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I have no idea why I took Debate 101 my sophomore year of high school back in the Paleolithic. I‘m not an enthusiastic public speaker. Nor have I ever been inclined to become one. 

Perhaps I was interested in learning advanced debating techniques so I’d always triumph in the important debates of daily life:

“You think you deserve that last piece of pizza? Let me tell you why you don’t.”

The explanation may be simpler:

1. My personal experience suggests that teenagers aren’t terribly bright
2. My later, more evolved, experience as a high school junior and senior suggests that sophomores aren’t terribly bright either.

Entering Debate 101, I was:

1. a teenager and…
2. a sophomore

The evidence, however circumstantial, is enough to convict.

If I was interested in learning debate technique, I was disappointed: the debate class wasn’t designed to systematically instruct students to taking apart their own position, reassemble it into a stronger position, and then use their new strong position to destroy their opponent’s position. This debate class was designed to cull skilled debaters out of the general student body who would then go on and compete in regional and state debate competitions. Some technique was dispensed from time to time in miserly bursts, Mostly though, it was one instruction-free speaking assignment after another. Those with innate debating instinct went on to join the school team with all the glory that bestowed (not much). The rest of the class had to live with disappointment (again, not much).

A debate format we were taught, Lincoln-Douglas (or LD), roughly followed this format I’ve adapted from Wikipedia:

1. The Affirmative (the person in favor of a proposition like “Free pepperoni pizza is a human right”) reads a pre-written case. Time taken: 6 minutes.

2. The Negative (the person against a proposition i.e. “No commie pinko scum, free pizza will destroy the fabric of society and lead to dancing”) cross-examines the Affirmative in an attempt to trip them up. Time taken: 3 minutes.

3. The Negative reads a pre-written case against a proposition and moves on to savage the Affirmative’s case without ruth. Time taken: 7 minutes.

4. The Affirmative cross-examines the Negative (“Why is it you want to make the pizza deprived into glue?”. Time taken: 3 minutes.

5. The Affirmative dissects both their opponent’s case and their own. Time taken: 4 minutes.

6. The Negative dissects the dissection of the Affirmative and summarizes the debate for the judge. Time taken: 6 minutes.

7. The Affirmative dissects the Negatives dissection of the Affirmatives’ dissection and summarizes the round for the judge. Time taken: 3 minutes

The LD format is adversarial: one debater speaks in favor of a proposition and their one speaks against it. Points are awarded by a judge. The winner is the debater who wins on most points.

I don’t know the specific format or scoring criteria my debate class used. I do remember the essence: if, in the course of your debate, you conceded that any of your opponent’s arguments had successfully debunked your own, you lost points. No points were given for being agreeable. Points were only given for being disagreeable. The more disagreeable, the better.

Being a mid-tier debater, I was pitted against a offensive lineman from our 4A state champion high school football team. I have linebacker height but not linebacker bulk: my debate opponent (we’ll call him “Brett”) outweighed me by 30-60 pounds. If our confrontation had been physical, I would have been dead. But I figured I was a better debater than “Brett”. I thought I could best him at LD.

Though we weren’t taught killer debate techniques, I had enough peasant cunning to throw “Brett” off. When our face off came, I threw all sorts of rhetorical tricks at “Brett” to make him concede that his positions were erroneous. I managed to be on offense even when I was technically on defense. My cross-examination peppered “Brett” from all sides. I’m sure my mid-tier dazzle was sufficiently dazzling.

It turns out being an offensive lineman is good preparation for LD debate. “Brett” did not counter-punch much and his counter-punches were ineffective but, in the end, it didn’t matter: Brett stolidly held his ground against my rush and conceded no points. I conceded no points because I was on offense the entire time. So it was a draw. We both got an A.

The argumentative hypothesis of human reason advanced by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber suggests that, as it goes in LD, it also goes in life: the purpose of human reason is not truth but victory. It not an disinterested search for ultimate enlightenment. It is an intensely self-interested search for wins.

And, as in LD, to win victory, you don’t yield on points. We reason to generate arguments. Weaponizing arguments is the highest calling reason. If reason produces arguments that win through an accurate approximation of the world as it really is, truth and victory align. If victory requires arguments that are more truthful than factual, truth and victory may never align.

