Breathing Room

2008 University of California, Berkeley Debate Reunion - Keynote Address

This month I was invited to give the keynote at the first-ever Cal-Berkeley Debate Reunion. This is the speech, with some minor modifications.

I confess that I am both honored and humbled to be here. This room is filled with exceptional and successful individuals of diverse backgrounds, spanning over half a century of joyful disagreement. Over the decades, our beloved activity has dramatically changed. The hundreds of debates today’s Cal students win every year are very different, for example, from the Joffre debates between Cal and Stanford, which annually discussed an issue of French national policy.

To find common ground, I undertook a search for the quintessence of debate – that which ties us together and transcends superficial differences of form and content. I stumbled across Prof. Alexander Meiklejohn, a university president, and philosopher who wrote that:

“when I try to single out… some one group which shall stand forth as intellectually the best - best in college work and best in promise of future intellectual achievement… it seems to me that stronger than any other group, tougher in intellectual fiber, keener in intellectual interests, better equipped to battle the coming problems are the college debaters - the students who apart from their regular studies, band together for intellectual controversy with each other and with their friends…”

This is a room full of successful, brilliant people, and the sooner I finish speaking the sooner you can get around to the business of conversing and proving me right. It makes no sense to belabor the point that team-based, labor-intensive, competitive persuasive argument strengthens the moral character and intellectual fiber of participants. So tonight I will dwell on the relationship between debate and matters of life and death. I speak from a heart filled with love and reverence for debate, and hope you will indulge my verbose nostalgia.

Recently I began graduate school at Georgetown and became friends a GU graduate voted the Best Debater of the 1970’s. He took a three-decade hiatus from debate, and after thirty years that utterly transformed America and its debaters, he attended a tournament and immediately felt the love of the game surge, adrenaline-like through his veins and super-charge his brain. He said that witnessing the brilliance, wit and determination of the students reminded him of something Vince Lombardi, the legendary football coach once said about the relationship between competition and greatness.

Being a compulsive researcher, I went searching for this Lombardi-ism. I have a rather personal attachment to Lombardi. At 57, at the peak of his profession, he died ten weeks after being diagnosed with intestinal cancer, in a room at Georgetown University Hospital. Today the Georgetown Cancer Center is named after him. I visit his building every other week to get treated for the Hodgkin’s Lymphoma that is trying to kill me.

Ironically, the Lombardi-ism I found is the opening quote of Any Given Sunday, the movie that Cal debaters of my generation traditionally watched before departing for tournaments. It reads:

“any man’s finest hour, the greatest fulfillment of all that he holds dear, is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle - victorious.”

Vincent Lombardi would have been a hell of a debate coach, and told his athletes so. He said:

“The quality of a person’s life is in direct proportion to his commitment to excellence, regardless of his chosen field of endeavor.”

I would like to make three points using three of Vincent’s maxims. First, debate is life. In both games, “if you’ll not settle for anything less than your best, you will be amazed at what you can accomplish.”

Since a small group of dedicated Cal Debate alumni decided to dedicate their time and resources to rebuilding the team ten years ago, UC Berkeley has experienced the most dramatic rise to greatness in the 61-year history of the NDT. Excellence starts at the top, with Dave Arnett and Greg Achten. Just one year after arriving at Cal, Greg guided debaters to our first-ever national championship. But since I, like Greg and Dave, have a vested interest in proving that Cal Debate has achieved something momentous, I consulted a source of unimpeachable credibility – the coach whose team ended my debating career with crushing defeat.

He said that “Cal “breaking the mold” of the monster private school… will be one of the most important developments of the decade…. Now, [all other public schools must abandon the oft-repeated] argument that public schools are “screwed [by the system]. If that sentiment festered, the activity [of college debate] would have been in real trouble.” It is no exaggeration to say that we have changed the landscape of competitive debate in America: we catalyzed the rebirth of West Coast debate. We challenged the conventional wisdom that only elite private schools could sustain success in 21^st century policy debate. The coach of the reigning national champion team, agrees with this: “The return of Cal debate to the national scene has been a blessing and a curse… “Hearing” and “knowing” the Cal debaters is a blessing, he said, and our team is “a blessed exemplar for all who would aspire to debate well and successfully. Every program, extant, or dormant, can say, ‘See, this is what is possible.’ No excuses. But Cal’s rise has been a curse for all of those who thought they were ready to [place in the top 16, win the Copeland award for the top-ranked team], or win any one of a number of tournaments.”

Our debaters are leaders; they exert a multiplier effect by enabling the achievements of others – typically, each Cal debater coaches a high school team of between 4 and 20 students. As a result, even though I am a half-decade removed from college, I know over two-thirds of the current Berkeley debaters – they were my students as teenagers. Just as UC Berkeley’s flagship status raises standards and exerts centrifugal force on the entire UC system, weaker teams in our region have ridden the coattails of Cal Debate to revival.

