By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
Here’s a little something to go with your morning coffee:
Here’s the transcript. This passage — this incredibly radical proposal — caught my eye, because it’s one of the most hopeful signs I’ve seen in years:
BILL MOYERS:
I heard you respond to someone who asked you at a public session the other evening–“What would you do about what you’ve just described?” And your first response was start debating societies in high schools all across the country.HENRY GIROUX:
That’s right. One of the things that I learned quickly as a result of the internet is I started getting a ton of letters from students who basically were involved in these debate societies. And they’re saying like things, “We use your work. We love this work.”And I actually got involved with one that was working with– out of Brown University’s working with a high school in the inner cities right, and I got involved with some of the students. But then I began to learn as a result of that involvement that these were the most radical kids in the country.
I mean, these were kids who embodied what a critical public sphere meant. They were going all over the country, different high schools, working class kids no less, debating major issues and getting so excited about in many ways winning these debates but doing it on the side of– something they could believe in.
And I thought to myself, “Wow, here’s a space.” Here’s a space where you’re going to have a whole generation of kids who could be actually engaging in debate and dialogue. Every working class urban school in this country should put its resources as much as possible into a debate team.
ZOMG!!!!!!!
This is amazing to me. Yves was a debater; I was a debater in high school and college; that’s where my focus on rhetoric came from.* (Of course, I was a policy debater, back in the day, which is a lot like smash-mouth football, except with words. We were the ones who would lug around legal briefcases full of evidence on index cards — no laptops then! — and blast through arguments at blazing speed. Policy debate was a real sport. Nowadays, the high school forensics associations have changed the rules to make debate more like touch football; debate has devolved. But I have done some judging, and it’s still recognizable as debate.)
Debate taught me:
1) How to win**. (Not just tactically, but the pleasure of winning, of avoiding defeating one’s self, of training hard, and seeking to excel.)
2) How to research. (Debate demands not only that you back up your reasoning with evidence, but that you be able to assess sources critically, and be able to assess whether evidence really supports the claims made for it.***)
3) How to argue. (Not just to reason, but to communicate reasoning; how to make and win a point.)
4) That it was OK to argue. (I’ve noticed, sitting in on some college classes, that there’s a real reluctance to critique; it’s somehow seen as impolite. YMMV — and I’d be really happy to be wrong on this.)
5) How to think on my feet. (Nothing more exciting than having a new proposal thrown at you, for which you have no evidence and of which you have no knowledge, and figuring out how to defeat it. Winning with no resources except reasoning and guile is much more exciting than winning with brute force.)
6) How to speak in public. (Apparently, many people are scared to speak in public. So was I, but debate cured me of it. And the more you win, the larger groups you get to speak in front of, because the initial rounds will be in classrooms, but the finals — in which you will, naturally, participate — will be in auditoriums, sometimes quite large ones.)
7) How to move an audience. (Not the same as overcoming the “fear of public speaking”; rather some mastery of logos and pathos.)
8) How to be part of a team. (Since I’m an INTJ, joining a team is never the first thing on my mind. However, in debate, you not only have a partner that you work and train with, but all the debaters on the team share evidence and practice against each other.)
Debate was one of the best things that has ever happened to me. If you have children or grandchildren, I seriously recommend you consider it; I can’t say enough good things about the experience. Debate has a strong “critical thinking skills” component, to be sure, but it also teaches that the best ideas in the world mean nothing unless you can communicate them to others, and that is a very different, and larger, set of skills.
So, imagine if every working class high school in the country were training young women and men in how to win, how to research, how to argue, that it’s OK to argue, how to think on their feet, how to speak in public, how to move an audience, and how to be part of a team! As Giroux suggests, the discourse would be greatly improved and with that, our ability to form new solutions in political economy (which today’s political class is so clearly unable to do, were they even willing).
And I bet there would be a lot less bullshit!
NOTE * See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
NOTE ** Readers, I don’t know if you’ve noticed this about me, but I still like to win. Over the years, however, especially since I started blogging, I’ve become (incredible though this may seem) much more mellow. In particular, although debate also taught me how to fight dirty, I try not to do that any more. It’s bad for me, and more importantly, bad for the threads.
