Transcription
Hey there, friends, fans, and foes of Dad Saves America. John Papola here, and welcome back to this, our second episode in our six-part series called The Death of Debate.
As you saw last week, and if you haven't, watch this and then go back and catch up. We are exploring what has happened to debate in America with a special focus on, of course, our kids and what's happening in K through 12, because the debate clubs of this country, largely hosted by the National Speech and Debate Association, have been going through some turmoil. Some turmoil that all of us as parents need to know about.
This project is partly an investigation into that organization and that experience for our kids, but it is also a broader exploration of why debate is important and how it became so central to Western civilization. And that is something we're going to be talking about a lot in this episode, going all the way back to the Greeks, Socrates, the sophists, and the ground they laid for Western thought. It's fun. It's historical. And it's a little bit cheeky, which you'll understand what I mean soon enough. But without further ado, welcome back to the death of debate.
[music]
This is where I get a lot of my best thinking done. Walking my dog Cheeky every morning. And yes, her name is Cheeky. It's where I get ideas for Dad Saves America.
Hey there, friends, fans, and foes of Dad Saves America.
>> It's where I think of new angles for our radical discourse rap videos.
>> Socialist's record isn't hard to parse. First, it was tragedy. Now, it's a farce.
>> And it's where I've spent countless hours thinking about this series. I knew I wanted to make a film about this story as soon as I first read about the alleged critical theory [music] takeover of high school debate. James Fishbach, the author of the infamous article, dropped a follow-up, and he also agreed to sit down with me for an interview. So, that was in the works. We'd have to see if he was willing to say on camera what he so aggressively put in print.
Things like, "The NSDA has allowed hundreds of judges with explicit left-wing bias to infiltrate the organization." These judges proudly display their ideological leanings and statements or paradigms on a public database maintained by the NSDA called Tabroom Room, where they declare that debaters who argue in favor of capitalism or Israel or the police will lose the rounds they're judging. For the record, these paradigms are no longer fully public and are more difficult to systematically review, probably because of the negative press the NSDA received from these stories. That is, of course, one of the things I wanted to talk to them about, but so far, they weren't willing to speak with us on the record.
In the meantime, there was video evidence to go by, clips of so-called debate that looked anything but.
>> Everyone good?
>> First, the critique. The app overlooks a necessary survival strategy of trans people of color, self-defense. They cannot. Where is the narrative you were voting on the after the negative drop to vanish one, which means we solve all the inter?
>> Should be able to wait between different political aes, determine what the best solutions are through.
>> And then there was this. He say, "Black man, black woman [music] come build America." He said it. Now, the bottom of it, I'm taking, I'm taking. You build America. The tribe is not a, a historically negative language. Native groups have reappropriated the term tribe, just like.
>> Modern day college debate in the CEDA championship. This tournament [music] is run by the largest policy debate association in the country.
>> I'm going speak these words. I'm going tell the blind man what he missing. So my brothers who were time man up in prison and thought they had to up the crime system. [music]
>> How could this be considered debate at all? The motormouth talk, the obscenity. [music] Yes, these were college kids, but was high school just as bad as Fishbach alleged? Getting to the bottom of it was going to take time. And as I kept thinking about debate and discourse, I started considering the roots of it and why it's so important. Especially on those walks alone with Cheeky, I started getting philosophical. And I started thinking about how all of these big ideas fit together. It made me realize that if I wanted to really tell the story of high school debate and the story of debate in modern America, I had to go back in time, way back to ancient [music] Greece, the fifth century BC, to be exact.
This is where most of Western civilization's roots really lie, including the principles of free speech and open debate. So, if we're going to talk about ancient Greece and speech, there's a few specific people and a few different methods of dialogue that we need to focus on. There's, of course, Socrates.
>> Look them up.
>> Oh, it's under so crates.
>> The granddaddy of them all. His question-based method of teaching, the Socratic method, is near and dear to my heart. So much so that I sent my son Matteo for a stretch to Acton Academy, where they use it religiously. In a sense, I try to use the Socratic method every week when I record our podcast. The show is all about asking questions, actively listening, thinking, and learning, with the occasional diatribe as question. I must admit, and thank you all for pointing that out.
Before we get to Socrates, though, we need to talk about another group first, the sophists. Ah, the sophist. That's Jay Heinrich. He's the author of Aristotle's Guide to Self-Persuasion and a slew of other books about rhetoric. These guys named themselves. So, sophist means wise one. [laughter] And that was their own brand. They came up with it. God bless them. Sophists were traveling teachers and speakers who got paid to instruct Greek men in arete, which means virtue or excellence. So, they were these itinerant, wandering scholars and orators. Now, at the time, speeches, theater, and sports were the three kinds of entertainment.
>> Are you not entertained?
>> Theater was like movies, but speeches were like the best documentaries. For sophists, debate and rhetoric was less about finding absolute truth and more about making the best argument, convincing an audience, being persuasive. That certainly sounds a lot like today's world.
