On Debating
No, I’m obviously not interested in analyzing how to do those boring debates with canned answers and biased moderation like ABC’s horrible 8AM Democratic debate a few days ago. I’m talking about the approach to debating an issue, which quite obviously will vary significantly depending on the topic and your target audience. Sometimes you can have an excellent argument in favor or in opposition to a stance, but if the other person frankly doesn’t think it’s very important, it’s not going to affect their perception of an issue very much.
For example, I think I can consider myself somewhat of a military strategy nerd. I like to analyze the different factions in a potential or past conflict, and try to make my own predictions about what might happen should they go to war, what factors might compel them to do so, what the social and economic consequences would be besides the obvious (death, destruction). Sometimes it’s fairly obvious even before something will occur that it will be absolutely catastrophic, perhaps for logical or historical reasons. Take the Iraq war, for example. It should have been fairly obvious to anyone with access to the internet and a sense of logical thinking that you simply cannot fight counter-insurgency warfare with such a limited amount of troops, or with air strikes because to put it in the simplest of terms – every single innocent civilian killed (and believe me, there will ALWAYS be civilians killed, especially with air strikes from 20,000 feet up) you will have an entire family pissed off at you. If you are not willing to go genocidal on a population, counter-insurgency tends to be fairly unproductive, because as the invader you automatically are at a disadvantage in the “hearts and minds” campaign. As long as you keep screwing things up, the insurgency will grow even if they each have their quarrels with each other, because they are united in their dislike of you.
Yet this sort of argument doesn’t necessarily affect people who don’t look at things from a political or military perspective. For the average layperson (which most of the population is) they may hear some arguments against military action, yet the media situation in the United States supporting the current status quo tends to make it so that those unpopular positions are easily filtered out, and so-called “experts” from “think-tanks” will tell you that this time it’s different, this time we have a plan, this time it’s morally justifiable. And if you are incapable or unwilling to do your own imperative research about an issue, you tend to take their word for it. Just look at the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq for an example. Why are people so willing to casually make decisions regarding life and death?
My belief is that most Americans (I apologize if I seem to be bashing Americans most of the time, it’s because I live in this country and therefore it’s easiest to observe and obtain information regarding our behavior, and writing about all the good stuff I see would be boring) are emotionally detached from the consequences of their decisions regarding foreign policy. Saddam has weapons of mass destruction? Well I guess if the President says so it must be true. Even if it’s a volatile situation and in an absence of power it’s highly likely that chaos will erupt, it should be worth it because it’s in the interest of defending American lives. In this sort of situation it is hard not to come to the conclusion that we simply don’t view the lives of other people as highly as we do our own. It’s a sad truth, but perfectly predictable given that we never humanize the enemy – it’s obviously counter-productive to the war mongerers.
Even many of my Christian friends bought the official story and rationale, until they started hearing the bad news. I don’t criticize them for not understanding the political situation there, or why it could be predicted that it would be a humanitarian disaster. I realize there is a deluge of information out there – much of it misleading, and unless you have an interest in this sort of thing (or are a political science major that should be doing this sort of research anyway) it’s too easy to be confused about an issue and simply take the word of someone from a position of authority. Christians in general tend to be more deferential towards authority in the first place, at least from my observations. Believing in an almighty all knowing omniscient divine being is part of it.
And so here I have to switch tactics. I don’t really like the word “tactics” in this situation because it sounds like I’m simply trying to win something to make myself feel better and make other people feel stupid, but you really have to decide on an approach that will convince someone when you are debating. If someone is a fundamentalist that takes the Bible literally, you’re not going to convince them otherwise by trying to explain carbon dating and evolution via natural selection to them. Instead you have to approach the issue hermeneutically, in a way that they can understand and sympathize with.
Depending on the audience, I approach the issue from a moral standpoint. To their credit, most of my friends now believe that the occupation of Iraq is bad, but I fear it’s only because we’re “losing”, and there’s no easily identifiable and sellable sign of progress or victory. I remember talking about this issue in a roundabout way with one of my friends from China, when we were discussing the 2008 Presidential Election. I was explaining to him why I would not vote for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries because I felt that her stance on foreign policy was pretty much Bush-lite. Yet that was also one of the reasons why she has a good chance of winning – because she portrays herself as “tough on terror” while being socially liberal, by American standards (which in comparison to Europe are actually all fairly conservative). My friend exclaimed, “Why should that help her in the polls? Americans hate war.” At this, I shook my head.
“Americans don’t hate war. Don’t be fooled by the current public disapproval of the current occupation in Iraq. The only reason why we see the tide turning against the current administration is because we are losing. At its core, the sense of American exceptionalism has not changed at all.”
And I believe that these words still ring true today, a few months, several hundred dead US soldiers and several thousand dead Iraqis later. In our national narrative, the Iraqis weren’t really people. Saddam Hussein was a menace and for the sake of our own safety (which turned out to be a lie) we had to invade the country. The fact that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would suffer, die, or lose their homes was irrelevant to us. I’m not accusing people of actually viewing Middle Eastern/Muslims as subhuman consciously; they just never took the time to actually think about what they were supporting or agreeing to. This is understandable when it’s from a social-political perspective, but not when it’s from a moral perspective. You don’t have to understand the complex histories and entanglements in another country to understand why it’s immoral to attack someone who never attacked us, and posed a smaller threat to us than we did them.
Until we start thinking of things from this sort of paradigm, history will repeat itself. Yet this inherently important argument that is fundamental to maintaining our humanity is rarely used. Even I have the feeling that if I ever get a job at the State Department or the CIA, any sorts of arguments I make will have to have their validity checked from political calculation, not moral calculation. Now even though it might have the same effect, sometimes it seems a bit too cold and analyzing. And that scares me. But I’ll say it here… I will not give up my soul.