NOTE *** Much less than it did. Big devolution here.
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Glad to know a fellow intj, you make me wish I had done debating too when younger. Sounds like a skill that translated well into life. I must admit that I would never have been able to stay loyal to the argument I was supposed to debate, and would not have cared what the audience thought, which of course was the whole point. Obviously you had the willingness to be non-intj.
A big part of debate is lowering the credibility of your opponent. How do you think this translates to the internet? I feels to me like it has translated too well, and thus has separated the combatants, rather than allowing them each to sharpen their swords on each other.
I am going to pose my question again more deeply to Lambert, and do so first by referencing a comment debate I lost (and lost deservedly) to Lambert. click here , then Search for “smarter trolls”
Here I was attempting to make an argument that would have lost on a half dozen levels, that essentially was that sufficient audacity is sufficient to topple an ideology. It might be true, but multitudes of historical data points would be riddled with other factors, which were all plausibly larger, and each irrelevant to the case at hand. I was fighting a losing battle.
But what interests me was the devolution, which is so common in online debate. I was the first to complain of style, and I am not sure it was ad hominum when I said you were blinded by ideology. Your reply, a non sequitor citing punctuation to prove a language convention was followed by “please, smarter trolls.” was ad-hominum and likely name calling.
So let me state that I was trying to make an honest intellectual point that I believed in, even if it was not my strongest moment. I also believe the same for you, and also acknowledge your role in the debate entitled you to devices intended to keep up the quality of the thread. You won, you were right to win, and I feel your choices were fine, once you accept that rhetoric is an amoral tool of policy, and I do accept that.
With that background, do you think that the uses of the devices as they have migrated from the powerful in a public square, to blog debates in democracy need different bounds? Should ad-hominum be accepted as evidence of weakness, or my complaint about style? It is awesome that you put me in line for a weak performance, but what obligation do we have to adapt rhetoric for the advancement of understanding, when the internet is so fluid, that harsh rhetoric can move bad opinion to a place where all debate is an echo chamber?
I naturally prefer rhetoric that is ambitious, over rhetoric that is dominating, because it exposes points of view that often yield insights. I don’t mind losing arguments as much as others do. Opinions that require strong rhetorical constructions are necessary for large scale consensus, but that neither guarantees they are right, nor even useful, and can in fact invite endless additional constructions until the consensus finally becomes provably wrong. Isn’t the value of debate to trim the weak ideas early, and can’t winner take all rhetoric in an echo chamber become unproductive? And lastly, isn’t internet debating tending towards a least common denominator of rhetorical devices, because in a semi-anonymous forum there is less implied ethos?
I am truly interested in your thoughts on rhetoric, which I have not studied, find fascinating, and see your passion.
Thank you for the link to the Bill Moyers transcript with Henry Giroux, the potential of debate, and your links to your past analyses of Obama’s speeches. Pretty amazing when capitalism kicks the social contract out of democracy, to the point where disposable generations and planet are conceivable, but FDR’s four freedoms unthinkable.
@Lambert per – “In particular, although debate also taught me how to fight dirty, I try not to do that any more. It’s bad for me, and more importantly, bad for the threads.”
I get what your saying and applaud your philosophical take on the matter, yet, there are individuals and groups which sadly require a bit of slamming. Doctrinaires and fundamentalists who fervently insist on a thing, purely out of belief, no matter what the consequences should be publicly outed stringently.
skippy… hay its better than pitchforks and lamp posts methinks.
“The ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American culture like an electric current…”
Why aren’t we more outraged? Why aren’t we in the streets?
Their breath was agitation and whose lovely ambition was that their lips, still touched with celestial fire, should tell…
Ben Lerner, “High school debate and the demise of public speech,”
“Although high school debate is often considered the thinking person’s—the nerd’s—alternative to sports… Our tournaments were held in Kansas public high schools that appeared strangely altered on the weekends…The lids come off the tubs, various papers are retrieved from hanging folders, and the round commences.
