Rational Discourse and Master-Debation

My undergraduate alma mater, New College of Florida (which has undergone some major changes in the years since I attended there) just revealed that they will be erecting a statue of recently assassinated conservative activist Charlie Kirk.  Kirk was widely known for traveling to college campuses to debate students on social and political issues, sitting under a banner reading “Prove Me Wrong” and allowing students to come up to a microphone and debate him.   Though Kirk never actually went to New College to engage in such debates, the college is nevertheless opting to erect a statue of him “as a commitment by New College to defend and fight for free speech and civil discourse in American life.”  Elaborating on the decision, New College president Richard Corcoran says that New College seeks “to be known as the number one college in the nation when it comes to supporting civil debate and freedom of speech.” 

Though it’s hard to see New College’s erection of a Charlie Kirk statue as anything other than an implicit endorsement of the positions Kirk advocated (and, for a brief sampling of some of the frankly abhorrent things that Kirk has actually said, see this article by Ta-Nehisi Coates), the official line of New College is that they are not erecting the statue in support of the political positions Kirk advanced, but, rather, the way in which he attempted to advance them: through rational discourse.  This, it might seem, is something that everyone should be able to get behind, and many commentators from across the political spectrum such as Ezra Klein, despite disagreeing with Kirk's positions, have embraced his approach as “practicing politics the right way.”  The idea that rational discourse is the engine of political progress is indeed not a particularly  controversial idea in American politics.  But should Kirk's activities on college campuses really be seen as the paradigm of politically productive rational discourse?  It seems clear to me that they should not be.  In fact, it seems to me that these activities should not be seen as instances of rational discourse at all.  Let me explain.
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In general terms, rational discourse is an activity in which positions are put forward, called into question, and given justifications in response to such questioning.  Robert Brandom describes rational discourse as “the game of giving and asking for reasons.”  The game metaphor can be helpful for spelling out the structure of discourse, but, insofar as we are going to use the metaphor, it’s worth being clear on just what kind of game we’re talking about.  If one takes as one's paradigm of discourse the sorts of “debates” that Kirk engaged in on college campuses, and which happen on stages in the lead-up to America’s presidential elections, one can easily get the impression that “the game of giving and asking for reasons” is a competitive game such as chess, where two players make various moves within a set of rules with the aim of defeating the other.  Most games are in fact competitive, and so it is natural to assume such a conception in likening discourse to a game.  However, there are also cooperative games, such as Pandemic, where players work together within a set of rules to achieve some shared aim.   Insofar as we are going to deploy a game-playing metaphor, it is a game of this latter sort that should be seen as the model for rational discourse. Rational discourse is, fundamentally, a cooperative activity.  Of course, it does involve challenging the claims that others are making, calling upon them to give reasons for these claims, and this can seem competitive if looked at in isolation.  However, this is done in pursuit of the shared aim of arriving at the correct views on the matters under discussion.

If rational discourse is a collaborative activity aimed at arriving at the correct view on a given matter, one cannot assume that one is antecedently in possession of the correct view when entering into rational discourse; otherwise, there’d be no point to engaging the activity.  Of course, one will have views that one comes into the discussion antecedently possessing, but a criterion of genuine rational discourse is that the participants are open to changing these views through the course of the discussion.  That's the whole point of the activity.  Now, typically, the sort of “change in view” that rational discourse gone well results in is not just one participant making a complete 180-degree turn, completely changing their mind on a given issue and agreeing with the other party, but, rather, both participants coming to appreciate distinctions that they had previously not appreciated, arriving at a more subtle and multi-faceted take on the issue than was previously available to them.  In other words, discourse gone well does not typically result in one person coming over to the position of the other, but, rather, the very space of the possible positions transforming through the course of the collaborative activity of calling for reasons, giving reasons, making clarifications, and so on. 

