Bad Debate, Good Debate and Antidebate
Towards a praxis of Deep Democracy
NB* The afternoon of December 15th will feature a Perspectiva Antidebate at St Ethelburgas in central London. With the Christmas context as a part of the setting (rather than part of the plot) you are warmly invited to participate in deepening our understanding of Peace, particularly its relationship to violence. We still have a few places for those wishing to volunteer. Sign up here. (Antidebate volunteers can also stay for the evening event and party for free).
In principle, debates clarify disagreements and bring everyone closer to the truth in a convivial dialectical process. In practice, participants clamour for attention, stoking tribal sentiment in memorable attack lines, soundbites, and strawman arguments.
A combination of endemic polarisation, weakening attention spans, enervated critical thinking, and social media incentive structures have undermined debate as a social good; it feels ill-suited to our epistemic needs and civic challenges. The US Presidential Debate in September 2020 between Trump and Biden was a nadir for the practice, described by The Guardian as 'debate apocalypse'.
Creating 'better debates' may not actually be feasible, and while dialogue is commendable, it's not clear it can cut through to shape culture at scale. The question becomes: What kinds of speaking, listening and thinking should we seek to encourage in the public sphere?
Perhaps we need an *antidote* to debate, rooted in the principles of good debating, yet fundamentally reconceiving their purpose to be closer in spirit to dialogue. Perspectiva’s antidebate is a nascent methodology that seeks to do that. There’s still an entertaining public contest of sorts, but the 'game’ being played is not about winning an argument, at least not in any familiar sense.
The Antidebate webpage on Perspectiva’s site gives a project overview that arose from the successful funding application to The John Templeton Foundation, and our first major public outing can be found here:
That first outing came after a year (albeit during the pandemic) of trial and error of various kinds. We are now more than two years into the project and I see it differently. Our most recent filmed attempt gives a clearer idea of what we are now trying to achieve, and I am grateful to Indra Adnan and Ivo Mensch for helping me to move the methodology along.
During the first phase of the project I came to see the need to distinguish between good and bad debate on the one hand, and genuinely innovative practice on the other. While cognitive empathy is important and being seen to take the trouble to articulate the other side’s arguments well matters, these qualities are still within the orbit of debate. They are still modernist at their heart, and they ultimately trust in the dignity of reason and the good faith of the participants, and they hope their actions will somehow model agreeable disagreement in a way that is educationally valuable and culturally generative. We are all for that. And yet it’s somehow going against the tide to imagine this civility and epistemic acuity could become the norm. For those who have tasted the pickle, and see the meta-crisis and our immunity to change as the superordinate challenge of our times, there is a strong case for trying to be bolder.
Debates have a morphology that encode unhelpful societal assumptions about who we are and what is at stake. They are typically about one question, with little scope to consider the power dynamics in relation to where the question came from, or the importance of other questions inside it that comprise it - who gets to set the agenda and why? That’s a critical question about power, and it defines the character of democracy for good and bad. Moreover, even good debates tend to reinforce an underlying binary between two people. And then they are typically about the intellect and propositional in nature – they are about arguing over statements and contentions. They are also typically about apparent experts on the stage, with a passive audience watching. Each of these features is fine, but they are limiting; even good debate is mostly ‘society’ with very little ‘system’ and even less ‘soul’ (Perspectiva’s aim is to improve understanding of the relationship between systems, souls, and society in theory and practice).
A more transformative approach would recognise that participants taking some ownership of the question itself is important, that there are questions within questions and people need time to establish what a question means to them and why. Moreover, many issues have many more than two sides, and debate not only obscures that multiplicity but reinforces the very idea of sides (opposition has its place, as does resistance as a creative spur, but it is one design principle among many.) And there are multiple ways of knowing (John Vervaeke’s ‘4 P model’ indicates propositional, procedural, perspectival, and participatory) and people need time and challenge to find their own intelligent views and voice in a way that is informed by the social contexts they are part of.
There are many philosophical perspectives on the meta-crisis, but one in particular helps to show the kind of innovation required for an antidebate to be worthy of the challenges of our times. I learned this perspective from Alexander Bard in his conversation with Daniel Schmachtenberger and it is not mentioned alongside an otherwise fairly exhaustive set of meta-crises in Tasting The Pickle. This model distils the challenge faced by global civilisation in the 2020s to three main converging crises that underlie all the others: a crisis in Logos (limits of reason, less care for truth, challenge of sensemaking and sound decision making), a crisis in Mythos (the story of who we are is in question, the meaning of life is no longer a given, our operative myths and metaphors no longer align with reality) and in Pathos (the world is full of suffering, self-harm, abuse of power, systemic oppression, ecocide, sociopathy, anxiety, depression, racism, poverty, violence, cruelty). While statistics can be used to show many things, in the context of ecological breakdown, and economic and bio-precarity, pathos is not going anywhere.
