The Antidebate: Experiments in the Art of Sensemaking for a World Gone Slightly Mad.

Announcing a New Short Film by Katie Teague for Perspectiva

I’ve always found the idea of ‘making an announcement’ - as opposed to just saying something - rather funny. But today I am delighted to announce that Katie Teague has created a new film about Perspectiva’s attempt to create a new social practice called The Antidebate. The 25-minute documentary weaves together footage from the last 3-4 years of antidebate praxis, alongside original interviews with antidebate contributors and participants. We are proud to share it here first:

The Antidebate: Experiments in the Art of Sensemaking for a World Gone Slightly Mad.

Our brief to Katie was to help us tell the story of our attempt to bring a new social practice into being. That story started with a decision to act on inspiration - let’s create an alternative to debate! - followed by trial and error, setbacks (including Covid), confusion, disillusion and often wanting to give up. But then also persevering, waiting, and inviting new contributors and participants until a process and method arose that now has a character, coherence, and I believe a bright future.

Something has been born, and it has many parents, which Katie’s film succeeds in showing, and which led one of them, Michael Bready, to affectionately call the antidebate ‘a mutt’, in the best possible sense of the term. There is plenty more to say about the antidebate, I give some overview here, and there is a short book due for publication by the end of 2024. For now, while I mostly want to let the film do the talking and thank everyone who has contributed to the project, for those coming to the antidebate for the first time, I offer the following quotations as a means of orientation.

A talent for speaking differently, rather than arguing well, is the chief instrument of cultural change – Richard Rorty

A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it. ―Rabindranath Tagore

The experience I am having of our conversation is landing within a lifetime of conversations, each of which has contributed to my idea of what a conversation can be, could be, should be, and should not be. - Nora Bateson

Underneath every disagreement a wordless negotiation over a relationship is taking place. If we don’t settle that, the conversation doesn’t stand a chance. - Ian Leslie

You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. ― Buckminster Fuller

The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it. But we will escape it only by adding something better to it. - Wendell Berry

It’s easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting - Multiple Sources

An ounce of practice is worth a ton of theory. - Swami Sivananda

It can be lazy to reach for quotations to do your thinking for you, but sometimes they are like banisters helping you find your way downstairs in the dark, or coordinates on a map that you can place together to find true North and figure out your way from there. Aphorisms are also like Buddha’s oars that you need to get across a river, but then safely leave behind because you don’t need them now, though others still might.

Those quotations distilled into my own words might be something like this:

The antidebate is about speaking differently rather than arguing well because its focus is not on substantive propositional claims but on the kinds of setting, process, and permission that make meaningful communication possible.

• The antidebate is a conversational innovation; it recognises that people come into conversations with varying histories of power, and a range of competencies, and it offers an inquiry that is inherently embodied, relational, and both collaborative and competitive.

• The antidebate arose out of the impression that debate is exhausted, and the conviction that as a preeminent social practice and edifying public spectacle, it is no longer serving democracy well.

• The challenge is not merely to critique debate better, however, because the world has changed to such an extent (see a previous Katie Teague film called Living in the Metacrisis) that debate may be beyond repair as a societal touchstone for a collective public inquiry. The challenge is also to consider what is best about debate, and then create, refine, and spread a new social practice to prefigure new ways of thinking, talking, and living together well.

• The antidebate is an antidote to the hegemony of rationalism as a default way of knowing. The method is pluralist and generalist in spirit, and resolutely offline because relational somatic data is a key part of the process.

Along the way we have developed shorthands for how to describe it:

• Epistemic Jazz, because we are venturing into known and unknown terrain and the process is semi-structured, with some creative constraints but considerable freedom to innovate.

• Serious Play, because we have designed the process to be lively and enjoyable, and yet the intentionality of inquiry that lies behind it is resolute.

• Democratic Discombobulation, because we do want the process to be ever-so-slightly destabilizing, to help shift our immunity to change, and oblige us to see and feel and think differently in the public sphere, especially when there are difficult decisions to be made together.

• ‘Kintsugi’, because we are trying to repair and recover something that is broken, and make it more beautiful than it was before.

We are not sure what comes next for the antidebate, but we can see it taking root in secondary schools and universities as an alternative to debate. We hope we have created a form of what Margaret Mead calls ‘prefigurative culture’, namely something we do together as a shared expression of who we seek to become, at a time when the past is no longer a good guide to that. Today it feels like the future is not so much ours to inherit, but ours to forge through new ideas, new tools, and new practices like the antidebate.

