Couldn't we just talk about the weather instead?: July 2008

Politics and Science

The Paradox of Tolerance

In his Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper argued that the only thing that a tolerant, open society cannot tolerate is intolerance:

The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of absence of any constraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. The idea is, in a slightly different form, and with very different tendency, clearly expressed in Plato.
Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. 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.

He sounds like he thinks he's solved the problem just by rephrasing the sentence as reserving the right to be intolerant in certain situations.

I used to think that this was a crude but effective solution. Now I'm not even sure how effective it is. But then I found this extra explanation:

All these paradoxes can easily be avoided if we frame our political demands in... some such manner as this. We demand a government that rules according to the principles of equalitarianism [sic.] and protectionism; that tolerates all who are prepared to reciprocate, i.e. who are tolerant; that is controlled by, and is accountable to, the public.

So just maybe Popper is already talking about a sui generis system, something akin to a Kuhnian paradigm.

I expect he would deny such a similarity and that he would argue that, just as two sciences can be assessed according to their verisimilitude, falsifiability and lack of falsification (a claim thoroughly debunked by Lakatos), so societies can be compared by their degree of openness and the governments' accountability to the people. But I think the questions of incommensurability come through here too.

(Leaving aside all Rousseau/Thoreau problems regarding the lack of freedom to opt-in or -out of a society) the question remains, how to explain cross-cultural tolerance. Specifically, is there any way to say who is the originator of the intolerance? Who started it? What to do when neither side tolerates the other? Isn't that just maintaining the status quo (not that that's necessarily a bad thing)?

For example, "Islamic values are sometimes quite different from Western values". When you say this sort of thing in Australia or America, most tolerant people interpret it as xenophobia, pure and simple. (Most of the time it is, but not always.) In Australia when the Howard govt introduced the Australian values test for citizenship it was widely ridiculed, because, among other things, knowing who The Don was is not really a good indication of the values one holds dear. When you ask an Australian about these things the answers are quite vague, words like "mateship" and "a fair go" pop up but interpretations of these words differ widely.

On the other hand, France recently denied citizenship to a Muslim woman for not being sufficiently integrated into French society. You see, she wasn't just Muslim, she and her husband are Wahabi. They're proud of the fact that they don't think men and women are equal. She has shown a "comportment in society incompatible with the essential values of the French community". While that statement would seem a bit vague in Australia (where such values are not enshrined in law; or even in America with its bill of rights), apparently it's quite clear to the French. When I asked Cindy she replied immediately, "Égalité is commandment number two. Obviously that means equality between the sexes. If you don't believe in that, then you don't believe in the French Republic."

So if we frame this as an intolerance of women acting in certain ways, the Islamic value is a type of intolerance. Then we are able to recast the refusal to allow these practices as an intolerance of that particular intolerance (rather than an intolerance of religious practices in general). But of course the Muslim will insist that this is a mischaracterisation, that it really is intolerance of her religion and thus she may reserve the right not to tolerate that. Where do we end up? This is not much like Popper's example of someone wanting to commit murder (although it may seem rather similar to his other example of reïntroducing slavery!). If we see both these values as central to a society (both the Frenchman and the Wahabi Muslim will tell you that they are central) then isn't each of them right sui generis?

I'd much prefer to believe that societies are not incommensurable and that there are some underlying values that all can agree on but this sort of thing makes me wonder.