Politics is the division of power. It divides through reinforcing cycles of fragmentation and consolidation. Fragmentation creates political opportunity by opening cracks in the division of power that can be selectively widened until they break off and you can grab your share of the fallout. Consolidation forecloses political opportunity by sealing cracks in your division of power so others can’t take power away from you.

A human trait is universally condemned by contemporary opinion is “confirmation bias“. Confirmation bias is commonly portrayed as a “bug” in our mental software since our first instinct is to search for evidence that reinforces our existing worldview rather than evidence that disproves it.

I disagree. If the argumentative hypothesis is valid, confirmation bias is no more a bug than “Brett” holding his position in the offensive line against a pass rusher is a “bug” or “Brett” holding his position against my cross-examining aggression is a “bug”.

In divying up power, any crack in your own power is a bug: they are an open opportunity for others to increase their power at your expense. Since argument is just one more means of dividing power, its consistency may be the hobgoblin of small minds to some but its inconsistency is a danger to minds of any size and the power they think they command.

Violent argument may seem the polar opposite of verbal argument but the underlying logic of seeking to fragment the power of others while consolidating your own is the same for both verbal and violent argument. The writings of the 19C French military theorist Ardant du Picq convincingly demonstrated that more battle casualties happen after one side breaks and runs then when both sides are holding their position. When one side breaks and runs, the other side can run them down and easily kill them from behind. If both sides stand and fight, casualties are lower: they face each other’s protected, up-armored front. (Poor du Picq later died from wounds suffered during a French battlefield defeat that ended in retreat during the Franco-Prussian War c of 1870-1871).

The victor in battle was the side that stayed consolidated while making the other side fragment. Sometimes the winning side uses a ruse to cause fragmentation: one favored tactic of cavalry generals from William the Bastard to Genghis Khan was feigning retreat before suddenly turning and attacking now that, in their instinctive rush to run down a fleeing enemy, their enemy was suddenly out of position.

Other times, one side’s patience reached the knife’s sharpest edge and a sudden event, rumor, or tremor of emotion caused them to fragment in ways opportune for the other side. In war, psychological breakage usually occurs long before physical breakage. Having to physical annihilate an enemy who holds their ground, painstakingly killing each enemy fighter one by one, is rare. When it happens, it’s as draining for attacker as it is for attacked. Infamously, the refusal (or inability) of Japanese soldiers to run away from overwhelming American firepower turned the War in the Pacific into a nightmarish quagmire of attrition.

In another debate format we studied that sophomore year of high school, the Congressional Debate format, the winners are those debate participants who give the best speeches under the constraints of Robert’s Rules of Order, the procedures that hypothetically govern procedures in the United States House of Representatives. Students who gain the floor are able to introduce legislation following the rules of the House. Other students can then speak for or against the bill during the time allotted. The bill then receives an up or down vote.

During the one Congressional Debate I participated in, a student introduced a bill to increase funding for hydroelectric dam construction. He gave an impassioned speech in favor of his bill. His main argument was that power generated by such dams was more environmentally friendly than power generated from fossil fuels.

His argument was constructed to fend off challenges from the right. It was reasonably well-fortified against attacks from that vector. However, structural weaknesses of his position suggested an obvious counter-ploy. I took the floor and made an easy kill by lackadaisically punching through his wide open left flank by decrying the “terrible environmental damage” wrought by hydroelectric dams. Since, even way back then and even in the Most Conservative State in the Union™, students were systemically indoctrinated by education and media into a reflexive left environmentalism, his bill was overwhelmingly voted down.

Normally, practiced debaters don’t throw up gimmes that let you feign retreat only to suddenly turn on them once they’re out of positon. However, this was a melee between students who’d, possibly, never encountered each other before and, possibly, never encountered each other thereafter. They were also mostly:

1) teenagers and…

2) sophomores

…with all the limitations those states imply.

They were like settled farmers, fighting on foot, who encounter steppe nomads riding on horseback for the first time: the nomads ran the obvious ploy, the farmers fell for it and chased them, the horse riders on their adorable little ponies swung around with unanticipated speed, and slaughter ensued.

