Expressing a difference of opinion can feel fraught in our current climate of polarisation, misinformation and media spin. But for writer and two-­time world-­champion debater Bo Seo, disagreement can be the beginning of a conversation rather than the end of a relationship. His eloquent 2023 book Good Arguments is both manual and memoir, charting Seo’s years of experience on the debating circuit and revealing how the art of articulating a divergent perspective – and listening carefully to our opponents – can help us think more clearly, act more collaboratively and converse more deeply and empathetically. In this conversation, which has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity, Bo talks to Griffith Review Editor Carody Culver about how speaking up doesn’t have to mean falling out.

CARODY CULVER: In the opening chapter of Good Arguments, you share the story of how you were introduced to debating – you were an incredibly shy fifth grader who avoided disagreement at all costs, and then one of your teachers encouraged you to join your school debating team. How did this begin to shift your perspective on what it means to disagree?

BO SEO: I moved from South Korea to Australia when I was eight and I didn’t speak English at the time. I learnt that the hardest part of crossing language lines was adjusting to real-­life conversations, and that of those real-­life conversations, the hardest ones to adjust to were disagreements. I also sensed what a lot of newcomers to a place do, which is that their belonging is conditional on not speaking up too much and not rocking the boat. A combination of those two things made me resolve to be very agreeable. And I thought I had found in agreeableness – the slight smile, the ready nod – a posture in which I could ride out the rest of my life.

What changed for me was that, in Year 5, my teacher pulled me aside one day and made me a promise: that on the debating team, when one person spoke, no one else did. To someone who had been constantly interrupted, spoken over and spun out of conversation, that was irresistible. The attraction I felt must have been to the promise of being heard not in agreement but in disagreement, recognised for the ways in which I was different as well as similar. So I signed up, and what I found there has since become the thesis of my book and of my work: that the opposite of bad disagreement is not agreement but good disagreement.

CC: One thing that comes through in that early part of the book is your awareness of the comfort of your listener, of not wanting to make them feel uncomfortable. You also say that by the time you were a seasoned high-­school debater, you felt you were living a ‘life of contradiction’: ‘even as I climbed up the ranks of competitive debate, I remained staunchly agreeable in my everyday life.’ I found this very relatable! I wonder if agreeableness is a quality we’re encouraged to embrace because of its association with empathy, co-­operation, sociability. Do you think that we overemphasise the benefits of being agreeable or overlook its potential costs?

BS: We overemphasise it for some persons rather than others. So, whom do we expect to be agreeable? It’s foreigners, those on the margins, people from whom we expect compliance. I was really struck by something Toni Morrison said in her Nobel lecture when she was recounting the story of the Tower of Babel. She said the story goes that our efforts to reach heaven were defeated by the confusion of our language. That in our different tongues, we lost the ability to co-­operate. She asked, well, whose vision of heaven was it in the first instance, and was the attainment of that goal too hasty if it meant we couldn’t take the time to listen to one another and try to reconcile these different perspectives? These days people talk about wanting their experiences and interactions to be ‘frictionless’. It’s a sinister word and I do wonder whom is served by our moving through the world in that way. What I know is that the posture of agreeableness did not allow me to participate fully in my life.

CC: Right – being agreeable all the time, or most of the time, forecloses the opportunity to move forward…whereas maybe if you pushed a little bit, you could have a better conversation or come to a different view.

I want to ask you about side-­switching, which is a tactic used in competitive debating whereby a debater imagines what they might argue if they were taking the opposing position, or how they might rebut their own arguments. You connect this process to empathy: ‘Whereas most people viewed empathy as a spontaneous psychic connection, or a reflection of virtue, debaters knew it as an understanding achieved through a series of actions.’ I loved this! Why do you think empathy is so often understood as a process of imagination or intuition rather than as something you actually have to work at?

BS: It’s tied in my mind to the trend towards embracing or requiring authenticity, which asserts a fixed version of the self to which we should give expression. As if our main obligation is to be truthful to ourselves. Debate emphasises different ideals. You are forced to argue for positions you don’t believe and, regardless of your stance, you learn always to consider the opposing perspective. That is quite literal: after preparing your case, you turn to a different sheet and write the four best arguments for the other side or mark up your argument for its flaws and inconsistencies. Paper and pen. That is countercultural at a time when we expect a tight nexus between speech and identity, and I think there is something to be gained from such role-­play. By relaxing our certainty, we leave open a crack through which something like empathy might arise, through which a richer connection might form.

CC: This fixation with authenticity is a peculiar one – maybe it’s because the world is a thoroughly confusing place now. Many of us spend a lot of time on social media, and it’s getting harder to tell what’s real and what’s not, so we become fixated on a form of truth that supposedly resides within our selves.

BS: Yes, but it’s a curious version of the self, one that answers to the impetuses of broadcasting and branding, as if you must first ask ‘what kind of person am I?’ before figuring out something to say that is of a piece.

CC: I think we see this with language as well – we can become so fixated on particular terms that have to be used. I do understand the impulse there, but perhaps it’s also a way of avoiding the issue?

