Toleration – Page 2 – Maverick Philosopher

Why Defend Tolerance and not Intolerance?

. . . I'm reluctant to say that tolerance needs defending more than intolerance.

The Muslim world is intolerant of many things that should be tolerated, such as 'paganism' and atheism. But then, the Muslim world is also rightly intolerant of all the worst things about our culture. They don't tolerate blasphemy-for-the-sake-of-blasphemy. If halfwits with 'education' degrees want to teach their young children that it's great to be 'gay' or 'trans', and maybe they should try it out, Muslims will not stand for it. They don't tolerate rape and murder just because stopping it would have 'disparate impact' across races. Don't we want to defend their intolerance in these respects?

[. . .]

I basically agree with Jacques although the penultimate sentence of the above quotation needs to be toned down and qualified. But it is certainly true that "the Muslim world is also rightly intolerant of all the worst things about our culture." I have argued this myself:

Thursday, February 10, 2011

What Do We Have to Teach the Muslim World? Reflections Occasioned by the Death of Maria Schneider

I was one of those who saw "Last Tango in Paris" when it was first released, in 1972. I haven't seen it since and I don't remember anything specific about it except one scene, the scene you remember too, the 'butter scene,' in which the Marlon Brando character sodomizes the Maria Schneider character. Maria Schneider died last week at 58 and indications are that her exploitation by Brando and Bertolucci scarred her for life.

Islamic culture is in many ways benighted and backward, fanatical and anti-Enlightenment, but our trash culture is not much better. Suppose you are a Muslim and you look to the West. What do you see? Decadence. And an opportunity to bury the West.

If Muslims think that our decadent culture is what Western values are all about, and something we are trying to impose on them, then we are in trouble. They do and we are.

Militant Islam's deadly hatred of us should not be discounted as the ravings of lunatics or psychologized away as a reflex of envy at our fabulous success. For there is a kernel of insight in it that we do well to heed. Sayyid Qutb , theoretician of the Muslim Brotherhood, who visited the USA at the end of the '40s, writes in Milestones (1965):

     Humanity today is living in a large brothel! One has only to glance
     at its press, films, fashion shows, beauty contests, ballrooms,
     wine bars and broadcasting stations! Or observe its mad lust for
     naked flesh, provocative pictures, and sick, suggestive statements
     in literature, the arts, and mass media! And add to all this the
     system of usury which fuels man's voracity for money and engenders
     vile methods for its accumulation and investment, in addition to
     fraud, trickery, and blackmail dressed up in the garb of law.

A wild exaggeration in 1965, the above statement is much less of an exaggeration today. But setting aside the hyperbole, we are in several ways a sick and decadent society getting worse day by day. On this score, if on no other, we can learn something from our Islamist critics. The fact that a man wants to chop your head off does not mean that he has nothing to teach you. We often learn more from our enemies than from our friends. Our friends often will spare us hard truths.

Companion post: What Ever Happened to Linda Lovelace?

…………..

Jacques' challenge to me I take to be the following: Why do you defend tolerance and not intolerance when, as ought to be obvious to any sensible person, there are things that we ought to tolerate and things that we ought not tolerate? Equivalently, why is tolerance in general better than intolerance in general? An anonymous commenter adds support to Jacques' challenge:

All sides can say "it is important that the right kinds of things are tolerated and important that the wrong kinds of things are not tolerated". Isn't that the only sense in which you, or anyone, is a proponent of "tolerance"?

I don't think so. In order to determine what is tolerable and what is not we must inquire, we must examine, we must canvass various options. For this we need the help of others. We need to read their writings and hear their voices. We need access to a broad base of historical and other knowledge. We ought therefore to tolerate a wide variety of views in order to understand the issues and possibly arrive at the truth about them.

We don't know what all to tolerate and what all not to tolerate. Should we allow (tolerate) immigration from Muslim lands at the present time? That is a serious question. The answer is not obvious. If you claim to know the answer you are blustering. This is a legitimate topic of open inquiry. Among the conditions of the possibility of open inquiry is toleration of opposing points of view.

