So here’s the deal. I have no idea how many judges in the world are prejudiced in favor of NFL-style debate (i.e., you debate the resolution, you achieve your value), but the number is not insubstantial, and at many tournaments represents the majority of the pool. Yet even at those, shall we say, conservative tournaments, digressive debaters doing anything but arguing the resolution and defending their value do very, very well. How could this be?
There are a number of possible answers, but I’m only going to present one of them.
A small but not insignificant number of debaters are intrigued by fashionable argumentation, which at the moment includes theory, kritik, off-case discussions, etc. This material, whatever its inherent value in the activity, is seen as hip—fashion is called fashion for a reason—and there is unquestionably a strategic advantage to running this sort of material in front of college student judges (who, in fact, may be responsible for much of it). As the same time, you would think that there’s a strategic disadvantage to running this sort of material in front of traditional judges. It is not unusual for major tournaments to be chockablock with those college judges, many of whom are being paid for those services, who are perceived as knowledgeable about the activity by tab (which is highly unlikely to be ranking them according to their paradigms—God knows I never have), and who are therefore in round after round, but there are plenty of those other judges in attendance as well, who are as inclined to think as poorly of digressive debate as these college judges are inclined to think positively of it. Yet the digressives are picking up the conservative ballots. How is this happening?
First of all, not all of the digressive debaters are necessarily good, and not all the digressive debaters are picking up all their ballots. The material they have chosen as the basis of their strategy is complex, and it’s easy to get lost in the intricacies of theory (debate or critical) and the like. We’ll exclude these schmegeggies.
But there is a select group of digressives who are good. The thing is, this is tough material, and some of the smartest people are attracted to it, and because they’re smart, they master it. Logical enough, regardless of your opinion of the material. (And if a debater is thinking strictly $ircuit, there’s hardly a down side to digressive strategy at all.) So, right off the bat, we have some of our smartest debaters attracted to material of a nature we’ll call Parmesan Debate, so as to skip the linguistic offensives of either pro- or di-gressive. We’ll call the kind of debate they’re not doing Romano Debate.
Switch to the tournament environment. Things are going hot and heavy. In a particular round we have a Parmesan Debater versus a Romano Debater. But here’s the thing. The Parmesan Debater is very very good and very very smart, while the Romano Debater is merely very good and very smart. The judge, despite his particular taste in cheese, will vote for the debater who wins on the grounds set by the debaters. In this contest, the Parmesan Debater has the natural advantages of skill and smarts, and wins the debate not because they are Parmesan but because they are, intrinsically, the better debater. Their cheese didn’t win, their brain won.
At many, many tournaments, it could be that the best and the brightest at that tournament are, by their own choice, Parmesan Debaters. Any tournament field will be dominated by its best and the brightest, and if that best and the brightest are Parmesan Debaters, Parmesan Debate will dominate the tournament. (Some of the best and the brightest may also be Romano Debaters, and in that case, flip a coin, but as long as they’re outnumbered as percentage of the field, they’ll be outnumbered as percentage of the elimination rounds.) My point is, obviously, not that the style of debate is winning, or even responsible for the win, so much as the people who choose to do it. They’re picking up even Romano judge ballots, not because their cheese is better, but their cheese making is better.
From here, you can look at all the various reasons/influences/whatever that are responsible for Parmesan Debate in the first place, and address them separately. But don’t address them as being responsible for more victories in the debate arena. It just may not be true, even if every single round at a given tournament is won by Parmesan Cheese. It could have been Romano. Hell, it could have been Provolone. The cheese isn’t what’s doing the job here.
Still, it’s incredible that so many of the finest would be attracted by mere fashion. Where are the iconoclasts when you really need them?
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