BS: Certainly. Such loaded terms and slogans are really shortcuts to avoid the conversation at hand. They end rather than invite discussion, as if you are saying, I have already considered this, made up my mind, and am imparting the conclusion. Catchwords do well online because they are easy to categorise and reproduce but they are at odds with the aim of conversation: to find a language with which to connect to the person across from you. That requires the reinvention and rearrangement of language, I think, rather than its repetition. So I’m very wary of that – of when, in conversation, we re-­enact the scripts of broader cultural and political discourse. I find those are the times when we talk past the other person to an imagined audience sitting on the sidelines, applauding as we make an example of the other person and, ­ultimately, of ourselves.

CC: And as you point out in the book, when we get into an argument with someone, we’re often not actually arguing about the same thing. So I was interested to read about how involved and complex the process is for phrasing a competitive debate topic – you need to be able to have clear arguments for and against, and I guess that emphasises how easily we can overlook or misunderstand what constitutes a worthwhile or a good disagreement in our everyday lives. You’ve developed a checklist for determining whether a potential disagreement is worth pursuing – could you explain that checklist?

BS: I think conversations have an architecture and that at its best this architecture gives accommodation to both sides. That comes down to the rules of engagement – for me, it was absolutely critical that I had the protection of being able to speak without interruption – but also shared understanding of what it is that we are disagreeing about. Here framing matters. So if you say, let’s debate whether wokeism has gone too far, you’ve set the table in a way that is not accommodating to both sides and that instead prefigures the outcome. You can still have an exchange, but it’s probably not a debate – it’s probably something else, like a show trial. Debaters are attentive to the fact that when we’re arguing with someone, we are at once disagreeing with each other, competing with each other as adversaries, but also collaborating or co-­creating a conversation. We’re making something together. I think that’s very truthful to the way we are as people – when we argue with family or friends, the argument is a part of our relationship, but it’s not all of it. It cannot totalise in that way.

In fact, one of the lessons I had to learn after I became pretty good at debating was that if you argue every point and try to defeat every argument put your way, you’re going to be pretty lonely. People will walk away and you won’t have succeeded in changing anyone’s mind. Cleverness is being able to make any argument, but wisdom is knowing which arguments to take up and which to let go. My shorthand for that is called the RISA checklist [Real, Important, Specific, Aligned]. Before jumping into any disagreement, we should ask whether the disagreement we have with the other side is real and not, for example, an imagined slight. That it’s important enough to us to justify having the disagreement. That the subject of the debate is specific enough that we’re going to be able to make progress in the allotted time we have. And finally, that both sides are aligned in their reasons for wanting to engage in the dispute. That checklist can be internal, but I like it best when it’s dialogical, when you’re asking the other person, well, what is it that we’re actually disagreeing about? Why is it important to you? Laying that groundwork can be time very well spent.

CC: It also comes back to what you were saying before about debate as a collaboration – you might be arguing the opposite point of view from someone, but you’re still working together to have that conversation. 

You’ve talked a little bit about how you don’t get to pick your side in debating – you argue for the side you’re given. Why do you think it’s important for us to be exposed to ideas and positions in which we might have no stake?

BS: I think…the issues in which we have no stake are very few. As citizens and as members of workplaces, members of families, much is done in our name, and it’s done in our name whether we’re aware of it or not and whether we talk about it or not. There’s that phrase from Seamus Heaney: ‘No such thing as innocent bystanding.’

I don’t subscribe to the idea that people should not speak on issues outside their ‘lived experience’. Of course we have to be attentive to the forms of injustice whereby some groups are ignored or sidelined on matters of great importance to them. But I don’t think it makes much sense to say we should not talk about something unless it conforms to higher notions of identity. Surely who we are is formed, in part, through conversation… That’s an important and joyful part of debate. I grew up in a quiet suburb of Sydney, and the thought that on any given Friday [at debating practice] I could travel the whole world by talking about sports or economic sanctions, all these things – it made me think that in the world of ideas, that whatever was of human concern could be my province, that it was within my reach, and I think that was a very valuable experience.

CC: Another valuable experience is losing – you say in the book that when you’re a debater, you lose more debates than you win, which means that you grow used to getting up on stage and having your point of view decimated in front of a live audience. It makes you understand that you are not the position that you’re arguing. But I think it’s easy for us non-­debaters to get emotionally attached to our points of view, which paradoxically can make them difficult to defend – we get so attached that we can’t countenance an alternate position.

BS: In debating you simply lose all the time. At the world championships there are 500 teams and one winner, so 499 teams are going home having ‘lost’. Even in the rounds that you win, your most triumphant rounds, you’re going to lose a bunch of points. You’re going to lose individual arguments, you’re not going to have a response to an example that [the opposition] gives. What I found very helpful about that experience was learning that there’s a difference between being right and being persuasive. You can walk away from a debate saying ‘I really had the better position, I’m really sure I was right, but I was unpersuasive on the day’ – and that’s not a character flaw, it’s a failure of skill and craft and something that can be worked on. I think that can be helpful to creating a condition of hospitality – saying to people, when you lose an argument it’s not a reflection of your intelligence or your character or your judgement. Our ability to talk to one another and persuade one another is a skill.

