The problems you're addressing could likely be solved if a culture of discourse was cultivated from the ground up. At my house we have a tradition of discussing a question on Wednesday nights at the dinner table. Every week another member of the family gets to propose the question, and the talk proceeds almost like a very informal debate. We don't choose sides or anything like that; we just talk about the question. Perhaps the problem lies in the "formal" nature of these debates, where points are awarded for arguments not given a rebuttal and other technical aspects. Excellent overview and I'm looking forward to part 2.
I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with discourse getting competitive or agonistic. That's basically how people would graduate from schools throughout the medieval period and well into the renaissance. Intense, rigorous oral disputations were the norm. What we have here is, I think, a very bizarre excrescence from that tradition, with some ideological nudging and a whole lot of internal genetic drift.
The problems you're addressing could likely be solved if a culture of discourse was cultivated from the ground up. At my house we have a tradition of discussing a question on Wednesday nights at the dinner table. Every week another member of the family gets to propose the question, and the talk proceeds almost like a very informal debate. We don't choose sides or anything like that; we just talk about the question. Perhaps the problem lies in the "formal" nature of these debates, where points are awarded for arguments not given a rebuttal and other technical aspects. Excellent overview and I'm looking forward to part 2.
I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with discourse getting competitive or agonistic. That's basically how people would graduate from schools throughout the medieval period and well into the renaissance. Intense, rigorous oral disputations were the norm. What we have here is, I think, a very bizarre excrescence from that tradition, with some ideological nudging and a whole lot of internal genetic drift.