So, even to get clear about what toleration is and is not, to get clear about its limits, to get clear about how it gears into other values, to get clear about what our first-order moral commitments ought to be, we need a space in which there is the free exchange of ideas, a space that is possible only under the aegis of toleration, and not in the precincts of Islamic fundamentalism or Leftism.

Suppose you say to me, "Look, free exchange of ideas is just one more thing that we ought to tolerate; but that is not a reason to defend tolerance in general rather than intolerance." Well, I think it is. For how do you know that free exchange of ideas ought to be tolerated? That is something that needs to be investigated. Tolerance is the space within which alone these questions can be addressed and possibly resolved (though I am not sanguine about resolutions); as such, tolerance and its conditions are not just further things that ought to be tolerated.

The Danger of Appeasing the Intolerant

Should we tolerate the intolerant? Should we, in the words of Leszek Kolakowski,

. . . tolerate political or religious movements which are hostile to tolerance and seek to destroy all the mechanisms which protect it, totalitarian movements which aim to impose their own despotic regime? Such movements may not be dangerous as long as they are small; then they can be tolerated. But when they expand and increase in strength, they must be tolerated, for by then they are invincible, and in the end an entire society can fall victim to the worst sort of tyranny. Thus it is that unlimited tolerance turns against itself and destroys the conditions of its own existence. (Freedom, Fame, Lying, and Betrayal, p. 39.)

Read that final sentence again, and again. And apply it to current events.

Kolakowski concludes that "movements which aim to destroy freedom should not be tolerated or granted the protection of law . . . " (Ibid.) and surely he is right about this. Toleration has limits. It does not enjoin suicide. The U. S. Constitution is not a suicide pact.

And just as we ought not tolerate intolerance, especially the murderous intolerance of radical Muslims, we ought not try to appease the intolerant. Appeasement is never the way to genuine peace. The New York Time's call for Benedict XVI to apologize for quoting the remarks of a Byzantine emperor is a particularly abject example of appeasement.

One should not miss the double standard in play. The Pope is held to a very high standard: he must not employ any words, not even in oratio obliqua, that could be perceived as offensive by any Muslim who might be hanging around a theology conference in Germany, words uttered in a talk that is only tangentially about Islam, but Muslims can say anything they want about Jews and Christians no matter how vile. The tolerant must tiptoe around the rabidly intolerant lest they give offense.

Was there ever a New York Times editorial censuring Ahmadinejad for his repeated calls for the destruction of the sovereign state of Israel?

Related: What Explains the Left's Toleration of Militant Islam? The piece begins as follows:

From 1789 on, a defining characteristic of the Left has been hostility to religion, especially in its institutionalized forms. This goes together with a commitment to such Enlightenment values as individual liberty, belief in reason, and equality, including equality among the races and between the sexes. Thus the last thing one would expect from the Left is an alignment with militant Islam given the latter’s philosophically unsophisticated religiosity bordering on rank superstition, its totalitarian moralism, and its opposition to gender equality.

So why is the radical Left soft on militant Islam? The values of the progressive creed are antithetic to those of the Islamists, and it is quite clear that if the Islamists got everything they wanted, namely, the imposition of Islamic law on the entire world, our dear progressives would soon find themselves headless. I don’t imagine that they long to live under Sharia, where ‘getting stoned’ would have more than metaphorical meaning. So what explains this bizarre alignment?

1. One point of similarity between radical leftists and Islamists is that both are totalitarians. As David Horowitz writes in Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left (Regnery, 2004) , "Both movements are totalitarian in their desire to extend the revolutionary law into the sphere of private life, and both are exacting in the justice they administer and the loyalty they demand." (p. 124)

Read it all!

“I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Misattributed to Voltaire, the above saying yet captures his attitude. The parroting of the saying in the wake of the terrorist attack by Muslim fanatics on Charlie Hebdo is becoming tiresome. It is high time we take a squinty-eyed look at it. I will be arguing that it does not bear up well under examination.

