But the main thing we learned from debate was that there is a foundational grammar, a skeleton of syntax beneath the superficies of semantics. Debate was the first place, if I may be forgiven for thinking of it as a kind of terrain, where I discovered not only the satisfaction but also the sanctity of a game with rules that remained invariant. I would go so far as to say that debate afforded me my first intimation of justice.
But another effect of the invention of jargon is ossification. When Hannah Arendt writes that the purpose of thinking is to “unfreeze” concepts that have been hardened into familiarity, part of what she means is that to grasp them is to break through the lacquer of familiar rhetoric and into the oozing center, to eschew the shortcut in favor of the longer, more tortuous route.
when people tell me they don’t miss any part of high school—don’t miss the gorgeously guileless little idiots they were when they were sixteen and unashamed to love embarrassments like debate—I do not believe them. Things were as fresh then as if they had been cut out of bright paper, sharp against the hazy future. Episodes in my adult life, even the seemingly major ones, seem dull in comparison. Now there is a sheaf of hesitance interposed between me and everything else, and no doubt this layer of remove is what makes me bearable, to the extent that I am bearable. But there was no barrier then, and even trivialities had a kind of solidity or vitality to them of which they have since been drained.
Certainly when I was debating I often succumbed to a somatic force, though it was somatic in that special way that running or sex or, I imagine, bodily mortification is somatic—so excruciatingly and exquisitely physical that its physicality dissolves into spirituality, like sugar into water.
Debate provided the sole domain I knew of in which intellectual conflict was dramatized and thereby glorified, and the body and its imperfections were subordinated to the motions of the mind. Social capital came not, for once, in the form of poise, much less in the form of conformity to the standards that submerge teenage girls and that I tried tirelessly in my non-debate hours to satisfy by dieting and binging and purging again, by applying creams and poultices, by conditioning and polishing, and finally by concentrating the blinding beam of my self-loathing onto my too-long nose and too-soft mid- riff, all without any success.
But I remain transfixed by the rhythmic intimacies of antagonism, so fundamental to erotic friction. I was smitten, as it turned out incurably, by those occasional swooping flashes of understanding that arrested me like a sharp intake of breath, by the cold grip of realization. Years later, when I read Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, I would gasp at a passage in which one character’s lover traces her outline with the blade of his sword. Debate felt to me then like the same kind of danger, dizzying and dazzling and exacting, sweet as a sharpened edge. Philosophy still feels this way. So does the sudden, stilling chill of a perfectly turned sentence, the snowy hush at the end of a novel or story I love. These things are true at a different and hazardous depth.
Here at last was a game that was more than a game, a competition I could win not by wearing the right jeans or having the right purse, by being nice or accommodating or soft-spoken, least of all by displaying the “social or emotional intelligence” men so often demand of women as a way of warding off a meeting of equals or, god forbid, a clash with a worthy adversary, but rather by slashing at a stupid argument until it bled to death at my feet.
It seems odd to blame the failures of career politicians on an arcane after-school club that offends precisely because it is so far removed from reality, precisely because it affords brief respite from the blunt blundering of adolescence, precisely because it divests its denizens of body and circumstance.
Does it follow, then, that any apologia for the activity that saved me comes at the cost of proclaiming its irrelevance? It is true that debate fails as a political intervention, and it is true, too, that debate is a game—but there are serious games, salvific games. To say that debate’s appeal is largely formal is not to insult it, for form precedes and produces meaning; it is the frame within which all pictures are possible. There was a way in which debate was true, by which I don’t mean that the conclusions I advanced were true. They were not, and I knew they were not. Of course I did not believe that there was a meaningful difference between the prospect of one nuclear war and the prospect of another. What I mean is that debate took the form of justice. Innuendo was carved into explicitness, and weak claims were probed and discarded. In this respect, debate was an antidote to the worst excesses of its own culture, for the application of its methods to the many cases in which a woman’s discomfort was gasified would have forced, instead, an honest confrontation with the concrete bolus of misogyny. Whether people hated you or tolerated you, found you too loud or too brash, whether you suffered from attacks of trepidation or temper, they had no choice but to do what the arguments recorded on the flow dictated.
Morality is not just a matter of enumerating truths: it, too, has a structural dimension. It rests on principles as severe as the steel that undergirds a flimsy building, and on the consistency of their application. Life is never reducible to its ligaments, but the impossibility of perfection does not mean an image of fairness is a luxury or a cavil. Rather, idealization is the only avenue that affords at least conceptual restitution.