Does Democracy Demand the Tolerance of the

Intolerant? Karl Popper’s Paradox

March 29th, 2019

In the past few years, when far-right nationalists are banned from social media, violent extremists face boycotts,
or institutions refuse to give a platform to racists, a faux-outraged moan has gone up: “So much for the tolerant
left!” “So much for liberal tolerance!” The complaint became so hackneyed it turned into an already-
hackneyed meme. It’s a wonder anyone thinks this line has any rhetorical force. The equation of tolerance with
acquiescence, passivity, or a total lack of boundaries is a reductio ad absurdum that denudes the word of meaning.
One can only laugh at unserious characterizations that do such violence to reason.

The concept of toleration has a long and complicated history in moral and political philosophy precisely because
of the many problems that arise when the word is used without critical context. In some absurd, 21st century
usages, tolerance is even conflated with acceptance, approval, and love. But it has historically meant the
opposite—noninterference with something one dislikes or despises. Such noninterference must have limits. As
Goethe wrote in 1829, “tolerance should be a temporary attitude only; it must lead to recognition. To tolerate
means to insult.” Tolerance by nature exists in a state of social tension.

According to virtually every conception of liberal democracy, a free and open society requires tense debate and
verbal conflict. Society, the argument goes, is only strengthened by the oft-contentious interplay of differing, even
intolerant, points of view. So, when do such views approach the limits of toleration? One of the most well-known
paradoxes of tolerance was outlined by Austrian philosopher Karl Popper in his 1945 book The Open Society and
Its Enemies.

Popper was a non-religious Jew who witnessed the rise of Nazism in the 20s in his hometown of Vienna and fled
to England, then in 1937, to Christchurch, New Zealand, where he was appointed lecturer at Canterbury College
(now the University of Canterbury). There, he wrote The Open Society, where the famous passage appears in a
footnote:

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.

This last sentence has “been printed on thousands of bumper stickers and fridge magnets,” writes Will Harvie at
Stuff. The quote might become almost as ubiquitous as Voltaire’s line about “defending to the death” the right of
free speech (words actually penned by English writer Beatrice Evelyn Hall). Popper saw how fascism cynically
exploited liberal toleration to gain a foothold and incite persecution, violent attacks, and eventually genocide. As
he writes in his autobiography, he had seen how “competing parties of the Right were outbidding each other in
their hostility towards the Jews.”

Popper’s formulation has been been used across the political spectrum, and sometimes applied in arguments
against civil protections for some religious sects who hold intolerant views—a category that includes practitioners
of nearly every major faith. But this is misleading. The line for Popper is not the mere existence of exclusionary
or intolerant beliefs or philosophies, however reactionary or contemptible, but the open incitement to persecution
and violence against others, which should be treated as criminal, he argued, and suppressed, “if necessary,” he
continues in the footnote, “even by force” if public disapproval is not enough.

By this line of reasoning, vigorous resistance to those who call for and enact racial violence and ethnic cleansing
is a necessary defense of a tolerant society. Ignoring or allowing such acts to continue in the name of tolerance
leads to the nightmare events Popper escaped in Europe, or to the horrific mass killings at two mosques in
Christchurch this month that deliberately echoed Nazi atrocities. There are too many such echoes, from mass
murders at synagogues to concentration camps for kidnapped children, all surrounded by an echo chamber of
wildly unchecked incitement by state and non-state actors alike.

Popper recognized the inevitability and healthy necessity of social conflict, but he also affirmed the values of
cooperation and mutual recognition, without which a liberal democracy cannot survive. Since the publication
of The Open Society and its Enemies, his paradox of tolerance has weathered decades of criticism and revision.
As John Horgan wrote in an introduction to a 1992 interview with the thinker, two years before his death, “an old
joke about Popper” retitles the book “The Open Society by One of its Enemies.”

With less than good humor, critics have derided Popper’s liberalism as dogmatic and itself a fascist ideology that
inevitably tends to intolerance against minorities. Question about who gets to decide which views should be
suppressed and how are not easy to answer. Popper liked to say he welcomed the criticism, but he refused to
tolerate views that reject reason, fact, and argument in order to incite and perpetrate violence and persecution. It’s
difficult to imagine any democratic society surviving for long if it decides that, while maybe objectionable, such
tolerance is tolerable. The question, “these days,” writes Harvie, is “can a tolerant society survive the internet?”
Retrieved from: https://www.openculture.com/2019/03/does-democracy-demand-the-tolerance-of-the-intolerant-karl-poppers-paradox.html

The Paradox of Tolerance

Dec 1 5, 2020
Vincent Vanhoucke

Karl Popper is probably the most underappreciated philosopher of the modern era. His writings provide a lens
under which to examine many of the key social issues of today, from fake news, the anti-science movement, all the
way to the controversies around power, religion, race, and gender that are gripping our world.

