School’s in session.
Workers have been summoned back.
Campuses are open for protests and counter-protests, invitations and
dis-invitations. That is plenty of fodder for argument, and that is leaving out
perennial sources of conflict like who was supposed to load the dishwasher.
اضافة اعلان
Who wants to pick a
fight first?
Because fight it out
we will. At a time riven by discord, the extent of disagreement among people,
their political representatives, and their media outlets feels simultaneously
intransigent, untenable, and entirely inevitable. Not only are we bad at
agreeing with one another; we are also terrible at arguing with one another.
Part of the problem
may be that we are not arguing over the right things. Part of the problem may
be that we are not arguing well. And part of the problem may be that we are not
arguing enough.
A little high school
debate club might help.
Bo Seo, a
28-year-old two-time world debating champion, says the problem of polarization
is not so much that we disagree but rather that “we disagree badly: Our
arguments are painful and useless.” We spend more time vilifying, undermining,
and nullifying those we disagree with than opening or changing their minds.
If more people took
their cues from the world of competitive debate, he argues in a recent book, it
would be easier to get people to reconsider their views or at least consider
those of others.
Let us consider his
argument. In his book, “Good Arguments: How Debate Teaches Us to Listen and Be
Heard,” Seo, now a second-year student at
Harvard Law School, says what we need
is to disagree more but to do so constructively. In debate, he writes, rebuttal
— arguing back — is “a vote of confidence not only in ourselves but in our opponents,
one that contained the judgment that the other person was deserving of our
candor and that they would receive it with grace.” Approaching arguments with
reason, logic, respect, and empathy can help people handle opposing views.
While that may not
work on Twitter, where character assassination and chasing likes win over
good-faith argument, or in electoral debates, which have become little more
than sponsored advertisements or opportunities to loom menacingly over one’s
opponent, it may work in real life. But you have to keep in mind a few key
principles.
First, know when to
engage. Arguments, Seo reminds us, are “easy to start and hard to end.” For a
dispute to go well, it should be real, important, and specific. You need to
have a point to make, not just an emotional conflict or complaint to air. If
someone has hurt you, figure out why; that becomes a real basis for argument.
Next, pause to
consider how important that point is and whether it is worth arguing over.
Finally, stick to the specific dispute at hand so that the argument does not
expand or spiral. If the disagreement really is over the dishwasher (and look,
there is often cause), do not let it become a referendum on your marriage.
The best place for those disagreements may be outside our current public forums for debate — places that offer a chance to meet people where they are rather than to perform in front of an audience.
Once you have
decided to argue, Seo says, know what it is you are arguing about. To begin,
determine the fact, judgment, or prescription that you would like someone else
to accept. Let us say it’s “Jen is a team player.” In order to make that claim,
add the word “because” and give your reason (“because she involves everyone in
the department”). From there, you offer substantiation and evidence to back it
up. (“She always goes around the room.” “She checks in with her crew weekly.”)
That is making your case.
Importantly, showing
how someone else is wrong is not the same thing as being correct yourself. In
debate, tearing down the other team doesn’t necessarily prove your team is in
the right nor is it likely to convince anyone who didn’t agree with you in the
first place. “No amount of no is going to get you to yes,” one of Seo’s coaches
once told him.
Finally, never let a
bully dictate the terms of debate. If faced with a brawler — someone whose aim
is, as Seo puts it, “not to persuade but to silence, marginalize and break the
will of their opponents” — your only hope is to restore the structure of the
debate. In other words, see above.
Some say competitive
debate is a flawed model for healthy discourse, whether for domestic disputes
or political disagreements. In an essay in The Dublin Review, novelist
Sally Rooney, a former champion debater, characterized formal debate as overly
aggressive and possibly immoral. “For the purposes of this game, the emotional
or relational aspects of argument are superfluous,” she wrote. Novelist Ben
Lerner, who also spent years as a debater, an experience he drew from in his
2019 novel, “The Topeka School,” told me he had to unlearn the idea “that every
conversation ended with a winner and a loser.”
Whatever the
shortcomings of school debate, our prevailing models for arguing — cable news and
courtrooms — certainly do not offer much hope. As Mark Oppenheimer, a former
religion reporter for The New York Times and the author of a memoir about
debate, told The New Yorker in 2010, “the sound-bite culture has ruined it
all.” And that was 12 long years ago.
But Seo thinks we
idealize a past of civil disagreement. “Those were times when people weren’t
able to speak,” he told me recently. “The disagreements were there; they just
weren’t visible. What we’re doing right now is unprecedented, which is to allow
a diversity of people to speak.” Avoiding difficult conversations, he says, can
“shade into contempt and otherness.”
The best place for
those disagreements may be outside our current public forums for debate —
places that offer a chance to meet people where they are rather than to perform
in front of an audience. Rather than annihilate a classmate in a large lecture
hall, invite him to coffee. Take a conversation offline, which removes the
incentives to escalate, Seo points out.
After the long hibernation
of
COVID and a few especially brutal years of online discourse, we could all
use a little practice having face-to-face disagreements again. That much, at
least, is inarguable.
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