The film credits mention most people involved, but I am happy to have this chance to personally thank Peter Limberg for seeding the idea in 2019/2020 and Christopher Levenick at The John Templeton Foundation for believing in its potential and encouraging us to apply. Thank you also to the Perspectiva Associates who worked together to establish the philosophical basis for the antidebate’s initial form, ethos, and ambiance, and thereby helped to secure the funding that made the project possible; including Bonnitta Roy, Ian Christie, Jeremy Johnson, Zachary Stein, Tom Chatfield, Dan Nixon, Anthea Lawson, and Hannah Close - we still have a recording of the extraordinary early conversation and subsequent email exchanges which I consider to be an example of Perspectiva at its best.

I’m particularly indebted to Mark Vernon for significant substantive contributions in the early stages, and practical help including the use of his home and garden for early practice sessions while ‘the rule of six’ was in play during Covid. Mark was an early advocate for the idea that the question should arise from the energy in the room, he informed the tableauing process (indicating viewpoints with bodies rather than words) and he helped us to develop the antidebate from a two-person practice to a process with a small group interacting with the audience, before graciously stepping aside while continuing to support our efforts, including a contribution to the film. I am also pleased to be able to thank Pippa Evans, Elizabeth Oldfield, Minna Salami, Tom Chatfield, and Anna Katharina Schaffner for a range of substantive and creative contributions, for showing up to the early practice sessions when we didn’t really know where to start, and helping to bring the first public andtidebate into being at the Realisation Festival in 2021.

The antidebate method evolved over time and significantly deepened through the contributions of Ivo Mensch and Indra Adnan who helped to make it a proper participatory process featuring multiple ways of knowing. The adventure was always to try to transcend and include the best of debate and dialogue in a way that might potentially enrich the public sphere. Viewed through Perspectiva’s DNA of ‘systems, souls and society’ the challenge was to bring depth without spiritual bypassing, to encourage moral and political commitment without getting stuck in virtue signaling or grandstanding, and to be as inclusive as possible while husbanding the gravity of purpose and retaining the necessary tension that arises from the balance of support and challenge. We did not always get it right, but this middle phase is where the role of the antidebate in fostering democratic dispositions became clearer. The idea of swarming (a kind of epistemic seduction in which we try to recruit others to our view and the room begins to form clusters or tribes) came mostly from Ivo and the inclusion of ‘the enigmatics’ (attending to those who feel disaffected by the process) came mostly from Indra. By the time of the Realisation festival of June 2022, the critical elements of the process were in place, which is why it features heavily in the film.

And yet there were still many problems! There was too much reliance on the room as a whole, an arena with too many people, and there was not enough small group activity or time for personal reflection, and the simple matter of getting tired from standing for too long undermined the better features. Speaking personally, with so many other commitments, it was beginning to feel strenuous to keep trying to bring the antidebate to life. I am therefore grateful to relatively new Perspectiva colleagues Michael Bready and Kylen Preator who rescued the project when I had almost given up on it. Michael’s background as an educator was indispensable both in trialing the process in schools and in seeing and feeling the process from the point of view of participants. Michael and Kylen introduced a range of design tweaks and clarifications to make the process less strenuous, and more fun, but still fundamentally serious. Kylen’s tenacity and determination to fulfil our project commitments was particularly important over the last few months, and the video would not have happened without her.

We are still learning and iterating, but it now appears that the default antidebate is a process featuring three ‘acts’ over three hours corresponding to the themes of coherence, confusion and commitment. The numerical sweet spot for the practice is about twenty-five curious people, and it works even better when they know each other.

Finally, while the project and the practice are much more than the film, I offer my final thankyou, for now, to Katie Teague, for her supererogatory efforts to create a film worthy of the project’s past, present, and future. This effort involved significant travel, working with amateur and incomplete footage from others, and processing contradictory feedback while doing several cuts, including the final final final final final version above and below.

This film marks the end of the beginning of the antidebate project for Perspectiva. We hope you’ll watch and share the video, we’re keen to hear what you make of it, and please get in touch if you would like to be involved in the future of the Antidebate as a funder, a partner, or a participant.

For now: Enjoy!

Jonathan Rowson, Co-founder and CEO of Perspectiva.