“The first few seconds of a speech might sound more or less like oratory, but soon the competitors will be accelerating to nearly unintelligible speeds, pitch and volume rising, spit and sweat flying as they attempt to “spread” their opponents—that is, to make more arguments and marshal more evidence than the other team can respond to within the allotted time, the rule being that a “dropped argument,” no matter its quality, is conceded…enter a zone in which sentences unfolded at a speed I could not consciously control. At that point it didn’t matter what words I was plugging into the machinery of syntax…
“When I was in my Dillard’s suit spewing arguments in a largely empty school…I was, in all my preposterousness, responding to a very real crisis: the standardization of landscape and culture, a national separation of value and policy, an impoverished political discourse (“There you go again”) that served to naturalize our particular cultural insanity. I was a privileged young subject—white, male, middle class—of an empire in which every available identity was a lie, but when I felt the language breaking down as I spoke it—as it spoke me—I felt, amid a general sense of doom, that other worlds were possible…
[the principle of hope and the language of hope]
“It’s in the incredibly slow speech of politicians, of the new right in particular…that I feel the wound, the void: the valorized slowness of fetishized stupidity, politicians flustered in advance by any question that pertains to anything but guns and faith…There’s no need to multiply the examples of gaps and gaffes—which are not aberrations in the speaking style of the far right but rather its basic unit of composition. Their linguistic world is that of the anti-Extemp, where failures in fluency are marks of authenticity, ignorance is often a point of pride, and tautology supplants cogitation.
[“The Violence of Organized Forgetting.” – Henry Giroux]
“It is a stubborn slowness that appeals to so many “spread” Americans, particularly white ones, for whom everything seems to be happening too rapidly: suddenly gays are getting married and there’s a black president with his hands on my Medicare and all these people speaking Spanish and a perpetual news-crawler’s worth of other outrages committed against the greatness of God and country… Everything public has long been up for auction, and the politicians across our very narrow spectrum run interference by speaking so slowly we’ll forget they represent a class of auctioneers…
[Template for the sort of idiocy that increasingly now dominates our culture: when Rick Santorum says, that the last thing we need in the Republican party are intellectuals. – Henry Giroux]
“But recently I have encountered another kind of slow speech, one that does not attempt to cover for the spreadsheets of Wall Street or tranquilize the public and that incorporates its audience into the speech act itself: the people’s mic…
“We are turning away from the thoroughly evacuated public discourse that serves primarily to further the interest of its corporate sponsors in order to form a grassroots corporate person. Because the public mic…is saying: This is a corporation of an older and more basic sort, a subject constituted around something other than private gain. No demands are being made…because the demand is for a new language. I’m not claiming that demand can be actualized, I can’t prove solvency, as debaters would say, and of course language can always be perverted or co-opted, but I believe its collective haltingness is an eloquent expression of the necessity of our learning as a people how to speak.”
[“I think that what is missing from all of this are the basic, are those alternative public spheres, those cultural formations, what I call a formative culture that can bring people together and give those ideas, embody them in both a sense of hope, of vision and the organizations and strategies that would be necessary at the very least to start a third party, at the very least. I mean, to start a party that is not part of this establishment, to reconstruct a sense of where politics can go.” – Henry Giroux]
http://harpers.org/archive/2012/10/contest-of-words/
“Why aren’t we more outraged?”
The answer to that is that we are unable to think morally because we have consciously or (most common) unconsciously accepted that the final moral arbiter is money and status. In some ways moral degeneracy has been a good thing–it has freed us from an outdated and rigid set of standards rooted less in the Gospels and more from Doestoevski’s Grand Inquisitor. If we accept that “greed is good” how can we be outraged at Gordon Gekko and his ilk?
“why aren’t we more outraged?”–why aren’t we more concertedly huffing bags of our own ineffectual indignation? Outrage is now our endgame? Then what, we clap each other’s backs all the way back to the locker room, christen each other with cheap champagne and stroke our plastic trophies til our brains and bodies crash? Pathetic.
Certainly there is an aspect of outrage that is very negative and I agree with you. It is a bad word to use–let’s say that given a certain standard of morality that we see violated we experience a sense of passionate sadness long with a desire to change the situation.
Well there’s no doubt that the “greed is good” cult has the rest of us on the run. But that may be slowly changing.
The free market Gestapo in places outside the US — for instance in the southern cone of Latin America — is already having problems enforcing its mandatory “free” markets. As Girous notes, just look at the region: the US-bakced military dictatorships have disappeared.
