I’ve said this before but I’m going to say it again. In the unlikely event that I am judging a round that you are in, please try to actually debate at least as much as you talk about debating. The last I heard, this activity was called “Lincoln-Douglas Debate,” not “Lincoln-Douglas Describe What You Have to Do and Then What Your Opponent Has to Do, And if There’s Any Time Left Over, Do It.”
Jeesh.
Debate theory, whatever that is (it’s handed down by tribal lore for the most part, making it difficult to understand if you happen to either not be a member of the tribe or didn’t happen to be sitting with your little drum by the campfire that night), has a nasty habit of pushing debating off the page entirely. A debater thinks, before writing a case: this is what I have to do to win. After thinking about this, the debater mentally adds: this is what my opponent has to do to win. In other words, consciously or unconsciously, our debater has laid out the theory of the round at hand. But here comes the problem. Rather than doing what it is that the debater thinks needs to be done, instead the debater writes up what would need to be done if a debate were to ensue along the links of the thinking so far. The debater writes up what the debater’s side has to do, and what the opponent’s side has to do, and six minutes of content later, the case is written. There’s only one thing wrong with this scenario: the debater never actually does the doing of it. He or she merely talks about doing it.
Jeesh again.
The delineation of burdens for the sides is hardly a new business, but somewhere over the last couple of years it has gone from a clear-cut, well-defined statement of a sentence or two into the entire body of the case. In defending or attacking economic sanctions, sides might elect not to discuss the harms and benefits of economic sanctions, preferring instead to spend their entire constructive time discussing how, if there were any harms or benefits of economic sanctions, their side would, by default, have to win. Huh? At the point where no argument is made that strongly proves that there are, indeed, the harms or benefits, all the talking about who wins or loses predicated on the existence of harms and benefits disappears. You’re not debating sanctions anymore. Frankly, I don’t know what you’re debating. So the question becomes, how can you win a debate on economic sanctions if you never actually spend any time arguing for or against economic sanctions? In a word, you really can’t. You end up relying on the exegesis of the structure of a hypothetical case about sanctions to convince a judge to vote for you, spending all your time on discussing that hypothetical case rather than presenting a real case. All the judge can do is marvel at your understanding of what the debate would have been, if you had ever done it. But you didn’t. At which point, no matter how you slice it, the judge flips a mental coin, if he or she is even marginally buying what you’re selling, or votes for the opposite side, if that side did, by some quirk of forensic recidivism, actually present a strong position for or against sanctions.
Try this: My burden in writing this blog entry is to convince you that something bad is happening, explain as best I can why and how it’s happening, and show why it’s results are bad. My burden is to provide a clear analysis of the thing as best I can, with examples, and demonstrate the impacts of that thing. Okay, those two sentences are, in essence, the theory of this entry. I could go on at much greater length discussing how I have to convince you, how examples work, how impacts work, etc., but I’ve taken a more classic approach. Look at the entry from the beginning. I started with, I hope, an eye-catching opening. Then I go into an explanation of exactly what I’m talking about, capping it with a prediction of what will happen vis-à-vis the judging when it does occur. A classic essay, if I do say so myself, as compared to this paragraph, with is the discussion of an essay. This paragraph has no content relative to debate: all its content is relative to essay-writing, and to the success or failure of my essay writing away from the body of the essay itself. This is the same as theory, which has no content relative to the resolution: it’s all about debating, not economic sanctions. And here’s the crux of it: My ability to convince you that I am right or wrong is not affected one way or another by this paragraph, because it contains no real arguments.
Theory has its place, of course. But its place is not front and center, every round. Have all LD judges lost the ability to follow a discussion of content in favor of a discussion of discussion? Maybe the thing is that theory arguments, removed from the need to pay attention to contentions, make the judge’s job a lot easier. Who would win if there were a debate is a lot easier to adjudicate than a lot of facts and arguments juxtaposed against one another. Maybe theory isn’t some grand development of LD after all. Maybe it’s just lazy debating and lazy judging.
That wouldn’t surprise me in the least. It’s not easy defending or attacking economic sanctions, and the topic was no doubt selected because of its richness. Defending or attacking how one’s opponent looks at a debate round, on the other hand, is virtually rote and almost inevitably topic-agnostic.
Give me the old-fashioned resolution any day of the week.
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