There was a time in my life when I’d wake up at the crack of dawn to debate nuclear weapons proliferation for 18 hours, then go home to sleep so I could start again at the same time the next morning. I’d pace up and down the corridors of whatever random Texan high school my debate team had landed on for the weekend, swapping 80-page evidence files with my teammates and mentally rehearsing rebuttals against Iranian sanctions. I inured myself to cacophonies of beeping timers, pen clicks and bored sighs from college students with nothing better to do but judge tournaments at their old high schools. In theory, debate was a noble use of time: I learned how to speak eloquently on topics of domestic and foreign policy, trained myself in the art of reasoned argumentation, and developed intimate familiarity with Lexus Nexus and JSTOR.
Competitive debate offers a vision of an ideal society predicated on settling disagreement through noncoercive rational discussion. Each side is given a roughly equal amount of time to present their arguments, and they’re supposed to persuade an impartial audience through logic and evidence, not heated emotion. Everyone presumably has equal status: debaters are, in principle, only judged on their clarity of presentation and argumentation, not attributes like their socioeconomic background, gender, or sexual identity. The notion of astute young people engaging in the free exchange of ideas, unfettered from pre-existing biases, is a fever dream for those who believe in the virtues of deliberative democracy.
In his The Structural Transformation of the Bourgeois Public Sphere, for example, the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas suggests that public debate and rational communication can move us toward a less oppressive society. He presents the 18th-century public sphere as a model of democratic politics. The growth of international trade drove private citizens to deliberate over matters of common concern in coffeehouses, literary societies, and taverns, creating an independent domain for critical discussion free from public authority. And while this sphere was historically reserved for a property-owning male elite, it contained kernels of its own critique, generating ideals of openness, inclusivity, and equality that would erode remnants of anti-democratic behavior. In a perfect world, everyone would be able to participate in public contestation; we’d all deliberate — turning over new perspectives, introducing unforseen counterarguments, bracketing our self-interest — until “the unforced force of the better argument,” as Habermas would say, triumphed. But the fact of the matter is that we don’t live in a perfect world, and upholding this ideal religiously as though complete objectivity and disinterestedness are possible seems like a disservice.
Anyone who has spent serious time in the speech and debate community knows that it is its own form of insanity. Every week thousands of cognitively endowed but emotionally underdeveloped high schoolers swoop into neighboring schools to position themselves as authorities on the electoral college, or the South China Sea, or cap-and-trade. Coaches feed their sense of superiority by telling them, as mine did with my teammates and me, that they’re smarter than all of the adults in Congress. Yet this world of “logic” and “rationality” is just as illiberal as any other environment that grants a select few “geniuses” undue self-importance. There are, as always, issues with locker room talk and sexual harassment. These actions come with their own logics, a network of subtle justifications that enable them to persist.
The actual debates I was having rarely resembled the triumph of the “unforced force of the better argument.” The objective was not to reach consensus but to win, to rehearse one’s pre-formulated positions in a manner most convincing to a judge with their own subtle biases. There is an entire industry based around selling “briefs” written by college students — packaged topic analyses, arguments, and corresponding evidence — to debate teams at well-endowed high schools. A year-long subscription to one of these services for the 2019-2020 Public Forum debate season costs $169.99, not to mention the potential cost of hiring one of these former debate champions to help these competitive teams prepare. Novel arguments not presented in these briefs are useful for their surprise factor, not necessarily their persuasiveness; if you pull them out, your opponent then has to spend most of the debate round catching themselves up to speed.
In debate rounds, everything was dealt with as an intellectual exercise. Debaters take some sort of sadistic glee in flinging out statistics about civilians dying in third-world countries in a bizarre game of ‘Whose is Bigger.’ These death counts, probably culled last minute from some United Nations report, are leveraged by affluent high schoolers who could care less about the well-being of Somali farmers. And because few of these issues had real stakes to us, at the end of each month, when my debate partner and I had “exhausted” the chosen topic, it didn’t matter that I could never figure out where I stood on an issue. At tournaments, we’d slip so easily between perspectives (pro for one hour, con for another) that we could convince ourselves of anything. There will always be statistics to back up whatever argument we want to believe; we could create a logical chain between, say, promoting education for girls in Romania and nuclear catastrophe.
In her critique of Habermas, Nancy Fraser contends that unequally empowered social groups tend to develop unequally valued cultural styles; what is accepted as a “rational” and “universal” mode of deliberating may actually be socially conditioned by who or what is in power. Hence, when University President Larry Bacow claims that he responds to “reason, not demands” against Divest Harvard protestors, he’s restricting what kind of actions get to be “reasonable”; he’s denying that protest also comes with its own rationales. Each form of debate has its own preferred values, its own version of rationality: the stereotype for Lincoln-Douglas debaters is that they link everything to individual rights, while Policy Debaters connect everything to nuclear war. How we weigh arguments relies heavily on our background assumptions, regardless of how desperately we want to believe that we can set aside our personal perspective to reach some universal understanding. There is no definitive framework for adjudicating debates that would enable everyone to come to consensus: there’s no equation that says the erosion of privacy incurred by stop and frisk laws is only justified if it equals 200 civilian lives saved. The problem with debate is not merely that it fails to actualize the ideal of open, unbiased, and symmetrical discussion; the problem is that this ideal is not possible in the first place.
Image Credit: Unsplash/Miguel Henriques