It's Who You Believe (or, Everything I Ever Needed to Know I Learned in Debate Club, Part I)
by Christopher Dash

The Schiavo case and the media feeding tube frenzy have profound relationships to deep currents in American and western politics and culture. Those who see it in terms of the rise of populism (as in John Lukacs'new book) or as an American analogy to Germany between the world wars, or even as a symptom of the implosion of western civilization in a clearly apocalyptic age, all have good evidence here for how this fits into their theories.

But let's talk for a moment on the level of personal experience, in a way that relates this case to the whole faith-based versus reality-based model of where we in the red and blue states of America are today.

These days I have many occasions to recall my thoughts and feelings as a high school student, when I began getting involved in the theory and practice of debating. U.S. high schools participate in a national system of debate competitions, which pit teams from one school against those of another, in debates on the same topic all year. (In my two years of debating, the topics were trade---the proposition would be today couched as an expanded NAFTA---and universal health care.)

Two person debate teams engage teams from other schools in their district just about every week, with a series of "finals" that lead to the national finals in the spring. At least this is how it was in the 1960s, when I moved up from Extemporaneous Speech ("extemp") competition to debate.

In extemp preparation, we learned about sources and facts, and how to use them in a speech. In debate, our sources and facts as well as our arguments were subject to question by the other team. So you had to examine evidence carefully, as your opponent would as well as how it helped you make your case. Since you debated the same proposition all year, using phony information or even an indefensible interpretation of the information, seldom worked for very long. Word got around, and sooner or later the other team would call you out on it.

The best "evidence" was from sources considered objective, arrived at by a legitimate process you could describe. (A study of x thousand people over x years, etc. by prestigious or at least reputable organization.)

In cross-examination and argument against the opponent's case, one basic debate tactic was to question your opponent's information. Was it someone's opinion only, or was it asserted to be fact? In either case, you questioned the source. "What's your source?" became the standard cross-examination question. You asked it when you suspected they didn't have a specific source, or if you already knew something about that source. How effectively you could describe the bias of the source was a key tactic. Was their self-interest involved? Ideology? A pattern of misstating facts, or giving a biased interpretation of their meaning?

The issue was credibility. If the underlying facts supporting the argument weren't credible, or at least questionable, it weakened the argument, often fatally.

If the source was good, you could argue intepretation or relevance. But credibility of the information was essential.

But there was another feature of this high school debate system that I believe pertains. We were expected to be able to debate on both sides of the debate question. As I recall, we learned which side we were to defend at the same time as we learned who and where we were debating on any given day, perhaps just minutes before the debate would start.

I still remember the blizzard of emotions I felt when I first faced this situation. If I truly believed in universal health care, how could I argue against it? That is, if the facts convinced me, how could I use those or other facts to argue against it? How could I be a convincing hypocrite?

I solved this for myself in various ways, but mostly by using a feature of the debate system: you could attack the opponent's plan for universal health care without attacking the need for universal health care, for example. But I'm bringing this up now because of the feelings all of this created.

Part of the impact of this idea stemmed from the insecurity of opening yourself to be convinced by facts and arguments. As a debater, I could not rely on received opinion. I had to argue the merits of a proposition, to convince someone else. We learned that especially in a democracy, the right to argue your case meant the responsibility to take arguments seriously.

So outside of the debate realm, I was face to face with the insecurity of opening myself to be convinced by facts and arguments. There were times I heard or read arguments that were persuasive, even seductive, and also wrong. The facts were inaccurate, or interpreted inaccurately, or just organized in a seductive way to come to a conclusion I knew was wrong. But sometimes I could not articulate what was wrong with the argument. Perhaps the facts were out of my realm of experience---scientific facts, for example, which I had no way of evaluating.

But what if I was fooled by them into some terrible mistake? What if the arguments convinced me because I wasn't smart enough, or didn't know enough, to see their flaws? Or I was seduced by the arguer, by an attractive, witty, overwhelmingly erudite Satan with the power to assume a pleasing shape?