His most famous work of course is about the philosophy of science. While I have no hope to do justice to the
breadth of his commentary on the topic, his key argument is both simple and exceedingly important:

You can only ever disprove a theory.

You can never call a theory ‘true,’ all you can do is relentlessly question it, test it, and observe whether or not its
predictions align with reality. If they don’t, your theory is wrong; if they do, you’ve merely increased the body of
evidence that the theory may be right.

It is a fundamental chink in the armor of any scientific discourse, which anyone who lacks the understanding of
how the scientific method works, or who has an agenda against it, can use to question any finding. Many of the
unscientific arguments you see proffered in the public sphere today take exactly that form: ‘prove it, or I’ll take
your lack of a proof as evidence that my alternative is right.’ Popper argues the very opposite, that the very strength
of a scientific theory is the degree of criticism it can be subjected to. Science may appear to deal in absolute truths,
but it really merely is just a giant pile of evidence that says ‘you’re probably not wrong.’

Popper’s perhaps lesser known, but equally consequential, body of work is about building the foundations of a
tolerant society. How do we foster a community that is inclusive of everyone and their perspectives? ‘Inclusive’
was not a commonly brandished word in Popper’s mid-20th century era, but when he speaks of tolerance, I find
his meaning is much more aligned to the notion of inclusivity as we understand it today than to the slightly
condescending modern meaning of ‘tolerant.’

And this is particularly where his views are underrepresented in the modern discourse about inclusion, respect of
everyone’s identity and beliefs, and freedom of expression. Popper argues that:

An open society needs to be intolerant of intolerance.

This Paradox of Tolerance, as it came to be known, argues that intolerant behaviors, irrespective of any judgement
of the values that underlie them, ought to be actively fought against in order to preserve an inclusive society. It is
important to emphasize this last point: intolerant behaviors ought not to be judged on the merits of their
underlying argument, or whether the party who is acting in an exclusionary manner has the moral high ground or
not. These behaviors have to be combatted on the premise of them being exclusionary.

S ocial media shields intolerance from our intolerance.

I would be curious whether Popper would view our 21st century vehicles of intolerant discourse in this light. It is
one of our chief new challenges to maintaining an inclusive society.

I take issue with the tone of the many conversations that I see unfolding in public today. Many of the points of
views most vocally expressed, from the most horribly prejudiced, all the way to the very ones advocating
inclusivity, are fundamentally driving an intolerant wedge into the public discourse.

My antidote has been to not engage, at the cost of not seeing my views represented in public, and of not being able
to advocate for those I want to support the most. It weighs on me, but I still believe this is the better path: one of
affecting the change I want to see in my community, but which doesn’t expose me to a public argument that would
force me into a shouting match that is exclusionary by its very nature. You can’t have a conversation when
everyone around the table is holding a megaphone.

May you and I ever be spared Having to pick a side.

— J-J Goldman
This recent article about Professor Loretta Ross and her plea for calling people in, instead of calling people out,
resonated with me in its advocacy of a better path to understanding and social change, through intimacy instead
of public shaming. It is surprising how many people I know and appreciate in person, whose public persona on
any form of broadcast medium I find plainly offensive. Some may argue that one’s true soul is bared when distilled
down to a few characters, but I choose to hold tight to the idea that a person’s true self is the one you meet in
person. So much of every person’s opinions is shaped by their life experience, and removing that context often
makes them incomprehensible and unrelatable.

The Paradox of Tolerance often pits me against those very people I want to support and help, because I have to
stand firm against public shaming and bullying, or lose that very inclusive society that I strive to foster.

And there is much one can do which would never fit on a social media post to enact change. In fact, I probably
have more latitude to act for the very reason that I am not out there expounding my views, biased as they are, on
social media. As I live and work in an environment that isn’t particularly predisposed to foster the best
communication skills, I have also learned to predominantly judge people by their actions.

Most of my personal heroes who are working tirelessly to improve our community are not out in the public eye —
they would most likely not have time to keep up with the deluge of it in the first place. It saddens me that so much
of their time today tends to be redirected to patching up the damage that purely stems from the toxicity of the
public discourse instead of working on the fundamentals of cultural and social betterment. I have to remind myself
every single day to remain biased toward action over words, and to keep my objectives grounded in concrete,
tangible, and, sadly, largely unspoken outcomes.

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