In which we get all historical

I continue to find it curious that my post in which I mentioned the EILDR (the Eternal Irrelevant LD Resolution, “Resolved: Some b.s. or other that doesn’t matter because you’re just going to argue what you feel like arguing anyhow”) has been viewed about five times as much as any other recent entry. Obviously it touches a nerve. Or maybe schools are just getting ready to vote for it this summer at NatNats and have done with it.

Having recently read about a tenth of an article on RVIs on the Briefly site, I realize that my lack of knowledge of modern LD and my lack of interest in modern LD are now in perfect alignment. The article, which begins by bemoaning the lack of debating the actual resolutions, goes on (and on) about theory and combating theory and all sorts of analysis of the mechanics of rounds, and I’ll bow to its authority I guess but I can’t say I cared much. Come to think of it, almost all the articles they publish go way inside baseball, talking about the mechanics and leaving me totally cold. I mean, strategy and tactics are one thing, but meta analysis of meta analysis is, well, way too meta for my taste. Even the people who wish we were debating resolutions, like the author of the RVI article, are pulled into the abyss.

So I look to the history of LD. I wasn’t there at the very beginning, but close enough, I think. Given that the point was to develop an activity different from policy, early LD was very much not policy, and very much concerned with basic ethics. It drew on canonical writers like Locke and Mill, which have always struck me as good starting texts for high school students interested in philosophy, and argued mostly about conflicting rights. Some of the resolutions were remarkably ethereal (e.g., bad government vs. no government) but if nothing else, the rounds were generally accessible. Accessibility was, in fact, a touted virtue, later to be one of the touted virtues of PF. Unfortunately, accessibility is in direct opposition to the average debater’s self-image. The great debater is the master of arcana, not of open discussion. The more arcane the study and the less accessible to the average human, the better and smarter it must be.

The first move away from the classic LD brought reams of evidence into rounds. It brought the subjects being discussed a little more down to earth, and I don’t think this was necessarily a bad thing. Whether the topics drove the reach toward evidence or the reach toward evidence drove the topics is moot. Topics became more real world, meaning that real-world analysis (i.e., facts) were needed, and people started to have cards in LD rounds. We were still connected to classic ethics, though. This was, to me, a fun period in the life of the activity. You learned some stuff about the world, but continued to analyze it from a workable philosophical position.

It was probably just a matter of time before people tossed out the canonical ethicists and brought in some sort of replacement. Seeing that much of the judging was done by college students studying philosophy, it makes sense that the philosophy they were studying, and passing down to their judgees (and the people they trained at summer camps), was the fashion of the day. To LD’s great misfortune, the introduction of the replacements for the canon coincided with the last dying gasps of postmodernism in academia. For all practical purposes, academia was moving on past most of the unreadable nonsense of the pomos, but we managed to latch onto it as if it were still all the rage. I think part of this may have been driven by the college students’ yearning for something, well, inaccessible, and the unreadable drivel promoted as philosophy by a lot of pomos filled the bill. If you could claim to make sense of this material, you must be quite the clever one. The fact that much of this material, even if it did make sense, was irrelevant to ethical issues was beside the point. The muddle that resulted in LD rounds was dreadful. You would listen to nonsense that its purveyors were totally convinced was anything but, and when both debaters bought into it, you would just shake your head in sorrow. Of course, they did use some more classic sources, like Nietzsche, for instance. But anyone who knows anything about Nietzsche would probably suggest that, as a guide for ethical behavior, you might want to look elsewhere. Foucault, on the other hand, survived this usage, and it’s probably unfair to toss him in with the Derridas of life. Foucault will be read long after Derrida has become just a footnote (which, probably, was the day before yesterday, at least).

Pomo finally passed into the discarded old ideas bin, to be replaced by an even worse idea, that it was possible to argue something other than the resolution. Whether or not the pomo debates and all their resulting kritiks led to this is another moot point, but somehow the road was paved with arguments that precede our ability to analyze the resolution. Also, theory, developed to combat abuses, somehow grew up to become an argument virtually aside from abuses. Not to put to fine a point on it, but every interpretation of the resolution is not abusive, but it would seem as if every round were about theory, i.e., abusive readings of the resolution, and there you are. Between theory and a priori arguments, you never have to look at another resolution again, and all of a sudden the EILDR isn’t all that funny. You can pick your favorite subject, draw a tenuous link from the resolution or quickly demonstrate that the resolution is abusive on face, and you’re off. You can now draw on whatever scholarship you like about whatever subject it is you’re promoting. You’re on your own.

I have no idea whether or not there are good debates going on anymore in LD. No doubt the folks who have pushed for and developed off-topic debating are perfectly content, especially if their non-resolutional goals are serving their personal agendas, e.g., all debates being about racial or gender politics. The question of whether these agenda-oriented debates move the needle on those agendas is yet another moot point, although a very interesting one. We’ll probably get to discussing that eventually.

EILDR. Sort of sounds like the name of an elf in the The Hobbit.