Wouldn't it be nice
by Omar Salahuddin on Tuesday, September 28, 2010 at 4:17am
I have long lamented the trend that has developed in Asian debating in the last decade: the one that seems to dictate an affinity with the apparently emetic effect of closed motions and the prolific vomiting of facts in a continuous stream of passionless invective that the effect seems to then dictate. Indeed, I remember standing alongside a senior member of the Australasian debate community, one Raymond De’Cruise, delivering a strange kind of ‘tag-team’ speech at the end of the Grand Final of the Philippines National Debate Masters’ Classic in the late 90s and pleading with the assembled throng not to allow the passion that the Pinoy then seemed to be slowly losing to wither and die. In retrospect, the plea was probably already too late.
Being a debate trainer first, an adjudicator second and a debater myself only third, I have tended to look at the problem from the perspective of what it feels like to have to adjudicate debates that are devoid of emotion - with a succession of speeches delivered like staccato machine-bursts in a manner that has nothing whatsoever to do with persuasion or engagement with a listener. Debaters have become insipid ‘presenters’ of information, preferring to disgorge the contents of their recent readings of the Economist, Asian Economic Review, Time magazine and Wikipedia in a monotonous torrent and leave it to the adjudicators to work out what it means.
During the feedback at the end of the debate, if a team agrees with the adjudicators’ analysis of this flow of words, they give the chair a reasonable score on a feedback form – and if they don’t (and there is always going to be one or more that have only ever lost debates in which the adjudicator “…didn’t understand what we were arguing,” and “…walked right into it and started making assumptions about stuff that we never intended,”), they give the chair a doughnut of their own in efforts to ensure that they don’t get that particular “…moron, imbecile and plain idiot,” again during the competition.
Indeed, debaters have become experts in manipulating the pool of adjudicators during a particular competition to their own advantage: they really don’t like to have their verbal porridge witnessed by people that can actually think for themselves anymore, but more of that another time.
The important thing is that I begin to believe that I have been too much concerned with viewing the problem from a single perspective; that of an adjudicator, a fact brought home to me shortly after the conclusion of the Iskandar debate series in UTM Johor earlier this year, and it happened in the most innocent of settings. In fact, I was communicating (some would say “chatting”) with a prominent member of NUS’s debate squad, using one of the little boxes that opens up when I click a name with a green light against it on my Facebook page. Now, while you are trying to cope with the absurdly high level of technical sophistication that I am capable of, let me go on to tell you that we were discussing my insistence on a slew of more open motions during the preliminary rounds of that competition (I was honoured with an appointment as CA) in an effort to give the teams that had better debating skills, rather than merely more facts and figures, a better chance to break – and maybe, just maybe, encourage people to speak with a little more sensitivity to the needs of their observers.
At this point, my colleague alluded to the idea that “…debaters don’t seem to craft speeches anymore. They just say stuff,” and I think that she hit the proverbial Dodo right on the cranium… Debaters these days rarely prepare, craft and present speeches anymore. Or at least, those that have been trained under the more avant-garde of current institutional debate coaches and trainers. She went on to explain that debaters in other Asian countries – and she mentioned India and Bangladesh specifically, have rapidly caught up with their counterparts in Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines in terms of the manner aspects of their debating, to the point at which, she concluded, it might not be long before competitions like the Asian BP Championships and the UADC were dominated by debaters from these nations.
I agreed with her then, and I have seen nothing since to persuade me that her concluding speculations were anything other than accurate. We are indeed being rapidly left behind: look at the numbers of teams breaking at international level that can be drawn from South East Asia. Ask yourself why Asian adjudicators don’t break in anything like the numbers that they used to – and why those that do end up sitting together on panels in ESL and EFL competitions (rather than main-break rounds) more often than not. Even our ability to adjudicate is now suspect – and no wonder.
But more specifically, ask yourself where the Malaysian powerhouses have gone. It’s a purely personal opinion, and I don’t want to tear the hastily assembled band-aid off the suppurating wound, but we really got derailed somewhere around 2004 and we haven’t found our way back – or even begun to. My own attendance at a couple of recent competitions confirms this hypothesis – at least, it does for me.
The IIU Open debates kicked things off for me. I was becoming jaded with regular adjudication (A thankless task, as so many CAs and Convenors say in the presentation ceremonies that follow Grand Final debates, and “…that’s pretty much all you get,” to quote a Clint Eastwood political campaign speech), and was extremely fortunate to get an offer of partnership from a leading light in UM debating. [Indeed, I begin to value the Malaysian “Royals” policy of paying adjudicators for judging rounds. It begins to seem positively Marxist to give judges a share of the rewards, particularly in a competition that functions in the ‘at-least nominal’ shadow of the monarchy – or maybe I’m thinking about Chekov].
