Finding the Synthesis

I decided to join debate in the first few weeks of freshman year, mostly to make friends and to help me get into college. When I got to the first meeting, the debate room was overflowing with teenagers sitting on chairs, windowsills, the tops of desks, and the floor.

The club leaders explained to the newcomers how our school’s (Bard Early College, Queens) form of debate, parliamentary debate, works.

Each team has two people. First the motions—the topics of debate—are released; then a coin flip determines which side of an argument a team takes. Each team has 15 minutes to write their arguments, either advocating for the motion or arguing against it. During this time, you are not allowed to speak to anyone except your partner—or do any research. 

The no-research rule may seem odd, but it is vital to the format. Parliamentary debate challenges basic values and assumptions: The goal is productive dialogue and to invite people to open their minds to new viewpoints. When a round is centered around statistics or data, the dialogue often becomes about whose statistic is more reliable: It’s easy to find a statistic to justify any argument. Parliamentary debate aims to analyze through the lens of commonsense reasoning.

Next, the club leaders explained the speech order. Each team of two gives three speeches, making for six total speeches per motion. 

Hearing about the format initially made me nervous. I was looking for a place where people read, talked about what they read, and exchanged ideas. A place where it was OK to argue. This six-speech back-and-forth seemed too structured, too complicated. 

 But then, after introductions, the club leaders went into what they called “tournament recap.” The experienced debaters laughed and gossiped as they discussed the complex philosophy they’d debated the week before. Most of the freshmen looked at their phones, but I knew I wanted to be in this world. One sophomore girl sitting on top of a desk, Mina, spoke so confidently and knowledgably. I was dazzled, and I wanted to be able to do that too.  

I did my first debate spring of freshman year, with a girl named Meital as my teammate. We only won one round out of four. Slowly though, Meital and I started to improve, and my nervousness faded. I even started to enjoy the rules, relishing the unique role of the third speech. The two of us began to do well at tournaments, making it to elimination rounds more and more often.

My Big Break

When the next season started at the beginning of sophomore year, I got my big break. The impressive girl Mina, now a junior and the team captain, was scheduled to debate at a big tournament at Rutgers, and her regular partner wasn’t free. I asked if I could fill in, and to my surprise, she said yes. Soon I was in a car with her and her dad, driving to New Jersey.

We were assigned the auditorium, a wide, airy room with a pedestal in the front. We met our opponents there, a girl and a boy from New York’s top public high school, Stuyvesant. We chatted until the judge, a debater from the Rutgers college team, arrived. 

Stuy won the coin toss. From three available topics, they chose the motion, “Independence and self-reliance are virtues.” That let us decide whether to support or disagree with that assertion, and we chose to disagree. Both Mina and I are interested in Karl Marx and his vision of a more cooperative society not based in capitalist competition.  

Mina and I rushed into the hallway to find a quiet place to sit on the floor for our 15 minutes of prep. We found empty floor space near an outlet, more valuable to debaters than gold, and plugged in our laptops to take notes. 

We decided I would go first in the opening arguments round. Mina would take the second round, where each side responds to the other’s arguments, and defends their own. 

And I would come back for the third round and present the synthesis. In that final speech, you acknowledge the arguments each side has made, and explain how they come together in a way that gives your side an advantage but also makes a stronger and more nuanced point than either of you did alone.

We talked and typed our fundamental observations into a shared document. I asked, “OK, so what does a strong emphasis on self-reliance and independence do to society? I think it makes people more selfish.”

Mina asked, “How?”

“Well, people want to put themselves first, which harms your community. You don’t want to help other people as much.” 

We fleshed out that argument, reviewing what each other wrote. 

Mina added, “In order to be a happy person, you need to live in a community that wants you to be happy. If no one cares about community, it’s harder to be happy,” Mina said.

As often happens at the beginning, ideas emerged and sharpened, as if from a fog. “I see what you mean, but how do we explain that?” We kept talking and typing until Mina’s phone timer beeped, and we rushed back to begin the round.

Just because an argument comes from a place you disagree with doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth evaluating and maybe even adopting.

Back in the auditorium, I sipped my water nervously, my hands shaking. I knew that as soon as I started speaking, I would have to be fully on—performing, listening, thinking, responding—for 90 minutes. 

I dove in. “Telling people to put themselves first fosters competition within a community, jeopardizing ties such as friendships and family relationships. It becomes harder to make friends in a hierarchical workplace. Making everyone into winners or losers fosters resentment and cruelty.”