If poor debates reflect the crisis in Logos, and good debates help to mend that, great! But the antidebate is an attempt to connect the challenges of a crisis in Logos with the challenges caused by our crisis in Mythos and Pathos too.
The antidebate is therefore becoming a form of social inquiry worthy of the character of this time between worlds and the meta-crisis. More precisely it is about the participatory knowing of deep democracy, in which we experience collective sense-making and choice-making through a simulated encounter with the nature of ‘the impossible we’. The point is to get beyond the idealisation of common ground and move towards the generativity of common experience grounded in mutual challenge and reciprocated respect. The aim is not to find a consensus position, but rather to create what Robert Kegan calls ‘optimal conflict’ in a way that helps to outflank platitudes and see ourselves and others more clearly. The active ingredient of the antidebate is the problematic set of issues embedded in the question, and the aim, again in Kegan language is not so much ‘solving a problem’ as ‘allowing a problem to solve us’. (I am currently preparing a manuscript on these issues and want to keep some of my powder dry).
The antidebate will be a moving feast for a little longer, but we are currently working with a methodology that moves from
1. Selecting an initial question/prompt designed to be rich and provocative and in some sense resonant or timely. EG: Is War Natural? Or If peace is the way, we will always have violence.
2. This question is then the central prompt for an online Polis survey which serves to ‘warm up’ prospective participants, as well as showing the richness of the question and the range of views and interpretations of it.
3. The survey gives rise to partially analysed data, which helps to distill the original question into major thematic issues and highlights the areas of convergence, divergence and ambivalence.
4. We begin the session with a brief overview of what we are doing, why, and what to expect.
5. The first phase is called ‘tableauing’ in which we draw attention to the major thematics from the polis data, and ask people present (30-60) to show where they would place themselves in terms of strong agreement on one side and strong disagreement on the other; and then to specify their sense of how much that issue matters to the main question/issue at hand. That means six different snapshots showing divergence, convergence and ambivalence of viewpoints in the room, and in each case people are asked/interviewed by a facilitator (of which there are currently three)
6. We then ask people to reflect on what they think is happening – ‘what’s this about?’ and describe the range of feelings and viewpoints in the room, and why the divergence might be the way it is. This phase often highlights some tension between what people think and what they feel, and it calls into question matters of identity with respect to the question(s) at hand.
7. We then send people off for a break, asking them to reflect and come back with their ethical commitments and willpower in the room and take a stand on something they feel particularly strongly about, in an attempt to steer the conversation and bring people with them. We also make it clear that people who feel disengaged or tired or unsure are welcome to sit it out around the edges of the room, but are asked to stay watching on the understanding we’ll check in with them later.
8. This phase is called ‘swarming’ and it’s dynamic, and enlivens the room. After people ‘take a stand’ on a particular issue, there are some rules but in essence others are allowed to join them. This process keeps happening until nobody wants to move or talk anymore.
9. At this point, mindful of the parallel problem of democratic disengagement, we turn our attention back to those who are disengaged, who have opted out, and we ask them to say what they are missing. We give each of the remaining swarms a chance to respond, with a view to recruiting them. Once that is exhausted we say to the swarms that although they have been disagreeing and taking (often) competing stands, they also have things in common that speak to today’s political classes, namely a desire to speak, to join, to persuade and to move. The room then divides into those engaged in the process and those who are disengaged. We bring people’s attention back to how this process began and to the original question.
10. We ask people to place themselves on a line again, in terms of whether they agree/disagree with the question at hand and we speak to those who have moved and asked why, and those who have stayed and asked them why. We take a moment of silence and then a round of applause and hope feedback helps to improve the practice further.
We are still experimenting, but I feel we are beginning to get somewhere. Come and help us if you can!
NB* The afternoon of December 15th will feature an Antidebate, and it will happen at St Ethelburgas in central London. With the Christmas context as a part of the setting rather than part of the plot, you are warmly invited to participate in deepening our understanding of Peace, particularly its relationship to violence. We still have a few places for those wishing to volunteer. Sign up here. (Antidebate volunteers can also stay for the evening event and party for free.
Jonathan Rowson is the co-founder and CEO of Perspectiva.