Two-Time Debate Champion Bo Seo on How Good Arguments Work

Two-time world debate champion Bo Seo breaks down why arguments fail, the bad-faith personas that hijack conversations, a framework for picking fights worth having, and what a Cold War standoff between Nixon and Khrushchev can teach us about staying cool under pressure.

How Good Arguments Work

I felt the need to write Good Arguments because I think our public conversations are in a state of crisis. There is the more visible crisis we see where every disagreement in media or in the public square is a source of division and pain. But there is also the hidden crisis of all the people who are driven away from participating in those conversations at all because they fear it is going to be pointless or painful and not worth their time.

Good arguments are not only what democracies have to do — they are what democracies on their best days aspire to be: a conversation between people who disagree, sometimes over irreconcilable things, to find areas of agreement, to spot points where they need to work across their differences, and to reach a better solution.

One of the reasons our arguments are so divisive and painful is that we have allowed the skills of disagreeing well to atrophy. We no longer view argument as a skill to be worked at. Instead, we see it as something we jump into out of instinct or defensiveness. The bad arguments that result in turn decrease our confidence in what disagreements can do for us. When we lack faith in what arguments can accomplish, we approach them more defensively — and that lack of confidence tends to be self-reinforcing. The quality of the conversation degrades further as a result.

A Tradition Rooted in History

The tradition of good argument I am trying to advocate for is very much rooted in history. It goes back to antiquity, where in ancient Greece the ability to make your point persuasively and engage other citizens in discussion and debate was seen as a requirement of citizenship — as what it meant to govern ourselves.

That tradition developed through tea houses, pubs, and coffee houses in London, where while the debates of Parliament were ongoing, citizens would gather and have the same debates among themselves, playing out the role of parliamentarians governing themselves. The tradition carries forward in the United States, with many of the founding fathers starting debate clubs and colleges viewing part of their role as instilling in the nation that spirit of debate.

Though that tradition has become harder to discern in everyday life, there have been periods in the history of the United States and of democracies around the world where those debates were a feature of people’s day-to-day lives.

Three Lessons from the Farmer–Malcolm X Debates

One high-profile example is the series of debates between civil rights leader James Farmer and Malcolm X, who held a different view of what racial liberation looked like and what the appropriate response to racism was. These were disagreements between people who were ostensibly on the same side, whose objectives were in some sense allied, but who were not shy about voicing their disagreements in candid, strong, and forthright ways before the public — knowing that the other side would respond respectfully and that through that conversation they would reach somewhere they could not go alone.

There are three lessons I take from the Farmer–Malcolm X debates.

The first is the importance of training. Farmer came up under one of the great debate coaches who ever lived, Melvin Tolson, memorialized by Denzel Washington in the film The Great Debaters. Malcolm X too found his voice through a debate program in prison that allowed inmates to debate against local colleges and schools. In order to host the kinds of public debates again that enlarge our understanding of what is possible, we have to start training — training ourselves and our young people to engage in those conversations.

The second is the importance of format. In the debates between these two men — held in colleges, on television, on radio — it is striking how long each was given to make his points. It was not one to two minutes followed by interruptions. Often they were given quite a long stretch of time to present their arguments, with the knowledge that once they had spoken, the other person would speak and they would get another turn. They were sometimes forced to sit back and listen, knowing their chance was not now but was coming later. The format in which we structure disagreement matters enormously.

The third is the importance of relationship. Behind the scenes of these big public encounters, Farmer and Malcolm X were getting to know one another. They visited each other’s homes. By being in a relationship with the other person that extends beyond the disagreement itself — by meeting one another’s families, seeing other areas of life, doing other things together — you can enlarge the possibility of what happens within the debate. You can be more candid and forthright, knowing there is a relationship to fall back on.

Finding My Voice Through Debate

I started debating because I moved in the third grade from South Korea to Australia without really speaking English. The hardest part of crossing language and cultural lines was adjusting to real-life conversation — where people can pivot mid-sentence to a new topic, where faces and gestures do not always match the words coming out of their mouths.

Those difficulties compounded in disagreements, where passions run high and people interrupt, speed up, and slow down at unexpected moments. In response, I resolved to be very agreeable in how I presented myself at school and to keep my thoughts to myself.

What changed that was joining the debate team, on the strength of one promise from my fifth-grade teacher: that in debate, when one person speaks, no one else does. To someone who had grown used to being interrupted and spun out of conversation, that sounded like a kind of salvation.

Learning to Listen

As someone on the margins who did not really speak the language and was visibly out of place in the classroom and on the playground, I learned to listen. I learned to read a room. I learned to take the temperature of a place before raising my voice — not only to avoid getting hurt, but because it was the only way I would ever be heard.

It turns out that many of the most successful debaters tend to come from slightly marginal backgrounds, carrying the perspective of someone on the periphery. Though it is easy to focus on the person at the front of the room delivering a speech, much of the action and strategy of debate involves listening intently — not only to what an opponent is saying, but from the perspective of the audience, so you can anticipate what they need to hear next.

What began for me as a liability ended up being a tremendous strength. One of the great lessons of debate is that in order to be heard, you have to first listen.

Diversifying Our Information Diet

Debates are only as good as the information, knowledge, and skills that debaters bring to them. One of the more concerning things we see at the moment is that people’s information diets are not sufficiently varied or rich to sustain the kinds of conversations we want to have.

The first problem is that we cannot allow the debates we see on cable television to replace the disagreements we should be having in our own lives. Our political leaders and media personalities cannot become avatars to whom we outsource our thinking. Media should be a source of knowledge and equipment that we then bring into our own conversations — not a substitute for having them.

The second is the need for a genuine diversity of sources. Partisan media and siloed information feeds off our desire to be validated — to have the news reflect back what we already believe. Just as debate encourages us to seek out differences and see them as productive and mind-expanding, we should approach our information diet the same way. A richer and more varied diet allows us to see more perspectives and challenge our own thinking more consistently.

A Life of Movement

My love of debate and desire to see things from different perspectives is inextricably tied to a life of constant movement. I moved from South Korea to Australia at age eight, grew up in Australia, then moved to the United States for college, pursued a postgraduate degree in China, and eventually returned through Australia to the United States.

Each move required a great deal of translation and adaptation — figuring out where the surroundings were before I could make a home in them. That meant gathering information, reading the news, and above all talking with people in those neighborhoods to answer the most basic and difficult question: where am I? You needed all the help you could get. Debate gave me the tools — and the confidence — to keep asking that question and to genuinely engage with the answers others had to offer.