However, such crude tactics don’t work against entrenched infantry well-schooled in the cunning of the steppes. They also don’t work against entrenched debaters schooled in the earthy cunning of rhetoric. Facing that species of opposition, the gap opened by running to the left while remaining anchored on on the right opens you to deadly counter-charges of You-Were-For-It-Before-You-Were-Against-It-Flip-Floppery inconsistency, Tribute-That-Vice-Gives-To-Virtue hypocrisy, and Profit-Over-Principles/People deceit, among others. Though any argument is designed to win and not to find truth, it’s always a bad argument to say so explicitly. The best argument is arguing that your argument’s purpose is to personify Truth and that opposing arguments are either mistaken or, more insidiously, deliberate falsifications, driven purely by the blackest of political calculation and unenlightened self-interest.

In the future, it will become ever more fashionable for the fashionable to charge enemies with “cognitive bias” instead of or in addition to traditional accusations of inconsistency or opportunism. This attack says that not only is an argument stupid and wrong but that the opponent’s brain is physically incapable of devising any argument that isn’t stupid and wrong. Opponents will look for any sign of panic in your eyes and, on the merest pretense, claim that they have discovered that you suffer from fatal cognitive dissonance, a defensive reaction by defective minds to stiffen their themselves against the radiant obviousness of greater truth.

Minds change, but do so infrequently. The first instinct is to hold your position in the face of events and arguments challenging what you already believe to be true.

This instinct is strong, and rightfully so: political change usually results after power shifts from one argument and to another. Other people have an agenda. They need only the right opportunity to pursue it. When power comes their way, it may seem like a revolution in thought where minds have changed. However, it’s not the balance of belief that changes (at least in the short run) so much as the balance of power tilting suddenly toward one position where, previously, it tilted toward another. When something that was previously improbable or even impossible becomes probable and even possible, it’s not because people didn’t want to do the thing before but, simply, through shifting events, now they can do it.

Back in June 2012, the state of Utah was on fire. As with any event, this was both an opportunity and a danger, depending upon the political position. Most political arguments raised up to cope with the burning already existed. The arguments most frequently advances were those that, hypothetically at least, were those that hit opposing arguments at multiple points simultaneously. Here’s an example posted to slashdot.org on June 24, 2012, with the ambition to be the argument to end all arguments:

The Salt Lake City Tribune reports that more than 9,000 people have been driven from their homes by a wind-whipped wildfire started by two shooters at landfill popular with target shooters who won’t face any charges because they were not breaking any laws. The fire was the 20th this year in Utah sparked by target shooting where low precipitation, dry heat and high winds have hit the West hard, exacerbating the risk that bullets may glance off rocks and create sparks. Despite the increasing problem, local agencies are stuck in a legal quandary — the state’s zealous protection of gun rights leaves fire prevention to the discretion of individuals — a freedom that allows for the careless to shoot into dry hills and rocks. When bullets strike rock, heated fragments can break off and if the fragments make contact with dry grass, which can burn at 450 to 500 degrees, the right conditions can lead to wildfires. Utah Gov. Gary Herbert has called on Utahns to use more “common sense” in target shooting urging target shooters to use established indoor and outdoor ranges instead of tinder-dry public lands. “We can do better than that as Utahns,” says Herbert, calling on shooters to “self-regulate,” since legislation bars sheriff’s officials from regulating firearms. “A lot of the problem we have out here is a lack of common sense.”

Hypothetically, if not in practice, this argument has breathtaking potential: it attacks the dumb rubes that support the other side, those that oppose legislation to deal with anthropomorphic global warming, those that support the right to keep and bear arms, those that want dual use of public lands (roughly 70% of the state of Utah is owned by the Federal government), and Truth and Unreason itself. If backed by sufficient power, the supporters of this argument could disarm the “wrong” voters, restrict recreational activities on public land, impose what they believe will “stop” anthropogenic global warming, and empower Truth and Reason itself. Left unsaid is that, under those same conditions, they’d have the opportunity to do anything else they wanted to as well, since the accomplishment of all the former goals would rid them of most division of powers in the hands of those opposing their other political agenda items.

