It has been said that “One man’s right to swing his fists ends where another man’s nose begins.” Does it then follow that “One man’s right to speak freely ends where another man’s ears begin”? Freedom, it turns out, is just another word for people to squabble over. How far do our freedoms extend, and who decides the boundaries?
Writing in 1945 and defending what he called ‘the open society,’ Karl Popper contrasted it with tribalism, primitivism, collectivism, superstition, and magic, all of which (he said) were characteristics of ‘closed’ societies. Popper wanted--in theory--maximal tolerance. The following excerpt (from his The Open Society and Its Enemies) illustrates his belief in Enlightenment values:
The strain of civilization is the strain of the demand that we should be rational, look after ourselves, and take immense responsibilities. It is the price we have to pay for being human.
We can never return to the alleged innocence and beauty of our tribal past. Our dream of heaven cannot be realized on earth. Once we begin to rely upon our reason, and to use our powers of criticism, once we feel the call of personal responsibilities, and with it, the responsibility of helping to advance knowledge, we cannot return to a state of implicit submission to tribal authority.
For those who have eaten from the tree of knowledge, paradise is lost. The more we try to return, the more surely do we arrive at the Inquisition, at the Secret Police, and at a romanticized gangsterism. Beginning with the suppression of reason and truth, we must end with the most brutal and violent destruction of all that is human. There is no return to a harmonious state of nature.
If we dream of a return to our childhood, if we are tempted to rely on others and so be happy, if we turn back from the task of carrying our cross, the cross of humaneness, of reason, of responsibility, if we lose courage and flinch from the strain, then we must try to fortify ourselves with a clear understanding of the simple decision before us. If we wish to remain human, then there is only one way, the way into the open society. We must go on into the unknown, courageously, using what reason we have, to plan for security and freedom.
But Popper also recognized, and highlighted, a critical paradox:
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 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.
Taking Popper's caveat to heart, America decided, in the 1950s, against extending tolerance to its ideological enemies. Our country banned the Communist Party and rooted out Communists from government, labor unions, and academia. 1 In the Sixties, however, the shoe of intolerance was on the other ideological foot, as the New Left harkened to anti-liberal Herbert Marcuse’s call for ‘repressive tolerance,’ by which he meant ‘selective intolerance,’ a notion which (although denounced by liberals) did not differ substantially from Popper's program.
This is from Marcuse's essay, "Repressive Tolerance":
Tolerance is being extended to policies, conditions, and modes of behavior which should not be tolerated because they are impeding, if not destroying, the chances of creating an existence without fear and misery. This sort of tolerance strengthens the tyranny of the majority against which authentic liberals protested.
Tolerance toward that which is radically evil now appears as good because it serves the cohesion of the whole on the road to affluence or more affluence. The toleration of the systematic moronization of children and adults alike by publicity and propaganda, the release of destructiveness in aggressive driving, the recruitment for and training of special forces, the impotent and benevolent tolerance toward outright deception in merchandizing, waste, and planned obsolescence are not distortions and aberrations, they are the essence of a system which fosters tolerance as a means for perpetuating the struggle for existence and suppressing the alternatives. The authorities in education, morals, and psychology are vociferous against the increase in juvenile delinquency; they are less vociferous against the proud presentation, in word and deed and pictures, of ever more powerful missiles, rockets, bombs--the mature delinquency of a whole civilization.
Tolerance cannot be indiscriminate and equal with respect to the contents of expression, neither in word nor in deed; it cannot protect false words and wrong deeds which demonstrate that they contradict and counteract the' possibilities of liberation. Such indiscriminate tolerance is justified in harmless debates, in conversation, in academic discussion; it is indispensable in the scientific enterprise, in private religion. But society cannot be indiscriminate where the pacification of existence, where freedom and happiness themselves are at stake: here, certain things cannot be said, certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain policies cannot be proposed, certain behavior cannot be permitted without making tolerance an instrument for the continuation of servitude.
Politics makes strange bedfellows. Who would have predicted the ideological marriage, or at least the cohabitation, of Sir Karl Popper and Herbert Marcuse? Did their union, legitimized or not, produce the monstrous twins, Political Correctness and Cancel Culture?
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Repressive Tolerance (full text) - Herbert Marcuse Official Website
1 "Congress passed the Communist Control Act of 1954 (CCA) as an amendment to the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950 “to outlaw the Communist Party, to prohibit members of Communist organizations from serving in certain representative capacities, and for other purposes.” Communist Control Act of 1954 (1954) - The Free Speech Center (mtsu.edu) Also see: McCarthyism - Wikipedia
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