In the months following Bo Seo’s move from South Korea to Australia at the age of eight, learning to match those around him was not just a slope – it became a survival mechanism.
He did not speak any English, and an acceptable disposition felt like the easy choice, even if he did not easily meet the scared debater inside.
“The most difficult conversations to adjust to were disagreements – when people tend to talk to each other, and passions start to happen and the rhythms of speech tend to break down, he said.
“It made me decide to be really nice, to smile and keep a lot of my thoughts to myself.
“The thing that got me out of it was my Fifth Year teacher who told me that, in the debate, when one person speaks, no one else does – and to someone who was spoken to and pulled from the conversation and interrupted, this it sounded like an irresistible promise. “
Through a debate, Mr Seo discovered a “community that allowed me to listen”.
He not only found his voice but used it to scale the highest rhetorical peaks and was part of the Harvard team that won the 2016 World University Debate Championship.
His ability as a school debater took him across Australia, and he recently returned to Adelaide for a discussion of his book Good Arguments at UniSA’s Hawke Center.
Disagreement doesn’t have to be disagreeable
The word “debate” can raise incongruous associations – on the one hand, there is the confident student politician, with rounded vocals and in a supercilious way, dreaming of the parliamentary frontbench.
But that photo is offset by another.
“If you think about the kids who were debaters at school, you may remember there were some weirdos out there,” Mr. Seo recently told AB TC Radio Adelaide’s Deb Tribe.
“They learn to read a room, often as a matter of self-preservation.
Good Arguments explores the consequences of that epiphany.
One of her insights is that the art of disagreement should not itself disagree – the debate and the small dispute are not different expressions of the same impulse, but deeply disagree.
The point is illustrated by the Monty Python sketch in which one character pays for an argument.
After opening exchanges of “yes I did” and “no I didn’t”, he becomes exasperated.
“An argument is a collective series of statements to establish a definite proposal,” he tells his interlocutor.
“Contradiction is just the automatic gain of everything the other person says.”
The distinction is approved by Seo.
“Coming to an agreement about the kind of conversation we want to have, and being very deliberate about it, can be helpful,” he said.
“Will we interrupt each other or not, will we give equal time to talk?
This lesson is not only applicable on the public stage, Mr. Seo hastened to add – it can also help in relationships.
“Our personal disagreements, certainly from experience, tend to be the most painful,” he said.
“We decided to share our lives together and as a result there are so many things we know about each other, so many points of contact that we accumulate every day, each of which can be drawn into the discussion – so disagreements about the dishes dirty also becomes [about] your mother.
“Here again, being intentional, setting some boundaries about what the conversation is and what it isn’t, can help.”
Blending judgement and wisdom
Such an approach may have its limits, Mr. Seo acknowledged, because being rational involves recognizing that humans can sometimes resist hard to see the reason.
Words will not solve all our problems – there is no perfect sentence for every scenario.
As satirist Jonathan Swift wrote three centuries ago, reasoning would not force anyone to “correct a wrong opinion” if that opinion is not acquired by reason.
“One type of bully I write about is the‘ wrangler ’- the person who has a bit of criticism for every idea he puts forward,” Mr Seo said.
“If you’re not able to come to an agreement on what kind of conversation you’re going to have, it might not be worth it.”
Despite this drawback, Mr Seo maintains “his faith in what the disagreement could do”.
He is currently a student at Harvard Law School and has an interest in human rights – an area that is often hotly contested.
“The argument is what we have to do every day – we have to do it in the workplace, we have to do it in school, we have to do it in our lives as citizens,” he said.
“The art of argument starts by recognizing disagreement as a job – it’s a kind of craft that you can get better at.