This was a profound question, especially since I was a student in a Catholic High School. We were always being warned about the temptations to fall into "error," and the insidious methods of unbelievers, Communists, secularists and heretics of other religions. They were "devilishly" clever and knew every human weakness. What if I became convinced of something that ran counter to the accepted truth of my Church, as well as my community?

I was more than a little bit of a rebel, and I despised hypocrisy. Though I still considered myself a Catholic then, I had a fairly sophisticated approach to what that meant. But I felt the basic fears: not only for my immortal soul being in the balance (though I believed in the primacy of conscience), or even of further ostracism, but of being misled, and misleading myself. Since I was already questioning authority as the final basis for belief, I was left only with my own devices. What if I was wrong?

We are dealing with a lot of emotions here. When we are presented with an argument, for or against, of any consequence, they all come into play. Let's start with my bottom line: what if I was wrong?

Haven't you ever experienced that fear, of feeling yourself being convinced by an argument or a person, against judgments and commitments you've made already, perhaps all your life? Haven't you felt a little dissociated, like the ground beneath your feet is moving or has disappeared?

Maybe you've had a "conversion experience": after being raised in a particular religion or with particular beliefs, or with particular racial or class views, something stirred you up, and over time, you changed. Can you recall how difficult that was? How confusing, and how threatening it might have felt at some point in the process?

It is most pronounced in the most important issues, which touch upon a conflict of values. I remember wrestling with my feelings and beliefs on nuclear disarmament. Yes, nuclear weapons must be abolished. But is unilateral disarmament the answer, or is it criminal negligence, inviting the very catastrophe we wanted to avoid?

How do we make these decisions? Often in debate and in life, it is based on "who's your source?" The credibility of sources, of the person you believe.

That credibility is not based solely on credentials. It's based at least partly on feelings, and that seems to me to be universal. Even if the fact that your source is a scientist who uses good scientific standards: if you believe in that kind of knowledge, don't you get a good feeling when you see the method, the evidence and hear it from someone you respect because he or she adheres to those standards? You have confidence in those findings, and there is emotion attached.

If someone is credible on one issue, we feel more confident in listening closely to what they say on others, with a predisposition to believe them. How many people who admire Howard Zinn or Arundhati Roy will fact check everything they say? Who has the time, let alone the inclination? You might check trusted journals or blogsites for a critique, but you already trust those places.

If an organization employs standards we believe lead to good facts and conclusions based on them, we don't necessarily examine their evidence and methodology closely on every case. We tend to believe them, until someone else we consider credible calls their assertions into question. We rely on credibility.

But the feelings of being able to rely on credibility also have to do with our lives. We rely on the credibility of our parents during our childhoods, and much of typical teenage outrage and rebelliousness comes from the sudden realization that just because our parents are right about some things, they aren't necessarily right about everything. We feel betrayed. That feeling gets repeated in different contexts.

We all live in contexts, and we depend on our families, churches, schools, workplaces and communities to support our very existence within this society. If we stray too far outside their purview, we risk becoming nonpersons. Few people, especially in an overcrowded society as competitive as this one, can afford to lose their membership in whatever cultural context they find themselves, certainly by adulthood. The people around us have a powerful credibility, because to not believe them is to put our survival in jeopardy.

There's no big secret as to why people live and work where others are like-minded. If their views are not culturally acceptable and generally held where they are, they tend to go where they and their way of looking at the world is shared. So the red states are getting redder, the blue places bluer. Why? It's not just comfort level. If we stay where we are not accepted, we are in fear of our survival---both as the persons we think ourselves to be, and as legitimate citizens of this society, that is, not homeless hobos. We fear that our lives are meaningless.

Even if we believe what those around us believe,we might fear that we will give in to temptations and pressures, and we will lose everything. All of this makes the people who support us, or who seem to support us, very credible.

