I once saw someone argue (haven’t found the citation) that, in context, Popper used the word “tolerate” to mean something like “refrain from using violence to suppress”. If that is so, then the “intolerant” are those who advocate using violence to suppress their opponents. Whereas today’s common usage of “intolerant” probably includes anyone who expresses negative opinions about groups of people. It does seem to me that the definition of “tolerance” is pretty important, when interpreting the quote, and I feel much better about it when I think that “intolerant” implies “violent” [bold added]:
Less well known [than other paradoxes] 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 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.
I think the relevant limits on free speech in America are generally taken to be “making specific, credible threats of violence, or advocating imminent lawless action”. So, under the above interpretation, Popper is saying that, for those who advocate an ideology that says its followers should commit certain crimes, we should prefer to oppose them peacefully, but we would be justified in opposing them by force and should do so when necessary; this would amount to somewhat broadening the above encroachments on free speech (e.g. by saying “advocating lawless action, even if it’s not imminent, still counts if certain additional conditions apply”). I’m certainly sympathetic to his position, and might agree with it—it would be nice to see a proper statement of what the new speech limit should be.
On the notion of “paradox”, here’s a related thing: Libertarians often subscribe to the non-aggression principle, which is usually interpreted to mean that violence is aggressive and therefore bad, unless it is used to either punish a prior act of aggressive violence (usually with some notion of proportionality), or stop an ongoing or possibly an imminent act of aggressive violence. One could look at this and say “So you want to minimize violence, but you’re on board with committing violence; that’s paradoxical.” But I think most people usually don’t consider it paradoxical to draw distinctions between kidnapping an innocent and throwing a convicted criminal in jail, or between murder and killing in self-defense.
While these are relevant elaborations on the paradox of tolerance, I’d also be curious to hear your opinion on the proposal I’m making here—could tolerance be contagious, without any intentional action to make it so (violent or otherwise)? If so, could that make the existence of an absolutely tolerant society conceivable?
Tolerance (of whatever form) certainly can be contagious. All behaviors are at least a little contagious—I think we have a module in our brains that observes what other people do and at least considers what it would be like if we did it too. Tolerance as “go ahead and disagree with me and insult me, and I will defend to the death your right to do so” I find inspiring; tolerance as “absolute pacifism” I do not, but I can imagine respecting someone who truly stuck to it—e.g. refusing to fight back even to the point of their own death—and probably some others do find it inspiring. Martyrs in general can be inspiring and tend to make those who killed them look bad.
Also, tolerance in probably any form decreases the incentive for others to be intolerant: one of the major use cases for violence, insults, or other “behavior meant to hurt someone” is as revenge/punishment to disincentivize others from hurting you, and if others’ tolerance means they’re unlikely to hurt you in the first place, then there’s less need for aggressive behavior to be top-of-mind for you.
That said, some of the above arguments also imply that intolerance is contagious. Intolerant behavior is at least slightly contagious due to monkey-brain imitation, and creates an incentive for others to become violent (for self-defense if nothing else).
Is an absolutely tolerant society conceivable? Here I think it does depend crucially on what “tolerant” means.
One point I’d make is, a small percentage of the population is truly bad apples. Sociopaths, who don’t care about morality or others’ pain; sadists, who enjoy causing it. People who respond to “turning the other cheek” with “Great, I’ll hit that one too!”; people who would accept charity and then take the opportunity to steal more from their benefactors. Probably some of them suffer, and feel wronged (by someone or by society), and therefore feel entitled to grab what they want, or want to make others suffer as a kind of revenge. Others think “morality” is a stupid delusion, and anyone bound by it is weak and contemptuous, and that the weak are annoying and should be crushed; others may be animated by an ideology that says “these people are oppressors and deserve everything we might do to them”, and perhaps even “those people are enablers and deserve no better”. Also, when one adds various kinds of insanity into the mix… Well, I don’t claim to understand evil particularly well, and am not eager to understand it better.
The point is: (a) evil exists, (b) in many forms, (c) some percentage of which is completely incorrigible and will just do evil things. The question is then, is (c) going to destabilize your 100% tolerant society? If “tolerance” means letting criminals torch the city unchecked, I’d say yes. If “tolerance” means letting the Nazis and the communists hold their meetings and distribute their pamphlets, without the FBI doing anything until the activists get sufficiently specific in their plans for violent revolution… I’d say it might work, and might not work; that whether those movements would grow to the point that they’re a real threat depends a lot on the population, the culture, and so on. Karl Popper (in my interpretation) would say he hopes that would be fine, but that if they become a big enough threat we should send in the FBI preemptively and feel justified doing so.
So yes, I agree that intolerance can also be contagious—and it’s sort of a quantitative question of which one outweighs the other. I don’t personally believe in “evil” (as you sort of hint there, I believe that if we are sufficiently eager to understand, we can always find common humanity with anyone) - but all kinds of neurodivergences, such as biological lack of empathy, do exist, and while we need not stigmatize them, they may be socially disruptive (like torching a city). Again, the question of whether our absolutely tolerant society can be stable in face of psychopaths torching cities once in a while I think is a quantitative one.
But what I’m excited about here is that in the case that those quantities are sufficient (tolerance is sufficiently contagious, psychopaths are sufficiently rare, etc), then we could have an absolutely tolerant society—even in that pacifist way you don’t quite like. And that possibility in itself I find exciting. And that possibility is something that I think Popper did not see.