It felt very much in the prelim rounds as if we were a pair of salmon struggling upstream, but then, maybe it did for most people. What was, however, strange was not so much the fact that we made the final, despite a slew of second and third places, but the odd happenstance that people we had just debated against kept coming up to us and congratulating us on our speeches, even though they had just beaten us. More than once, I was tempted to make the comment that, “No, you shouldn’t be trying to speak like us. After all, you were more successful. You won!”
At one early stage, the pair of us were left dumbstruck when, having asked the chair of a prelim’ panel for some extra feedback, particularly pointers on our overall manner, he/she/it said, “Awesome rhetoric; very persuasive, but the manner was pretty much the same across the board for all speakers.” See what I mean? Then again, perhaps I am wrong in thinking that good rhetoric might once have had something to do with manner – or maybe confusing congratulatory comment with an outpouring of sympathy for the depredations of age. Who knows, or cares? Well, actually… I do…
At the end of the competition, the VVIP in attendance at the Grand Final made some very nice comments about the older members of Malaysia’s debating fraternity returning to debate in competitions and, in doing so, assist in the continued development of debating in the country by setting examples that might inspire, as well as making themselves a ‘target’ for up and coming debaters on the scene. It was a gracious and munificent thing to say, but I ask myself whether that model is the most appropriate one, given existing conditions, and the conclusion would have to be, ‘If you want to debate and win in South East Asia, forget manner considerations and concentrate on the emetic that analysis has become.’ On the other hand, if you want to win anywhere else, you are going to have to become the proverbial shape-shifter of Borneo legend.
It was this competition, as much as its aftermath, that the spirited lady in Singapore and I discussed in the ether of an abstract conversation, but the simple truth of her ideas was brought home to me in the next two open competitions, in which I returned to adjudication: The MMU Ramadan Open and the just completed UCTI Open Debate Championship. What, for me, was very telling was that there was always a clamour amongst the adjudicators in the briefing room, post-motion announcement, to be on panels in rooms where teams featuring even more returning ‘dinosaurs’ of debate were to speak. Even stranger to note that this clamour was not only happening amongst the more senior members of the judging pool, but also amongst those only just setting out upon the wild waters of an undergraduate programme. Why would they want to watch the fossils of IIU, MMU and UiTM debate in open competition against their own peers?
Well, let me clear this up for you, particularly if you’re still suffering an incapacitation of intellect of the kind fostered by the continuous ingestion of rendang, nasi impit, pulut and F&N-bottled toxic waste - and the cholesterol and sugar haze that inevitably follows: People wanted to watch the old dudes debate because they were funny, they were entertaining and they were persuasive – and, God forbid, they sounded smart. People wanted to watch the old farts debate because they were able to be all this – to do all this wonderful stuff – and STILL get the job done in terms of constructing powerful arguments and stringing them together to form cases that actually proved something. I mean, bloody hell, they even seemed to be really enjoying this stuff! They actually looked as if they wanted to be in the room, delivering speeches that intrigued as much as they informed. I’ve been an adjudicator in far too many debates lately in which the participants looked as if they were sitting in the waiting room of a dental surgery.
I am making my prime objective in the next year or so to do what I can to train and coach debaters… perhaps even “coax” would be a better word… to develop skills in the largely forgotten areas of Manner and Method. I will do this with an eye on the main prizes, rather than local and regional competitions, because I begin to despair at the direction things are taking in Asia. I want my debaters to win Australs and break consistently at Worlds. If, in doing so, they set a new [old] trend in local debating and begin to craft speeches that people actually want to listen to, then all well and good.
However… (and another “…at the end of the day” phrase looms large), in an effort to do a ‘Canute’ and turn the tide, it’s all well and good to develop Manner-related skills in our debaters, but if they are to meet with the relatively untrained species of adjudicators that we seem to be breeding these days, then all they are going to feel is frustrated and dejected with a lack of success. We have to begin learning how to adjudicate these aspects of the great art again – re-establish ourselves as a nation capable of producing adjudicators who can not only break in international competition, but whose judging skills are appreciated and sought after – as much as the occasional gem of a speech from an ageing velociraptor.
And not only this… we need to start accounting for manner in terms of our observation and assessment of debates in a way that is fair and equitable [Perhaps this really is an “equity” issue]. We need to start recognizing that a team with better manner can win a debate because of it – and that we must learn how to justify that kind of judgement in a reasoned way during feedback. In short, we should go back to the simple basics that real debating was always based on: Matter, Manner AND Method, and stop this puerile and heretical sacrifice to the false God of Matter. Idolatry must die… ‘Long live the 3Ms – all of them!’
Tell you what: Wouldn’t it be nice if adjudicators were clamouring to judge in your debates at some point in the future? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could walk out of a debate round smiling in the knowledge that you gave your best and enjoyed it for a change – regardless of the outcome? “Wouldn’t it be nice…” (The Beach Boys).
This article appeared originally as an MIDP handout at the KLUIC debating tournament, 24th to 26th September, 2010, as a part of their educational outreach programme.
Omar S. Seremban, 23rd September 2010
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