2023-08-02 13:37:41
Opinion Treacherous phrase
If the moderator “has questions”
As of: 4:55 p.m. | Reading time: 3 minutes
Looking for answers? On TV?
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“I would like to ask a question”: This is roughly how a critical discussion used to start. The mediocre moderator of the present, on the other hand, puts it differently: “We have questions,” is his refrain. The phrase reveals how bad it actually is about asking questions. And not just on TV.
It used to be part of any public discussion to ask and answer questions. It wasn’t the most important thing, but it enlivened the conversation and added substance to the argument. Asking a question could also mean questioning something, even the person being questioned: polemically questioning the legitimacy of his or her speech and confronting one’s own arguments with his own.
Today, on the other hand, one has questions instead of asking them. The mediocre moderator of the present does not start with the threatening sentence “I would like to ask you a question” to provoke his counterpart, but responds half empathetically, half impatiently to the lengthy explanations of his guest: “I think we have understood that now, but we have questions.”
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Whereas in the past it was mostly an I who asked questions, today it is almost always a we who has questions, even if it is an I who asks them with the voice of we. The gesture of this plural sounding through the ego is both presumptuous and affirmative: before it questions anything, it first says yes to the whole, and then petty and cocky about the individual. It fully accepts the authority of its counterpart, no matter how flimsy it may be, only to stick its tongue out at it like an impertinent class nerd collective: We understood everything, but hey: We have questions!
The collective singular who has questions also likes to slip into the role of the sympathetic listener, who goes along with you a bit everywhere, is completely with you in almost everything, understands almost every point and finds everything totally exciting – only to then ask questions, many for that very reason Questions, to have a lot of questions.
Knowledge or Knowledge?
Asking questions aims for argument, for contradiction and shared knowledge; Having questions aims at conformist defiance. It is an expression of an aggressive interest, of a lurking sympathy that only wants to know everything in order to know everything better, that only listens in order to be able to protest and only protests in order to participate better.
That’s why people who always have questions keep lists with the heading “What we know – and what we don’t” on every current topic. Because questions that you only have are either still open or already ticked off, depending on what we know and what we don’t. Only questions that you ask instead of having them open up thoughts that go on and cannot be checked off, because they are not just aimed at knowledge, but at cognition.
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Therefore, whenever a We, appearing as individuals, still has questions on Anne Will’s talk show, in the senior seminar at the university, or at any podium discussion, one can be sure that no more will be asked. Those who continue to ask questions are well advised to do so in silence and pursue them alone without listening further to whoever has questions.
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