I once saw someone argue (haven’t found the citation) that, in context, Popper used the word “tolerate” to mean something like “refrain from using violence to suppress”. If that is so, then the “intolerant” are those who advocate using violence to suppress their opponents. Whereas today’s common usage of “intolerant” probably includes anyone who expresses negative opinions about groups of people. It does seem to me that the definition of “tolerance” is pretty important, when interpreting the quote, and I feel much better about it when I think that “intolerant” implies “violent” [bold added]:
I think the relevant limits on free speech in America are generally taken to be “making specific, credible threats of violence, or advocating imminent lawless action”. So, under the above interpretation, Popper is saying that, for those who advocate an ideology that says its followers should commit certain crimes, we should prefer to oppose them peacefully, but we would be justified in opposing them by force and should do so when necessary; this would amount to somewhat broadening the above encroachments on free speech (e.g. by saying “advocating lawless action, even if it’s not imminent, still counts if certain additional conditions apply”). I’m certainly sympathetic to his position, and might agree with it—it would be nice to see a proper statement of what the new speech limit should be.
On the notion of “paradox”, here’s a related thing: Libertarians often subscribe to the non-aggression principle, which is usually interpreted to mean that violence is aggressive and therefore bad, unless it is used to either punish a prior act of aggressive violence (usually with some notion of proportionality), or stop an ongoing or possibly an imminent act of aggressive violence. One could look at this and say “So you want to minimize violence, but you’re on board with committing violence; that’s paradoxical.” But I think most people usually don’t consider it paradoxical to draw distinctions between kidnapping an innocent and throwing a convicted criminal in jail, or between murder and killing in self-defense.
While these are relevant elaborations on the paradox of tolerance, I’d also be curious to hear your opinion on the proposal I’m making here—could tolerance be contagious, without any intentional action to make it so (violent or otherwise)? If so, could that make the existence of an absolutely tolerant society conceivable?
Tolerance (of whatever form) certainly can be contagious. All behaviors are at least a little contagious—I think we have a module in our brains that observes what other people do and at least considers what it would be like if we did it too. Tolerance as “go ahead and disagree with me and insult me, and I will defend to the death your right to do so” I find inspiring; tolerance as “absolute pacifism” I do not, but I can imagine respecting someone who truly stuck to it—e.g. refusing to fight back even to the point of their own death—and probably some others do find it inspiring. Martyrs in general can be inspiring and tend to make those who killed them look bad.
Also, tolerance in probably any form decreases the incentive for others to be intolerant: one of the major use cases for violence, insults, or other “behavior meant to hurt someone” is as revenge/punishment to disincentivize others from hurting you, and if others’ tolerance means they’re unlikely to hurt you in the first place, then there’s less need for aggressive behavior to be top-of-mind for you.
That said, some of the above arguments also imply that intolerance is contagious. Intolerant behavior is at least slightly contagious due to monkey-brain imitation, and creates an incentive for others to become violent (for self-defense if nothing else).
Is an absolutely tolerant society conceivable? Here I think it does depend crucially on what “tolerant” means.
One point I’d make is, a small percentage of the population is truly bad apples. Sociopaths, who don’t care about morality or others’ pain; sadists, who enjoy causing it. People who respond to “turning the other cheek” with “Great, I’ll hit that one too!”; people who would accept charity and then take the opportunity to steal more from their benefactors. Probably some of them suffer, and feel wronged (by someone or by society), and therefore feel entitled to grab what they want, or want to make others suffer as a kind of revenge. Others think “morality” is a stupid delusion, and anyone bound by it is weak and contemptuous, and that the weak are annoying and should be crushed; others may be animated by an ideology that says “these people are oppressors and deserve everything we might do to them”, and perhaps even “those people are enablers and deserve no better”. Also, when one adds various kinds of insanity into the mix… Well, I don’t claim to understand evil particularly well, and am not eager to understand it better.
The point is: (a) evil exists, (b) in many forms, (c) some percentage of which is completely incorrigible and will just do evil things. The question is then, is (c) going to destabilize your 100% tolerant society? If “tolerance” means letting criminals torch the city unchecked, I’d say yes. If “tolerance” means letting the Nazis and the communists hold their meetings and distribute their pamphlets, without the FBI doing anything until the activists get sufficiently specific in their plans for violent revolution… I’d say it might work, and might not work; that whether those movements would grow to the point that they’re a real threat depends a lot on the population, the culture, and so on. Karl Popper (in my interpretation) would say he hopes that would be fine, but that if they become a big enough threat we should send in the FBI preemptively and feel justified doing so.
So yes, I agree that intolerance can also be contagious—and it’s sort of a quantitative question of which one outweighs the other. I don’t personally believe in “evil” (as you sort of hint there, I believe that if we are sufficiently eager to understand, we can always find common humanity with anyone) - but all kinds of neurodivergences, such as biological lack of empathy, do exist, and while we need not stigmatize them, they may be socially disruptive (like torching a city). Again, the question of whether our absolutely tolerant society can be stable in face of psychopaths torching cities once in a while I think is a quantitative one.
But what I’m excited about here is that in the case that those quantities are sufficient (tolerance is sufficiently contagious, psychopaths are sufficiently rare, etc), then we could have an absolutely tolerant society—even in that pacifist way you don’t quite like. And that possibility in itself I find exciting. And that possibility is something that I think Popper did not see.