Onslaught of the intolerant
Acclaimed philosopher Sir Karl Popper considered how we should tolerate the intolerant while an academic in Christchurch during World War II. Will Harvie reports.
In July 1927, Karl Popper witnessed a massacre in his home city of Vienna, Austria. Police fired into crowds of Leftwing rioters, killing 89. Popper was Jewish, though not religious, and those deaths were one of many signals that life in Germanspeaking countries in the 1920s and 1930s was not for him and his eventual wife, Hennie.
They went to England and, in March 1937, to the New Zealand city of Christchurch, where Karl had been appointed a lecturer in philosophy at Canterbury College, now the University of Canterbury. While there, he wrote The Open
Society And Its Enemies, which became ‘‘one of the most famous and influential books of the 20th century’’, says Diane Proudfoot, a philosophy professor at Canterbury.
It is an ‘‘uncompromising defence of liberal democracy and a powerful attack on the intellectual origins of totalitarianism’’, according to the Princeton University Press.
In a footnote, Popper briefly addressed what he called the ‘‘paradox of tolerance’’. It resonates today because of the Christchurch terrorist attacks, the first of which occurred a little over a kilometre from the old college campus.
Popper was trying to find the limits of tolerance. When can a tolerant society be intolerant of the intolerant?
And what actions can a society take against the intolerant?
‘‘Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance,’’ Popper wrote. ‘‘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.’’
Having set up this alarming paradox, he then briefly retreated.
‘‘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.’’
In other words, the tools used in New Zealand in 2019 – rational argument, public opinion, democracy – are the wise first choices.
But then Popper returned to how the intolerant can actually behave. ‘‘. . . 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.’’
And then the famous one-liner: ‘‘We should, therefore, claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.’’
It’s been printed on thousands of bumper stickers and fridge magnets and means whatever the reader wishes. The Left, the Right, the godless and the godly, the exhausted and the unwavering have relied upon that sentence to support their cause.
Oddly, many discussions of Popper’s paradox end there. But in the footnote, he goes on: ‘‘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.’’
So it’s not just self-defence against violence – ‘‘fists or pistols’’ – it’s incitement. ‘‘Incitement to intolerance and persecution’’ should be criminalised.
Earlier in the footnote, he wrote: ‘‘We should claim the right to suppress them if necessary, even by force.’’
Popper had witnessed the rise of fascism in Austria and Germany.
He’d seen ‘‘frequent anti-Semitic riots at the university’’, he wrote in his autobiography.
‘‘The competing parties of the Right were outbidding each other in their hostility towards the Jews.’’
He’d seen incitement at work, then watched Hitler rise to power and wage world war.
Popper wrote that Open Society was ‘‘my war effort’’. He intended it to be a defence of freedom against totalitarian and authoritarian ideas, Proudfoot says.
There are, of course, criticisms. When does free speech become incitement? Who decides? How should suppression be calibrated?
And these days, can a tolerant society survive the internet?
Perhaps we need a new edition of Open Society with new ideas about counteracting online intolerance.
In a lecture to the Canterbury Workers’ Educational Association in 1942, Popper said: ‘‘I believe that a spirit of co-operation, not only of Christians and non-Christians, but of white and coloured, of Ma¯ ori and Pa¯ keha¯ , of scholar and layman, of old and young, is a prerequisite of any step we can make towards building a world which is a little better than ours at present.’’
But in Open Society, he also wrote: ‘‘There can be no human society without conflict: such a society would be a society not of friends but of ants.’’
‘‘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.’’
Karl Popper