Debacle Debate
Monday at last! There are times when I roundly detest weekends with their enforced inactivity. This morning has been doubly pleasant by this week being the spring break of the public shuls around and the teacher taliban was blissfully absent from the zoo that is the Scant City gym.
This morning’s podcast was an episode of CBC’s “Best of Ideas”, one from back just before christmas, a Monk debate dealing with interventions.[1] The debate was at once both whacked and one sided. The liberal position was argued on a structure hopelessly illogically posited and emotionally elaborated. The whackedness arose from the failure of either side, or the debate proponents, to put the whole thing on a reasonably structured basis of considering the maze of interactions between a myriad of organizations and their members.
But what the podcast did, aside from its treatment that was so macabre as to actually be humorous, a miscarriage rather in the venue of that old Disney movie “The Black Hole” that is ostensibly science fiction or SF or scifi or something but is none of these so much as it is unintentional parody, was to put me in consideration of debates.
Supposedly debates are the province of the nerd, at least according to Benjamin Nugent in his book American Nerd. [Link] As entertaining as the book is, and occasionally accurate, it fails to adequate distinguish between the geek and the nerd. And therein lies the root, I fear.
Debates are conducted using a strict complex of rules, and winning a debate is usually more about how one uses the rules to one’s benefit more than it is about the information presented. However, since that information is all factoid and almost never critical, nor even mathematically based, it becomes patently clear that the debate is a social activity of geeks. It is highly structured, rule based, and requires little in the way of social adaptation. Further, the only creativity involved is that of mangling the rules in a legalistic fashion. An ideal situation for geeks, especially geeks who want to become justicers.
I should also offer that debates are not “won”, a matter of subjective judgment, by accuracy or solution, but by how well a case is presented or argued. This is a very attractive thing for a geek since all that is involved is arms length structure behavior, but neither direct social interaction, nor basic creativity, nor even actual understanding, just passing familiarity and factoid possession.
It is with a degree of shame that I admit to having once been in a debate, an exercise conducted in a high shul psychology class that in retrospect seems to have been designed as a means of occupying class time in lieu of actual education. My memory of it is that it was less effort than a term paper but infinitely less satisfying and productive. Happily I discovered in college that scientists tended not to have debates – a fact always overlooked by the mystical superstitious – and did real work and decided things based on testable, verifiable measures.
Which is what got reinforced this morning at gym.
[1] Yes, I know that is almost three months old. I told you I subscribe to more podcasts than I have occasion to listen to so I tend to get behind.
