Sports were never my strong point. I didn’t mind this: especially once I discovered that most of the people who told me I should be good at them were almost universally untalented at physical activities themselves. So I just stopped engaging and shifted my focus to less violent pursuits, which is how I came across parliamentary debating.
My interest began mostly as a way to have a social life with sane kids from other schools but debating also gave rules and structure to my articulate sense of outrage. It forced me to think through arguments, to consider them holistically and without bias – and in so doing interrogate any preconceived notions I had of the choices in front of me.
I always believed that one of the more strategically important positions in the debating team is the first speaker, because it was they who set the parameters of the debate. Uniquely advantaged, they got to decide the outlines of what the debate could be about.
France's colonial crimes in Algeria and elsewhere have been cited as being part of the story
Allow me to explain: If the topic was “Science is bad” and I had to argue in favour of that, it would be silly of me to try and convince everyone in the room that science itself was evil because the notions are so easily disproved. Had I done that, all my opponents would have to do was list out some good things that scientific exploration of our natural world had led to - antibiotics, vaccinations, cellphones, the internet, chemistry, mathematics, astronomy, particle physics, brain surgery - to demonstrate that my arguments were wrong and therefore win.
So instead the smart thing was for me to limit the playing field of the argument. In this case, I would say that no one in their right minds was arguing that science itself was bad, but that government-funded uses for scientific exploration of methods of mass murders - biological weapons, nuclear bombs, drone assassination - should be considered bad.
I felt the same way when people were outraged that the Hagia Sophia was turned into a mosque. The lazy argument there is to see it as an example of creeping Islamization of the only secular Muslim country. Fine, because it is. But another, more useful way to argue it is as a demonstrable, entirely avoidable consequence of white Europe keeping Turkey on the waiting list for the EU for a century with no intent on letting them in because they are Muslims
See the difference? Now, in order to win, the opposing team couldn’t simply point to pre-natal surgeries or the Big Bang Theory, they had to play within my narrow parameters to prove that nuclear holocaust was a good thing. That’s much more difficult, which proves that one of the best ways one can win an argument is to be the one that gets to say what we are arguing about. This is, of course, an exaggerated view of how to look at the world, but its stuck with me ever since because people are nearly always unaware of the parameters of a debate.
Take the Charlie Habdo comics and the recent resurgence of outrage around them after a French teacher was beheaded for displaying an offensive picture in class. Stated simply, no one should be beheaded for a picture. That much most people agree on, and it is the crux of the way the French are presenting the case. But there is also an international sense of weary outrage from Muslim countries that recognize that the parameter of that debate willfully ignores years of France’s Islamophobia, institutionalized racism, cultural and physical colonization, accusations of genocide and centuries of problematic practices in North Africa and other Muslim countries.
The questions so far are designed to purposely reduce the incident to free speech vs religious-inspired homicide, so by default if one believes in free speech then one has to defend Charlie Hebdo. But, if you tweak that and change the question from a generic “Does free speech matter?” to “Is France an institutionally, historically and culturally Islamophobic country that disproportionately ghettoized its Muslim citizens thereby creating overarching, deliberate environment of distrust over its citizens that come from countries it illegally pillaged and colonized?”, things become quite different.
The scene after the deadly attack on Charlie Hebdo's offices
Now, one has to look at not simply free speech, but institutional racism and bigotry. It’s still just as bad to decapitate people, but it does make it harder to ignore what the motivations could be.
I felt the same way when people were outraged that the Hagia Sophia was turned into a mosque. The lazy argument there is to see it as an example of creeping Islamization of the only secular Muslim country. Fine, because it is. But another, more useful way to argue it is as a demonstrable, entirely avoidable consequence of white Europe keeping Turkey on the waiting list for the EU for a century with no intent on letting them in because they are Muslims. Seen in that frame, the turn from monument to mosque isn’t an act of sacrilege, it’s a causal effect not entirely caused by the Turks at all.
These aren’t simply examples of playing Devil’s advocate. It behooves us all - particularly at a time when bias isn’t simply tolerated but encouraged in news coverage - to not simply ask what the question is or who is asking it, but also to interrogate how it is being asked, and what things are we being asked to ignore by default.
Because often, the kinds of questions asked tell us more than some of the answers we get.
