The Great Debaters, how do they win?

Tako · Before February 2015

<< Contains spoilers >>

The Great Debaters is a fantastic film that tells the story of a young, African-American team of debaters from Wiley, Texas who win debate after debate until they meet Harvard University and win.

What I do not understand, entirely, is how they win. I'm hoping there's someone here who can give me their mature thoughts on the matter.

Wiley's stance is affirming that civil disobedience is moral.

Here is the final debate:

Junior said:
Resolved: Civil disobedience is a moral weapon in the fight for justice. But how can disobedience ever be moral? Well, l guess that depends on one's definition of the words. Word. ln 1919, in lndia, 10,000 people gathered in Amritsar to protest the tyranny of British rule. General Reginald Dyer trapped them in a courtyard and ordered his troops to fire into the crowd for ten minutes. 379 died-- men, women, children-- Shot down in cold blood. Dyer said he had taught them a moral lesson. Gandhi and his followers responded not with violence but with an organized campaign of non-cooperation. Government buildings were occupied. Streets were blocked with people who refused to rise, even when beaten by police. Gandhi was arrested, but the British were soon forced to release him. He called it a moral victory. The definition of moral: Dyer's lesson or Gandhi's victory? You choose.

1st Harvard Student said:
From 1914 to 1918, for every single minute the world was at war, four men laid down their lives. Just think of it. 240 brave young men were hurled into eternity every hour of every day, of every night, for four long years. 35,000 hours. 8,281,000 casualties. 240. 240. 240. Here was a slaughter immeasurably greater than what happened at Amritsar. Can there be anything moral about it? Nothing... except that it stopped Germany from enslaving all of Europe. Civil disobedience isn't moral because it's non-violent. Fighting for your country with violence can be deeply moral, demanding the greatest sacrifice of all: life itself. Non-violence is the mask civil disobedience wears to conceal its true face--anarchy.

2nd Wiley student said:
Gandhi believes one must always act with love and respect for one's opponents, even if they are Harvard debaters. Gandhi also believes that lawbreakers must accept the legal consequences for their actions. Does that sound like anarchy? Civil disobedience is not something for us to fear. lt is, after all, an American concept. You see, Gandhi draws his inspiration not from a Hindu scripture, but from Henry David Thoreau, who l believe graduated from Harvard and lived by a pond not too far from here.

2nd Opposition Debater said:
My opponent is right about one thing. Thoreau was a Harvard grad, and, like many of us, a bit self-righteous. He once said, ''Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one.'' Thoreau the idealist could never know that Adolf Hitler would agree with his words. The beauty and the burden of democracy is this: no idea prevails without the support of the majority. The people decide the moral issues of the day, not a majority of one.

2nd Wiley student said:
Majorities do not decide what is right or wrong. Your conscience does. So why should a citizen surrender his or her conscience to a legislator? No, we must never, ever kneel down before the tyranny of a majority.

2nd Opposition Debater said:
We can't decide which laws to obey and which to ignore. lf we could... l'd never stop for a red light. [laughter] My father is one of those men that stands between us and chaos: a police officer. l remember the day his partner, his best friend, was gunned down in the line of duty. Most vividly of all, l remember the expression on my dad's face. Nothing that erodes the rule of law can be moral, no matter what name we give it.

Junior said:
In Texas... they lynch Negroes. My teammates and I saw a man strung up by his neck and set on fire. We drove through a lynch mob, pressed our faces against the floorboard. I looked at my teammates. I saw the fear in their eyes... and worse... the shame.
What was this Negro's crime that he should be hung, without trial, in a dark forest filled with fog? Was he a thief? Was he a killer? Or just a Negro? Was he a sharecropper? A preacher? Were his children waiting up for him? And who are we to just lie there and do nothing?

No matter what he did, the mob was the criminal. But the law did nothing, just left us wondering why. My opponent says nothing that erodes the rule of law can be moral. But there is no rule of law in the Jim Crow South, not when Negroes are denied housing, turned away from schools, hospitals, and not when we are lynched.
St. Augustine said, ''An unjust law is no law at all, '' which means I have a right, even a duty, to resist... with violence or civil disobedience. You should pray I choose the latter.

I will admit that I just ripped out the emotion of this speech, but you don't need emotion to see a logical point. How does he prove that civil disobedience is more moral than violence? He does an excellent job at saying something needs to be done about unjust laws, but he doesn't say much about how it should be carried out.

I could easily take his argument and go shoot a senator who has been known to affirm unjust laws.

Different55 · Before February 2015

We saw this movie in American History class right before my school let out last month. I don't remember much of it, so I apologize if I'm missing something obvious.

You want to know:

Your post wrote:

How does he prove that civil disobedience is more moral than violence?

But you said:

Your post wrote:

Wiley's stance is affirming that civil disobedience is moral.

So I'm all like:

My head wrote:

He doesn't have to prove that civil disobedience is more moral than violence. His goal is to prove that civil disobedience is moral. If they pull that off, they win. They don't need to compare it to any other form of disobedience. The conditions of winning isn't quantitative*, either it's moral or it isn't. It doesn't need to be more or less moral than anything else.

*I don't like this word. If you have a better word, please suggest. Can I use the word "boolean" here? That's pretty similar to what I'm trying to say.

Tako · Before February 2015

Civil disobedience isn't moral because it's non-violent. Fighting for your country with violence can be deeply moral, demanding the greatest sacrifice of all: life itself. Non-violence is the mask civil disobedience wears to conceal its true face--anarchy.

So this is the statement that brings up violence to begin with. He's just using it to rebuke the claim that nonviolence is moral because it's not violent. That's it. By doing that, he turns the question of morality over to the result of civil disobedience, which he says is chaos instead of order.

Junior later answers his question by saying in Jim Crow South, laws are unjust and therefore they need to be dealt with. So in that regard, they prove that civil disobedience can be moral. But they also prove that violence can be moral.

I suppose that can be regarded as a victory, but still, why mention that civil disobedience is preferable to violence? You're right, Different, it is irrelevant and confusing. He should have concluded with

St. Augustine said, ''An unjust law is no law at all, '' which means I have a right, even a duty, to resist.~~.. with violence or civil disobedience. You should pray I choose the latter.~~ Civil disobedience is moral not because it is preferable to violence, but because it is a way to change things in the face of corrupt laws.

Different55 · Before February 2015

Agreed, that'd have been a better way to have ended it.

mrjawapa · Before February 2015

"..how do they win?"
They are master debaters.

It takes being calm, and some what knowing what you are talking about... so uh... I would be bad at it.

Tako · Before February 2015

JaWapa wrote:

"..how do they win?"
They are master debaters.
It takes being calm, and some what knowing what you are talking about... so uh... I would be bad at it.

I'm talking about specifics. How, specifically, in this debate, do they win?

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