The New York Sophist

If I have one thing that I want to establish over the course of next year is the elimination of the phrase “public debate.”

I used this term a lot without understanding the full implications of the insidious nature of this phrase. It’s used by those who are deeply involved in the world of tournament-contest debating in order to make what they do legitimate.

You will never hear those who support tournament debate call their work “tournament debate” – they use the term “debate” for it, referring to things made for general audiences as “public debate.” This is no accident.

What this does is make debate that is created for audiences about publicly interesting topics appear to be the diminished, non-real, trivial form of debating. “Real” debating is for elites; it is for those who know what true debate looks like. It takes years of hard work to master. It’s an exclusive realm for debate experts. Not only do they know the right arguments, they know the right topics too.

This is in direct contradiction to the art of rhetoric, which is always about audiences. The measure of a good argument is whether the audience buys it. It’s a thwarting of “real” debate to totally remove audience from the picture and then claim that you are studying how to make good speeches to move minds on an issue.

The centering of the bizarre practice of tournaments-as-debate has been accepted without critique by most rhetoric and communication scholars. To resist the centering of a very limited and very anti-rhetorical practice of debate, I believe we should stop saying “public debate.” The reason why is that debate necessitates a public in the form of the audience, which serves as a synecdoche for the public.

Instead of saying “public debate,” let’s indicate that this is “real” debate by calling it “debate.” That is, any debate for an audience on an issue that most debate coaches and tournament champions would consider boring, too simple, unfair, or “played out” is what debate is, and where it lives best (bios). And yes, debate can be characterized as a living thing. More on that in a future post.

For the tournament-centric model of debate, we should push that from the center by calling it “contest debate” or “sport debate.” I don’t think there will be much objection from the tournament-centric participants as they already envision themselves as participating in something they already envision as a metaphor of American intercollegiate football. The approach says it all.

Perhaps this is a triviality or a strange bone to pick. I believe in the power of words, the power of naming. For too long we in the debate world have used the phrase “public debate” without understanding it’s full and sinister implication of removing debate from the discourse forms that everyone should be able to engage in productively. By making it something elite, something that requires the ample time and resources of privilege to master, we have done a disservice to rhetoric, to communication. Perhaps a renaming is all we need to start a revolution in conceptualizing debate where it should be: Something base, something everyday, and something that anyone and everyone should be able to practice in their daily lives. Contest debate doesn’t offer that. We don’t casually hold pick-up debates like we do with basketball and football, even though there’s an NFL and an NBA? Why? There’s a lot less insecurity there, and a recognition that practicing the art, no matter the skill level, or the reason, is valuable. Tournament debate professionals have missed that insight by dismissing debate’s place, it’s heart – the art of rhetoric.

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.

Still no sign of my ancient copy of The Federalist Papers but for some reason Amazon gave me a 15 dollar discount on a Kindle version of them, so I’m good to go for my super-awesome procrastination plan of reading them through instead of doing any actual work. I feel like a rhetorical defense of originalism is what’s brewing in my head and although that might sound like a contradiction to some of you and incredibly stupid to the rest of you, I think that any defense of any hermeneutic approach is going to be rhetorical.

Two things on my mind this morning as I virtually attend the C-SPAN Center for Scholarship and Engagement Annual Conference:

I forgot, or perhaps never knew that The Federalist Papers were aimed at, and made for a New York City audience. It was very important to Hamilton’s strategy of ratification of the work of the convention to get the city on board with the new Constitution, as that would flip a lot of other minds in other towns as well as render most of New York’s citizens views outside the city irrelevant.

For an unnamed side project that I’ll probably talk about on here one day, I’m putting together a class tentatively called “Debating New York” where we just go through all the various controversies that New York City has faced over time and have class debates, discuss, research, and write about them. This class takes on my idea that debate is a site of inquiry meant for discovering and learning. So now I can include the debate over the Constitution as a New York city debate, thanks to Alexander Hamilton anyway.

