Beyond the Binary: The Intellectual Cost of Debate

I am at a church youth event and on the programme is a debate. The title: “Faith Vs Hard Work for Results”. I don’t care much for this topic. It is a relic of a debate format that no longer serves humanity. A format that contributes to polarity in society.

My problem with this topic, and all debate topics in general is that they are binary. They are yes, or no. For, or against. Right, or wrong. They take complex issues and attempt to shoehorn them into two distinct categories that do not capture nuance.

Nothing is ever so simple. And attempting to make them so makes people miss out on a lot of important analysis. What we do with these binary topics is that we force people into an outcome. We have already decided their destination before they ever hit the road. So no matter what they find on the road, they contour their journey to fit that destination. This contradicts the nature of knowledge.

Curiosity requires that you start on the path, and learn what comes along the way. When seeking knowledge, you go where the knowledge leads, not where your bias forces. And the only way to seek knowledge this way is if you’re dishonest, or just too dumb to see nuance. That brings us to a major problem of binary debates: The kind of character it encourages, and fosters. It trains people to turn a blind eye to critical thinking, as no truly intelligent man who truly researches a topic can arrive at the conclusion that one side is bad, and one side good. If he has intellectual integrity, the furthest he would go is to try and define a scenario-specific lesser evil.

Even at that, a lesser evil is not always easy to determine. Intellectual integrity demands that you pick one, based on a scale of preference, or opportunity cost. I guess in a way, selecting the lesser evil is an economic decision. Binary topic debates therefore train participants to intentionally turn a blind eye to nuance— if they can spot it— and peddle a worldview that they know is incomplete.

Given that debate clubs typically recruit from adolescence, we are training our future public speakers to research, and peddle half truths and intellectually dishonest positions. We also reward this behavior in adults, because forcing things into such categories means that there must be a winner, and whoever can best achieve victory is vindicated no matter the means with which such victory is achieved.