In my younger and more vulnerable years, I was asked to fill in for a debate on the shores of Nantucket, after a last-minute cancellation by a more prominent combatant. The subject was God and religion, and I served as defender of faith against the prosecutorial efforts of Christopher Hitchens.
In my memory it was a brutal affair. The audience was there to hear Hitchens at the peak of his powers, and I was the Washington Generals. I threw some carefully rehearsed, extremely reasonable arguments at him; he batted them wittily away. The crowd cheered; the angels wept.
The lesson I took from that experience was simple: Trying to defeat charismatic men with facts and logic is a fool’s errand. Hitchens’s “religion poisons everything” account of human history was a mixture of balderdash, historical caricature and barely-veiled anti-religious bigotry. Therefore I should not have elevated his arguments by publicly debating them. Instead, I should have worked toward a world where institutions would decline to platform his fundamentalist style of atheism, no matter how many Nantucketers might clamor for tickets.
Wait, no — that’s not the lesson I drew at all. The lesson I actually took was, Ross, you blew it, do better next time. Because it didn’t matter whether I personally considered Hitchens’s atheism to be beyond some intellectual pale; he was an important figure leading an influential movement, and in a free society there is no substitute for trying to win arguments with influential figures, no matter the risks of defeat or embarrassment you run along the way.
This is basically the perspective I bring to the argument about whether it makes sense for defenders of mass vaccination and other consensus health-and-science policies to publicly debate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Democratic candidate for president.
Recently one such vaccine defender, Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College, was invited to debate Kennedy on Joe Rogan’s extremely popular podcast and declined, on the grounds that R.F.K. Jr. is slippery and unpersuadable, too much of a goal post-shifter to productively debate. Various intelligent people wrote essays defending Hotez: For instance, for Bloomberg Tyler Cowen explained why he doesn’t engage with crankish economic theories, while my colleague Farhad Manjoo wrote about his experience debating Kennedy’s stolen-election theories about the 2004 election, and why he now thinks that was a futile effort.
I don’t begrudge anyone opting out of a specific debate format, and I agree that there are ideas that it makes no sense to dignify with sustained rebuttal. In the year 2023, however, the ideas that Kennedy champions are not obscure; they clearly have influence, for instance, over the millions of Americans who declined the Covid-19 vaccine. The man himself is a famous figure who already has access to many prominent platforms, Rogan’s included. And he’s a candidate for the presidency of the United States, probably ultimately a marginal one but with meaningful support in current polls.
Which means that if you don’t think he should be publicly debated, you need some other theory of how the curious can be persuaded away from his ideas.
Right now the main alternative theory seems to be to enforce an intellectual quarantine, policed by media fact-checking and authoritative expert statements. And I’m sorry, but that’s just a total flop. It depends on the very thing whose evaporation has made vaccine skepticism more popular — a basic trust in institutions, a deference to credentials, a willingness to accept judgments from on high.
That evaporation hasn’t happened because of bad actors on the internet. It’s happened because institutions and experts have so often proved themselves to be untrustworthy and incompetent of late. So every time those now-untrusted institutions make heavy-handed appeals to authority (“Mr. Kennedy, WHOM EXPERTS CONSIDER A CONSPIRACY THEORIST, says …”), they are entrenching suspicion and alienation, not defeating it.
Whereas argument, while it risks much, gives you a chance to make the suspicious feel like their suspicions are being taken seriously, to regain the trustless person’s trust.
There are also multiple ways to have a public argument. For instance, if I were asked to to debate R.F.K. Jr., I wouldn’t speak on behalf of the vested authority of science, but on behalf of my more moderate doubts about official knowledge, a much more cautious version of the outsider thinking that he takes to unjustifiable extremes.
Whatever the terms of the debate, the goal is not to get Kennedy himself to concede that, say, the vaccine-autism link has never been substantiated. Rather the hope is to persuade part of your audience, to change minds at the margin. I suspect that at least some hearers were convinced by my colleague’s case against Kennedy’s 2004-election theories, for instance. And I like to think that I’ve done enough good for theism through, say, occasional appearances on Bill Maher’s HBO show to make up for my disastrous showing on that Nantucket beach.
Maybe that’s a fond delusion. But unless you’re willing to go all the way to a Ministry of Truth, there is no reasonable alternative.