Lifelong lessons from debate class
We were taught public speaking in high school: writing and giving speeches in first year, extemporaneous speaking in second year, and then debate in our last two years.
In third year, our debate formats pushed us to do research on all sides of an issue. We had to defend a side using prior studies with only a few days to prepare. Sometimes, we found out which side we were on mere minutes before the debate. Other times, we had to recruit witnesses who could corroborate our claims for cross-examination.
In fourth year, our debate format focused on philosophy and logic. We were given our issue and side just before the debate began. We then had to call on our knowledge, imagination, and experience to speak on topics such as “Resolved: There is no such thing as failure.”
To a pedestrian observer, having two years of debate sounds superfluous. Why not concentrate on fact-based debate and argue based on history, truth, and objective reality?
Because we do not make sense of the world through facts alone.
This was a lesson that returned years later, in graduate school, as we unpacked what constituted “facts,” especially in the context of science. A scientific fact is not purely objective: it is agreed upon by experts whose decisions are shaped by their expertise, values, and background. To put a premium on facts alone is to disregard human experience and emotion, to forcibly blind ourselves to other people’s sensemaking, all in the name of enforcing what we believe is the only legitimate source of knowledge and the only way of knowing.
These thoughts came to mind as I sat in a meeting of the East Asian Pastoral Institute last week, where they discussed the viability of turning their in-house journal into an internationally indexed journal. This would make the journal more visible, but it would require the editors to insist that authors write empirically driven, theoretically based articles—a strict fencing-in of pastoral and missionary experience that is so unlike reality, the meeting members said.
The journal, thus far, has been a space for the religious to narrate their stories in the hopes of imparting lessons or systematically reflecting on phenomena to deepen spirituality using perspectives different from those of the Western world.
To fit stories into a prescribed framework was to reduce them to facts and theory—the traditional measures of legitimacy in the world of research.
Who knows how many stories we might have learned from, how many deep insights we might have received, had the hidden, the voiceless, and the vulnerable been given a broader platform? What kinds of knowledge have been hidden by strict frameworks and binding legalities?
This preoccupation with legalities is something that simmered beneath Nicholas Kaufman’s defense of former President Rodrigo Duterte. There was no direct link, he said, between the ex-president’s words and the killings, no blatant definition of what constituted “neutralize” and “kill,” no real legal basis for a case.
This focus on legalities erases the stories of children like Kian delos Santos, whose lives are now reduced to mere numbers, whose names become mere footnotes.
At home, we, too, are in danger of such a shortsighted view of the world when we reduce something as evil as corruption to the machinations of people without questioning whether the systems in place encourage good and ethical behavior. Recent research by Annette Quayle and Andrew West, in “Critical Perspectives on Accounting,” nuances the issue: When corruption is publicly equated with wrongdoing only because it breaks the law, rather than wrongdoing that has broken moral and ethical codes, then we stifle public debate on the systemic nature of corruption.
The truly corrupt will find loopholes or blind spots in an unquestioned system. We will just end up with people who can find more ingenious ways to steal beyond today’s Mary Grace Piattos and favorite contractors with 40-car garages.
To focus on the legal, empirical, and factual comprises only one kind of debate. This tradition of argumentation relies on information to build and defend an argument. However, it is only one way to see the world, and to insist on its sole use is to disregard people’s stories as mere anecdotes to read in enjoyment rather than parables from which we can glean new lessons.
It is to reduce the world to facts while ignoring what the facts mean.
It is to ask, “Is this true?” rather than the deeper, “Why do people think this is true?”
Our fourth-year debate classes were more than intellectual exercises. They were a way to teach us that people can make sense of the world through a variety of lenses. Being exclusively fact-based would have made us blind to the richness of experience of those who appreciate the world through narratives, through moral imagination, with complexity rather than reduction.
We were being taught compassion so that we could work in a world that often pushes us to walk in paths that imprison, even when we think we are free.
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iponcedeleon@ateneo.edu
