Debate is an Instrument
Debate is an instrumental art form, not a complete one, and not transformative on its own. It transforms the way we operate, think, and approach other forms of discourse, such as discussion and dialogue, possibly argument, but not often, and that’s because argumentation has a huge oppositional approach to debate.
Debate is consensual and planned, and argumentation appears. Debate has a set end, argumentation can return years later. Argumentation has no borders or boundaries; debate does. Debate addresses a very specific issue, argumentation is free range.
Preparing for argument requires debating. There’s no amount of research, fact-gathering, or deep understanding of the stakes involved that can take the place of debate as preparation for argument. Debate is the daily trip to the gym or the daily jog that prepares you for the marathon of a lifetime of argument.
A better metaphor I can discuss at length is that debate is like martial arts, and argumentation is like self-defense situations. You can study tae kwan do, for example, for many reasons. One might be for exercise to make you healthier, and one might be to meet new people and establish friendships. A common one might be self-defense because you never know when you might be in a situation where you are threatened and need to protect yourself. All of these are reasons to participate in debate as a form of exercise, art, or enjoyment, as well as
If you live in a democratic society, argument is a part of your inheritance as a citizen and part of your responsibility as well. It cannot be avoided no matter how distasteful it might be to you. It can’t be lateraled into “science says” or “those are the facts.” It has to occur and it happens with and within the facts. Nothing can save you from this obligation save debating.
We don’t regularly teach debating as a part of the curriculum because we have a lot of social and cultural stories around debate. One is that someone who is good at debate is really intelligent. This is similar to saying someone who is good at marathons is good at running. The comparison is apt – someone becomes good at something through practice, nothing more. There is no natural inclination to be good at debating. There are people who enjoy athletics, reading, or computers more than others, but that’s merely a starting point to becoming a good basketball player, a scholar, or a computer scientist. All those aptitudes do not equate to being that person without a ton of education. And what is education at its core other than practice in being that identity?
Another myth about debate is that it allows people who do not know anything to portray to others that they really know their material. Anyone who has encountered a person who just wants to argue with you or wants to set up a debate about anything you say knows that one isn’t ever convinced that they are incorrect at the end of it, merely frustrated that they cannot come up with the phrasing or the terms that the arguer insists are correct or meaningful. What these people forget is that meaning is a collective activity. This is why we disagree about so many things. A great example of this is the law. We disagree about what the law should be to prevent or deter certain actions. We disagree as to the punishment. This sort of disagreement and argument is collective meaning negotiation. We are attempting to determine what the specifics of the law should be while also determining the point of the law itself. This leads to a continuous return to the text of the law and maybe calls to change it, and different hermeneutics, or ways of reading the law that we believe are correct (progressive, originalist, etc).
Because we emphasize to the exclusion of all other forms of knowledge a “scientistic” education (not necessarily scientific, but a reverence and deference to the authority of science) we are incapable of doing collective meaning-making well at all. Instead we look for the truth which we feel is equivalent to the facts. Facts are great tools for building a case, but truth is far more elusive and difficult to determine. It seems that what we felt was true a generation or two ago isn’t true anymore. We have to re-evaluate our sense of what’s true, and that’s frustrating. Instead of the hard work of re-evaluation, we turn to nostalgia and imagine life a generation ago as a “simpler, clearer time,” where the truth was apparent to everyone and no negotiation was necessary.
It's tiring to think rhetorically, it’s tiring to build a case for other people, to think like other people in our society that we share. It’s tiring because we have no practice in it; we haven’t been to the gym and we are expected to run a marathon. Jogging is only beneficial and easy when it is a routine based on research, practice, and the proper equipment. Our schooling in the United States provides none of this, merely a reverence for fact delivered by an authority figure, be it a teacher or a state exam, and the idea that once you have the degree your work, your thinking and research, is over. This is the death of democracy.
Revitalizing democracy requires practicing our instrument of debate, playing every day no matter how bad it sounds to us or others. To take on a tutor, play some more difficult pieces with others, to mess up the fingerings; to mess up the timing. It’s something that isn’t scientistic education. It’s a form of knowledge and a practice that is rejected because we have become lazy thinking that facts, science, and other people out there somewhere are going to provide the truth for us. We collectively work together to make this sort of music.