Suppose you are talking with someone who publically asserts with a straight face, "No Jews were killed at Auschwitz by the Nazis." Will you defend your interlocutor's right to say it? And will you defend it to the death? I hope not. The right to free speech cannot reasonably be taken to include the right to state what is false, known to be false, and such that its broadcasting or public expression could be expected to cause social harm. (The characteristic claim of the Flat Earthers is false and known to be false, but not such that its broadcasting or public expression could be expected to cause social harm, and this for a couple of reasons: whether or not the earth is flat is not a 'hot button' issue; the vast majority consider Flat Earthers to be utter loons.)

Generalizing, will you defend to the death anyone's right to say, seriously and publically, whatever he wants to say? If you answer in the affirmative, then I will label you a free speech extremist, that is, one who holds that the right to free (public) speech is absolute. But what is it for a right to be absolute? And could the right to free speech be an absolute right?

There is a distinction between moral and legal rights. I will consider only whether there is an absolute moral right to free speech. Some rights are exercisable, other are not. The right to free speech is exercisable whereas the rights not to be killed and not to be spied upon are non-exercisable. Some rights are general, others are specific. The right to free speech is general: if any person has it, then every person has it.

To say that an exercisable right is absolute is to say that its exercise is not subject to any restriction or limitation or exception. This implies that an absolute right cannot be infringed under any circumstances. And if an absolute right is general, then it cannot be restricted to some persons only. So if the right to free speech is absolute, then everyone always in every circumstance has a right to free speech.

I believe I have clarified sufficiently — for the purposes of a weblog entry — the sense of ' The right of free speech is absolute.'

My thesis is that the right of free speech is not absolute. It is no more absolute than the other rights mentioned in (but not thereby granted to us in or by) the First and Second and other Amendments to the U. S. Constitution.

Consider gun rights. Is the right to keep and bear arms reasonably regarded as absolute, i.e., subject to no limitations or restrictions? No. I would put you down as a fool if you said otherwise. Felons are not allowed to own guns, and for good reason. Ditto for children and the mentally incomeptent. The right to keep and bear arms does not extend to nuclear arms or biological weapons. The firing of guns is subject to various restrictions, etc. In this case it should be perfectly obvious that the right to keep and bear arms cannot be an absolute right.

Is the right to own real property absolute? If it were, no use of eminent domain would ever be justified, when surely some uses are. Eminent domain laws are sometimes abused to benefit special interest. We cnservatives protest that absue. But the abuse of eminent domain is no argument against its judicious and limited use for purposes that truly serve the common good. Suppose there is a dangerous mountain road on which hundreds of people have lost their lives. The state engineers propose a bypass, but building it would involve the coercive taking, albeit with monetary compensation, of a little land from a fat cat who owns a parcel the size of Rhode Island, the coercive taking of a strip of land occupied only by a few prarie dogs. A rational and morally decent person would say that here the right to property must be limited for the common good. (And let's assume that the good really is common: the owner of the land himself must travel the dangerous mountain road.)

Third example. Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion. That is a near-quotation from the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution. But what if the free exercise of some religion includes not having one's children immunized for measles or other highly infectious diseases? Would a reasonable person maintain that under no conceivable circmustances would the government ever be justified in forcing a parent to have a child immunized in contravention of a religious precept? I don't think so. There are some truly loony 'religions' out there.

I could go on, and you hope I won't. In the three cases just mentioned it ought to be clear that the rights in question cannot be absolute. Now is there something about the right to free speech that makes it different from the ones mentioned above in a way that justifies saying that free speech is an absolute right when the others are not? Not that I can see.

I have heard it said that speech is just speech; it not like discharging a firearm in a residential area or seizing a man's property or forcing parents to immunize a child. But this is a lame response because speech is not 'just speech.' Not only does public speaking and publishing involve all sorts of actions, it can and does reliably lead to actions both good and evil. People are susceptible of exhortation. One can fire up a lynch mob with well-chosen words. I don't need to belabor this: it is obvious. Speech is not 'just speech.'

The right to free speech meets a limit in the moral obligation to not inflame murderous passions. There is no absolute moral right to free speech. Whether certain forms of speech should be legally prohibited is of course a further question.

