None of the Above

I enjoyed this week of chezes discussing the topic with a small number of people. It reminded me of the good old days, when the entire team fit into the backseat of a VW Beetle, and meetings were exclusively topic discussions at the chez, or close to exclusively topic discussions. We would talk about other stuff too, but mostly it was like fine dinner conversation without the fine dinner. I don't love these because I get to stay home, but because everybody gets a chance to talk fairly equally. There's a big difference between Menick at a blackboard and Menick in a comfy chair, at least in the playing out of chitchat. I'm going to institute a weekly topic analysis session, at the chez, on Wednesdays, from 7-8. With a signup, limited to 7 people (more than that would get out of hand). People can come or not, and the session would occur provided that there's enough interest (i.e. 2 or more people on a given week). We'll see how it works out.

I also like the fact that we've now isolated the three sides of any debate round: affirmative, negative, and none-of-the-above. The fashion of NOTA drives the average coach crazy, for a variety of reasons, chief among them being that LD is intended for reasoned discourse on the theoretical problems of the day, and NOTA encourages mere academic flummery. The new topic, for instance, asks to evaluate whether the US is right to push its democratic ideals in foreign nations. This is an interesting question that raises many issues of history and politics and cultural identity and hegemony and whatnot. NOTA looks at the topic and says, for instance, that governments are intrinsically amoral and therefore immune from questions of right and wrong. This would be run, presumably, as a negative, but it isn't. It supports both sides (or undermines both sides). A NOTA., by definition. Of course, at least that particular argument is orthodox NOTA. The latest NOTAs take recent postmodern scholarship (which is something of an oxymoron) and apply that to the topic: On one level or another, relativism precludes the resolution; pick your pomo guru to support it. Preferably a Frenchman.

The French have a lot to answer for.

The thing is, that's the stuff colleges teach nowadays, and a number of LD folks are in college or recent graduates immersed in this stuff. Literary and linguistic scholarship is often conducted only at the level of structuralism and relativism and deconstructionism. Study of the narrative has been replaced by the study of narration. Now I'm as into heuristics as the next guy, but sometimes the text is the context, and the subtext as the signifier of the inherent non-relativistic ur-texts worthy of disputation is a lot of ... malarkey. Or as the French say, "la malarque." Indeed, Derrida, before he "died," was working on a book with that very title, "La Malarque," in which he admitted that he was in fact an illiterate wrangler of truffle pigs who just happened to strike it big on the pomo market when some hapless graduate student mistranslated his as-told-to book "Les Champignons de Provence" as "No God, No Radio."

The problem that results from this scholarship is simple. A small coterie of pomos push their ideas down on high school students. At the very least they divert these students from the real text of the resolutions, and at the worst, they force these students to study texts that are simply beyond their educational training. Debaters are probably the smartest 16-year-olds in the universe, but should we be teaching them the latest fashion in philiosophy before they master the norms? Did Picasso paint abstracts before he learned to draw figures and mix paint? High School LD is about the only active venue for high schoolers to study any philosophy at all. And maybe, ever again. Being canonical may be dull, from the post-graduate point of view, but isn't it best for the students? It is probably not a winning approach, compared to running some hifalutin case that only a mother (or a pomother) could love—or understand—but it would much better serve the purpose of the activity.