For many years I have been trying to hammer out this book on metaphors for debate as an educational practice. Competitive debate is, of course, tied up in there even though I know you refuse to believe you are participating in something educational (my own students call non-tournament debate events ‘learning trips’ – nicely diminutive with just the right dash of halcyon school-system rhetoric). The metaphors are not in short supply, but what is are the connections making the metaphors really sing.
Recently finishing up reading Esther Schor’s book Bridge of Words about the history and development of Esperanto. I was using Esperanto as a possible metaphor, making the argument that there are a group of folks out there looking at debate as a pure form of argument, something that is absent the missteps or errors of daily lived argumentation. A quick glance at the Malaysia Debate Guide confirms both that the desire for purity is alive and well in the debate world, and secondly that a quick glance is all that is needed to get the total value from that document.
Turns out I haven’t been thinking of Esperanto in the proper historical context to make it an adequate metaphor for debating practices. Instead of Esperanto being a corrective to the imperfect and irregular natural languages of the earth, Esperanto was meant to be an equalizer between speakers of different languages. Instead of one person having all the advantages by being a native speaker, or by having studied and mastered the language with other native speakers, both speakers must work to interpret what is being said and what they want to say. It disadvantages both speakers so nobody has the upper hand in the communicative moment.
Since there are no native Esperanto speakers, this works pretty well. Nobody in the exchange has an unfair advantage. There’s no secret place to go to master the accent, the grammar, the idiomatic parts of the language. There’s only both people practicing within a language that is not theirs, but the world’s. A language that belongs to nobody.
Debate should be more like esperanto, but many practitioners think that debate is a quest for getting an advantage around idioms, irregular constructions and the like. Most debaters and most debate coaches think that debate is about mastering the grammar and realizing it to a level of perfection. They think the way to do well in debate is to find mastery of the language of debate to leave their opponents at a disadvantage in the language of the form.
What is the grammar of debate? Fairly useless idiomatic things that only make sense to the users of that language. Things like roadmaps, distinguishing rebuttal from constructive, and announcing the number of arguments you will say. There are also argument specific ones such as examples that are frequently given, and grand statements on the nature of rights and freedoms in democratic systems.
This is much closer to Latin, in particular those Latinists who are obsessed with Ciceronian Latin, a form of the language that is perfectly useless. What I mean is that it’s use is an attempt to achieve a perfect form of the grammar and agreement of the terms of Latin in a very ornate, formal, and pure way – meaning that nobody would use such Latin in their daily lives. The daily Latin is full of slang, errors, and constructions that do not serve perfect structural meaning, but serve getting meaning across situationally.
What we need isn’t a perfected argumentative structure or form of public deliberation. What we need is an equal playing field between speakers in order to test the value and strength of our arguments. Treating debate like a language to perfect only serves a monastic vision of debate, something that is useless but admirable as the perfect elimination of all the slip-ups of everyday argument. Instead of this Ciceronian ideal, let’s make our formats Esperanto – a place where one’s advantages and disadvantages in speaking and arguing are rendered moot in the face of a structure that is easy to learn but difficult to master. This is how you get fairness in debate is a system where all participants have no access to an automatic frame in which to deposit what they are going to say. What should improve are the depth and subtlety of student arguments, not their perfection in time management or getting that rebuttal speech down just right. A perfect debate form serves nobody, excluding those who come well prepared to discuss important ideas but are left behind by a community obsessed more with the argumentative equivalent of an ablative of means (like counterprops) rather than examining a variety of information about a controversial issue brought foward intentionally by the format in a way that a wide number of people could access and understand.
Comments
2 responses to “Embracing Esperanto as Debating Metaphor”
This is an interesting read. However, I wish to challenge a few points.
First of all, it is difficult for this metaphor to function effectively since it is too close to the phenomenon. Debate is in a language: typically, in English. This real dominance of Anglophone bias in the international debating community makes the metaphor to Esperanto difficult to swallow. Of course, there is an argot and a "grammar" that is specific to debating communities, but one of the reasons this is such a problem is the relative ease with which native English speakers can pick it up and feel that they have "learned how to debate." Moreover, the poverty of the debating jargon – both in its ability to register complexity and to communicate – belies the notion that this purity is a source of power. The insistence on this comes from the peculiar forms of debate practice – the tournament, the team, the "intercollegiate debate", the brief/file/card – that organize the community’s common forms of exchange.
While the projects of constructed languages seem to offer a ripe metaphor for the Whiggish and hubristic attempts to legislate the norms of good argumentation within a debating community, I also think this misses the mark. One of the problems discussed in a recent In the Bin episode is how the sensus communis of the debating community goes unchallenged. The creation of a grammar inevitably confronts the creator with a series of problems that cannot be resolved through common sense. They constantly need to "debug" — so even if the language ideology that a language could be constructed that eliminates ambiguity, error, etc., remains in place, the activity of language creation requires a constant revision of its own grammatical ideas. This process often leads to new insights about the nature and limits of communication that challenge the ideological motivations for the project. This does not appear to happen in debate precisely because it is not constructing an entirely new system, but seeking to pass off its own common sense as a general or expert norm.