And the same thing will most likely also, given enough time, happen in the US and Europe. As Leonidas K. Cheliotis explains (emphasis mine):
I read Fromm and Marcuse and yet my specialty, World War II, point out the unbelievable resiliency of profoundly debased ideologies in German, the Soviet Union, and Japan (and, depending on how you see it, Britain). I’m not so sure that the irrationality and counter-productive nature of current neoliberal and neoconservative ideologies are easily unmasked or delegitimized. I think they have a profound following among a strong cadre of people, both rich and poor, powerful and powerless, and that these ideologies meet needs that many alternatives do not.
I was always struck by the scene in the film “Mississippi Burning” wherein Gene Hackman tells the story of how his father killed his black neighbor’s mules because he was a more skilled and successful farmer than him. Somewhat embarrassed, he told his son: “If you aren’t better than a nigger, what are you?”
What concrete and believable arrangement do we offer people (mostly men) who feel they are losing or have lost their privilege vis-à-vis blacks and women? What do we offer them in compensation for abandoning the Empire and giving up our (perceived) ability to kick the shit out of any military on Earth? What do we offer the well-to-do in compensation for losing the advantages and privileges that money does buy, both for themselves and their children? Just asking them to be fair and play nice and treat everyone as equals isn’t going to cut the psychic and/or material mustard.
Asking “what’s in it for you?” seems like a good place to start if you’re hoping to move someone’s perspective through dialog – at an individual or a group level. Which suggests that it’s also helpful to listen to them to try and understand and value their unique narrative – even if you don’t agree with it.
Once you establish some common values, it’s more likely that you can productively start tracing some of the cause and effect relationships between policies and personal interest.
There’s so much disparity between the policies/programs/politicians that many people support, and the actual results of those policies, etc. But just logically pointing it out rarely cuts through an entrenched perspective that resonates so viscerally from their own experience.
It’s easy to see getting pissed off about some of the more personally invasive regulations like seatbelt laws and such. But how would those rugged individualists feel if they realized they were being manipulated to vote against things that would benefit them – like regulating banks?
Pissed off people tend to resist letting go of that warm feeling of righteous indignation. But then they can get really stirred up if they find out they’ve been hoodwinked.
I really like your comment and agree with you on the resiliant nature of conceptual frameworks even if they are obviously toxic to oneself and others. I really have to scratch my head at how easy it is to misdirect and fool people if you have a good idea of how the psyche works. However, we are in a situation of rapid and profound change where everybody, even the most racist and reactionary among us that know that not just the current arrangements but even the opinions we hold lack permanency.
This historical moment is unique and unprecedented. People often hold onto ridiculous beliefs even if, in the back of their minds, they the ridiculous nature of the beliefs simply because having no belief and no conceptual framework makes life too hard to bear. In my view, our massive problem with depression, anxiety, chronic physical pain, ADD and other forms of malaise are directly related to the lack of consistent values.
DakotabornKansan cites:
Thomas Jefferson had great faith in the power of speech, and it is this faith which informs our first amendment. Here’s Jefferson:
What could possibly go wrong? We of course now know that a great many things can go wrong with Jefferson’s highly reductionist libertarian philosophy, including:
For instance, witness the current “debates” between the Republicans and Demcrats. These are like professional wrestling matches: great entertainment, but one should not mistake them for a true contest.
Jefferson believed that free argument and debate were a truth-finding exercise.
At the opposite end of the political (and ontological and epistemological) spectrum was Plato. As Hannah Arendt explains:
The New Left, neoliberals and neoconservatives place a great deal of faith in the power of persuasion. They believe one can “create his own reality” with pure rhetoric. For instance, Richard Bernstein notes that
I actually agree with Bernstein up to a point. In public debate one is dead in the water without a mastery of speech and debate. However, I believe that speech and debate by itself is not sufficient. Man has a litanty of ways of knowing, including:
Great political figures like King, I believe, use a combination of all four of these, and are masters of all four.
But of course it goes without saying that without a mastery of speech and debate, you’ve lost the argument before it even begins.