In this way, genuine rational discourse can be contrasted with the popular idea of “debate.”  Changing one’s view, in the context of genuine rational discourse, is a sign of success, whereas, in the context of “debate,” it is a sign of failure. The aim of “debate” is not to change one’s own mind—or, really, even to change the mind of your opponent—but to show (to some third party) that you, with the position you enter into the debate antecedently holding, are right, and your opponent, with the position they enter into the debate antecedently holding, is wrong.  This is the activity that Charlie Kirk made his career engaging in, and, indeed, was quite good at it (at least when pitted against your average college student).  I have watched far too many clips of Charlie Kirk over the past several days, and I can report that he did indeed have a knack for making college students look foolish with quick rebuts and “gotcha” questions.  Doing this, he managed to convince large audiences (watching in person, but, more notably, watching on platforms such as YouTube and TikTok) of the various positions he came into the debates antecedently holding.  He was, as Ezra Klein puts it, "one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion." However, for all the videos I’ve seen, I still have not seen a single clip where Kirk actually changed his mind, even in the minimal sense of admitting that he had come to see some issue in a new light, with a complexity he had previously not appreciated. This is perhaps not too surprising, but it is telling.  Changing his own views was never the point of the activity he took himself to be engaging in; he was never engaging in genuine rational discourse.

​In a South Park episode that aired just a few weeks before Kirk’s death, Eric Cartman fashions himself, following Kirk, as a “master debater.”  The pun, of course, plays on the similarity of the words “master debater” and “masturbator.”  But there is a bit more to the pun than mere childish humor (though it’s mostly childish humor).  When I first started in philosophy, my dad used to refer to it as “mental masturbation,” the implication being that it is a self-serving activity that runs in circles for the mere point of doing so, without actually serving any sort of useful external end (for instance, the uncovering of truth).  To be a “master debater” is to be someone who is rightly subject to the same general sort of criticism.  It is to be someone who is good at arguing a point, regardless of the correctness of the point for which one is arguing.  A more traditional philosophical term for master-debation is “sophistry.”  A sophist, as Socrates puts it in the Apology (characterizing the charge that he is himself accused of), is someone “who makes the worse argument the stronger,” using rhetorical tricks to make a bad argument seem good.  Whereas to be a philosopher is to be a seeker of understanding, something best pursued through rational discourse, to be a sophist is to be a "practitioner of persuasion."

Now, New College has a new series of public conversations entitled “The Socratic Stage,” where policy makers and public intellectuals come together to engage in public discourse.  The name, of course, is in reference to Socrates, and New College is aiming to position itself as a champion of the sort of rational discourse that Socrates exemplified and, ultimately, was killed for.  Many have now come to see Charlie Kirk as a 21st century Socrates: someone who pursued rational discourse above all else, ultimately, even his own life.  American Vice President JD Vance, for instance, remarks that Kirk "stood for a tradition that Socrates established 2,500 years ago."  Kirk's death is, to be sure, a tragedy.  But likening his life's activities to those of Socrates is a gross distortion of the truth.  The sort of “debate” that Charlie Kirk engaged in at college campuses and is now being celebrated by New College through the erecting of a statue was not Socratic rational discourse but precisely the sort of pseudo-rational activity that Socrates himself most detested: sophistry, or, a bit more memorably, “master-debation.”

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I have spoken of Charlie Kirk here because his activities have recently been brought to the public spotlight, with more people viewing his videos in particular than ever before.  However, the general issue of master-debation in today’s political landscape is not unique to Kirk.  The kind of debate content Kirk produced has exploded in recent years.   The popular YouTube channel Jubilee has even turned political debate into a literal game show, where one notable figure is surrounded by 20-25 opponents, who each have their shot at the mic to out-debate the master-debater.  In general, the key to mass appeal in producing this kind of content is the potential for snippets of these debates to be clipped into 30-second TikToks, Youtube shorts, Instagram reels, and the like.  A single “gotcha,” clipped and posted to these sites with a clickbait title (“Charlie Kirk SLAMS College Student for Calling Him FASCIST,” “MAGA fan DESTROYED by the MOST SIMPLE question EVER”, "Andrew Wilson DESTROYS Destiny") gathers millions of views, often an order of magnitude more than the extended video.  Such shorts are designed to be seen and scrolled on, each one giving the scroller a brief bump of confirmation in their pre-existing political views, displaying the abject stupidity of the other side. 

There is more political polarization in America now than there has ever been in recent history.  I'd venture to bet that all of this master-debation content isn't helping. Discourse is indeed needed now more than ever.  But until we realize that genuine discourse is not a matter of one side trying to prove the other wrong, but, rather, both sides working together to arrive at a shared understanding, what passes as "rational discourse" (but which is really nothing more than master-debation) will continue to drive us further apart.​

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