Vilifying Debate

I was taking a required “Crucial Confrontations” course today at work. I find these exercises really funny because they’re designed to “help” you deal with confrontations at work but automatically make an erroneous supposition that everyone who has a job also has negative confrontations at work. Then it gets worse because they assume that you’re constantly at odds with people and that you’re obvious lacking in abilities to handle yourself in these horrible circumstances. I’m going to let you all in on a little secret: I get along smashingly with the people I work with, and a course on “Crucial Confrontations” needs a crucial confrontation with its suppositions because not always do we have problems with the people with whom we work. It’s actually pretty funny to listen to a group of people who actually get along with each other trying to find some reason to complain before giving up and deciding that they’d rather just eat more of the free bagels and laugh with each other over how ridiculous life can be sometimes.

But one thing that was included in the conversation that kept bugging me was the fact that the authors of these series of books and corporate programs (Grenny Patterson and Switzler McMillan…really, are these really their names?) seem to have a HUGE complex with the process of debate because every time they mention it, they use such statements as “avoid letting someone use debate tactics in conversation”. In other words, they don’t see debate as what it is, but as they seem to perceive debate might be.

And this is what I want to talk about because I’ve seen this mistake a lot, and my supposition is that this is a mistake often made by people who never did debate, or might have done it but never did it very well so that they have been scarred by the premise of debate forever. To them, debate is this evil thing that people do in order to hurt other people. When they talk about “debate tactics” they’re not talking about using advanced persuasive skills to convince another person of the merits of your side’s arguments, but think of it as insults, biting commentary and probably snide attempts to dominate a conversation unjustly.

I see it used in the media a lot, mainly because the majority of people do not have a history of positive debate. Instead, their closest brush with debate has been a political campaign where one individual used some parlour trick to disgrace his or her opponent during a quick exchange that was handled on national television where people get sound byte moments of time to win or lose a campaign. Or they think of the few “debates” they’ve seen between two talking heads on some violent political show where people screamed each other down until one person managed to survive long enough to get his or her point across in some zero sum diatribe that never consisted of a moment of actual conversation.

People have forgotten that the founding fathers dreamed of a future of cool and deliberate conversations between people to decide what might be the best course of action for any number of different circumstances. Debate in this country was supposed to be the kind of conversation you find between common men who would argue points of view like was supposed to be done in a court of law before lawyers became the main attraction. People were supposed to be able to hold public conversations so that the best possible views could be heard, and then people could make enlightened decisions based on having heard all of the good information provided for them.

Instead, we base our decisions on sound bytes and screaming matches. Or even worse, we listen to only those voices we already agree with, so we don’t even allow ourselves to be exposed to voices that might differ from the ones we already hear on a constant basis. This means that new ideas are ignored and avoided while we keep hearing the same bad ideas over and over again, because that’s all we’re ever capable of hearing.

Debate in this country is seriously lacking, and part of the problem is the derision we cast towards the very nature of debate itself. Having a conversation with someone you disagree with used to be a wonderful thing until people stopped communicating and just went to “win” arguments with people they disagree with. When that happens, we stop listening to what other people have to say and hope to keep talking long enough to exhaust the other guy so that we’re all that other people hear.

A few years ago, I was lucky enough to hear a debate between a very good collegiate team from Ireland against one of our top teams in the United States, and what was so interesting about the debate was that the issue was about immigration, and in the beginning, it appeared the Irish team was at a disadvantage because the conversation was one that was dominating the US market. But what happened was that the Irish team brought up arguments and evidence that people in the United States rarely, if ever, get to hear, and it was as if we were hearing about immigration for the very first time, even though we hear it practically every time there is an election in the United States. During this one hour or so debate, it was unique, different and overwhelming.

Unfortunately, we don’t partake in such exchanges like that very often. Instead, we remain with tunnel vision and pretend we know all of the facts because we’ve been convincing ourselves that we’ve heard it all before and compartmentalize any opposition before we actually even hear the first opposing word.

There’s not enough debate in this country as it is, and the very little there is remains locked up in despair because people have already decided what is and is not “debate”. So, like the whole Crucial Conversations joke of an educational module, we are doomed to treat debate as opposition to good conversation, leaving us in a state of rarely ever learning anything new. And that is truly sad.