I've been reading excerpts from the biography of Trump advisor Stephen Miller, and the description of his high school years seems familiar to me. He was interested in politics early, and while I don't know if he was on the debate team, he was oh so surely a debate kid.
I was a debate kid for two years in high school, and I enjoyed the hell out of it -- the only reason I quit was because my dad made me, so that I could have an after-school job that also required me to work on Saturdays, which is when debate tournaments were held. The style of debate we used in Kansas (I don't know if it still works this way) required two-person teams to show up ready to debate either side of an argument. There were a couple of ways to win -- just present so much evidence (basically, in the form of cited articles) that you'd overwhelm the other team, or to present so many arguments that the other team couldn't keep track of them all. We used "flow charts" to track the arguments, and leaving an argument un-argued against -- no matter how absurd the original argument -- risked losing the round.
With the benefit of hindsight, I see now that the format encouraged a couple of things: Fast talkers -- because the more arguments you could cram into your allotted time, the more difficult you made it to counterargue. It also encouraged absurd out-of-left-field types of arguments that had little to do with the topic at hand, because your opponent probably had prepared to respond. What it didn't encourage: Solving problems, or thoughtful, civil real-life debate. The object of the game was to create too much noise for your opponent to handle.
With the benefit of hindsight, I see now that the format encouraged a couple of things: Fast talkers -- because the more arguments you could cram into your allotted time, the more difficult you made it to counterargue. It also encouraged absurd out-of-left-field types of arguments that had little to do with the topic at hand, because your opponent probably had prepared to respond. What it didn't encourage: Solving problems, or thoughtful, civil real-life debate. The object of the game was to create too much noise for your opponent to handle.
Debate kids are the folks who grow up to be lawyers and leaders, as well as insufferable Ben Shapiro-style "debate me" pundits. And now I wonder if the game of debate didn't encourage a few generations of Americans to decide that the best way to publicly argue over our issues was to create an extraordinary amount of sound and fury that signified nothing.
4 comments:
I don't disagree with your assessment, but I think you hint at a more general problem with academia and politics, of which debate clubs are a part. There is a belief that "smart" is about making good arguments. In debate this is (I think) driven home as people are asked to take positions that they don't agree with as part of the game. This may be fun, but we deceive ourselves when we equate smart with good-sounding arguments. I mean, that *could be* a definition, but it's not a good one. Reason isn't "reasoning", it's "reasons", meaning that generally when we reason we're coming up with arguments to make our PRE-CONCEIVED positions seem logical to others. Steven Miller is a racist and anti-immigrant first. He learned how to argue this position second.
My favorite example of this is SCOTUS. One would think that given nine of the very smartest people in the country (according to some measure) who all have access to the same case information, they would always come to the same conclusion -- there would always be 9-0 decisions. But of course, this isn't what happens at all. SCOTUS arguments, just like all the others, are about providing justification for political position/beliefs.
Mercier and Sperber's "The Enigma of Reason" is good on this.
Personally, I think academia needs to de-emphasize reason and instead focus on morals at the most basic human level.
Good point.
I don’t accept the notion that, for instance, SCOTUS should often arrive at 9-0 decisions. The reason justices agree to,hear appeals is that lower courts have confronted the same issue and came to different conclusions about the remedy. Are appellate courts lacking humanity because they can’t arrive at a consensus?
There’s a difference between machine logic and principled reasoning. The former is no way to govern a society. The latter should result in healthy disagreements because people develop principles from differing experiences. At least in theory.
As to the point about high school debaters being insufferable, well, yeah. That’s why I gave it up after a couple of years and took up extemporaneous speaking and drama instead. Whole ‘neither set of problems ;)
I think Andrew is writing that a lot of reasoning is motivated reasoning. But fair on: "There’s a difference between machine logic and principled reasoning."
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