I think debates are of limited utility. A debate is a game, and as such it has to take place on a ‘playing field’ and under rules. Often, the outcome of the debate can be determined by the selection of the field and the rules before the first move is made. If not, getting control of the terms of the debate at the outset (‘framing’) may serve the same purpose. Since the overall framework of the game is to come up with a winner and a loser instead of a synthesis, truth, evidence and reason (except in a limited sense) are quickly tossed aside in the search for power (victory).
Debates in schools are particularly suspect because they take place under the authoritarian assumptions and practices of an educational system.
Debates are entertaining as a game, and they may be good exercise, but I think their limitations should be recognized.
Genuine, meaningful debate shouldn’t be about winning, but about authentic discussion. These days, you can dismiss somebody with a meme, or a “that sucks.” Clearly Lambert knows good rhetoric, but too often any kind of emphasis on “winning,” means that meaningful exchange is lost.
Professor Giroux is tired of a society which privileges slick comebacks and wants young people to dig deeper, to learn how to engage and to listen.
In my classroom, I try to foster meaningful socratic exchanges where we arrive at higher truths. It’s about so much more than winning, or losing. That’s capitalist jargon, and the sooner we move beyond that the better.
Okay, so now we’re redefining ‘debate’. When I went to school, and this seems to be what was being referred to above, it was a contest between two sides which was to be won and lost by means of argument. (The word itself comes from a word being to beat or fight.) Outside of school, the activity is an important component of the larger world, such as legislative and juridical procedures. I am attempting to critique the notion of debate goodness given here by Giroux and others, but I can’t do that if the subject is going to move shapelessly about.
I think “debate” is utterly overrated. The point is never to “win”, because in the end words have very limited coercive power anyway. The point is to exchange ideas in a mutual attempt to find out what is going on and what you would like to do about it. At the very least this process can reveal true motivations–what is it that the Koch brothers are really trying to do. In a dialogue you can elicit such information by asking probing questions.
What is missing is not debate, it is good will and a desire to articulate what our problems are and how we might solve them in an honest manner. Debate cannot compensate for ill will and mendacity.
“Reality mimics reality TV”
Makes me think of Simulacra and Simulation.
I am a bit less impressed than you by high school debating with its often stunningly facile arguments making up in shallowness the need for depth on the issues discussed (often very narrow)–Socrates would have called it sophistry; however, on balance I share your view that it would be a good thing by, at least, bringing to the fore the seemingly lost art of rhetoric (which includes most of your points) and motivating students to do research. Personally I don’t think debate ought to be competitive but I do think anything that sharpens the mind by encounters with others on that level is mainly a good thing.
Having said that I believe that the role of competition is overvalued–we need less not more of it, frankly. True debate is more like music than sports. We try to find agreement along the lines of Socratic dialogue. But this also implies a certain moral education that is missing from our culture. For example, online debates are rarely cooperative and thus very little comes of it other than keeping alive facts, research and so on–but often it all turns into pissing contests–where words are twisted by using a prosecutorial style assuming that my words, say, are based on relative ignorance rather than understanding that we all have very different perspectives and experiences and even if were “wrong” we may have caught aspects of the truth because of our very different POVs.
Yes, the pissing contests are reflections of a cutthroat society that pushes competition. Yet, for all my years in the States, I was often surprised that the quality was frequently lacking. A German academic friend of mine also laments the solitary, hyper-competitive attitude among university physicists that means less collaboration, and more solitary work that suffers for the lack of peer support. Truly fine work is often the result of cooperation between between others, rather than a fight to win.
Nobody,
Thank you for the Graeber interview — that’s perfect. That’s a much more workable paradigm.
You’re welcome, but it’s nobody with a lower-case n, please.
Well all that lofty rhetoric from Graeber sounds very romantic, but is it realistic?
The moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt would argue that Graeber’s idealism departs too far from the way human beings actually operate:
Indubitably Mr Mex.
That’s why I’m a proponent of ethical reasoning over moral rationalization.
In this lecture Haidt elaborates in a bit more detail:
Agree that consensus will always be the determinate, although morals etched in stone are not subject to broad consensus by histrionics. I think the basic rules apply to any camp of inquire.
BTW for profit inquire in not science in by opinion, it’s biased discovery. For myself general systems theory is more inclusive.