Toleration Extremism: Notes on John Stuart Mill

In the wake of the murderous rampage by Muslim terrorists at Charlie Hebdo in Paris on 7 January, many have embraced a form of extremism according to which any and all (public) expression must be tolerated. This entry questions this extremism as we find it in John Stuart Mill.

Here are two passages from Chapter Two of John Stuart Mill's magnificent On Liberty (emphases added):

But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. [. . .] We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.

[. . .]

Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion, but object to their being "pushed to an extreme;" not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case. Strange that they should imagine that they are not assuming infallibility when they acknowledge that there should be free discussion on all subjects which can possibly be doubtful, but think that some particular principle or doctrine should be forbidden to be questioned because it is so certain, that is, because they are certain that it is certain. To call any proposition certain, while there is any one who would deny its certainty if permitted, but who is not permitted, is to assume that we ourselves, and those who agree with us, are the judges of certainty, and judges without hearing the other side.

Evaluation of the First Passage

As sympathetic as I am to Mill, I am puzzled (and you ought to be too) by the last sentence of the first quoted passage. It consists of two claims. The first is that " We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion . . . ." This is plainly false! The opinion of some Holocaust deniers that no Jews were gassed at Auschwitz is an opinion we can be sure is false. We are as sure of this as we are sure of any empirical fact about the past. Or suppose some fool denies that JFK died by assasination or maintains that McCain won the last presidential election. Those are fools' opinions we know to be wrong. There is no lack of examples. What was Mill thinking? "We can never be sure," he writes. A modal auxiliary married to a negative universal quantifier! To refute a 'can never' statement all you need is one merely possible counterexample. I have given three actual counterexamples. Pace Mill, we can be sure in some cases that certain opinions are wrong.

Mill's second claim is that even if we are sure that an opinion we are trying to stifle is false, stifling it would nevertheless be an evil. Mill is here maintaining something so embarrassingly extreme that it borders on the preposterous. Consider again an actual or possible Holocaust denier who makes some outrageously false assertion that we know (if we know anything about the past) to be false. Suppose this individual has the means to spread his lies far and wide and suppose that his doing so is likely to incite a horde of radical Islamists to engage in an Islamist equivalent of Kristallnacht. Would it be evil to 'stifle' the individual in question? By no means. Indeed it could be reasonably argued that it is morally imperative that such an individual not be permitted to broadcast his lies.

How could anyone fail to see this? Perhaps because he harbors the notion that free expression is unconditionally worthwhile, worthwhile regardless of the content of what is being expressed, whether true or false, meaningful or meaningless, harmful or innocuous, and regardless of the context in which the opinions are expressed. Now I grant that freedom of expression, of discussion, of inquiry and the like are very high values. That goes without saying. I have utter contempt for Islamists and other totalitarians. I'm an Enlightenment man after all, a student of Kant, an American, and a philosopher. Argument and dialectic are the lifeblood of philosophy. Philosophy is free and open inquiry. But why do we value the freedom to speak, discuss, publish, and inquire? That is a question that must be asked and answered.

I say that we value them and ought to value them mainly because we value truth and because the freedom to speak, publish, discuss, and inquire are means conducive to the acquisition of truth and the rooting out of falsehood. We ought to accord them a high value, a value that trumps other values, only on condition that they, on balance, lead us to truth and away from falsehood. We value them, and ought to value them, mainly as means, not as ends in themselves. This is consistent with holding that some public expression that is not truth-conducive has a value in itself.

So the Holocaust denier, who abuses the right to free speech to spread what we all know (if we know anything about the past) to be falsehoods, has no claim on our toleration. For again, there is no unconditional or abolute right to free expression. That right is limited by competing values, the value of truth being one of them. The value of social order is another.

Two arguments, then.

The first is that free expression while it may have some value in itself has a high value only as a means to an end, where the end is the acquisition and dissemination of truth. The second is that the value of socila order far outweighs the extremely limited value of someone's spouting falsehoods about, say, the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis. Those we abuse the right to free speech by spreading pernicious falsehoods have no claim on our toleration.

