The Flawless Debate

The form of deliberative discussion known as "debate" has a contributed much to Western knowledge. The participants and subject matter of the first debate have long been lost to us, but it was Socrates and his eponymous method that are credited with popularizing the art of back-and-forth. This, of course, is common knowledge to most. What is less familiar to Western audiences is the little-known fact that the Socratic dialectic was originally conceived not as a mechanism for achieving insight, but rather as a drinking game.

Socrates had, at one point, been the greatest warrior in all of Athens. In his later years, he was known chiefly as the town's social antagonist, with his short, fat build, piggish beady eyes, and clutching, arthritic fingers. Still, the haughty young men of Athens, weary of their riches and intercrural intercourse, were more than happy to join Socrates when he suggested they go off into a cave to play a new game of his own devising. The rules were simple. One of the young men would put forth a proposition. Socrates would then ask a question. The man would then take a shot and try to answer it. Socrates would then question that answer. Drink and repeat. As the ouzo warmed their bellies and befuddled their brains, the young men disrobed into a naked cave of distraught, confused manhood. Socrates would then promise them backrubs if they listened to his answers to the questions that had been asked. In the throes of inebriation, it became clear to them that he was the wisest man who had ever lived. One of them began to transcribe the conversations in a twitchy, drunken scrawl. Several hours and 900 pages later, Plato had written The Republic.

There have, of course, been many debates since then. Sadly, all have been fatally poisoned by some procedural flaw. Our own nation's history is littered with examples. The Webster-Hayne debates were corrupted by Daniel Webster's chronic pantlessness. The Lincoln-Douglass debates were compromised by Abe's long, spindly fingers, which he would dance through the air to distract the judges while making his points. In more recent years, the Goldberg-Beinart debates have been debased by the fundamental indignity of grown men yelling about libertarianism on Skype in their basement.

Thankfully, that did not stop one brave goon from venturing forth to propose what he called "The Flawless Debate", valuing substance and style, procedural rigor over glitz and glamour, and integrity above all else. He called upon his fellow forum members to join him in a debate for the ages. The subject matter was unimportant--all that mattered was conducting a perfectly formed debate. And his brothers answered his call mightily, with peerless aplomb. In fact, they engaged in the finest debate ever conducted in the history of man, which, like Plato, drunken and intellectually molested, I transcribe for you now.

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