Intelligence Squared is a privately-funded outfit staging debates in London. You can get a sample of the kinds of topics they debate from their home page.
Free-market capitalism is so 20th century
The threat to our civil liberties from an overmighty state has been much exaggerated
Everything a man does he does to get laid
It is time to lift sanctions against Burma
Atheism is the new fundamentalism
… … …
Pretty much anything, in fact.
Well, yesterday they debated the motion: “The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world.” Speakers for the motion were John Onaiyekan, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Abuja, Nigeria, and Ann Widdecombe, a Tory Member of Parliament and Catholic convert. Speaking against were actor/writer/gadfly Stephen Fry (Jeeves, General Melchett) and, yes, Christopher Hitchens.
Onaiyekan and Widdecombe got their keisters kicked. Daily Telegraph reporter Andrew Brown, a Catholic himself, tells the story here.
As Brown points out, the defeat of the motion was highly predictable. The two arguing against it were seasoned public performers, though of different kinds. An archbishop and an MP are also public performers, but not of the kind with long and deep training in thinking on their feet. (Members of Parliament are better at this than your average congresscritter, to be sure; but the House of Commons is not what it once was, and there are plenty of dull drones in there.) As Brown says:
The problem (from the Catholic point of view) was that the speakers arguing for the Church as a force for good were hopelessly outclassed by two hugely popular, professional performers.
He goes on to wish …
… that there still existed a great Catholic apologist like Chesterton or Belloc, someone who was not only brave and prepared to square up to the Hitch, but was his intellectual equal. Surely there is someone today who could do that?
I’m not sure about Belloc, but I don’t think Chesterton was a very good speaker. He was a good writer, but that’s a different skill set, though a great many people seem not to know this. (Nabokov: “I think like a philosopher; I write like a great novelist; I speak like a child” … & of course Dr. Johnson’s observation in the Rambler.) Someone in the comment thread suggests Robert George, whom I have never seen in debate. I have seen Michael Novak, debating with Heather Mac Donald. I’d been told by Catholic friends that Novak was one of their best minds. Perhaps he is, but he was a poor debater on that occasion. Sample: On the point about religious societies being better behaved than irreligious ones, Heather asked “What about Japan? They’re irreligious, but it’s a very orderly place.” Novak: “Oh, I think the Japanese are very religious …” Uh-huh. (On another occasion, in an exchange on NRO, I asked Novak how there could be any evidence for a human female having been impregnated by an invisible spirit. He, apparently trying for mockery: “John Derbyshire does not believe the Mother of God.” Uh ……. huh.)
In any case, Brown’s account of the event left me feeling more sympathetic to the defenders of the motion than the subject matter would have led me to predict. The mismatch of presentation skills is so big, I wonder if there wasn’t an element of set-up about it, though even if there was, I suppose the defenders have only themselves to blame for accepting the deal.
The reason this caught my attention is that I’ve been doing some public speaking myself recently. I’m pretty hopeless at it; but of course when your publisher tells you to go out and do X, Y, and Z to promote your book, you go and do them. I’ll draw the line somewhere this side of going over Niagara Falls in a barrel … but not very far this side.
There’s a sample coming up on TV this Sunday, a televised event where I do Q&A on my book with Alan Colmes. It was terrifically decent of Alan to do the thing. It paid nothing, and he had to come all the way out from Manhattan to Long Island in the rush hour for it. He’s really a very good guy. Still, sitting down for the Q&A, the thought going through my head was something like: “OK, here’s Alan, seasoned TV performer/debater/defender-of-his-faith (i.e. multi-culti liberalism), and here’s me, a retired and uncourtly scholar, dragged blinking from his garret into the daylight. This will be lions & Christians …” Friends who were present tell me I didn’t do too badly, but of course, driving home, I thought of all the points I should have made if only I’d been quick-thinking enough. I guess Abp. Onaiyekan and the Right Hon. Ms. Widdecombe were similarly afflicted last night.
The “set-up” was inherent in the framing of the topic. The only “good” the Catholic Church can do beyond it’s own flock are things like supporting soup-kitchens or food banks or any of the other fine things any organization can do. Christian apologists like Chesterton, C.S.Lewis, or Hillaire Belloc were defending their “faith” and not the “good” they were doing.
It is astonishing to me that no Jesuit or Dominican theologian was invited. Unless of course, as well as loading the dice with the topic, the organizers were careful to steer clear of the real intellectual backbone of the Catholic Church.
Derb —
I’ve seen Anne Widdecombe on Have I Got News For You (BBC chat/panel/game show of a type that doesn’t quite really exist in the U.S.) and similar venues, and she’s just dreadful: priggish, hectoring, self-important, poorly spoken, &c. I think there may be some admirable things in her character, but there’s almost nothing winning about her public persona. Stephen Fry, meanwhile, is something like the consensus national boffin/wise-bachelor-uncle in Britain. And we all know Christopher Hitchens’ debating skills. Whether overtly or not, that debate was definitely a set up.