The other thought is this: Could you do an entire debate or argument course on The Federalist Papers? Like, just read through those, some of the Convention debates from Madison or other sources, and have the students construct arguments about and around the issues that are brought up in the papers? I don’t think every essay matters that much anymore, but depending on when you taught the class there would be some play and emphasis. For example, if I was teaching this right now I would put a lot more emphasis on Hamilton’s three essays on the role of the judiciary and try to see what those mean for the Barrett hearings, as well as for her understanding of originalism. What’s an originalist take on the role of the Supreme Court, or the process for getting people nominated and confirmed?

In times where there are congressional debates, perhaps focus more on those essays. Maybe pair the reading of the papers with Joseph Ellis’s great book Quartet which would give some more background on the framing and shaping of these arguments. I wonder if I could pull this off.

Regardless of these future plans, it’s becoming clear to me I’m going to have to go up to my office to see if I can find my 1990s copy of the book, my dissolving Federalist papers collection, on my shelf up there, no doubt coated with a fine powder of 1950s building materials sluffing off the celling, dirt, and dead coronavirus particles. Sounds so exciting. I really just can’t wait. Although I did hear a rumor I’m getting a new office, but I’m sure that means the actual policy is at least 2 years away.

American policy debate fundamentalists have found a new phrase to martial in their panicked defense of their practices. I don’t know why they feel so threatened; policy debate can easily co-exist with many different debating styles. But fundamentalism ensures that there is an either/or, a very significant conflict where the stakes are the highest they could be. 

Recently I’ve seen a new subtle defense surfacing in the form of the phrase “Evidence-based debate.” This is meant to differentiate policy debate, with its requirement that all arguments are supported by published material that is made available to both sides, from other debate formats that don’t require this. American policy debate fundamentalists are the ones who are circulating this term as a means of distinguishing their practice, or trying to make it superior by creating types of debate that simply do not exist either in theory or practice

There is no form of debating, academic, competitive, or otherwise, that would not be evidence based. Evidence and proof are central elements, required elements, I would say, to any model of debate that is based on reason in persuasion.

The practice of distinguishing debate and evidence-based debate is not a useful one for either production or criticism. Debate without evidence is not debate. The distinguishing feature of debate is the use of arguments that must have some sort of evidence to make the argument work. This evidence must be explained to the audience. If you accept this distinction, you open up a number of non-debate forms of speech to being called debate – such as diatribe, ranting, or just statements made to others for the point of persuasion. It explodes the category of debate to a point where it is no longer heuristically valuable. 

If we look closely at policy debate, we find it to be a paradox when it comes to evidence. It is, at the same time, a form that valorizes a level of skepticism that is a destructive level of incredulity while also holding one particular form of evidence as unquestioningly superior to all others. This practice replaces the reasonable audience with a mechanism or procedure that trumps the presence of human beings as the audience. It replaces a human audience with a very clever algorithm for decision making that people just don’t do without a lot of special training.

The second part of the paradox is an incredible, all-in attitude toward published information as being the only and the best qualification for conviction on a claim. 

It is the practice of policy debate evidence that gives the most weight to the persuasive defense of policy debate offered by Ed Panetta when he argued that the primary reason to teach policy debate is to train skilled bureaucrats. Policy change, he argued, does not happen at the level of the persuasive speaker anymore. It’s the technical master behind the scenes who can manipulate a field of complex requirements and lots of information who gets things done.

We could say all forms of debate are evidence-debate, but policy debate is evidence-dependent, that is, the artificial and alien concept of evidence forwarded by policy debate fundamentalists creates a culture of skeptic-addicts. The goal of the debate encounter is to valorize published text to the point where it atomizes. CERN in Switzerland is the metaphor for policy debate, the atomization of the category of persuadability into its sub-atomic particles. Instead of a democratic practice, we get a democratic absence, or an absence of any believable substance.  The absence of belief. 

DIscussion and the value of perspective is also not only diminished through this practice, but it’s also blatantly rejected. Anecdotally, anyone who has had policy debate experience knows the scene of finding the perfect piece of evidence for an argument, sharing it, and stating, “They’ll have nothing to say.” Perfect evidence in the world of American policy debate, creates silence instead of vibrant discussion.