Skippy… looks like we’re due for an upgrade on the enlightment project… both trilling and terrifying at, the same time, with the clock a ticking.
Noone is going to say it but it’s also going to attract a lot more males than females. Some females will love debate and well they should. But overall. The preference for harmonious human relationships.
Please keep your gender bias to yourself. Women do not prefer “harmonious human relationships”. Women are quite ruthless and competitive, but they simply have to refrain from tactics that would result in physical fights, since in pretty much all cases, they’d get the shit beaten out of them.
And you are also wrong re debate. When I was in high school, competing in two different states, there were about as many women as men debating. And studies found that man-women teams (teams were always 2 members) did better than single gender teams.
since in pretty much all cases, they’d get the shit beaten out of them. Yves Smith
Hmmm. Not as often as women might suspect since quite a few men would never hit a woman even if hit themselves. Nor would many men even admit they were physically hurt but that would be pride, not chilvary.
As in most aspects of culture in America, our “bettors” are able to define the meaning of debate. The prototype are the presidential “debates” which are totally sanitized and stripped of content before either party will even agree to participate. Another form of “debate” is that which takes place in a court of law where two immoral actors engage in a contest to display their knowledge of the technicalities of law and their adeptness in psychologically manipulating juries.
In this context one cannot expect high school debate classes to be free from the larger role of education which is to manufacture “successful” and conformist consumers. That said, in principle the thought patterns required to become a successful debater are certainly desirable. And I’d certainly rather watch a session of the House of Commons rather than any presidential “debate” ever held!
Yup – I was president of high school debate team. Most important: you have to listen to what your opponent is saying, understand it, figure out which points are essential and then how to respond to those points. Most people do not listen to what their opponents are saying so most discussions are filled with people who are talking past each other.
I use this acquired skill all of the time.
I hope everyone watches this video or the complete show on Bill Moyers. This needs to go viral, especially among the “zero generation”. Better yet…sit down with others without a computer or television and discuss these issues.
Fight back against cultural demise.
After looking around at what this country has become it’s obvious that capitalism is waging a war against democracy and capitalism is winning, in spades. After hearing this excellent interview I couldn’t help but to remember what Andrew Jackson said in his 1837 farewell address which might explain the current mentality and lack of spirit of American citizens, in part:
“These ebbs and flows in the currency and these indiscreet extensions of credit naturally engender a spirit of speculation injurious to the habits and character of the people. We have already seen its effects in the wild spirit of speculation in the public lands and various kinds of stock which within the last year or two seized upon such a multitude of our citizens and threatened to pervade all classes of society and to withdraw their attention from the sober pursuits of honest industry. It is not by encouraging this spirit that we shall best preserve public virtue and promote the true interests of our country; but if your currency continues as exclusively paper as it now is, it will foster this eager desire to amass wealth without labor; it will multiply the number of dependents on bank accommodations and bank favors; the temptation to obtain money at any sacrifice will become stronger and stronger, and inevitably lead to corruption, which will find its way into your public councils and destroy at no distant day the purity of your Government. Some of the evils which arise from this system of paper press with peculiar hardship upon the class of society least able to bear it.”
Andrew Jackson epitomizes the contradicitons that inhere in American populism.
Unrepentent advocate of slave ownership and Manifest Destiny, completely oblivious to the rights of blacks, indians or Mexicans, he nevertheless was the champion of the lower orders of anglo society.
As to monetary policy, John Kenneth Galbraith judged his postition as being “confused.”
As usual, Scripture anticipates:
Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. Proverbs 27:17
Yay! A Beardo comment.
Welcome back!
Reminds me of my favorite Kierkegaard quote: “As regards that which each must do for himself, the best that one man can do for another is to unsettle him.”
Giroux is unsettling in the best way.
love this! and agree.
the problem is that so many of us (myself included) have become un-unsettlable.
or, too easily settle-able and firmly fixed by the wrong details or through technique (style>substance).
Being cerebrally unsettled through our lives is definitely good for us all.
Being physically unsettled is not (ie. 12 moves in last decade alone incl. 6 countries, is not something I personally recommend).
If sharpness is all you want.
