In the months after Bo Seo moved from South Korea to Australia at the age of eight, learning to get along with those around him wasn’t just something – it became a survival mechanism.
He spoke no English, and a pleasant disposition felt like the easy option, even if it didn’t sit easily with the would-be debater within.
“The hardest conversations to adapt to were disagreements – when people tend to talk over each other, and passions start to run and speech rhythms tend to break down,” he said.
“That made me decide to be very happy, to smile and keep most of my thoughts to myself.
“The thing that broke me out of that was my Year 5 teacher telling me, in discussion, that when one person speaks, no one else does – and to someone who had been talked over and had been spun out of conversation and interrupted, that sounded like an irresistible promise.”
Through discussion, Mr Seo found “a community that allowed me to be heard”.
Not only did he find his voice but he used it to scale the highest rhetorical peaks and was part of the Harvard team that won the World University Debating Championship in 2016.
His ability as a school debater took him across Australia, and he recently returned to Adelaide to discuss his book Good Arguments at UniSA’s Hawke Centre.
Disagreement doesn’t have to be disagreeable
The word “debater” can conjure up incongruous associations – on the one hand, the confident student, with round vowels and a superior manner, dreams of the parliamentary front bench.
But that portrait is countered by another.
“If you think about the kids who were debaters at school, you might remember that there were some weirdos,” Mr Seo recently told ABC Radio Adelaide’s Deb Tribe.
“They learn to read a room, often as a matter of self-preservation.
Good Arguments explores the consequences of that epiphany.
One of his insights is that the art of disagreement itself should not be unpleasant – argument and petty dispute are not different expressions of the same impulse, but very opposite.
The point is illustrated by a Monty Python sketch where one character pays for an argument.
After opening exchanges of “yes, I did” and “no you didn’t”, he gets angry.
“An argument is a collective series of statements to establish a definite proposition,” he told his interlocutor.
“Contradiction is just saying the automatic gain of anything the other person says.”
The distinction is supported by Seo.
“Coming to some agreement about the type of conversation we want to have, and being very deliberate about that, can be helpful,” he said.
“Are we going to interrupt each other or not, are we going to give each other equal time to talk?
This lesson doesn’t just apply on the public stage, Mr Seo hastened to add – it can also help relationships.
“Our personal disagreements, certainly from experience, tend to be the most painful,” he said.
“We have decided to share our lives together and as a result there are so many things we know about each other, so many points of contact we accumulate every day, all of which could be drawn to into the discussion – so disagreement about it. the dirty dishes also come [about] your mother-in-law.
“Here again, being intentional, setting some boundaries about what the conversation is and isn’t about, can help.”
Blending judgement and wisdom
Such an approach may have its limits, Mr Seo acknowledged, because being rational means recognizing that human beings can sometimes stubbornly resist seeing reason.
Words will not solve all our problems – there is no perfect sentence for every scenario.
As the satirist Jonathan Swift wrote three centuries ago, reasoning will not make someone “right in a bad opinion” if that opinion was not obtained due to reason.
“One type of bully I write about is the ‘wrangler’ – the person who has a bit of criticism for every idea you come up with,” said Mr Seo.
“If you can’t come to some agreement about what kind of conversation you’re going to have, it might not be worth the effort.”
Despite this disadvantage, Mr Seo retains his “faith in what disagreement can do”.
He is currently a student at Harvard Law School and has an interest in human rights – an often hotly contested field.
“Arguments are what we have to do every day – we have to do it in the workplace, we have to do it at school, we have to do it in our lives as citizens,” he said.
“The art of debate starts with recognizing disagreement as work – it’s a kind of art you can get better at.