Now place all this in our national context. From my point of view, political leadership has ranged from inadequate to quite wrong and even, I would say, effectively evil, for most of my life. There have been bright spots now and again, and I found champions and exemplars of my ideals, principles and commitments, some of whom of course helped form these ideas and commitments. There were people and sources that as far as I was concerned were reliably credible. When something was asserted that surprised me, coming from a source I didn't know, I could wait until it was vetted by people or institutions I trusted.

For most of my life, I felt that the major news organizations were basically committed to objective reporting, if often wrong on particular subjects, and biased in favor of "establishment" points of view. But I had confidence in their responsibility to check facts, question sources, and report fully on both, and eventually to get it right. In many situations, I found them credible.

So there were two major sources of credibility: people or institutions I found credible because of their record but also because they were on the same side of issues as I was; and news organizations, newspaper, magazines, etc. I found credible in certain situations, especially the day-to-day.

So now I come to my simple points, which may not have required all this preliminary.

The reality-based versus faith-based argument is more complicated than this contrast of descriptions expresses. In a sense, those of us who say we are reality-based, are really saying that we have faith in the truthfulness of certain people and institutions, because of their sources and their methodology. We find them credible.

The faith-based are saying the same.

It's a question of who you believe, and why. What we must face is that the rabid right has created a new national context. From the perspective often identified as fundamentalist Christian, any source that does not share their beliefs in the authority of their religious leaders, is not credible. From the perspective of the rabid right as a whole, the "liberal media" are not credible.

The image of the common national media they have is that what the news media say constitutes not facts but opinions. And tragically, the media is rapidly remaking itself to fit that proposition, though for very different reasons than those supposed by the rabid right. The media, led by cable news, but affecting almost all news media, is engaged in competition for audience and advertising revenue, using rules than no longer value the old standards of fact-gathering and reporting. They are in fact becoming purveyors of opinion, though hardly liberal opinion.

Even in networks and newspaper conglomerates, news bureaus in place that cover what happens in that place, both overseas and domestically, have diminished to the point of disappearance. The news media have less news to report they've gathered themselves, and the standards of reporting are fading, in favor of infotainment.

Cable news now lives on opinion and emotion. The kinds of emotions constitute a whole other topic, but it's part of this topic as well. That cable news latched onto the Schiavo case, which is propelled by emotion, is all the confirmation we need that there is no news there. But we all tend to find credible those who otherwise support us, or agree with us, or even more importantly, represent the foundation of what we believe. Maybe we even learned to believe that way from them, be it the church or the college where we learned critical thinking.

In a sense, what I learned in high school debate was a major factor in my "salvation." I was saved from certain internal conflicts, though the decisions I then made led to a lifetime of external conflicts. So today I will find credible the front page of major newspapers like the New York Times, especially if what they say checks out with the Los Angeles Times or the San Francisco Chronicle, and then is evaluated positively by columnists, journals and bloggers who I trust, or who make sense to me.

Some people feel the same way about rabid right radio talk shows.

Of course I am not arguing that all facts are opinions, or that getting information from climate scientists is the same as getting it from Rush Limbaugh. What I am saying is that there is no mystery as to why the rabid right believes what they believe is factual. What you believe depends on who you believe.

That's partly why you learn to rely on the credibility of some authority, or institution or people.

And what and who you believe tells you---and everybody else-- who you are. When you lose that certainty, you lose yourself, and you lose your place in your community, which can mean losing your livelihood and family.

It's easy enough to say, if your grasp of reality conflicts with your context, go somewhere else, do something else. That's true, and a lot easier to say than to do, especially if you're of an age or a class or a gender or a race that makes mobility difficult, or without skills, training and experience that will get you a livelihood and a life in some new place, assuming you can find it. If your difference is you're gay, the places you can go are likely known to you. If your differences are harder to define, you could feel between the devil and the deep blue sea.

So what do you do? Apart from learning to write dialogue, so you can argue with yourself. Which is about all I did.