- The tradition of good argument
that I'm trying to advocate for
is very much rooted in history.
It goes back all the way to antiquity:
where in ancient Greece,
the ability to make your point persuasively,
to engage other citizens in discussion
and debate was seen as a kind of a requirement
of citizenship.
That's what it meant for us to govern ourselves.
And that developed through tea houses and pubs
and coffee houses in London, where while the debates
of parliament were going on, citizens would gather
and have the same debates between themselves.
That tradition kind of carries forth
in the United States with a lot
of the founding fathers starting debate clubs and colleges;
viewing part of their role as leaders and
as founders of a new country as instilling in the nation,
that spirit of debate.
And though that tradition has become harder
and harder to discern in our everyday lives,
there have been periods in the history of the U.S.
and the history of democracies,
and the history of the world,
where those debates were a feature
of people's day-to-day lives.
One high-profile debate that comes
to mind is the series of debates
between the civil rights leader, James Farmer,
and Malcolm X.
- 'If a dark-skinned Puerto Rican went
down to Mississippi, he probably would be lynched too.'
- 'If he was Spanish, he wouldn't be lynched.'
- 'No.' - These were a series of disagreements
between people who are ostensibly on the same side,
whose objectives were in some sense allied,
but they were not shy about voicing their disagreements
in really candid, strong, forth throated ways
in the view of the public,
knowing that the other side would respond respectfully,
that they would be candid about the disagreements,
and through that conversation, that they would be
able to get somewhere they couldn't on their own.
There are three lessons that I take away
from the Farmer-Malcolm X debates:
The first is the importance of training.
In order for us to be able to host the kinds
of public debates again that enlarges
our understanding of what's possible,
we have to start training,
and we have to start training our young people;
we have to train ourselves to be able to engage
in those conversations.
The second is the importance of format.
It's striking how long they were given to make their points.
Often, they would be given quite a long stretch
of time to present their arguments with the knowledge that
once they had spoken, the other person would speak
and they would get another turn.
The third thing that you see
in those debates is the importance
of having a relationship
with the person that you're disagreeing with,
that's greater than just the disagreement itself.
By introducing the family to one another.
By seeing the other areas of life.
By doing other things together.
You can often enlarge the possibility
of what you do within the debate.
- 'I find myself in so much agreement with Mr. Mondale.'
- Debates are only as good as the information
and the knowledge and the skills
that debaters bring to it.
One of the more concerning things that we see,
at the moment, is people's information diets
not being sufficiently varied, not being sufficiently rich
to sustain the kinds of conversations that we
want to have.
We cannot allow the debates that we see on cable television
to be a kind of a replacement for the disagreements
that we should be having in our day-to-day lives.
So our political leaders or our favorite media personalities
can't be like avatars to whom we outsource the work
of thinking for ourselves and having these conversations
for ourselves.
And I think in order for us to start building back
the skills of good argument, we usually need to
do it face-to-face.
And we might need to do it in the absence of an audience
to start with, so that we resist the urge to perform
for an audience, but rather listen and respond
to the person across from us.
So it may well be, that we can one day equip ourselves
to engage in a better form of social media,
but I tend to think the starting place has to be
face-to-face,
has to be maybe away from an audience to begin with,
so that we're building one interaction at a time,
the skills that we have lost.
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