Guest post: The paradox of tolerance
Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on Blaming the beheaded.
Remember a few years ago when the in meme was the paradox of tolerance?
The paradox of tolerance is that pure tolerance doesn’t produce a tolerant society because there comes a point at which tolerating the intolerant means that the intolerant dominate the more reasonable people.
The solution to the paradox is that tolerance isn’t an absolute virtue. There is a line beyond which you don’t tolerate any longer. That line, according to the original argument, was drawn at the use of violence for political ends. You don’t tolerate terrorism.
Unfortunately, this same argument was used to endorse violence against bigots.
The problem is that violence is habit forming, and the habit generally expands beyond the initial target. It is difficult to deny that there is a misogyny problem on the left right now, and a part of that I think is the Nazi puncher movement. It didn’t take long at all for the Karens and “Terfs” to become the new Nazis.
Learning from this, we can conclude that it is thus very important to be very hesitant at the use of violence, and yet, the base argument the paradox is founded on is sound.
We saw this in the days of unmoderated comment threads; this is why so few news vendors even allow comments anymore because they can descend into such utter toxicity so easily due to a small number of highly intolerant, basically shitty people, who crowd out the decent majority.
It is all about where you draw the line, where you decide that freedom of speech dies. Personally, I draw it at the endorsement of violence for the aforementioned reasons.
For example, Dana Nawzar Jaf:
I fully condemn French police’s brutal senseless murder of the Muslim suspect last night. Macron and his security apparatus should explain to the public what was the need for the use of the disproportionate force against someone suspected of a knife crime. France is in crisis.
Bullying Muslim children in the name of teaching them free speech has to stop. Showing caricatures to Muslims kids disrespecting Prophet Muhammed is child abuse. Macron’s ass will be on fire if a teacher promoted Holocaust denial in front of Jewish kids to ‘promote free speech’.
Is this in the realms of tolerable intolerance?
#NotallMuslims, but the ones who are pushing this shit matter. #Notallmen, does not excuse those men who abuse women, and does not solve the problem of those men who do. What I am talking about here isn’t all Muslims, it is the specific Muslims who push this line.
And this man is mainstream enough to have written for the New Statesman, at least according to the Daily Mail.
Of course he claims this article is full of lies, yet his tweets speak for themselves.
Caricatures of Mohammed do not constitute calls for violence, can the same really be said for Jaf’s tweets? I’m not sure. I don’t think equating showing children caricatures in a lesson about free speech to child abuse after the teacher who did that was beheaded, can be said to be anything less than an active endorsement of the beheading.
There is a deep hypocrisy within the Islamist mind, whereby we are supposed to tolerate those who endorse the killings of cartoonists, teachers, authors, artists, and people who happen to work near the former offices of any of the prior individuals, and yet not tolerate the drawing of pictures of a certain long dead Middle Eastern pedophilic warlord.
We are supposed to place respect for the feelings of people who are fundamentally not respectable (and again, that’s #NotallMuslims, but certainly is those who agree with Jaf), ahead of the value we place on human lives. Is this a tolerable state of affairs?
If we are going to talk about freedom of speech, and whose speech should be banned, I do not think it is the speech of the cartoonist, but rather the speech of groups like 5 Pillars, of individuals like Jaf. If we are to restrict freedoms, we should restrict the freedoms of those who have demonstrated that they cannot handle living in a free society.
Great argument, Bruce. One of the things that struck me was comparing the showing of cartoons of a long dead man who claimed to be a prophet to…killing six million people.
iknklast
What pissed me off about that, is, I don’t know what history education is like in Europe, right? I was educated in South Africa.
I remember my history lessons including outright Nazi propaganda. We had cartoons out of Die Sturmer, for example. This was valuable because it showed us the dangers of that propaganda, and how propaganda can lead to awful results.
So I don’t know for sure whether this is a difference in South African education to French education, but I suspect his claim is pure bullshit. I can’t say for sure it is, because I don’t know the French curriculum, but I have serious doubts.
Sowing a caricature of The Prophet (pbuh) is a criticism of a religious doctrine. Kids have to learn to think critically, just to save them from being conned and had by every shonky operator around. So they should be invited, Muslim kids included, to discuss why people might want to ban such criticism, commonly while themselves criticising and rejecting other religious doctrines.
To engage in Holocaust denial is to argue that certain historical accounts (the mainstream ones) are wrong. Again, it can be drawn to all kids’ attention (including Jewish children) that there are Holocaust deniers out there. There can be profitable discussion in classes as to why such deniers might be into this.
The historian David Irving, I understand, has a refined view: not denying that the extermination camps existed, but asserting that Hitler was kept in the dark about them. This raises interesting possibilities for discussion as to the likelihood of this, and of the nature of the Nazi bureaucracy, and of the likely fate of someone who gave Hitler a problem he did not want, no matter what bureaucratic level the problem-giver operated at.
Er, no it doesn’t. Irving falsified the evidence. See: Richard Evans’s Lying About Hitler. (He’s a real historian; David Irving isn’t.)
I was against the punching Nazi movement before it was cool. :-) Seriously, I never saw it as a good idea for several reasons including legitimizing and escalating violence (punch a Nazi, he now feels freer to punch an anti-Nazi); reducing the debate to a simplistic us vs them without the deeper meaning of why their ideology is a problem; and degrading those who do it – violence is a means of last resort and a response to violence perpetrated against you in self-defense. If you use it to win arguments, that implies that you can’t win the argument or don’t want to try.
I’m not saying ‘never punch a Nazi’. I’m saying if they’re not threatening you with imminent violence, one might find trying another method first to be more effective, if not to the Nazi, then to all those who are observing. Punching a Nazi might go viral, but silently, calmly standing in resistance can be just as powerful visually. See the incredible photo of the young black girl calmly and defiantly staring into the face of a white man screaming in her face. But it takes incredible bravery and an acceptance that your passive resistance may still be met with violence.
I’m reading a book at the moment where an alien word is used to describe the intentional infliction of mental pain on a person in order to allow them to experience personal growth. I interpret this as being akin to creating dissonance for the recipient such that they have to reexamine their beliefs and thought processes. A good approach to take with others that you disagree with. Direct logic/argument seldom actually works.
One does not have to be a professional historian to be a ‘real historian’, however defined; nor is there any intrinsic reason to accept the account of an amateur historian in preference to one from a professional on any particular given topic.
I would maintain that Irving, professional, amateur or somewhere in between, would have to be wrong with near 100% certainty, just for the reason I gave. If Irving on top of that ‘falsified the evidence’ as well, then that merely adds weight to my contention that he would most likely be wrong simply on the basis of the nature of the Nazi bureaucracy.