>> It's [music] pretty clear.
>> Mayor Bowser, what is a woman?
>> I'm a woman. Are you a woman?
>> 100%.
>> Donald Trump would sell this country for a dollar.
The sophists were people who not only gave these speeches but also performed them. And so, one who is both a teacher who charged vast amounts of money, but also gave the most popular speeches at the time, was this man named Gorgias. Gorgias, some people pronounce it, but I prefer Gorgias, 'cause he was. Gorgias was criticized by some for being a shallow, if effective, entertainer. He was the rap star of the time. In fact, he, he spoke with this kind [music] of rhythmic, highly elaborate kind of speech that's very similar to the way hip-hop stars [music] perform today. Well, that sounds familiar. Remember the college debaters I showed you earlier?
>> Some say the black is the berry, the sweeter the juice. I say the darker the flesh, the deeper the roots. Young black reckless generation, strapped and asking questions like, "Tell I let this up in my liver with these top six as I sip? I get up." [clears throat]
>> Seems an awful lot like Gorgias and the sophists, doesn't it? Gorgias wowed the people and he made so much money charging for his orations and charging people to teach how to, how to orate, that he actually allegedly had a solid gold statue of himself created. It would be like if Taylor Swift not only, you know, performed but also taught music for millions of dollars and then commissioned a solid gold statue of herself. I would personally go see that. But that's the equivalent of what Gorgias did. Theatrics aside, at least some of the ideas of these sophists make sense to me. I mean, it's a good skill to learn, right? Making a great argument that connects with people is really important for sales and pitching, something I've been doing as a producer and a small business owner for 25 years. I want to share, sort of, our vision for how to tackle the battle of ideas. And I can see how it would be useful in high school debate. This is how you win. But there's also problems that come up when people don't really care about what's right or wrong and they only care about winning.
The sophists were accused of relativism, the idea that there's no single truth. And I think that they deserved, um, a lot of [music] the criticism. One in particular said, "Man is the measure of everything."
>> In other words, everything exists, exists through the opinions of individual men.
>> That sounds downright postmodern, doesn't it? You could see it fitting pretty comfortably in a modern woke classroom.
>> They, them is the measure of everything. Gorgias, who I mentioned earlier, [music] actually believed that there is no single reality. It's only [music] what we believe reality to be. So, reality not only doesn't exist, but if it did exist, we wouldn't be able to share it with one another. [music]
Now, it's worth noting, a lot of what we know about sophists comes from people who didn't like them, which brings us back to the master himself, Socrates.
So, great. >> Socrates was a [music] philosopher who wandered around asking people fundamental questions in a really cheerful way. [music] But then he would drill down into the meaning of things. So, he would say, "So, what do you do? Why do you do it? Why do you like what you do? What does that mean? So, where the sophists were all about winning an argument, Socrates was all about finding truth."
This resonates with me a lot. I love asking people questions. I'd frankly like to think that what we do with this channel is try to find the truth through discourse. And that's certainly what Socrates did. He sought the truth by asking questions. And so, he's constantly probing the meaning of things. And then he'd get together with these rich guys, and they'd have a conversation. That was the famous dialogues. Now, look, nobody's going to compare Socrates to say, Joe Rogan. But you can see that the ancient master might have approved of at least some of what we're doing today, seeking truth by talking, having conversations. It's amazing that thousands of years later, Socrates is still making his presence felt in schools all around the world.
"I know that I know nothing, yet you are surrounded by knowledge. Does this abundance of facts truly make you wise?" Especially because we don't exactly know what Socrates thought about a lot of things. His famous dialogues weren't actually written down by him. They were written by his greatest student, Plato. Socrates probably wasn't even literate. I mean, maybe he was. Nobody knows. But Plato clearly was. Plato wrote dialogues starring Socrates, channeling his ideas. He also, of course, made plenty of contributions of his own, including one, probably his most famous, that teaches us deep, fundamental lessons about free speech and debate, the allegory of the cave.
The cave appears in Plato's Republic, book 7, and the idea of it is simple but profound. Plato tells us to imagine a cave, and then imagine prisoners in that cave, chained up, facing a wall for their entire lives. Behind the prisoners, there's a fire casting shadows onto the wall. Here's where it gets, well, philosophical. The prisoners think those shadows are reality because the shadows are all the prisoners have ever seen. Which makes perfect sense when you think about it. If all you ever saw were those shadows, of course you would think they [music] were real, actual things, wouldn't you? You wouldn't know any better. Plato continues the mental exercise and suggests this idea. What if a prisoner were to escape, leave the cave, and see the real world? Then what if he returned and told the rest of the prisoners what he had seen? [music] What would happen? Plato gets pretty dark at this point.
>> We will not go.
