of a commodity, and the only path to success is being a commodity that consumes other commodities. 

Debate’s structure makes structural demands on speakers. When entering a debate, one enters carrying the immense ideological weight of what you think a debate should look like. All the debates you’ve seen, all that you have thought debate is and should be, every debate you’ve hated and enjoyed – we all walk into the debate carrying these bags like a Sherpa of discourse.

This isn’t necessarily bad. In debates with friends and family, in the bar, or at work about political issues, this makes and marks the speech as a particular type. That marking of speech – your tone, speed, and intensity – communicates to interlocutors what the appropriate responses can consist of. This is why we change our tone, speed, and non-verbals when we are losing the debate or getting too frustrated and want the discourse to change. Sometimes we want to stop the conversation and indicate that through discourse.

These markers for what works and what doesn’t work are handed down to us through social practice, mired with power and the history of who, or what types of subjects, have been authorized to speak in certain ways and at certain places throughout that culture/society’s history. For example, I always ask my students what the difference is between them speaking in the front of the classroom and me speaking in the front of the classroom. We have trouble moving beyond “authorization via degree and employment” most of the time.

This is the root of the problem with the debate tournament, or as many debaters and coaches hilariously call it – “debate.” I’ve wondered how to mark my work when I’m writing and speaking about debate. Writing might be easier: I can always say there’s debate and Debate, the difference being clear. Verbally I often say debate and contest debate to show that what most debate coaches and participants/addicts mean when they talk about debate is the very narrow, very limited, very privileged, very private, and very exclusive world of the tournament debate where the public isn’t invited or even made aware it’s happening.

The demands of a tournament competition of any kind shave off practices and habits from anything that you might want to put into a tournament form. Based on how the tournament is evaluated, the strategies will change and alter toward winning. The debate tournament is the practice of eristics, or in this case the shaving off of appropriate debate moves or practices in order to win. Most judges recognize this shaving off of what would “count” in a debate outside the tournament through some metric – often a paradigm in the American tradition – and call this recognition the practice of adaptation. This is not adaptation to the audience but adaptation to the tournament, and is rewarded as such.

Debate tournaments are fine if they aren’t the only debate education available, but often they are. The only exception I can think of is Stoneman Douglas High School where all the students received their instruction through an imbedded debate curriculum. After the mass shooting it became clear that these students were well prepared to engage the public in argumentation.

I don’t think debate teaches much except how to skirt rules and policies, how to mirror an appropriate discourse when everyone is in on the game, how to sound like you care about something other than winning (eristic style), and perhaps the answer to Herbert Marcuse’s Great Refusal: I’m happy to play a game when I’ve seen the dice loaded because I have practice in dice loading.

Excellent debating and winning tournament rounds reifies the importance and certainty of the tournament. It doesn’t question the tournament’s existence or bring attention to what’s outside of the tournament round. Something that did that would lose every time, as it would undercut the root of the pleasure those who administrate and judge tournaments feel. It would call out their symptom. And as Lacan tells us, we will kill to preserve our symptom.

Hopefully the LiveJournal vibes can be captured. Loved the voice posting. It was so long ago now. Here’s my attempt!

A voice post

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.

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.