Mass interaction in the web world generates scores of new words every year that reflect new modes of human thoughts and actions. Whataboutery is one of these new words.
All of you might be familiar with the meme associated with it. Every time someone passionately writes about issue x, someone inevitably comments: “What about y? Why do you only care about x?”
Whataboutery is a form of trolling whereby any opinion can be disparaged through introduction of another issue. Actually, not all whataboutery can be dismissed as trolling, there are gradations.
Some are plainly ridiculous because of total lack of relevance. For example, some noted academic may express a strong opinion about harassment faced by working women every day in the roads and workplace.
A ludicrous whataboutery would be bringing up that person’s nonexistent support for democracy in the country. Everything is interrelated, but occurrence or non-occurrence of a fair election has very little to do with social practices that emanate from longstanding culture.
An example of a more serious whataboutery that cannot be dismissed so easily is mocking those who ostentatiously exhibit solidarity with terrorism victims in Paris or Brussels but have muted or nonexistent response to attacks in Istanbul or Beirut. Later, I will argue that, even in these cases, whataboutery is not a serious response to a critical issue.
Lastly, an example of a whataboutery that is very unsettling because it raises deep questions about our belief systems, is asking, why do you make such a brouhaha when a blogger or a LGBT activist is hacked to death by assassins, but do not make a peep when scores of youths are regularly abducted by “unnamed” forces and then found tortured, disfigured, and very much dead in roadside rubbish heaps?
Is it just because you do not like their politics that you think their deaths do not matter even when they have not done anything deserving to be incarcerated, let alone murdered?
Let us first dispense the illogic of soft whataboutery. We can see that thousands of morally outrageous things are happening all around us and thanks to immersion in information world, we are aware of these incidents 24/7.
If somebody wants to be impeccably non-discriminating, he will have to remain morally outraged continuously without break. Any psychologist will tell you that the human mind can remain outraged only in finite doses and remaining outraged 24/7 will surely lead to total nervous breakdown within days.
We therefore try to be selectively outraged to preserve our sanity while continue consoling ourselves as being conscientious citizens. What are the criteria we use to select our outrages?
Outrage is an emotion, and the most influential criterion of selecting outrage has always been emotional attachment; we get outraged by things that we feel emotional closeness with. We feel outrage when bad things happen to people who are very similar to us. Every year, there are news about some drug-crazed youth killing parents in village or small-towns when they refused to give money to their son; news that are hidden with small prints in local news pages and never commented upon by the commentariat. But when meth-addled Oishee killed her parents, the urban middle-class could talk about little else for days on end.
Next to familiarity, frequency is a very important benchmark of selecting outrages. We get used to outrageous things if they happen regularly, our mind simply incorporates them in to the new normal.
There is no doubt that our worldview is heavily influenced by West-centric narratives, and that’s why a terror attack in Paris becomes more salient to us than a bombing in Istanbul. But bombings have been going on regularly in Turkey for quite some time now, and large attacks in Western cities are still rare.
Undoubtedly, rarity influences salience of events. In the 1970s, when political struggle over the future of Northern Ireland was at its bloodiest, and high-casualty bombings and terrorist attacks were happening every month in the UK and Ireland, news of a new bombing was hardly sending ripples all over world. People just shrugged and went on their lives.
But excuses of familiarity or frequency do not cut it in some issues that are intimately tied with the ideology behind the outrage. As I said earlier, one of these questionable selective outrage is discriminating between blogger killings and killing of political activists.
The ideals behind the outrages are very similar — indignation that a conscious life can be taken away arbitrarily just because of personal beliefs and expressions of that consciousness. Killings for beliefs shock us but it seems they shock us selectively.
The secular urban class cannot deny accusation of hypocritical selectivity because they are directly involved in the overall ideological struggle. Discriminating among deaths fuel the narrative that there is nothing about liberal ideals behind the expressive outrages, but only a very partisan urge to protect one’s own kind while condoning elimination of the other.
The secular class may ask that when most religious people are avowedly against coexistence with secular and liberal ideals, and the more extreme of them openly cheer killing of “deviants,” why shouldn’t seculars pay back in kind?
Why should seculars accommodate people who, by principle, will not accommodate them at all? This is because liberalism has a more expansive view of human morality than religions or any other ideologies.
Apart from respect for individual freedom and dignity, liberalism also strongly emphasises universalism, which entails that rights and principles apply to all individuals. A specific principle which modern liberalism has gradually settled into is that conscious human life is sacrosanct. An individual life cannot be taken away for any reasons other than if that life directly poses threat against other lives.
Liberal view of right to life transcends both past crimes against humanity and present crimes against god. It is the more expansive view of morality that has enabled progressive liberalism to become the dominant ideology of modernity, triumphing over other more parochial beliefs.
In tacitly condoning deaths of ideological opponents, in demanding no other recourse than the death penalty, in standing against freedom of thought and expression, in supporting dismemberment of democracy and denial of political space to others, in promoting an exclusive vision of nationalism, the Bangladeshi secular class has lost all claims of being liberals and stooped to a tribal morality and identity. They have denuded themselves of moral superiority. Many questions of whataboutery are not groundless trolling of seculars at all.
This diminished moral authority plays no small part in discrediting the urban seculars before the general mass of fellow countrymen. Though international society may laud the heroics and sacrifice of victims and activists, their stock is not very high among the people of the country.
Politicians, who have an acute sense of relative moral and physical power of factions within the country, have shown their preferences very clearly.
They have overwhelmingly abandoned secular activists and embraced their ideological opponents. Bereft of all moral authority and physical security, the plight of seculars in Bangladesh will not evoke envy, even among the most vulnerable people of the world.
But they can take solace from a very religious view, possibility of redemption. If they can become self-aware and self-correcting, they may yet gain the moral high ground and redeem themselves before the people.
Source: Dhaka tribune