One defense that might be martialed for this fundamentalist phrasing would be that there are anlogs from the professional world – evidence-based practice has been commonly written about in social work, medicine, and many other fields for years. So debate is just catching up to the real-world. There’s debate, and there’s evidence-based debate, which is better.

However the analogy breaks down once you read the work on evidence-based practices. These practices are not meant to be mechanistic, hard-and-fast rules for the use of evidence in these fields. They also do not valorize evidence, reminding practitioners that all evidence must be understood by the situation and the participants. There is no evidence that pierces through the situation, arranging all things in a way that conclusively moves opinion to one side, as evidence is ideologically meant to function in American policy debating. 

Such policy debate fundamentalism recalls models of pedagogy from the Zen Buddhist tradition, where students often get stuck halfway to enlightenment on the idea that reality is not what it appears to be. “the pencil laughs at you,” says the half-baked monk. The deep acceptance/high skeptic paradox has taken hold. 

This is merely a stopping point on the path to enlightenment. Outside of Buddhism, we could say that this is a sophomoric attitude. In my field of rhetoric, this is the point where the student frequently says, “Everything is rhetoric! The table is rhetoric! We are rhetoric!” Although an important recognition of the power of rhetoric as a perspective, this is by no means the conclusion that rhetorical studies draws, nor is it close. 

The phrase “evidence-based” debating is a panicked, defensive move that doesn’t accept the idea that debating is whatever audiences believe it to be, functioning however we allow it to in those moments. There is no such thing as “debate” per se, but that doesn’t mean that a solid, absolute definition based on some sort of arbitrary rules is needed. Instead, exploration of the notion of debate and how we allow it and disallow it to exist in particular discursive contexts would be a very valuable element to bring into our debate pedagogy. Evidence? How can you prove to be that this is evidence? Or in the words of Stephen Toulmin, “What have you got to go on?”

Me preparing my lecture for teaching mid-century NDT debate for class

I’m tagging all the posts about my emergency last-minute pick up argumentation class with the tag “pick up” so you can easily search for them if you want updates on how that’s going. This is one of them.

The only reasonable approach that I think you can take in teaching this form of debate is to root it in two large contexts. 1) The historical context of the American university after World War 2 and 2) the need to have other metrics than efficacy in order to talk about the value of argumentation.

The first one is a historical treatment of the impact the so-called “G.I. Bill” had on the American university system which was really only for elites up until the 1940s. This meant that universities were taking in a lot of veterans from very diverse places without expected educational backgrounds. The result was the formation of what we now call the core curriculum, a number of courses everyone has to take in math, science, writing, literature, and yes, speech. This also explains why speech departments and debate as they are in the U.S. have little to no correspondence with other countries. The development of NDT-style debating was a result of the rise of core courses in public speaking and argumentation. It was a flat, easy way to practice this idea of multi-positional reasoning and speaking.

The second one is an effect of the first: There needs to be a way to evaluate the quality of debates without relying on a speech actually persuading someone. There were already rumblings from philosophy and other places that this metric allowed for the association of effective arguments with “the good.” We know this isn’t always the case. The development of stock issues rules and evaluation of debates is a rubric that allows us to look at and evaluate the quality of a debate as the debate itself and not the persuasive effect.

So with those two starting points, I think we have a good frame on this type of debate for the students to use in class. We aren’t looking for the truth or for what’s right in the topic; we are looking for ways we can approach information within a controversy and expand the ways we can talk about disagreement. We can test all aspects of an argument to see if it holds up. And through this we whittle away at the various approaches until we are left with some that appear to be good approaches.

Their topic is that the U.S. should disarm the police. A good topic for sure, lots to research and learn about. On the first day I took over, a student asked if the affirmative could ban the police as a way of disarming the police. We wrote responses to this question, and through looking at a few of them and sharing them in class, it seems the students are inventing procedural arguments from the ground up. It’s much better to hear the long-form justification for their claims about what they are learning and why it matters to be able to talk about one set of ideas over another one. This seems like pretty good practice in argumentation.

On the days we aren’t having debates we will read different pieces of argumentation theory and discuss them. I already told the class the final will be one question: What is an argument? The answer should be a synthesis and discussion of a number of approaches to this question through the reading.