As I see it, then, Mill makes two mistakes in his first passage. He fails to see that some opinions are known to be false. Now there may not be many such opinions, but all I need is one to refute him since he makes a universal claim. I will of course agree with Mill that many of the doctrines that people denounce as false, and will not examine, are not known to be false. The second mistake is to think that even if we know an opinion to be false we have no right to suppress its propagation.

Now of course I am not claiming that all, or even most, known falsehoods are such that their propagation ought to be suppressed. Let the Flat Earth Society propagate its falsehoods to its heart's content. For few take them seriously, and their falsehoods, though known to be falsehoods, are not sufficiently pernicious to warrant suppression. Obviously, government censorship or suppression of the expression of opinions must be employed only in very serious cases. This is because government, though it is practically necessary and does do some good, does much evil and has a tremendous capacity for unspeakable evils. It was communist governments that murdered 100 million in the 20th century. And when the Nazis stripped Jews of their property and sent them to the Vernichtungslager, it was legal. (Think about that and about whether you want to persist in conflating the legal and the moral.)

Mill's mistake, as it seems to me, is that he allows NO cases where such suppression would be justified. And that is a position whose extremism condemns it. Toleration extremism, to give it a name.

Evaluation of the Second Passage

Mill only digs his hole deeper in the second passage. "Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion, but object to their being "pushed to an extreme;" not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case." Surely the bolded principle is a bizarre one. Consider respect for human life. Respecting human life, we uphold a general prohibition against homicide. But it is not plausibly maintained there are no exceptions to this 'general' prohibition where the term does not mean 'exceptionless' but 'holding in most cases.' There are at least five putative classes of exceptions: killing in self-defence, killing in just war, capital punishment, abortion, and suicide. Now suppose someone were to apply Mill's principle (the one I bolded) and argues as follows: "Unless the reasons against killing humans are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case." Would you not put such a person down as a doctrinaire fool? He holds that if it is wrong to kill human beings 'in general,' then it is wrong to kill any human being in any circumstance whatsoever. It would then follow that it is wrong to kill a home invader who has just murdered your wife and is about to do the same to you and your children. The mistake here is to take an otherwise excellent principle or precept (Do not kill human beings) and remove all restrictions on its application.

There are plenty of counterexamples to Mill's bizarre principle that "unless reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case."

We conservatives are lovers of liberty and we share common ground with our libertarian brethren, but here we must part company with them.

Joan Rivers: A Conservative Response

I was one of those who saw "Last Tango in Paris" when it was first released, in 1972. I haven't seen it since and I don't remember anything specific about it except one scene, the scene you remember too, the 'butter scene,' in which the Marlon Brando character sodomizes the Maria Schneider character. In a post from February, 2011 written on the occasion of her death, I had this to say:

Islamic culture is in many ways benighted and backward, fanatical and anti-Enlightenment, but our trash culture is not much better. Suppose you are a Muslim and you look to the West. What do you see? Decadence. And an opportunity to bury the West.

If Muslims think that our decadent culture is what Western values are all about, and something we are trying to impose on them, then we are in trouble. They do and we are.

This brings me to the Jewish comedienne Joan Rivers who died recently at the the age of 81. No conservative can celebrate her life and influence without qualification. For she played a role in making our culture cruder and trashier. By how much? I'll leave that for you to ponder. And of course the comediennes among her admirers will take it, and have taken it, further still, and without the curbs on excess deriving from her education and upbringing.

That being said, conservatives of my stripe defend her right to free speech as against both the Islamists and their leftist enablers who have shown time and again that they have no interest in free speech except insofar as it politically correct free speech.

One of the ironies of the present day is that we conservatives are the 'new liberals,' 'liberal' being used in the good, old-fashioned sense to mean a person who champions toleration.

But of course you must never forget that toleration has limits. Ought one tolerate those who do not respect the principle of toleration? Of course not. If toleration is truly a value, then one ought to demand it not only of oneself but of others. My toleration meets its limit in your intolerance. I cannot tolerate your intolerance, for if I do, I jeopardize the very principle of toleration, and with it the search for truth.