For example, the “question” of global climate change, is actually five questions:

1. Is the earth getting warmer?
2. If so, what causes global warming?
3. Should something be done about global warming or its causes?
4. If something is done about global warming, what other agenda items can be piggybacked onto the something done?
5. If other agenda items are piggybacked on a solution to global warming, who ends up ruling whom?

Some people view such questions as questions of truth or of morality or even of survival. Whether they are or not is a matter of argument and as such, whatever their truth, morality, or necessity, they are inescapably political questions. And behind any political question is but one inescapable question, infamously posed by Vladimir Illich Lenin as: ??? ????? (“who, whom?”).

Who rules who for whom?

Whatever the virtues of an argument, only fool accepts it without considering the division of power undergirding it or the division of power it will bring about if its premise is accepted.

Unfortunately…

1. We have a bumper crop of fools.
2. Those fools are filled with arguments of passionate intensity.
3. Argument is politics.
4. The only escape from politics is death.

[ by Charles Cameron — closing out a thread that began with anoither recent post of mine ]
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Organ, Berlin Cathedral

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The immediate occasion for this [second] post is my reading about the book Eucharistic Poetry: The Search for Presence in the Writings of John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, and Geoffrey Hill, by Eleanor J. McNees. Her subtitle names four poets I greatly admire, and whose company I would aspire to keep:

Though widely separated chronologically, all four poets use the Anglican and Roman Catholic doctrine of eucharistic Real Presence (the literal embodiment of Christ in the sacrament of Holy Communion) as model for their own poetry. Each poet seeks to charge his words with a dual physical/spiritual meaning that abolishes the gap between word and referent and so creates an immediate presence that parallels Christ’s Real Presence in the Eucharist.

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That pasage, in turn, reminds me of some words John Eliot Gardiner spoke on the topic of Bach and grace,
on the DVD of a rehearsal of Bach’s cantata Christen, ätzet diesen Tag (BWV 63) right after Sara Mingardo sings O Selger Tag. Gardiner first quotes Bach, then translates him:

Nota bene: Bei einer andächtigen Musik ist allezeit Gott mit seiner Gnaden Gegenwart.” Now I find that very, very significant. That he’s saying wherever there is devotional music, God with his grace is present.

How close is that to the poets McNees talks about, creating with their poems “an immediate presence that parallels Christ’s Real Presence in the Eucharist”?

And then he comments —

Which, from a strict theological point of view is probably heresy, heretical, because it’s saying that music has an equivalent potency to the word of God.

I’m not so sure about the heresy, but this is the point at which I turn to Lexington Green‘s comment on a recent post of mine, in which he quoted the Cathecism of the Catholic Church:

1374 The mode of Christ’s presence under the Eucharistic species is unique. It raises the Eucharist above all the sacraments as “the perfection of the spiritual life and the end to which all the sacraments tend.” In the most blessed sacrament of the Eucharist “the body and blood, together with the soul and divinity, of our Lord Jesus Christ and, therefore, the whole Christ is truly, really, and substantially contained.” “This presence is called ‘real’ – by which is not intended to exclude the other types of presence as if they could not be ‘real’ too, but because it is presence in the fullest sense: that is to say, it is a substantial presence by which Christ, God and man, makes himself wholly and entirely present.”

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Whether in the performance and hearing of Bach, Christ can be said to be “wholly and entirely” or “devotionally and musicially” present is a delicate question, one part ontological and absolute, I’d suppose, and one part epistemological and subjective.. but I find myself in warm agreement with Gardiner’s elaboration of his theme..

And I think that in essence is why Bach is so attractive to us today because he is saying that the very act of music-making and of coming together is, in a sense, an act which invokes the latency, the potency, the potentiality of God’s grace, however you like to define God’s grace; but of a benediction that comes even in a dreadful, overheated studio like Abbey Road where far too many microphones and there’s much too much stuff here in the studio itself, that if one, as a musician, puts oneself in the right frame of mind, then God’s grace can actually come and direct and influence the way we perform his music.

I really must read me some Hans Urs von Balthasar.