Third, one might see Esperanto as a "corrective" project at the same time that it is "egalitarian." These views are distinct, but not opposed. It also applies to Ciceronian Latin (which you quite quickly dismiss as useless). Pietro Bembo and the other ideological Ciceronians of the Renaissance made a commitment to use no Latin not found in Cicero. Yet this quixotic and seemingly pig-headed project of elitism also forced them to re-encounter a language they were inclined to understand through their own usus. To use terms with the correct distinctions required a historical excavation of original meanings — what was the difference between candidus and alba? This lead to an alienation of language use from common use that, of course, did have the effect of excluding those not competent in this highly erudite restitution, but it also forced these ideologues to develop new ways of reading. One might argue that it is precisely through this seemingly bizzare ideology that the discipline of hermeneutics emerged from. It is not an accident that it was Valla, perhaps the most elitist Latinist of the Renaissance who was able to show that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery because its Latin not classical.
The point being — language ideologies are powerful, but they are not omnipotent. They do not control or even direct all of the linguistic effects that result from them. While we should remain on the qui vive for how language ideologies effect our practices, we should not react to the identification of one such ideology with the reactionary project to construct another. The idea that we might create a debate space where advanatages are "moot" ignores much of what debate critics have been saying for a long time. Race, gender, accent, code: these are not accidental features of language practice that can be neutralized by the rules of a game. A language that belongs to no one is a (well-intentioned) phantasm, but let us remember that this is almost precisely how the ideology we are critiquing initially represented itself.
Good comments! I agree with a lot of what you write here, but not all of it.
I think that the metaphor of a language – that thing we use to make and unmake the world for ourselves and one another – is very apt for discussing debate. For most, debate is the first "language" that makes world politics and events valuable for the participant – they feel like they are a part of things, that they have accessed a code with which they can make sense of it all (hermeneutics might be another metaphor that would work here). Despite the English bias, there are second language debaters and others who would also happily agree that debating provides the best way to speak about, understand, and "get to the truth" about the world.
If that were it, perhaps we could say debate is a hermeneutic, and go there for the metaphor. But this would ignore the constant policing of grammar that debate relishes. It’s constantly on the move looking for ways to "correct" the "misspellings" and "subject-verb agreement" of various speakers. I bet if we had transcripts of judge decisions we could code them for grammar rules. Most conversations about debate are not about persuasiveness, or getting to the heart of the issue (as it would be in hermeneutics) but are much more frequently about structure, timing, rebuttal percentage, warrants, refuting, knifing, and things like that.
That should make it more clear. But even more, what makes me prefer the grammar analogy to the hermeneutic one is both public access (easier to use the language metaphor to a broader audience than the hermeneutic one) and the fact that the community does have to struggle with the challenge of the grammar outstripping the preferred ideology all the time. This is why there’s a judge briefing at every competition – far more than empty tradition, it makes sure that the particulars of grammar are on the minds of everyone when they go to judge. I need to post my screenshots from the briefing at the Budapest Open, there is virtually zero commentary on content, argument structure, or persuasiveness and how to evaluate it, and almost total conversation about binary rules for meaningful statements. The grammar fights against the community precisely because people age out and in of the group. This system must continuously re-present itself as "headless" (discourse of the university) against the constant threat that the tournament might be "unfair" (discourse of the master). II think we have to look at all aspects of debating to determine the value of the metaphor.
As for Ciceronian Latin, I am not quickly dismissive of it. I do marshall it precisely to say what you say at the end – that the fantasy of a neutral set eliminating ideology is a well-meaning error. I cannot disagree with this. Neither can those who worked on Esperanto. They too realized the foolishness so why not create a system that forwards such awareness. Everyone is on edge; nobody is comfortable. The current debate community is like the Latinists you cite with one key difference – there’s no reflection, nor is there the space for this possibility. The Latinists were conducting an experiment which, like most experiments, was most valuable in the unpredicted gains. Debaters are on a conversion quest – the analysis has already been done. The answer is clear. There might be accidental gains, lord knows I used this defense of tournament debate for most of my debate administrator career. But the perspective of a teacher can see that these accidental gains – such as freeze dried ice cream and pressurized ink pens might not be worth the cost of a space program that sees everything as ownable territory.
In closing, I’d say the hermeneutic metaphor is a good one, I’ve used Gadamer to talk about BP debate specifically, but the language metaphor, for all the flaws of it, is better rhetorically. It makes a lot more sense given the way people convert over to the debate narrative once they see what they are able to do with the content of the world around them if they master it.