The Debate
What lessons can today’s world learn from an ancient Mongol debate?
I was watching a Fox News video the other day, about the Green New Deal.
Ostensibly, it was supposed to cover facts about the Green New Deal; however, before showing any video clips about climate-change mitigation, commentator Tucker Carlson butts in with a dig at his opponent: “Chris Hayes is what every man would be if feminists ever achieved absolute power in this country.”
He goes on to say the video he’s about to show was aired on the “very same news outlet that spent two years lying to you about Russia”, and mockingly calls Senator Occasio-Cortez ‘doctor Cortez,’ implying that someone with a background in bartending cannot understand the science of climate change.
It only got worse from there. But then again, that seems to be the state of debate these days: keep yelling and throwing insults at each other, and the one with the worst insults wins. Poison your opponent and their argument withers and dies.
Were debates always like this, or were things done differently in the past? Let’s look at an instructive example from eight-hundred years ago.
It sounds like the start of a bad joke: “A Christian, a Muslim, and a Buddhist walk into a Mongol debate…”
But this is exactly what happened during the rule of Ghengis Khan’s grandson, Mongke Khan, and it can teach us three very important lessons when it comes to debating emotionally charged topics.
The Franciscan monk William de Rubruck came to the Mongol court, as an envoy from the French King to spread the word of God. By all accounts it should’ve been straightforward — Mongol society, despite its reputation for savagery outside their empire, was actually more tolerant of religions than anywhere else in the world at the time, boasting a colourful quilt of faiths from Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, to Taoism, Hinduism, and various forms of shamanism. However, Rubruck ran into a few problems: namely, how to share his religious beliefs.
“He was unaccustomed to debating with people who did not share his basic assumptions of Catholic Christianity,” writes Jack Weatherford in his book, Ghengis Khan and the Making of the Modern World.