I also think debating has an interesting relationship with certainty. In order to put yourself in a room and come up with arguments within a short time for your position, to stand in front of an often large audience and speak with some conviction, you have to get yourself into the head space of ‘I am right, this is what I’m certain about’. But over the course of the discussion, mostly through that experience of losing points, of finding yourself coming up short, you don’t quite stop suspending disbelief about being correct, but you start to register the ways in which that certainty is a kind of facade. And at the end of the debate you walk away with a more textured understanding of what’s going on, and that back-­and-­forth takes residence in your mind.
So I think the best conversations are ones in which we walk away with a different form of certainty, with a different form of understanding. It’s not just your voice, it’s the other person’s, too.

CC: Absolutely. And language can sometimes be a barrier to that shared understanding – you used the example of wokeness earlier, and ‘political correctness’ is another one you use in the book to show the ways in which particular phrases can set the terms of a conversation before it’s begun. Do you think we should try to avoid using those loaded phrases, or is it better to do the opposite – try to restore their meaning and prompt people to think about them differently?

BS: When I think about the most meaningful conversations I’ve had, I’ve often felt that at the end of them, I’ve discovered a new vocabulary for talking about something, and that vocabulary is a kind of co-­creation between you and the person you’re speaking to. I think the best conversations work towards the creation of that kind of language – we find the words that are right for us at this time to have that conversation. It’s private and idiosyncratic and essentially intimate. I think language is the way in which we make other people’s reality our own; it’s our best chance at finding some medium over which to connect in conversation. Reclaiming that prerogative to invent a language with which to better recognise one another – I don’t think that’s something we should give up.

CC: I also wanted to ask you about your views on protest, as there’s been so much protest across the world over the last few months in response to some of the terrible things that are happening right now. Do you think protest is a necessary way of advancing the conversation about a particular issue or event? How you see the relationship between debate and protest?

BS: That’s a great question. One of the relationships that I write about in the book is between Malcolm X and James Farmer – the latter was a leader in the more traditional civil rights movement, and Malcolm X was the firebrand spokesman for the Nation of Islam. Protest was a very important part of their work and of making change in the world, but what fascinated me about their relationship was that in addition to their acts of public protest – public confrontations between the two of them, articles [they wrote] denouncing one another – they developed, over time, a relationship where they would speak to one another privately, they would go to each other’s houses. I don’t know how you show causation with these things, but over time you saw the ways in which strains of [each man’s] thinking had crept into the other’s speech. So, for me, [protest should have] a public dimension and a private one, and one thing I worry about now is the ways in which the dynamics of public conversation can predominate over private ones. I think it’s not uncommon for people to allow the dynamics of protest to enter intimate and familial spaces – we talk about deplatforming the crazy uncle or cancelling them, and I’m not sure that makes a great deal of sense. It seems to me quite natural that we have one way of engaging in public political discussion and a different way of engaging with one another when it’s just face to face. So that’s what I would say about the relationship between protest and debate – there should be room for both.

CC: That reminds me of the very salient point you make about silence at the end of the book – you say that many people can be afraid to speak up, and I think that’s particularly true in our current polarised environment. Do you think we have a moral responsibility to engage in dialogue with one another? What’s your view of using social media as a platform to inspire people to act?

BS: If arguing well was a moral obligation, I know where it would be located. It’s an obligation to ourselves, to others, and to the ‘we’ that arises from the relations in between. But some part of me shies away from the designation because I think it would be very tiresome for people to hear my views on their moral obligations. What I can do more confidently is give testimony of my experience.

When I was that shy kid avoiding conflict, one bargain that I had with myself was that when I had a cross word [or disagreement] that I didn’t give voice to, I would try to remember it and tell it to my family at night. But of course I would forget over the course of the day and so lose access to that part of myself – my reactions and opinions. I experienced that as a form of alienation. So, too, with my relationships with others. I learnt that placid smiles can mask depths of contempt and resentment. I walked my friendships like tightropes, afraid to venture beyond a narrow band of agreement and common feeling. But when I was free of that, when I jumped off the tightrope, I was more often than not surprised by the grace with which the other person received me. Our disagreements formed the basis for a richer, fuller relationship.

Debate begins with the self, but it reaches towards the other, and the last move that you make as a speaker is to hand over the microphone to the next one, often to your opponent. It’s the scariest part of the whole thing, because for all the terror of public speaking and of making arguments, it pales against the lack of control you feel when you have to listen to someone comment on what you just had to say. But you do it because there’s no conversation without it, there’s no debate without it. I think the choice to enter into that kind of conversation will never stop being terrifying, but it’s essential – it’s the only way in which the conversation continues. For all that to happen, people have to first raise their voices, and they have to raise their voices not only in agreement but in disagreement. A great deal can follow from that choice.

This conversation was supported by the Korean Cultural Centre Australia.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons