Thanks to high school debate, I learned at a young age that a rational person could argue either side of any policy conflict. There’s a cold logic to competitive debate that cuts through ideology or “belief” — whether you draw affirmative or negative from round to round predetermines your strategic options and often your arguments.
For this reason, a judge in a competitive debate is supposed to leave his or her beliefs at the door of each round. A judge is free to determine a paradigm that guides the evaluation of arguments—most weigh the advantages and disadvantages of proposals in a pragmatic or John Stuart Mill utilitarian fashion—but opinion about the arguments is not an acceptable guide.
No doubt debate has shaped the way I view modern democracy. I hold little value in opinion, even those that are widely shared, unless powerful reasons and data back the opinions. Being a rhetorician by trade, however, has often placed me in the position of making the kinds of emotional rhetorical appeals that would not stand up to forensic scrutiny. The positive side of that is that I can recognize a purely rhetorical appeal instantly and know to discount it.
Plato is arguably the father of competitive debate, because he argued so forcefully against the use of rhetoric as a policymaking tool. While it’s true that Plato’s dialectics differed from debate because both sides in a dialectical exchange commit to truth and neither win. In reality, this kind of open intellectual exchange virtually never happens. Does anyone, for example, read one of Socrates’ dialectics and not come away thinking that he won the debate?
This is how I view the world — every issue is going to divide up between supporters and opponents. There will be reasonable arguments on both sides of the issue. And if I’m going to do my duty as a citizen in our democracy, I have a duty to check my ideological biases at the door before determining where I stand. The single worst way to make a political decision is purely partisan. To support or oppose an action based purely on the party label of who supports it is robotic and inhuman.
Ideology is a perfectly reasonable tool to frame the decision that you’ve already made, to put the decision in others that you’ve made, but deploying it in a policy decision context is much like exchanging your scalpel for a butcher knife before entering an operating room.
Montaigne argues in this essay that, especially in matters of war and peace, there is almost always a historic rationale for any strategy deployed:
Events and their outcomes depend, especially in war, mainly on Fortune, who will not submit to our reasoning nor be subject to our foresight—as these lines put it: Badly conceived projects are rewarded; foresight fails, for Fortune does not examine causes nor follow merit but meanders through everything without distinction. Clearly, there is something greater which drives and controls us and subjects the concerns of men to laws of its own.
It’s easy to get caught up on the concept of “something greater” that Montaigne mentions here. It sounds like a providential hand at play, but my guess is that Montaigne had something else in mind. As noted in other essays, Montaigne’s view is on the verge of fatalism. He expresses a belief in limits to human rationality, and this skepticism no doubt influenced philosophers from Descartes to Nietzsche.
But Montaigne’s fatalism doesn’t result from a single divine torrent determining outcomes, rather it flows from multiple streams of historical forces. Wise decisions almost seem to be made for the wise leader, knowing how to divine them is a matter of sensibility, not reason.
As Montaigne wrote:
There is every possibility of speaking for and against anything
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