Scripture speaks about cooperation and the value of taking council too and many other things as well. Just because Scripture says one thing does not mean that that is all it says.
Sharpness is important but it’s not the only thing. Believers are to be “speaking the truth in love”, for example, Ephesians 4:14-16.
It’s very hard for americans to think through rhetoric, people either accept or reject it. It’s hard for americans to argue without everyone getting hurt feeling and going home. It would be nice to teach these things.
The trouble with debating skills, is that debating over topics that matter these days involves debating with people who have no intention of honest debate, and this creates a Greshams Dynamic (one of the most useful, informative and broadly-applicable terms I know).
This creates conditions where the dirtier and more subtly deceptive their methods of argument, the more (irrationally) convincing they are to others, and the greater the competitive advantage they have over you (unless you stoop to their level) – debating skills don’t help with this.
Bad/cunningly-deceptive arguments, drive good/honest arguments out of debate, and out of the realms of credibility.
I find that for myself, debating is more an avenue of learning, and it’s hard to pay respect to truthful/honest methods of argument, and be convincing at the same time.
When a debate becomes about reducing the credibility of the person, rather than their argument, I (to be honest) can’t stand that. It’s at that point, that you know the person is not debating with honest intent, and when you are arguing with multiple people, it often turns into a circlejerk.
I know. Well said. It’s kind of amazing to me that so many are concentrating on debating the “debate” portion than whats actually being said ?!
Much was made of it in the original post.
I understand lambert’s interest in highlighting Henry Giroux’s comments about debate but what really struck me about his interview with Bill Moyers was how Giroux exposes some of the underlying assumptions that pervade our national discourse. His words cut through the typical conservative/liberal, left/right “debates” like a knife:
Sorry, my reply to your post ended up under JohnB’s post and makes no sense as a reply to their comment. It was for your good post. Thanks.
Watched the entire show on the tele this morning. Immediately I was bothered by the use of the term “democracy” which pops up 44 times in the transcript.
The interview began with this:
“HENRY GIROUX: Well, for me democracy is too important to allow it to be undermined in a way in which every vital institution that matters from the political process to the schools to the inequalities that, to the money being put into politics, I mean, all those things that make a democracy viable are in crisis.”
Excuse me, but save very few mechanisms which would likely be used in a “democracy” such as a voting both (only with many choices, real options, including perhaps most importantly None of the above!) we the USA have nothing but contempt for democracy. Democracy, like human rights are terms used to deceive by assuming we have them or even a modicum of regard for them.
From the text of the Constitution on down, democracy does not exist. Why do so many ignore this and perpetuate the lie (or myth) that we need to move back to something we never had?
And this cringe inducing use of the democracy meme happened 44 times in a few short minutes by two people supposedly interested in substantive debate! And they wonder why the Rick Santorums of the world garner sizable audience when expressing contempt for intellectuals.
so, they didn’t define their terms? or they both assumed that the other person (and the audience) knew what they were talking about? is this like that old comment about pornography, that you ‘know it when you see it’?
I didn’t here any “return to the Golden Days of Yore” in there, but could be wrong. could it be truthfully said that, whatever Democracy means, to these two or to each of us individually, we are moving farther and farther away from it at every step?
I agree that we never had it. perhaps that is the problem?
these remarks are off the cuff and from a person totally unskilled in debate, and also probably totally uninformed about the issues that I will bring up, but here goes:
I find the combat model totally unhelpful. the points made about assessing sources and research, and having sound arguments and things are all really great, should be absolutely taught and are totally necessary to live within our modern world and try to make any kind of reasoned decision about things.
but I do not think that this kind of reasoned method is compatible with a brief combat model, where the person who can trump the other with enough numbers (which? everyone seems to have their own set), their own facts (again, which? perspective and subjectivity are everywhere here), and the right rhetorical style can “win” and an dispassionate look at all of these things, and an attempt to deal with the epistemological problems in all of them, would be really rather ignored and/or lost.
what does the person come away with? the understanding that the person who was thinking quickly and had done their homework and was on their toes, plus their image (that we can’t deny plays a role) will win, however important or thoughtful the response or contrasting side, might be?