As I spoke, I moved my hands, made eye contact with the judge, and used the stern debate voice I had learned from watching Mina. The judge smiled when I made the point about competition and community, which I took to be a good sign.

After my speech, the boy from Stuy opened by talking about innovation. He said that self-reliance leads to an individualistic society, which leads to more competition. In turn, competition and individuality incentivize people to develop new products, such as the iPhone, or create art that expresses their individuality, which leads to societal progress, a richer culture, and better quality of life.

I was taking notes on our shared document for Mina’s second speech. I began to worry. The other team was right, competition does lead to progress and innovation. I had no idea what Mina would say to this.

After he finished, Mina walked up to the podium calmly and confidently. “I will start with innovation, because it was the most important point of the previous round.” 

That seemed like a bad move, telling the judge that the other team’s strong point was the most important thing. My usual strategy was to minimize the other team’s points and praise my team’s. 

Mina acknowledged that the iPhone was the idea of one individual, and that competition fueled its development. She said flat out that they were right. I was mystified: Why was she throwing the round?! 

Building Something Together

But then she zoomed out from Steve Jobs to the long journey that put iPhones in billions of hands. In the beginning, ancient civilizations came up with numbers, leading to the development of binary coding, computers, and eventually cell phones. 

And at the same time, somewhere else in the world, completely different people set the groundwork for mechanical reproduction, and somewhere else, someone was making an even smaller computer chip. 

Progress is not the work of individuals; it is the constant, simultaneous collaboration of thousands of people across time and space, working together in seemingly unrelated ways. In this way, innovation is the product of a community. 

I had never thought that way about the community necessary for progress, even when that progress comes from innovation. The other team’s insight, and then Mina’s response, changed my view of how the world works, and expanded my idea of our debate topic. 

Once Mina finished her speech she returned to her seat and whispered, “What? You were looking at me weird for my whole speech.”

“I was just distracted because it was a really excellent speech.” (It turns out Mina was teaching me something all experienced debaters know: Build upon the other team’s good point rather than trying to refute it.)

We both laughed, but our conversation was cut off by the beginning of the other team’s speech. Mina and I summarized on our shared doc their best points. 

The Stuy second speaker responded to Mina’s speech by saying that without personal recognition, people wouldn’t be incentivized to work or invent new things. In our style of debate, the team that goes second in the first two rounds actually starts the third round, i.e., has to give two speeches in a row. I would go last.

The boy from Stuy, their first speaker, walked up to the podium and reiterated a lot of their earlier points. He re-stressed that valuing independence teaches kids to take initiative. He largely stayed away from the topic of progress, because Mina had shifted that argument so much when she talked about the teamwork needed for any innovation.

For our third speech, I touched on earlier points about how competition can harm mental health, but I quickly got to the main point, what debaters call the “collapse.”

“The other team has brought up the excellent point that teaching self-reliance leads to innovation and societal progress. My partner Mina pointed out, though, that progress and innovation are inherently products of collaboration. And both are enhanced when people don’t put themselves first, but instead prioritize their entire community. Innovation may sometimes come from wanting your name on a billboard, but we think the product of that innovation is better when it comes from wanting to help those around you.”

After the round, all four of us walked into the hallway. The two teams offered each other compliments, and we both said, “I think YOU won!”

After a few minutes, the judge called us back in and said, “I ended up voting for Bard.” Mina and I tried to suppress our smiles, then packed up our stuff. 

In the car ride back to New York City, I thought about the round more deeply. The way Mina had debated shifted my thinking. It ended up changing how I perceive competition and cooperation, how both personal accolades and helping others motivate us to excel and create. And the way I got there was through this very combination of building an argument both against and with the Stuyvesant debate team. 

Just because an argument comes from a place you disagree with doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth evaluating and maybe even adopting. And even if you don’t end up agreeing with something the other side said, their good point can sharpen your ideas and expand your thinking. 

A lot of people say debate is good if you want to be a lawyer or a politician, but the parliamentary debate I do seems to prepare me more for teaching or philosophy. I think our style of debate, where we synthesize what others say rather than shooting it down, is better than, say, presidential debates or Jubilee, where people are just trying to display differences and score points off each other. We debate to force each other to critically evaluate a range of ideas, even the ones we disagree with. That often leads to us thinking of an issue in a different way, or discovering something we wouldn’t have thought of on our own.