``There is nothing quite like the exhilarating experience that comes from
reading a provocative new piece of legal thought. Of course, at some
point this exhilaration will give way to ennui as the new piece of legal
thought unravels -- ultimately to be classified as yet another possibly
clever, perhaps thoughtful, but nonetheless utterly failed contribution.
One characteristic feature of our own postmodern condition is the
breakneck speed with which the second experience succeeds the first.
From exhilaration to failure, the distance has been reduced to a couple of
sentences.'' (Schlag)
The push for the Civil Rights (CR) topic began as a noble quest. It would
transform the debate community, offering real space for reflection and
advocacy. It would be the long-sought bridge between the isolated debate
community and social realities.
Well, these claims were all founded on a fundamental misconception about
the nature of debate, debaters, debating, and the collegiate debate
industry. We assign purpose to debate as a post facto vindication of
debate as recreation or diversion.
Take my high school debate career, for instance. Last I remember, it was
my senior year and I was debating juvenile crime. This was the topic:
finally, I would debate something personally relevant to me, and debate
would move from a serious distraction to a useful endeavor. Visions of
utopia jostled about like the morning breeze. Of course, being a debater,
I wasn't in much of a position to do anything, but that made little
difference; after all, I was being plenty idealistic, and that's what
young pseudo-intellectuals are supposed to do. My high school debate
career ended with an incredibly long losing streak, of nearly 100 rounds,
and I decided to pack things up and try my hand at collegiate debate.
Of course, I would have no part in silly notions such as outreach or
public debate; those are things for the lay public to worry about, and I
was a member of an elite group that had to remain dedicated to the
critical task at hand. There were epic battles of life and death
at hand; bombs exploding, lives hanging in the balances, indeed
racism to be prescribed out of existence by decree. It was all
going incredibly well and incredibly utopianly. Here I was only 20 years
old and effectively keeping the world safe and secure, or at least
destroying it the minimum possible number of times-- I was a hero, nay, I
was a god.
Well, of course, there was the minor detail that none of it was real. But
being marginally intelligent, and being surrounded by the intellectual
elite, this did not present any major difficulty. The trick was to make a
bunch of shoddy answers, to slightly draw the objection into doubt, and
then go on as if it had never even been raised-- ``they say I'm not doing
anything, but we could become policymakers someday,'' and ``they say I
should do something, but the ballot is an opportunity to act,'' or
even better, ``well, duh, we never claimed that we could do the plan, we
just think it's a good idea,'' which was always effective, since it
ostensibly conceded the reality of debate-as-inaction, but trumped it by
appealing to the value of policy prescriptions per se. And of course there
were truisms I could fall back on that incontrovertibly demonstrated the
value of the whole enterprise-- ``argument can educate as well as
emancipate,'' for one.
The fundamental mismatch between the crude vindications for debating and
the practice of debate qua debate were easily ignored. After all, I knew
that debate-ontology was good because it was useful.
Still, I was uneasy somehow. While I was cetain that the enterprise I was
engaged in must be terribly important-- that was apparent from the scale
of its grandeur alone, travel 1000s of mile, fancy hotels, prestige--
there was still this nagging feeling that perhaps doing nothing was doing
nothing. Now, I was certain that I must really be doing something,
because everyone else seemed so convinced, so sure of it. So I asked
them. I asked what debate is, and people laughed. It was not, of course,
unexpected that an industry ostensibly focused on the task of refining
communication and language abilities found it impossible to articulate a
simple definition of itself; in fact, it was, in a sense, the perfect
definition in its lack thereof.
I was confused, to say the least, about what I was doing. But it was all
right; after all, it was still debate, and debate is good; it has to be
good because it is useful, and we know it is useful because it is good. My
logical abilities were razor sharp.
So, I began the 1998-1999 debate season in earnest. I walked to the
debate office and signed up, having been convinced by a friend of mine
that it might be fun. This was an opportunity to calm those lingering
concerns that the whole enterprise was a collosal waste of time; this
topic had real meaning, and would actually do something. (Although
it was an obvious second choice to Tax Reform, which would have surely
advanced my actuarial career, at which I had been working for years.)
This topic would change the way we talk. Yes, that was the problem and
surely this topic could solve it.
Well, the CR topic did not change anything. The nexus between debate and
reality remained tenuous at best. I certainly did not engage in any
political or social action. And if I had, it would have had nothing to do
with debate.
Jackey Massey is, in a sense, correct when he curses the failure of the CR
topic.
Despite my best intentions and efforts, I am a racist.
Despite my best intentions and efforts, I am a sexist.
Despite my best intentions and efforts, I am a heterosexist.
As a mere accident of birth, I have been privileged in countless ways.
His solution, however, is naive, at best; in fact, it is astonishing how
it misses the deeper, structural problem.
``One begins to suspect that the answers given to the question `How should
we talk?' may well have been already scripted by as-yet unarticulated
answers to questions such as: On what or whose terms are we already
talking? What is making us talk? And who or what gets to stop the talk?
One might begin to have these suspicions when one recognizes that even
though the prescriptions for how we should talk all seem to vary
considerably (and never seem to get adopted), the process, the form, the
rhetoric of the argumentation that supports these prescriptions stays
pretty much the same.'' (Schlag)
We can talk about oppression and whiteness and racism and sexism. We can
talk about it all in a different way, through a new lens, perhaps. Jackie
is just making another argument for how debate should go about. If we
merely shift the locus of our argument like so, suddenly debate will have
meaning and purpose. By correcting this minor flaw, debate will be
tweaked to be a vehicle for progress and social change; we'll actually be
doing something meaningful and worthwhile-- once we correctly locate the
faculty of inquisitiveness on the frontal lobe, the science will work
properly.
Debate is inaction. Attempts to reform it and use it as an instrument
towards various ends are frequent, but are quite question begging-- what,
precisely, is worth salvaging? We continue to engage in fantasies about
what agents beyond our control ought to be doing, while we do nothing.
Well, then I thought, slipping back into the past, that maybe doing is
overrated. After all, it's about as meaningless as talking. And so, I
set out to determine was was real and worthwhile after all.
``The social world, the realm in which love, war, friendship, and hatred
manifest themselves, defies realism. Many seek to accurately depict the
world, in the sincere hope that they can use these depictions to change
the world. Ultimately, this aim may be futile; the social world, to use a
term introduced by Jean Baudrillard, is hyperreal. An objective reality
exists, and yet as it is juxtaposed against other "realities," themselves
the products of contending ideologies, modes of communication, and
experiences, it becomes nigh impossible to distinguish between the real
and the unreal. Domains once believed to be distinct of fact and of
fiction, of truth and of lies, of happiness and of suffering gradually
combine seamlessly as moorings are lost and answers are sought;
consequently, the epistemology of the modern world can be described as one
of mass social irrealism, wherein any claims can be made and truth becomes
subjective.'' (Salam)
Well, now this would not do. Someone out there must have meaning for me.
After all, everyone else was going about quite happily as if everything
made perfect sense. I must have been missing something glaringly obvious.
Well, I am still missing it, whatever it is. I lack meaning and purpose,
and am unsure of nearly everything. I am, however, convinced that the CR
topic was always already a failure, because debate itself is,
fundamentally, a worthless diversion. It is impossible to do something
important in the context of an enterprise designed to diffuse and destroy
both advocacy and action.
Debate teaches what it has to teach in a year, maybe two. After
that it is at best a waste of time, and at worst a truly dangerous
obsession.
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