>> Because what he theorizes is that [music] the prisoners would reject the person who escaped, the person who learned the truth about the shadows, because the truth would shatter their worldview. He even speculates the other prisoners might kill the person who did nothing more than tell them what was real, tell them [music] the truth. Pretty bleak stuff.
So, what's the lesson here? Why does this matter today? Well, even thousands of years ago, Plato understood the way human beings trend towards consensus and confirmation bias. Now, look, plenty of times, there's good reasons for this. It can keep us safe. People can get more things done more efficiently when groups of us agree instead of constantly being at each other's throats. It's also more efficient, since changing our minds takes a lot of neural energy and effort.
>> You need neural energy to be able to go and contemplate something that is very different to what you've thought is the truth. You are [music] encountering new information, and your prefrontal cortex now has to make new connections. [music] Now, if you've done these things before, you got a neural pathway. You know exactly how it happens, and you save energy. That's what a habit is. A habit is formed so that you don't have to use a lot of neural energy.
But it also sometimes leads to [music] us believing lies, like the prisoners in that cave. And even when we aren't sure about the consensus, we can often keep silent because we fear [music] we're in the minority, when in fact, what we believe is actually broadly [music] shared. This is what psychologist Todd Rose calls collective illusions. [music] The majority of people in a group believe the majority think something that they don't. They lead individuals to [music] make decisions that are contrary to their private values. And as a result, the entire group can end up doing something that almost nobody wants, which is fatal to free society.
As social creatures, most people are deeply, biologically, and psychologically inclined to go along with the crowd, right or wrong, and ostracize [clears throat] those who don't. Plato understood the extreme danger of being a person who challenges the consensus. And that holds true today as much as it ever did. Just ask the doctors who dared challenge the medical experts during COVID. People like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who's been on this show, and the other authors of the Great Barrington Declaration. They were among the few who opposed COVID lockdowns and mask mandates when the entire establishment was in favor of them. And like the mythical prisoner who escaped Plato's cave and returned with the truth, the authors of the declaration were pilloried. Anthony Fauci called the declaration ridiculous, "TOTAL NONSENSE, AND VERY DANGEROUS." The so-called experts did not want debate. They tried to stop it at every turn. We all remember the phrase "trust the science" and Fauci's infamous proclamation, "They're really criticizing science because I represent science."
As we now know, Bhattacharya and his allies were exactly right. It turns out we should have had more debate at the time. Debate is how we break the spell of collective illusions and discover truth. Instead, we unleashed the hell of co-authoritarianism on the world, and we and our kids are still suffering for it to this very day. Plato understood human nature all too well, the way we sometimes kill the messenger. His mentor, Socrates, actually was killed not long before Plato wrote the cave allegory, accused of corrupting the youth of Athens and worshiping false gods. He was put on trial, lost, and famously ordered to drink poison hemlock. That was [music] all she wrote for Socrates.
There's a lot of complexity and debate around the reasons for his trial and execution, but what we know for sure serves as a really good warning for today. Socrates made a lot of enemies because he was constantly questioning powerful and influential people in public. In fact, Plato quoted Socrates as saying, "I am that gadfly which God has attached to the state, and all day long I arouse and persuade and reproach each one of you." Put another way, he embarrassed politicians and the elite, which can be a pretty bad move, sometimes fatal, as we've seen throughout history through to today. Socrates can be seen as a martyr for free speech and a symbol of what happens when a society punishes open debate. Is it possible that our elite is filled with people just like the sophists, just out there making arguments, defending their side? And is that same elite, the media, politicians, [music] academia, trying to destroy people like Socrates who are in the arena saying [music] things that are unpopular?
Finally, how much of the good and how much of the bad from our roots [music] in ancient Greece has infected the culture of high school debate? The biggest danger of all comes back [music] to Plato's cave. Open debate, the battle of ideas, is the only way to ensure we won't all become prisoners in that cave. And yet, looking at the accusations against the NSDA, an extreme [music] threat was starting to become clear. If this organization was actually shutting down debate, declaring certain ideas off limits, they were in essence rewarding the prisoners for staying ignorant, flipping [music] the entire process on its head and creating mobs to go after anyone who came back to the cave and challenged [music] the consensus with the truth.
>> [music]
All right, folks. That's the end of episode two. A really solid foundation for how to understand and think about debate in Western civilization and, frankly, in civilization as a whole. If you missed episode 1, we will put links all over the place, including on our homepage. So, be sure to check that out. And also, be sure to hit the like button, subscribe to the channel, and, of course, head over to dadsavesamerica.com, where we've got so many more resources and plenty of other videos and articles to check out.
Next week, we fast forward to the American founding and grapple with the debates that formed this country, including the presidential debates that have shaped America at key moments throughout our history, including one of the most outrageous debates I think we've all ever seen.
>> If we finally beat Medicare.
>> If you want to debate me, you know where to go. Head to the comments. And if you want to debate with me besides in the comments, head over to X. I'm there. And, of course, have a great weekend.
>> [music]