Bad Conversations

The Limits of Speech and Debate

When I was a sophomore in high school, I joined the speech and debate team. Initially, we won a lot. We qualified for nationals. But the longer I was on the speech and debate team, the more I thought about the arguments we were making. They weren’t as good as they could be. In my junior year, I decided to try to make even better arguments. But these better arguments were less successful. By the end of junior year, it was clear to me that the speech and debate conversation was fettered - there was a limit on how good you could make it. If you tried to push the limit, you would be punished.

There were reasons for this. The judges in speech and debate are usually the parents of the students. So, they have a specific class background and a particular media diet. If you make middle-class arguments grounded in an understanding of middle-class culture, you win. Most high school students would consider themselves to be successful in life if they achieved the same class position as these parents. If you learn to think like the lawyers, doctors, and engineers who served as debate judges, you would be able to go to college and get a degree and work in these fields. In time, you would acquire the things these people possessed - houses and spouses and kidlets and so on.

Now, there were plenty of people who struggled to figure out how to make arguments that were compelling to the middle-class parents. For these people, becoming a lawyer, doctor, or engineer was a difficult challenge. Because speech and debate helped these people to achieve normal, everyday success, they love speech and debate. They think it’s great, because it trained them to think and act more like a successful middle-class person. They worked hard to be what they are, and they feel they’ve earned everything that they’ve got.

But if you were able to succeed in speech and debate at a relatively early point, then there’s an opportunity to experiment, to try to push past this level of consciousness. Now, when most people do this and start to lose debate matches, they think they’ve made a mistake. They assume that because they are losing, this must mean that they’re going crazy. So, to protect themselves from going crazy, they begin limiting their own intellectual development. They stay within the guard-rails of the arguments that win. This becomes their blueprint for life - they can be lawyers, doctors, or engineers, but only by intellectually restraining themselves, by recoding intellectualism as a kind of madness. They become professional class successes, but they become aware of the sense in which they have compromised to achieve this. This adds a melancholic element to their life. No matter how successful they become on a material level, this melancholic element never goes away. Sometimes it rises to the surface and destroys middle-class life. Many of my favorite films are about this - they are warnings against taking a bad deal.¹

And yet, what’s the alternative? In antiquity, Roman elites often said that a little Greek philosophy is essential, but too much makes you crazy. Too much Greek philosophy makes you into the sort of person who cannot function as a Roman elite, who won’t tolerate the limitations of the kinds of conversations that shape real-world decisions.

But here’s the tricky thing - in the world today, the middle-class conversation is not the sort of conversation that shapes real-world decisions. The lawyers, doctors, and engineers mostly don’t understand how the international political system works. They have a functional education that allows them to operate within legalist, corporatist systems. Their media sources cover world news in a superficial way. The kinds of jobs they do never force them to confront this superficiality, because most of the important things that happen in the world have little direct effect on the work lives of lawyers, doctors, and engineers operating in western countries.

Yet the middle-class conversation cannot be ignored either, because the electoral mechanism allows the middle-class conversation to constrain what can be done. Political actors therefore have to participate in this middle-class conversation while also, at the same time, participating in other conversations. The trouble is that these conversations don’t fit together. To be well-adapted to talk to the middle-class, you have to limit your ability to have an elite conversation about the world, and to have an elite conversation about the world, you have to limit your ability to talk to the middle-class. And, of course, if you are interested in having a conversation with the traditional working class (how old-fashioned of you!), that will only further complicate matters.

Since, in democracy, any project that can succeed politically requires combining these conversations together, the further apart they become, the harder it is to have a viable political project.

We have already discussed three types of speech and debate kids:

1. The kids who never succeed at joining the middle-class conversation.

2. The kids who, through hard work, manage to join the middle-class conversation.

3. The kids who are able to move past the middle-class conversation, but return to it to avoid becoming maladapted to middle-class life.

