FEAR COMPLEXITY, NOT CONTROVERSY

In discussing the Queensland v Victoria debate earlier, we noted two key advantages of ‘playing hardball’:

1. It can change the fundamental issue of the debate, thus shifting the debate onto your team’s terms; and

2. It can take your opponents by surprise, leaving them unwilling or unable to respond to your challenge to the fundamental assumptions of their case or mindset.

However, the most important and most persuasive reason to ‘play hardball’ is that, in many situations, you can argue a much simpler case. “So what?” you may ask. The answer is straightforward: debating is not like other forms of intellectual argument (such as the writing of academic articles). There are two key distinctions:

1. Debaters have a relatively short time to put their case. As we will examine in more detail later, the substantive (prepared) case must be presented by the first two speakers only. Assuming eight-minute speeches, your team has a maximum of 16 minutes, including rebuttal, to outline, explain, support and summarise your case.

This is not suited to complex or intricate cases!

2. Debaters must use the spoken word. Debaters do not have the luxury of writing an intricate essay, allowing readers to read the complicated sections as many times as they need to. Similarly, unlike many public speakers, debaters cannot use whiteboards or computer presentations to display their ideas graphically.

Preparation: The Case Approach

Therefore, as a general rule, you should seek the simplest case, however controversial it may be. Play hardball if your argument, although harder to stomach, is easier to understand!

For example, consider a debate between Australia and Scotland, hosted by the Oxford Union, as part of the 1999 World Schools Debating Championships. The topic was

“THAT THE KYOTO SUMMIT DIDN’T GO FAR ENOUGH”, and Scotland was affirmative. The case approach for Scotland was always going to be relatively straightforward; they were required to argue that the agreement at the Kyoto Summit did not go far enough in protecting the environment. In that sense, the Scottish team had little scope to ‘play hardball’, even if they had wanted to.

But what about the Australian team? A simple analysis would be that the affirmative team (Scotland) was designated to criticise the Kyoto agreement, whereas the negative team (Australia) was designated to defend the agreement. Indeed, this was the analysis used by most (if not all) of the other negative teams who argued the same topic at the Championships. Essentially, they said to themselves, “The two sides to the debate are clear: the affirmative will criticise Kyoto, and we will defend it. Simple.”

This seems simple and straightforward, until the negative team tries to prepare its case.

Only then does the team realise what a difficult task it has set itself. The Kyoto Protocol is, in many respects, a ‘mish-mash’ of different targets for different nations, often determined more by each nation’s bargaining position than by its environmental or economic needs. The more that the negative team researches the intricacies of the Protocol, the more difficult it becomes to justify the Protocol as a ‘perfect’

compromise between economic and environmental needs. Specifically, the team finds itself logically trapped on both sides:

• If the team concedes, even briefly, that the Protocol could reasonably have done even a little more for the environment, it has conceded the debate and will lose.

• If the team tries to balance this risk by suggesting that the Protocol could have done less for the environment, it has contradicted its own case approach (that the Protocol struck a perfect balance), and will again probably lose.

There is a further strategic problem, too: that of simplicity. The negative team knows that the affirmative can present a very clear case, simply arguing, “Every nation lacked the courage to meet an appropriate target. Therefore, the Summit didn’t go far enough.” However, by maintaining that Kyoto was an effective compromise, the affirmative team would be forced to argue, “The EU promised an 8% emissions cut, the USA promised 7%, Japan promised 6%, Australia were allowed an 8% increase, and the overall reduction was 5.2%. Each of these amounts was entirely appropriate for the relevant nation or region. Therefore, the Summit struck an appropriate balance.” Clearly, by trying to argue for such a complicated balance, a negative team would be handing the affirmative a significant strategic advantage.

Preparation: The Case Approach

So what, then, was the ideal negative case? The answer was simple: play hardball – the case would be more controversial, but much more likely to win. This was exactly what the Australian team did; they chose to conceptualise the debate as a conflict between the environment and the economy (rather than between criticising and defending Kyoto). Rather than defending Kyoto, the Australian team chose to attack it just as emphatically as did their opponents – but from the ‘other side’. In simple terms, the negative team chose to argue, “The Kyoto Summit went too far in supporting environmentalists’ claims.”

Had the negative argued its original case, it would have been trying to balance on a very narrow part of the continuum; walking a ‘logical tightrope’, in constant fear of falling either to one side (‘not far enough’) or the other (‘too far’). Just as tightrope walkers prefer their feet on solid ground, so too did the negative find it much easier to argue a clear and simple alternative: to play hardball.

This analysis may seem very specific: it may seem that we are examining this one topic in far too much detail. However, this principle is useful for a large number of debates. For example, we noted in Chapter One that it is strategically very weak to negate comparison topics by arguing that the relevant quantities are equal. The example used was the topic “THAT THE MEDIA IS MORE POWERFUL THAN THE CHURCH”, and we noted that it was much more effective for the negative to argue “the church is more powerful than the media” rather than “the church and the media are equally powerful”. We can now understand this as a form of ‘playing hardball’.

Of course, ‘playing hardball’ is a guiding principle, not an underlying rule. Above all, you must use your common sense in choosing when and how to ‘play hardball’. For example, suppose that you are affirmative for the topic “THAT THE US SHOULD ABANDON MISSILE DEFENCE”. A simple, controversial and ultimately ‘hardball’

case for the affirmative team might be to argue, “the US should abandon missile defence in favour of missile attack – if the US perceives a nation as a threat, it should use nuclear weapons to obliterate that nation and its government.” Although this may seem like a courageous case, it is almost certainly more stupid than simple; common sense would indicate that this case would be so controversial as to be absurd. Unlike the cases for Kyoto or for drugs in sport, it could be effectively (although not ideally) destroyed by a negative team willing to scoff and ridicule.

Therefore, the guiding principle is clear:

Be willing to argue controversial or ‘hardline’ cases if they are simpler or easier to defend. However, use your common sense to distinguish between cases that are

‘brave’ and those that are foolhardy – between those that are ‘simple’ and those that are merely facile.

Preparation: The Case Approach