Debate world champion explains how to argue | Bo Seo
– 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. – Get smarter, faster with videos from the world's biggest thinkers. To learn even more from the
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