Via Julian Sanchez, here's a documentary I hope reaches DC soon. Just the ticket: a movie about - drum roll please - debating. Like Julian, mind you, I'd rather it focused on proper debating - by which i mean, naturally, British Parliamentary style - rather than the mad, mad, mad world of American Policy debating which is not, frankly, debating at all. If you don't believe me just watch the movie's trailer which, however unfairly, gives the impression that Policy Debating is an activity for autistic weirdos rather than an elegant - if disputatious - entertainment aimed at, you know, persuading* people of the validity of your case. Instead, the Policy format treats debating as though it were some tortuous never-ending lawsuit rather than a convivial after-dinner activity over port and cigars.
As best I can recall from my own debating days (some of them - well a couple - halcyon!), the American style is alternately baffling and dreary, prizing the ability to spit out facts and arguments as though one were a machine-gun wielding automaton with precious few points on offer for style or wit or the possession of a vaguely plausible manner...
Mind you, the American approach has, I think, infested proper debating too. The days of the amateur are long gone. In the good old days - by which I mean the period up to and including 1997 - a fellow could turn up and rely on little more than whatever he held in his cranium supplemented by a cursory glance at that day's newspaper. If you were really keen you might consult an old copy of The Economist found tucked beneath one of the Conversation Room sofas. Preparation was for people who, frankly, weren't very good at debating...
Changed days my friends. The Americans, aided and abetted by the Australians, spread the word that debating was about knowledge not persuasion. Professionalism arrived and changed everything. Suddenly folk were turning up to tournaments armed with ready made cases covering every damned issue of the day. These were people who prided themselves on knowledge of things called "carbon sinks" or who took a keen interest in obscure developmental and animal rights issues.
Even the ones who weren't from Durham University started carrying briefcases and one had the disconcerting impression that debating had ceased to be a lark and become some ghastly CV-enhancing exercise... The days of Et in Arcadio Ego were left behind long ago**. O tempora, o mores indeed...
*I'm minded, for instance, of an occasion in which a Glasgow University debater flummoxed his opponents by referring to the (admittedly oft-overlooked) Great West African paw-paw dispute that made Togo a mango no-go area. Though I grant that perhaps you needed to be there.
**On the other hand, some things have improved. The keen young chaps and chapesses now charged with the sacred task maintaining the immortal flame of the Dublin University Philosophical Society do a vastly, almost-immeasurably more impressive job of stewarding the Phil than we crusty fogies ever did back in the day. More power to their collective elbow.
Alex, are you calling me -- a proud Policy Debater -- an "autistic weirdo". I'll gladly cop to the second charge, but the first is just inaccurate.
Policy Debate gets a lot of crap for being fast, but that's just because everyone else is jealous because we clearly make the most complex arguments and do the most work.
I'm kidding -- but the spirit is the same. There's really no reason for policy debate to change its norms and practices because of outsiders who have this view of what "debate" ought to be. Since I love the activity so much, and with the coming of Resolved, comments like this are sure to keep on coming, I'll be constantly defending the activity.
Posted by: Matt Zeitlin | October 27, 2007 at 10:22 AM
First let's establish my bonae fides for being a sapient human (by Alex's criteria).
Born in the Borders: Check
Loves Cricket: Check
Thinks Big Ger doesn't add much to Rebus' Edinburgh: Check.
Now, let's talk about Policy Debate. It is, quite simply, the most sublime competitive activity ever invented.
Wait, comes the inevitable response, what about chess?
Well, I used to play chess. I was good enough to have Murei and Ivanov among my scalps, and to have a few things published. But now I don't play and I don't write because debate is a better game.
It's unfortunate that the speed of the delivery makes the activity virtually incomprehensible to outsiders. At this point Spencer's 'contempt prior to investigation" kicks in, and otherwise smart folks assume that teams win by just being smarter than the other guys.
The speed is, however, only a reification of the idea that substance matters, style doesn't. Thus, so long as the other competitors and the judge understand, all is good. Think about that for a moment - how few activities these days privilege substance over style!
...and the arguments. I was at a high-school tournament this weekend and I heard (inter alia) a discussion of whether Zizek's unoversalism is a warrant for rejecting a humanitarian state action, the short and long-term implications of selling off the SPR, the extent to which consulting other governments about actions constitutes soft power, and whether the IMF definition of Djibouti as not being part of sub-saharan Africa should be preferred over a definition that says it is in SSA. And, I repeat, this was a high-school tournament, and not a big national event, but merely a local Phoenix tournament.
One of my competitors last year once named all 100 members of the US Senate, complete with State and party, to win a bet. When Judith Butler spoke at ASU, the whole team went down to hear her (and then spent the next week arguing about what she'd said)...and so on.
So please don't knock debate. To trivialize it as just people talking fast is as fundamentally silly as saying that chess is nothing more than moving bits of plastic around!
Cheers!
(Oh, and do we have any chance of beating Italy?)
Posted by: The Sophist | October 28, 2007 at 07:26 PM