we have a lot of that already in this culture. in fact, I’ve recently determined that due to the fact that I have never seen anything on the internet which suggests to me that any of the discussions results in a true depth or alteration of understanding, on either party’s side. mostly what happens is that each side hardens, marshals their facts and so on. granted, this is not the same thing as ‘debate’ as practiced, where you’d better get your opponents side as down pat as your own and where you should be ready at the drop of a hat to assume their position if necessary (suggestive of a dispassionate look at both sides, but really implying to me a -study the enemy to beat ’em- kinda thing). going back to the internet, I see nothing but a dissolution in civility and an inability to really take to heart the other person’s point of view or their criticisms. this kind of faux-debate interaction has sullied the intellectual abilities of ALL of us, I think. and it has made us less civil to each other, and less willing to entertain that the “other side” might have anything useful to say to us. ((again, I know that it isn’t -true- debate. but I think the parallel holds))
to the point where the recent interactions that I’ve witnessed on this website and others regarding a certain (in)famous journalist, on a few different issues and involving a few other different individuals, was so lacking in civility and involved so much sniping superiority and inability to conscience the other side’s arguments, that it began in these cases to look like the intellectual equivalent of a Jerry Springer show.
what I think we need to be focusing on ARE the critical-thinking skills pointed out above, and how to teach them in such a way as to involve a dispassionate (if possible–may not be. we are humans and if the problems were that easy to solve, we’d set a computer to do it) search for the truth. a process of discovery. a process that roots out the epistemological problems, examines subjectivity, understands WHY there are even multiple sides to begin with, etc. if data or facts were the determiners of any kind of ‘resolution’, as I say we’d simply have a computer do the right algorithms and be done with it. why and how have human beings solved problems in the past, what tools have they developed, how useful are all of those tools, what does our current mode of ‘scientific’ truth say and how can those things also lead us astray (not science itself, but how we use it. and we are always the weakest link there. otherwise, there would be no debate. so obviously, how we use ‘science’, broadly termed to include the social sciences, must be riven with the human problem of subjectivity, no?).
I don’t think you can get all of these things by marshaling a better ‘set’ of facts or a better ‘set’ of sources. I don’t think this kind of thing, in itself, fosters thoughtful debate. perhaps a symposium where each side presents, and discussion follows might. perhaps all methods at once. but if we don’t address the root problems of knowledge, I don’t think this is going to get us anywhere except to MORE of what we currently have–which is that image and presentation matter, and may trump ‘the truth’, IF that ‘truth’ is even determinable.
sorry. I am likely a fool here who doesn’t know what i’m saying.
sorry, got going down the garden path and lost the trail of my own thoughts on this sentence:
“we have a lot of that already in this culture. in fact, I’ve recently determined that due to the fact that I have never seen anything on the internet which suggests to me that any of the discussions results in a true depth or alteration of understanding, on either party’s side.”
due to the above, I was going to say that I had determined that I personally would be giving up reading or writing comments on the internet (and yet, here I am AGAIN! argh…) and probably reading most editorial-style articles. it may not be helping me get closer to the truth, and it certainly doesn’t help the other party. both sides just want to win, and they just want to argue. and they’ll generally do whatever it takes to do that, making what they were arguing about rather meaningless in the end.
shorter translation, after working my way back up the thread:
I agree wholeheartedly with David Graeber.
The problem being is the primitive will always exist underneath what ever social indoctrination one is born into, when societal mental anchor points fail… watch out.
We need a Saul Alinsky in this era. He’s dead and no one like him is out there.
“Policy debate was a real sport. Nowadays, the high school forensics associations have changed the rules to make debate more like touch football; debate has devolved. But I have done some judging, and it’s still recognizable as debate.)”
I’m late to the discussion but I’d like to point out that the majority of the political discussion that Giroux is referencing in debate is a product of the last twenty or so years. Policy debate is alive and hasn’t “devolved” since the index card days. It certainly is in a stage of crisis currently, but that isn’t due to any rules imposed from above.
I’m not sure what debates you are judging; it’s certainly possible that local circuits have their own rules, but I’d suggest observing national competition in high school or college.
Well, that’s a relief! State of Maine is my area, but since people going to Nationals with these “Caucus Race”-style events, I assumed policy debate was no more. I am glad to be wrong!!