Like a strong family, a market-leading company, or a great nation, Cal Debate is built of sweat and love. I know this because I have worked for 8 years to help strengthen it. When we began the Cal Debate renaissance, the debate community stereotyped all Cal debaters as friendly, easy-going hippie slackers with more intelligence than work ethic. Today, they know Berkeley’s friendly, easy-going hippies will, more often than not, charmingly and overwhelmingly demolish their best and brightest students with the flair for originality and sophisticated research that makes UC Berkeley a global force to be reckoned with in every academic field.

I recently read the debater orientation handbook that Dave and Greg give to new students, and I realized that it distilled the results of  all our late nights and early mornings, our shared heartbreaks, petty fights, and reconciliations, our near-death experiences with car thieves and house fires, academic and UC-bureaucratic calamities of varying but inevitable proportions, our joint backbreaking labor, our life-altering successes, and heartbreaking defeats – our shared existence as teammates and our unbreakable fellowship, reduced to a pamphlet size for our debate descendants to relearn. Everything I quote here is from the handbook – which, for the record, was written before this reunion was a glimmer in Greg’s eye:

“Research is the foundation of the Cal tradition… Our team has a long history of producing some of the highest quality [arguments] in the nation.” I should point out that words like “tradition” and “long history” should fill every heart in this room with joy: we wrote that history. We are the tradition, and it almost died out – on several occasions. Socrates, the world’s first Debate Coach of the Decade, said that “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is a habit.”

It is, perhaps, difficult to appreciate how dramatic our habit formation process has been. When I arrived at Cal, I was aware of only three traditions: getting lost on the way to tournaments, the resolution of disputes through games known as “not it,” “shotgun,” and “face in the copier,” and accidentally skipping events like celebratory banquets and preliminary rounds of tournaments.

The Cal Debate handbook contains 8 Guidelines for Success in Debate.

1. “Work is Desire. Hard work makes [the] good… great and great… transcendent…. Work almost every day. Cramming… is not a substitute to hard work… and will cost you dearly when it most matters.

2. [Have] Patience. Nothing about this is easy. If it was, [it] wouldn’t be half the game it is… it can and should be frustrating at times. The process… entails fits and starts, trial and error, and ultimately a lot of reflection. No one is born… great… It is a long process that never ends.

3. Never lose [to] the same [thing] twice.

4. Using your teammates, coaches, professors, and friends as a resource is essential.

5. We work for each other… If you take nothing else away from… college…. I hope it is this ideal.

6. It is understandable to get upset at times, [but] rudeness is unacceptable and unwise.

7. Think about your competit[ors].

8. Healthy Body, Healthy Mind.

These are rules for great debaters, but with only minimal modification, are generalizable guidelines for a life well-lived. Perhaps this is why, when other debate institutions produce champions who graduate into spectacular unemployment or worse, Dave and Greg’s students without exception go on to successful careers. Debate is life. We win at both.

My second overarching point about debate and matters of life and death is that we all need to do what we can to support debate, because our national life hangs in the balance. Lombardi said “Individual commitment to a group effort… is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work… The achievements of an organization are the results of the combined effort of each individual.” I ask you to consider this in light of the following two salient facts: 1) We live in a nation that chooses to fight and kill for its interests, beliefs and in defense of its homeland and 2) only 1% of society serves in the military, and only one out of seven people in uniform is a combat arms professional. In other words, less than half a million Americans daily pay the life and death costs of foreign policy mistakes.

I passionately believe that debate has a significant role to play in a society at war, but will not treat you to a harangue about the value of vigorous wartime dissent and the perils of totalitarianism – this is, after all, a meeting of Berkeley alumni. Greg and Dave did not invite a professional agitator to speak here – they invited a “strategic communication” planner, a man who works with the military to persuade foreigners not to kill Americans, help kill Americans, or kill each other in ways that threaten American interests.

One of my good friends holds a senior position in the US military. Like me, and most students of international relations, he believes that anonymous, structural forces and dynamics drove the US to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and made both wars so intractable. We agree, however, that such explanations are somehow incomplete and unsatisfying. I asked my friend after a particularly frustrating day in Iraq how the most powerful nation in human history could have made so many catastrophic errors in judgment, at such staggering cost in blood and treasure.

He said without hesitation that “we made bad judgments because the professionals did not know how to debate.” In our system of government, when civilian politicians are convinced that war is necessary, they must rely on professional knowledge producers and action planners. Ultimate responsibility for justifying and implementing political decisions lies with these people. When dealing with al-Qaeda and Iraq, they systematically failed to correct retrospectively obvious analytical judgments and poor operational decisions.

Although my friend never debated, he understands what debate is: strategic analytical argument. Competitors are assigned to mutually-exclusive positions, and objectively evaluate all of the available evidence. Each participant is required to think through the arguments on both sides. They then identify strongest arguments and assemble them into logical cases which they deliver persuasively, and an unbiased evaluator dispassionately renders a judgment. Subsequently, arguments may be reevaluated in light of changed evidence or circumstances, and the participants may switch sides, but continue to argue with equal passion and competence.