For example, I think I can consider myself somewhat of a military strategy nerd. I like to analyze the different factions in a potential or past conflict, and try to make my own predictions about what might happen should they go to war, what factors might compel them to do so, what the social and economic consequences would be besides the obvious (death, destruction). Sometimes it’s fairly obvious even before something will occur that it will be absolutely catastrophic, perhaps for logical or historical reasons. Take the Iraq war, for example. It should have been fairly obvious to anyone with access to the internet and a sense of logical thinking that you simply cannot fight counter-insurgency warfare with such a limited amount of troops, or with air strikes because to put it in the simplest of terms – every single innocent civilian killed (and believe me, there will ALWAYS be civilians killed, especially with air strikes from 20,000 feet up) you will have an entire family pissed off at you. If you are not willing to go genocidal on a population, counter-insurgency tends to be fairly unproductive, because as the invader you automatically are at a disadvantage in the “hearts and minds” campaign. As long as you keep screwing things up, the insurgency will grow even if they each have their quarrels with each other, because they are united in their dislike of you.
Yet this sort of argument doesn’t necessarily affect people who don’t look at things from a political or military perspective. For the average layperson (which most of the population is) they may hear some arguments against military action, yet the media situation in the United States supporting the current status quo tends to make it so that those unpopular positions are easily filtered out, and so-called “experts” from “think-tanks” will tell you that this time it’s different, this time we have a plan, this time it’s morally justifiable. And if you are incapable or unwilling to do your own imperative research about an issue, you tend to take their word for it. Just look at the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq for an example. Why are people so willing to casually make decisions regarding life and death?
My belief is that most Americans (I apologize if I seem to be bashing Americans most of the time, it’s because I live in this country and therefore it’s easiest to observe and obtain information regarding our behavior, and writing about all the good stuff I see would be boring) are emotionally detached from the consequences of their decisions regarding foreign policy. Saddam has weapons of mass destruction? Well I guess if the President says so it must be true. Even if it’s a volatile situation and in an absence of power it’s highly likely that chaos will erupt, it should be worth it because it’s in the interest of defending American lives. In this sort of situation it is hard not to come to the conclusion that we simply don’t view the lives of other people as highly as we do our own. It’s a sad truth, but perfectly predictable given that we never humanize the enemy – it’s obviously counter-productive to the war mongerers.
Even many of my Christian friends bought the official story and rationale, until they started hearing the bad news. I don’t criticize them for not understanding the political situation there, or why it could be predicted that it would be a humanitarian disaster. I realize there is a deluge of information out there – much of it misleading, and unless you have an interest in this sort of thing (or are a political science major that should be doing this sort of research anyway) it’s too easy to be confused about an issue and simply take the word of someone from a position of authority. Christians in general tend to be more deferential towards authority in the first place, at least from my observations. Believing in an almighty all knowing omniscient divine being is part of it.
And so here I have to switch tactics. I don’t really like the word “tactics” in this situation because it sounds like I’m simply trying to win something to make myself feel better and make other people feel stupid, but you really have to decide on an approach that will convince someone when you are debating. If someone is a fundamentalist that takes the Bible literally, you’re not going to convince them otherwise by trying to explain carbon dating and evolution via natural selection to them. Instead you have to approach the issue hermeneutically, in a way that they can understand and sympathize with.
Depending on the audience, I approach the issue from a moral standpoint. To their credit, most of my friends now believe that the occupation of Iraq is bad, but I fear it’s only because we’re “losing”, and there’s no easily identifiable and sellable sign of progress or victory. I remember talking about this issue in a roundabout way with one of my friends from China, when we were discussing the 2008 Presidential Election. I was explaining to him why I would not vote for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries because I felt that her stance on foreign policy was pretty much Bush-lite. Yet that was also one of the reasons why she has a good chance of winning – because she portrays herself as “tough on terror” while being socially liberal, by American standards (which in comparison to Europe are actually all fairly conservative). My friend exclaimed, “Why should that help her in the polls? Americans hate war.” At this, I shook my head.
“Americans don’t hate war. Don’t be fooled by the current public disapproval of the current occupation in Iraq. The only reason why we see the tide turning against the current administration is because we are losing. At its core, the sense of American exceptionalism has not changed at all.”
And I believe that these words still ring true today, a few months, several hundred dead US soldiers and several thousand dead Iraqis later. In our national narrative, the Iraqis weren’t really people. Saddam Hussein was a menace and for the sake of our own safety (which turned out to be a lie) we had to invade the country. The fact that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would suffer, die, or lose their homes was irrelevant to us. I’m not accusing people of actually viewing Middle Eastern/Muslims as subhuman consciously; they just never took the time to actually think about what they were supporting or agreeing to. This is understandable when it’s from a social-political perspective, but not when it’s from a moral perspective. You don’t have to understand the complex histories and entanglements in another country to understand why it’s immoral to attack someone who never attacked us, and posed a smaller threat to us than we did them.
Until we start thinking of things from this sort of paradigm, history will repeat itself. Yet this inherently important argument that is fundamental to maintaining our humanity is rarely used. Even I have the feeling that if I ever get a job at the State Department or the CIA, any sorts of arguments I make will have to have their validity checked from political calculation, not moral calculation. Now even though it might have the same effect, sometimes it seems a bit too cold and analyzing. And that scares me. But I’ll say it here… I will not give up my soul.
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