Karl Popper and the Paradox of Tolerance makes the rounds every so often. It’s a concept that I believe masks a fundamental reality of cultural interaction. And that masking causes us to think more poorly about how to create stable societies.
You can find a ton of descriptions out there, but I’ve randomly grabbed this final part of the paradox as a good starting point:
We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.
The idea is simple enough. If you have intolerant people among tolerant people, those intolerant people might take political power or do something to harm all the tolerant people. Therefore, you can treat them as a criminal underclass to preserve your tolerant way of life.
For example, if you let too many leftists in your society, they will use their intolerance of parental rights and authority and take your children from you. So then you are perfectly justified as treating them as outside the law. Obviously. Or if they are intolerant of your disagreement with their self-perception, they’ll try to make it illegal to disagree and force it on you.
“No, no, no!” some might say. “That’s not what the paradox implies at all! The right is the intolerant one!”
But it does imply that, and obviously so. It’s not a paradox, it’s a bad phrasing of the issue.
It’s Called Being a Decent Human Being
“Tolerance” is a word that only makes sense in relationship to some standard of good. No one “tolerates” a delicious meal. You can only tolerate something you disagree with or think is wrong.
As this article says:
Thus, when a university administrator, politician, or activist speaks of tolerance, he is implying that there are certain actions he finds intolerable. He is also saying that these intolerable actions or beliefs should be proscribed.
The paradox of tolerance is, at its core, the “Friend/Enemy” distinction. It’s a statement of what you will allow in your society and wont, and a statement that you feel justified in treating the part you won’t allow worse than the part you will allow. It is an intellectualization of a simple truism of human nature, which is that diversity and proximity results in conflict. I am not happy that this is true, but all evidence points to its truth.
The paradox of tolerance is both a poor restatement of and a proof that diversity and proximity result in conflict. It is a call to such conflict should the need arise.
The reason the paradox gained ground, I think, is that it acts like an academic Radio Rwanda. You don’t have to sound like every other unenlightened society. “Grug no like Ug because Ug sit weird by fire” is low status. But if a philosopher has said that physical removal might be OK because your high and mighty principles of tolerance justify it, then it’s time to start grabbing your bow ties and machetes1. You’ll be a good person the whole time! Every slash is just brimming with the preservation of tolerance.
This goes back to my long-running gripe about political stability - which is that centralizing laws around these civilization-level conflicts is a really stupid idea. There are ways to run a multi-ethnic, multi-national government. The right way is not to shove everything to the top - to not force diversity into too close a proximity - to not force groups intolerant of each other to vie for power over the others.
We’re Not So Different, You and I
People who want to deport illegal immigrants or use force against violent protestors that are destroying private and innocent property are saying that they want the life and society they know, love, grew up in, and want to succeed to be preserved. To them, the presence of those issues are intolerant toward their way of life. To the point where action is justified.
Then there is another group of people who believe the exact same thing, just about the people in the first category.
They are both correct about the intolerance. It’s just civilizational conflict as the conceptions of the common good of society become diverse2. Somewhat ironically, the right wing was overly tolerant, and maybe should have thought about the paradox a bit harder. Now that they are aware that their tolerance might put their way of life at risk3, they are taking action that raises the alarms of the left. Now the “Intolerance!” finger pointing has begun in earnest.
To be clear, this is not something to be happy about. It is not a good situation, even though it is understandable. Once we understand it for what it is, maybe we can work to peaceful resolutions.
What to do about it
Now we should understand that the paradox of tolerance is both a poor restatement of and a proof that diversity and proximity result in conflict. It is a call to such conflict should the need arise. Is there a way out of this unstable trap? Maybe, we hope.
The focus on tolerance is the wrong way to go about regaining a stable society. Tolerance is a component for stability, as it lets you ride some waves of social movements and pressures, but it can’t be the primary focus. We must re-understand tolerance’s place in our politics and lives.
“Tolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons. Tolerance applies to the erring; intolerance to the error.”
A shared moral vision of about the goal of a society is the only way to know what is good. Once we know what’s good, we can figure out what is tolerable and what isn’t. We’ve currently lost that shared moral vision, so tolerance talk is useless until we regain it.
In the American context, the best solution is to get back to the states as the primary deciders of policy (not the feds). This allows the peaceful and free movement of people into cultures that they would prefer to live in and assist in preserving. Let California and Florida do their different things peacefully apart from each other.
There are hurdles to accomplishing this, but without a path to living peaceful side-by-side, the diverse cultural proximity power battle will only escalate.
Obviously this doesn’t happen right away, but it’s the first step.
It doesn’t have to be this way or as serious. It’s possible for the left and right to live together for most issues. The left doesn’t have to force the baker to bake a cake to have feelings for or share a house with whomever they want. They don’t have to force others to use certain words to feel whatever they feel about themselves. No one has to be forced to miss their grandma’s funeral because of a virus when the fearful laptop class can just sit inside on their own. No one needs to be arrested for standing silently across the street of an abortion clinic. And yet they do, because leftism is the unconstrained vision, and stopping the vision from progressing is generally considered violence.
There’s nothing much to list here for the right, because the right has mostly just rolled over and gone along with everything.
Mass immigration (legal or illegal) is bottom-up gerrymandering, but that’s a future post.