My friend identified five failures in the professional conduct of the war on terrorism, all of which plague unskilled debaters: 1) Failure to consider plausible but unconventional interpretations of the available evidence 2) Failure to thoroughly consider alternative means of achieving an agreed-upon goal 3) Failure to re-evaluate strongly-held beliefs in light of new, discrepant evidence 4) Failure to respect and understand the adversary 5) Failure to react to intellectual intimidation and vitriolic disagreement from authority figures with moral courage and strong, evidence-based counter-argument.

When Goldman-Sachs considers an investment, analysts and economists are assigned to Blue and Red teams to debate the question out in front of the decision-makers. No comparable institutionalized process exists in the US intelligence and military communities. Fortunately, we may win these first battles in the 21st Century’s Long War without fixing these problems. But if we do not resurrect a national culture of robust debate on issues of life and death, we will eventually pay a butcher’s bill so grotesquely massive that our losses thus far will seem a bloody pittance. And unfortunately, in war, as in life, as in debate, it is the last blows in the struggle that dictate the outcome – not the first.

For my third and final point, there is no Lombardi-ism, because it deals with the opponent that he couldn’t bring himself to face, that undid all his maxims about strength and courage and made him a coward. The first thing I did when I found out I had cancer was hug my mom and cry. The second thing I did was debate.

According to my doctors and other cancer patients, even patients with treatable disease may face crippling mental obstacles to successful healing. Because of debate, I have been blessedly free of such problems as I struggle to defend my life.  By way of explanation, here is a debate I had in my head in the surgical recovery area of Georgetown University Hospital.

Resolved: I should be angry at the world because the injustice of what has happened to me

Affirmative:

1. Anger at the world over the injustice of my cancer will help provide a coherent explanation for, and emotional response to, being sick

2. Coherent explanations for unpleasant events help make them manageable

3. Attitude will not determine if I survive, but it is one of a very small number of factors under my control. I need a coherent mental response that strengthens my determination to fight

4. Anger is part of what I am feeling right now, and denying that would be counterproductive: feelings that are buried get buried alive. Sometimes they come back as zombies.

Negative:

1 a) Not everything is the result of purposive or coherent causes – some things, including bad things, are the result of random unpleasant occurrences like spontaneous  genetic mutations or freak storms – a man struck by lightning cannot reasonably complain about the unfairness of the event

1b) Attempting to provide a coherent explanation for random events is not always a good thing: superstitions and stereotypes are examples of this.

2) A coherent cause for my cancer would not necessarily improve things. If a doctor comes here to say smoking cigarettes in college caused this , I will feel worse about having made myself sick, not better.

3a) Attitude matters, but a will to fight is not as important a positive and sustainable approach that is consistent with my beliefs and personality.

3b) I am not the kind of person to prefer comfortable illusions over uncomfortable facts

4a) If anger is the difference between me wanting to live and accepting death, I don’t want to live enough to survive this

4b) Anger is just another strategy of denial – I’m actually scared and frustrated at being powerless. Accepting anger buries alive the reality of that fear and my powerlessness in the face of mortality

Just as I did hundreds if not thousands of times at Cal, I planned the debate out in my head, from beginning to end. Then I judged the outcome and decided that the benefits of anger were outweighed by its costs. No more impotent frustration at the unfair world for me - much to the frustration of the hospital social workers and psychiatrists. I had several debates with myself that night. Topics included “Resolved: I should act as if I know I am going to beat this disease,” and “Resolved: I have wasted most of my life until now.”

Vince Lombardi was so scared of cancer that even as it rotted away his gut, he refused to get tested for it. He buried his head in the sand, just as American officials did as internecine strife ripped out the heart of the Iraqi nation, and just as I am daily tempted to do. I have heard and seen a lot of responses to cancer that appear, like most bad ideas, simple and seductive. People get entrapped in these well-intentioned emotional traps, and sometimes they deprive themselves of the tools they need to survive. There but for the grace of God go I: I know that without Cal Debate, I would probably not be capable of fighting off the disease without losing my mind.

It takes hard work to stay healthy and active, engaged with the outside world, employed and sociable while sick. It takes character to face seemingly-endless bombardment with toxic chemical and radiation, nausea, baldness, sores, acne, and pain that cuts right to the bones without collapsing into self-pity and fear. Keeping a family together and sustaining a multi-state, international support system requires teamwork. And keeping up the strength required to survive with dignity requires commitment. Hard work, teamwork, character and commitment are the four pillars of greatness that the Berkeley debate team and its coaches struggle to uphold every day. These values are intrinsically laudable, but they are also effective – I am happy and increasingly healthy: after 2 rounds of radiation and 12 chemotherapy treatments, as of this week, scanners can no longer detect active cancer cells in my body.

Debate is life, debate saves lives, and debate is keeping me alive. Long live UC Berkeley Debate.