“I am the
best at arguing.” My best friend from home can constantly be heard saying,
which we have all accepted as true. He has a strong invented ethos he has spent
the last 5 years of our friendship building a reputation as a great debater and
now I would not even bother to argue with him. He would have his points laid
out and present them so well and eloquently which is not surprising since he is
a communication major. As I go through this class I release more and more the
different rhetorical devices he uses. Which contrast the fact that one of the
first things I noticed is that he is not a true rhetoric user since he does not
allow us to prove him wrong. Even if we have strong arguments he dismiss them
as if only his can be right which makes it hard for us to argue with him so I
just stopped trying to.
This is the problem with most
debaters you can only have winners or losers so the person who you are arguing
with points gets dismissed. The main purpose of rhetoric is to gain the
opinions of others and see if their opinions can also be right debate
discourages this sense of compromise. That is a problem since debates are the
most common form of rhetoric and we end up with problems like people not
wanting to argue their opinion the way I am with my friend and this is not
good.
I realized how bad debates are after
I had one in my Asian literature class. We were discussing whether or not the
dropping of the atomic bomb was right or not. There was mixed opinions and in
the end no one’s view changed. My side technically won, but to me it was a lost
because people felt the same way after the debate as they did before and a few
students asked if the debate can be ended since it was getting heated. Debates
are bad rhetoric and discourage compromise and leave us all as losers.
You make a good point. In order for rhetoric to be effective, the rhetor must present his argument with strong convinction. However, he cannot be deaf to opposing viewpoints. After all, rhetoric is about changing things, and nothing can be changed if rhetors are unwilling to listen to each other.
ReplyDeleteYou have a strong argument about how debates never have winners. I can see how this can be true. People who are into debates are usually very narrow-minded and stubborn, they truly believe that their argument is the correct one and are very unwilling to change it. In that sense, I feel as if debates are useless, if nobody changes their viewpoints.
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