[ by Charles Cameron — relics of a catacombs martyr, St Valentine and more ]
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There are times when the DoubleQuote format is confining, and the comparative method it is based on could be uswed effectively with more than two examples. Here consider also:

The Tamil Tiger martyr Jenny, as discussed in a fascinating article by anthropologist Michael Roberts aka Thuppahi, Death and Eternal Life: contrasting sensibilities in the face of corpses:

The Al-Qaida martyr al-Zubayr al-Sudani as screencapped by Chris Anlazone:

And the Irish Catholic martyr Michael Collins as portrayed in death by Sir John Lavery:

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Buddha is reported to have said:

Of all the footprints, that of the elephant is supreme. Similarly, of all mindfulness meditation, that on death is supreme.

The cover of American Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky‘s book of poems, Gulf Music, features a Tibetan Buddhist Dance of Death:

Likewise, the Jesuit St Peter Faber meditates on the crucifixion and death of Christ:

Jesus Christ, may your death be my life
and in your dying may I learn how to live.
May your struggles be my rest,
Your human weakness my courage,
Your embarrassment my honor,
Your passion my delight,
Your sadness my joy,
in your humiliation may I be exalted.
In a word, may I find all my blessings in your trials.
Amen.

while Hans Holbein invites us to contemplate death behind the varied appearances of human life:

[ by Charles Cameron — capable photographers capture “form” in their viewfinders, not just “content” ]
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A toothy sea

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I have just been browsing someone’s choice of the “100 best photographs ever taken without photoshop”, and was struck by the ways in which form in general, and contrasts in juxtaposition more specifically — two of my recurring interests, form and the DoubleQuotes respectively — kept cropping up. I’ll get to them, and offer some stepped-down images from the series —

but first, take a look at the whole series as posted at The 100 best photographs ever taken without photoshop. Even the reduction to 60% of published size necessitated by the ZP column width loses much of the beauty — and imagine how they’d be as actual framed prints, in their original full sizes!

Someone’s choices? Yes, and by no means necessarily the best choices — this selection no doubt answers to a selection bias in the individual who put the series together — so the patterns I’m seeing here may belong either to that individual, or to the general human delight in contrasts, parallelisms and oppositions.

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Earth and Sky, Heaven and Earth:

Waterspout on Lake Victoria, Uganda

Fickle moods

Volcanic eruption in Iceland

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The seasons: time as change

An autumn forest. 50 percent Downloaded

Autumn and winter meet in Colorado, USA

Autumn and winter meet in Miklukhin, Rostov region, Russia

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Human impact observed:

Two worlds divided, New York, USA

Celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Kim Il-sung, North Korea’s founder

An Italian beach

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On reflection, sheer, simple symmetries:

The aftermath of a flood in Ljubljana, Slovenia

An eagle soaring over a lake in Canada

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And that’s only a fraction of what the whole series of a hundred photos offers us. Each of these, I’d submit, is what I’d term a DoubleQuote in the Wild.

One final shot, color against grey — perhaps the loveliest of all:

A temple covered in ash from the Ontake volcanic eruption, Japan

So much humanity, so much pathos there.

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Brilliant minds in both the arts and sciences focus as much on form as on content — on patterns, repetitions, symmetries for their own sakes, as much as on the particulars of the fields they study and in which they find them. At heart, this is a matter of aesthetic cognition.

We would do well to cultivate this kind of double vision — the awareness of form as well as content — across the board, from education and the arts to the sciences and strategy.

The moment we become polarized, however, in terms of a political or other form of partisanship, content becomes all we see (and agree or disagree with), and form effectively evaporates. In terms of the images above, we see earth or sky, summer or autumn, town or country — left or right — but not — but no longer — the whole.

[ by Charles Cameron — architectural history as a question in philosophy — Palmyra ]
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Future?

A jailed activist’s 3-D models could save Syria’s history from ISIS https://t.co/4YjbSuaOwB pic.twitter.com/K8daGICoUW

— WIRED (@WIRED) October 21, 2015

Past?

#Getty Research Institute Acquires 150-Year-Old Photographs of #Palmyra and Beirut http://t.co/wuRsA5VfZZ

— Mariam (@Mariamirani) October 13, 2015

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I’ll admit my preference for “past” — but is it just “the patina of antiquity”I’m appreciating?

What building from the first decades of this millennium might people think worth preserving — or destroying — a thousand years hence?

And what if the present should arise and fade, unaided?