I somehow doubt that my local NPR station will be airing this particular Intelligence^2, but then it doesn’t sound as if I’m missing terribly much, rather like watching the Super Bowl champion take on a high school varsity team. Our local station does broadcast occasional debate. The last one I remember was, “It is always wrong to pay for sex.” I disagreed with the final vote, but I also said that child support is retroactive prostitution–you’re paying for sex that you had.
As it happens, I’m listening to one of the greater contributions of the Catholic church to civilization, HvK’s recording of Mozart’s Requiem Mass. (Although the quality of the music probably says more about W.A.’s unnatural gifts than about the church, beyond the beauty of the Latin text.)
Hey Derb, are there any plans for publicity tours in the southwest? Say around Phoenix?
The key to Hitchens’ speaking and debating success, I’ve realized, is that that’s what he’s always doing. You can find scores of speeches and debates on youtube. Listen to four or five and you realize that he’s like a real good quarterback who’s memorized the playbook and is ready for any contingency with a quick quip. He repeats many of the same lines and themes. I suppose if a Christian apologist spent some time studying his previous work and developed and memorized a list of comebacks, they could conceivably take him down, but none seem to bother, so they always get wrongfooted. I certainly don’t see how a cardinal or a legislator could hope to devote that sort of time to the effort.
#4: Yes: as with wellnigh everything, the key to success is decent preparation and masses of practice. I doubt you could send a ball over the net to Bjorn Borg (sorry, my sports knowledge is a decade or two out of date) is a way he’s never been sent a ball before. And then, with Borg and Hitchens both, there’s natural talent in play, unless you’re a “hard” blank-slatist, like the lady who opens the education chapter in my book.
#3: Book tours? [Hollow laugh] Thing of the past, alas. Used to be EVERYBODY got a book tour. My first two books, I was sent all over the country. Now, unless you’re Dan Brown, you’re lucky to get an event in your home town. (I’m sure I wouldn’t have if Alan hadn’t agreed to show up.) Publishers are all broke. Writing sucks. I wanna be an electrician.
Derb,
As I mentioned in the other thread, I passed your website onto my friend Raynard who hosts a weekly radio program and I hinted that you would make an explosive interview. Lately a lot of his op-eds and his radio show has been on racial politics and the GOP. It’s not a book tour, but you might come across a few more thinking people…
Anyways, I was hopeful that they’d get you out this way. I want to get my copy of Unknown Quantity autographed.
Derb,
Yes, of course, there’s an element of native talent involved–paired with a genuine desire–but in our haste to avoid blank-slatism let’s not scuttle from Scylla to Charybdis. There’s still quite a bit of nurture involved, and I think it’s worthwhile to point that out, as I’m sure you agree.
At any rate, I’d think that an archbishop and an MP would have enough speaking skill to make the match interesting if they had played the apologetic game (and it really is a game) as long and as intensely as Christopher Hitchens has. That’s why I referred to it as key to his success. He goes up against a lot of speakers, but very few, I wager, have made a specialty of this field the way he has in recent years.
You identify a problem with religious debaters generally. They may make a very good affirmative case; but when put under pressure, when heckled or skilfully rebutted, they resort instinctively to retorts that might come off as brilliant ripostes before an audience of their fellow believers, but which fall flat before, and even repel, a neutral audience.
There is also a big difference between a good speaker and a good debater. You can even be a good debater without being a good speaker, if you have ability at locating the jugular and going for it.
It is inherently demeaning to any serious idea to debate it with characters like Hitchens, before cranks, clowns and professional performers. Perhaps the great evangelist Martyn Lloyd-Jones was right that unbelievers should never be debated, only preached to and evangelized. And Lloyd-Jones was one of the great speakers of his time –though how good a debater we never got to find out.
Belloc tried his hand against Wells and, to my biased view, Belloc came across as a deceitful, pompous ass who couldn’t give a hang for honesty and truth considering as he was speaking ex cathedra and Wells was just a guy with a brain.
Wells, of course, was beautiful and brilliant. Don’t believe me? Read it yourself. I’m on a phone but I wouldn’t be surprised if parts of the back and forth were online by now. God, I love Wells.
Hecht also had a go at Belloc, but not for his Catholicism. Hecht simply felt bilious towards anti-semites in the ’40s and rand screed at all comers. God, I love Hecht.
Ross Douthat is a good debating parnter. He quite ably takes on Heather MacDonald here:
http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/18973
… that there still existed a great Catholic apologist like Chesterton or Belloc, someone who was not only brave and prepared to square up to the Hitch, but was his intellectual equal. Surely there is someone today who could do that?
You can be sure that such a person would not be invited to debate. The left and their fellow travelers have used this strategy for generations. The object of course is to “win” the debate before the first word is spoken. “Stacking the deck”, so to speak, gets the job done nicely. Another favorite tactic is to seat panels where conservatives/believers are outnumbered. This not only insures that their opposition will monopolize more of the speaking time, but presents the oppositions views as representative of the majority. Pathetic.