Listen to those who have gone before: Part 1

Listen to Those Who Have Gone Before

There’s an old saying that my mother used to tell me: God gave you two ears and one mouth, so you should listen twice as much as you talk. When you listen before you talk, you are able to understand the context of the situation better and discern what exactly are the right words to say. You seem more wise, make more friends, and get into a lot less trouble that way.

Because debate is essentially a conversation, this principle applies to us debaters as well. We love to talk (that’s kind of what we’re at a tournament to do), but there is a vital form of listening that we should practice before we start opening our mouth: the art of listening to those who have gone before. This is Tip #2 in our series (see here, here, and here for Tip #1). 

Tip #2: Broadly research the topic

In my first years of competition, I would write the resolution down, define the key terms, and then scour the depths of my brain for the best arguments that I could think of. It seemed a logical way to do things; after all, once you understand what the topic is about, there’s nothing left to do but write arguments about it, right? Well, not quite. Using this method, my arguments tended to look something like this:

Resolution: Preemptive warfare is morally justified.

Thought process for the Negative side: Well, “preemptive warfare” is defined as “An attack initiated on the basis of incontrovertible evidence that an enemy attack is imminent.”* You attack your enemy first because you have really, really good reason to think that they’re going to attack you. However, even “really, really good reasons” don’t mean the anticipated war is 100% guaranteed. Even though it seems really obvious, there could possibly be a misunderstanding between us and our enemies. Maybe we misinterpreted some message from their ambassador because of a cultural barrier. We shouldn’t start a war when we could be wrong.

Argument for the Negative side: It’s not moral to start wars when we can avoid them. We technically could avoid war because there might be a misunderstanding. So we can’t say that preemptive warfare is morally justified.

This argument makes logical sense. True, there’s no way we can know the future with 100% certainty. So it’s true that there’s possibly a misunderstanding, and it’s true that we possibly might start a war that could have been avoided. However, this is a very superficial argument. 

How likely is it that we’d have such drastic cultural misunderstandings given our increasingly globalized world? Is this just a hypothetical, or are there any actual examples of preemptive attacks that were launched because the two sides simply didn’t understand each other? Is it worth it to reject “incontrovertible evidence” because of such a slim possibility to the contrary? 

My argument didn’t provide answers to in-depth questions like these. I was sitting alone at my desk and trying to tackle the millenia-old problems of military ethics with my sage 14-year-old wisdom. As a result, my arguments tended to be painfully hypothetical and based on possibilities (wrung from the definitions) rather than probabilities (gleaned from real life). I’d scramble to find applications to fit into my logic, but I mostly would come up empty-handed because I was trying to find examples of how a teenager thought the world worked.

The problem was that I was trying to write checks without having a balance in the bank. I had to conjure up ideas out of what was already in my own head, because I didn’t have anyone else’s ideas already in my head from which I could build. I wasn’t listening before I started talking. So it was such a blessing to eventually hear this bit of wisdom from a coach:

People have been debating about this topic for hundreds of years. Learn from them. If you just sit at your desk and conjure up arguments out of your own head, you’re not going to get very far. Listen to the Great Conversation.

This brings us to the first of four facets of “listening to those who have gone before.” 

(N.B. The goal here is not to become so engrossed in the millions of details that could possibly be explored so that you never get around to writing your case. Your goal is to get a broad feel for the topic and the possible arguments around it so you aren’t completely lost when you try to write your own case or when you hear an opponent arguing something completely different from you.)

Facet #1: Understanding the Topic

Stoa does not invent debate resolutions. When deciding on resolutions for a new competition season, Stoa does its best to find words that will precisely nail down a debatable topic that has usually been discussed for centuries beforehand. Even with cutting-edge subjects like biomedical engineering, there are bound to be established historical conversations about various facets of the issue: the role of safety in medicine (dating back to at least before Christ), the scientific method (dating back several hundred years), and ethical restrictions on experimentation (widely discussed right after World War II). 

Understanding where we came from is vital to understanding where we’re going. Even if you don’t use a single one of the historical ideas in your case, it will surely be helpful for you as you begin to write brand-new ideas. But you might be surprised at how many of the ideas you thought were new really weren’t. There’s nothing new under the sun...

Even if you’ve already done a tournament or two, researching the historical topic could still be very beneficial. You already have a heads-up on what your fellow competitors are beginning to say, so you have a clearer grasp of what specific parts of the historical conversation are going to be the most beneficial for you to pay attention to. And then you can come back to your next tournament with a bit more wisdom about how these different arguments are fitting together. 

If I had done this with my preemptive warfare topic, I probably would have discovered Just War Theory, the Begin Doctrine, the Bush Doctrine, and other key components of the historical conversation that would have given me a much bigger breadth of understanding. I wouldn’t have been so flat-footed when my opponents used them against me because I would have learned at least a little bit about them beforehand. I also probably would have discovered many more philosophical positions that I could build a case with, and discovered much sooner that arguing “well-there-could-be-a-possibility” just wasn’t at the same caliber. “Well, don’t attack yet—it’s possible we’re misunderstanding them… there’s a possibility those aren’t nuclear missiles… maybe those are just really big fireworks!” 

Stay tuned for three more ways to listen to those who have gone before. ~

*source for definition: Joint Chiefs of Staff, Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, Washington, D.C.: Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2004, p. 415.