But then there is the next kind - the kind that quits speech and debate so as to overcome the limits it imposes. These kids want to be unfettered intellectuals. But if you become an unfettered intellectual, if you abandon your ability to talk to the middle class or the working class out of contempt for the quality of these conversations, your iteration of elite discourse will not actually be compatible with democracy. Elite discourse has to actually result in decisions, and since in democracy elite discourse has to be in dialogue with at least middle-class discourse, an elite discourse that rejects middle-class discourse cannot be elite discourse.

When I was in undergrad, I found myself trying to make increasingly complex normative arguments. I was trying to participate in normative political theory, the kind of political theory that results in high-quality publications in the most prestigious academic journals. But whenever I tried to discuss normative political theory with people from home, I realized you cannot actually do anything with this discourse. Arguing about what freedom is, or what equality or justice requires, at what seems to be the highest possible level, produces a kind of conversation that is totally impotent.

And yet, in the university system, you can be heavily rewarded for engaging in this. In this respect, the university system is another iteration of speech and debate. So, this gives us three more types of speech and debate kid:

4. The kids who never succeed in joining the pseudo-elite conversation.

5. The kids who, through hard work, manage to join the pseudo-elite conversation.

6. The kids who are able to move past the pseudo-elite conversation, but return to it to avoid becoming maladapted to pseudo-elite life.

This last category is particularly interesting - you have a strong incentive to limit yourself to the pseudo-elite discourse. It’s your success in the pseudo-elite discourse that secures your academic career. Many academics see that they could go beyond this conversation, but they restrain themselves.²

What happens if you try to go beyond it? The next group are the public intellectuals and influencers, the academics who try to exit the pseudo-elite conversation. In some countries where the political culture allows it, a small number of these people get into government. The bulk of them, however, become grifters. Now, when I say that they are grifters, I don’t mean that they are deliberately or intentionally deceiving anybody. But they are entering into middle-class and working-class conversations from outside, descending on them from above. They are not immanent to the middle-class or the working-class, they represent a top-down effort to manage these classes. I like to call these people “discourse mages,” they are people who try to subjectivize those they consider to be inferior through the manipulation of signs.

The discourse mages think they stand above the middle-class and working-class conversations. But this isn’t really true. In fact, coming back down into the middle-class and working-class conversations causes these people to become obsessed with public opinion, with finding the correct take. They are trying to win, and that means they have to persuade, at minimum, the lawyers, doctors, and engineers. They have, unwittingly, returned to speech and debate and to the limits that the speech and debate conversation imposes. Instead of controlling or elevating the conversations they are in, they are gradually deformed by their participation in this heavily stultifying discussion, losing their ability to think independently.

So, we have three more types of speech and debate kids:

7. The kids who never succeed in becoming discourse mages.

8. The kids who, through hard effort, become successful discourse mages with large online followings.

9. The kids who are able to move past the discourse mage conversation, but return to it to avoid becoming maladapted to influencer life.

Again, this last category is particularly interesting - you have a strong incentive to limit yourself to the grifting activity, because the grifting activity is compatible with making a living. If you refuse to make content that follows the algorithms, you simply aren’t going to develop a large enough audience to sustain your operation.

This gives us three different types of highly conscious kids, type #3, type #6, and type #9. It’s not obvious which of these is best, because none of these three groups really succeed in making the world a better place. They are just three different ways of surviving, economically, as a person with strong verbal reasoning skills.

In the 10s, I moved away from making normative arguments, embracing a more diagnostic style of political theory. This kind of political theory is less well-adapted for pseudo-elite success. I have some good journal articles, but it’s harder to publish a large number of competitive journal articles in the style I have adopted.

At the same time, I got involved in trying to help Bernie Sanders and in podcasting.

So, I had a foot in both the academic conversation and in the discourse sorcery. At the time, I thought this was a good way of splitting the difference, in trying to find a genuinely elite mode in which to operate. But increasingly, I don’t think there is a way of splitting the difference. I suspect these are just three different ways to prioritize becoming middle-class over having a good conversation.

There has to be a better way. I will keep looking.

1. E.g., Ikiru, American Beauty, Lost in Translation, Pig, The Surfer

2. They don’t make movies about this, because the audience for them is too small, and because the number of filmmakers who would be inclined to make such films is extremely limited.