Should we tolerate the intolerant?

Could a free society destroy itself if it upholds the right to oppose freedom?

For years, woke activists have invoked the ‘paradox of tolerance’ proposed by the philosopher Karl Popper in his book The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945). Popper seems to be saying that if we tolerate the intolerant we ensure our own destruction, and the concept has often been cited as a defence of censorship or the suppression of political opponents. Many of us will have seen the cartoon meme gleefully posted by woke zealots, and this perhaps offers us the most succinct summary:

This week I had the pleasure of appearing on Winston Marshall’s podcast in which we discussed my new book The End of Woke (you can watch the full episode here and subscribe to his Substack here). During the course of our conversation, Winston raised the spectre of the paradox of tolerance, but in the context of how we might wrestle with the problem of unfettered immigration from societies that do not share our democratic values. This has given me much food for thought.

Given that the paradox is likely to be invoked more frequently now on both sides of the political spectrum, it is worth exploring a little further. Firstly, we should familiarise ourselves with the content of Popper’s paradox. This is what he writes:

‘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 most unwise. But we should claim the right even to suppress them, 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 anything as deceptive as rational argument, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists. 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, exactly as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping; or as we should consider incitement to the revival of the slave trade.’

It is noteworthy that although Popper’s formulation is often cited by woke activists, his insistence that we ought not to suppress intolerance so long as it can be restrained by the force of public opinion is often overlooked. The triumph of social liberalism in today’s society is evident in that open declarations of racism and other forms of intolerance are treated with near-universal disdain. Faced with this reality, woke activists have resorted to detecting intolerance where it may not exist, sometimes as a means to justify acts of violence as a form of self-defence. A survey of undergraduates in the United States in 2017 found that 30 per cent of respondents agreed with the statement: ‘If someone is using hate speech or making racially charged comments, physical violence can be justified to prevent this person from espousing their hateful views’.

Popper was writing in the context of a global conflict and the atrocities of the Third Reich. It is unlikely that he would ever have envisaged his words being used as a validation for authoritarian strictures against free speech. His definition of intolerance explicitly relates to those who are impervious to rational argument and who cannot be constrained by public opinion. The woke ought to take care when invoking Popper’s paradox, given that they are the ones who most clearly resemble the model of ‘intolerance’ that he describes.

But what about the scenario of mass immigration from countries where tolerance itself is mistrusted? If we fail to make cultural assimilation a condition of citizenship, and instead foster multicultural societies in which opposition to liberal values and free speech become the norm, are we not endangering society as a whole? Where would we be if Islamist fanatics were to seize power in parliament, or sharia courts were to become more widespread, or the population shifted to such a degree that the public votes for a party that promises to take away its freedoms? Is this not precisely what Popper envisaged when he claimed that ‘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’?

I do not claim to know how best to negotiate this problem. In a previous article, I explored the case of Sweden, whose lax approach to cultural assimilation has reached the point where it feels as though the liberal consensus that the country once enjoyed has been obliterated for good. I noted that in spite of once boasting a crime rate significantly lower than most of its European neighbours, Sweden is now known as the gun-crime capital of the continent. With the exception of Mexico, Sweden is the country with the highest incidence of grenade and bomb attacks in any nation not at war.

Yet I do not feel that the UK has reached this point of no return. We still have the opportunity to affirm and reinforce the liberal values upon which our civilisation depends, but it will require resolve and vigilance. Most significantly, we need to reassert the right to freedom of expression, even (and perhaps especially) when it comes to offending the religious convictions of our fellow citizens.

The example of Hamit Coskun, the man who was arrested after burning his own copy of the Koran outside the Turkish consulate in February, represents a case in point. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) had originally charged him with intent to cause ‘harassment, alarm or distress’ against ‘the religious institution of Islam’. In a free society, there can be no such proscriptions against those who decide to protest peacefully against a religious belief. The CPS has since amended its wording and claimed that Coskun is now being charged under Section 5 of the Public Order Act for behaving in such a way that is likely ‘to harass, intimidate or distress others’. This is a slight improvement, but it is still far from satisfactory.

In order to ensure that Popper’s paradox need not be invoked, we should be ensuring that nobody is ever arrested for peaceful protest in the first place. To prosecute a man for burning his own book - simply because the act offends another’s faith - is not only an example of tolerating the intolerant, but outright pandering to them. Immigration on the scale that the UK has experienced is only sustainable if we defend liberal values and refuse to make any exceptions. We might call this a robust form of liberalism, one that does not cultivate the conditions of its own demise.

So while a future in which a majority of the country reject the principle of freedom is plausible, it is not inevitable. In order to avoid that eventuality, we need to act now and complain loudly when those in power insist on two-tier justice. The paradox of living in a liberal system is that not everyone will share those liberal convictions. But tolerating the right to oppose liberalism does not mean that we should sow the seeds for its destruction.

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