Radical Islam, in its fanaticism and murderous intolerance, has no claim on the West's tolerance. It is no breach of tolerance on our part to demand that they behave themselves. We must also demand of them that if they want to be tolerated, they must tolerate others, Jews for example. They must not be allowed to benefit from the West's tolerance in order to preach intolerance and hate. Just as they have a right to their beliefs, we have a right to ours, and a right to enforce our beliefs about toleration on them if they would live in our midst.

Toleration is a value because truth is a value. A toleration worth wanting and having is therefore not to be confused with indifference towards truth, or relativism about truth. The great Leszek Kolakowski makes this point very well:

It is important to notice, however, that when tolerance is enjoined upon us nowadays, it is often in the sense of indifference: we are asked, in effect, to refrain from expressing — or indeed holding — any opinion, and sometimes even to condone every conceivable type of behaviour or opinion in others. This kind of tolerance is something entirely different, and demanding it is part of our hedonistic culture, in which nothing really matters to us; it is a philosophy of life without responsibility and without beliefs. It is encouraged by a variety of philosophies in fashion today, which teach us there is no such thing as truth in the traditional sense, and therefore that when we persist in our beliefs, even if we do so without aggression, we are ipso facto sinning against tolerance.

This is nonsense, and harmful nonsense. Contempt for truth harms our civilization no less than fanatical insistence on [what one takes to be] the truth. In addition, an indifferent majority clears the way for fanatics, of whom there will always be plenty around. Our civilization encourages the belief that everything should be just fun and games — as indeed it is in the infantile philosophies of the so-called 'New Age.' Their content is impossible to describe, for they mean anything one wants them to; that is what they are for. ("On Toleration" in Freedom, Fame, Lying, and Betrayal, Penguin 1999, pp. 36-37.)

The New Illiberalism

I have often pointed out that there is nothing liberal about contemporary 'liberals.' Kim R. Holmes' Intolerance as Illiberalism is well worth your time. Excerpt:

Hard illiberalism, however, is not the only variant. There are “soft” versions too. They often appear “liberal” and even operate inside democratic systems otherwise committed to the rule of law. But their core idea is that liberal democracy and the constitutional rule of law are insufficient to bring about absolute equality.

It is this form of illiberalism that is gaining traction in America today. It comes in many guises and varying degrees of intensity. It is a campus official countenancing “trigger warnings” and speech codes that censor free speech and suppress debate. It is a radio host shouting that he hopes employees of the National Security Agency get cancer and die. It is politicians and government officials who bend the rules, launch investigations, overturn laws, criminalize so-called “hate” speech, and stretch the meaning of the Constitution to impose their views on Americans. It is the mindset of “us versus them” that leads government officials such as New York’s governor to say that there is “no place in the state of New York” for “extreme conservatives”— by which he meant not fringe or violent groups but anyone who opposes abortion or the redefinition of marriage. And it is the idea that constitutional limits, individual rights, and even due process can be ignored in the “greater” cause of creating income equality.

These people have become not merely intolerant but fundamentally illiberal.

Illiberalism is not just about government denying people the right of free expression and equality before the law. It is also about controlling how people think and behave. It is a threat both to our democratic system of government and to the “liberal” political culture.

Am I a Raving Liberal? The Problem of Ideological Extremism

I happened across a post from a couple of years ago on a defunct blog named Throne and Altar. For some reason the post's title drew me in: Another Casualty: Maverick Philosopher Embraces Tolerance. The author, one "bonaldo," claims that Islam has turned me into "a raving liberal." The entry of mine that drew his ire was a defense of the Pope entitled Pope Benedict's Regensburg Speech and Muslim Oversensitivity. The post so offended bonaldo the extremist that he removed me (or rather a hyperlink to my weblog) from his blogroll. What got his goat were the final two paragraphs of my entry:

That is why both leftists and Islamists must be vigorously and relentlessly opposed if we care about our classically liberal values.

The trouble with the Islamic world is that nothing occurred in it comparable to our Enlightenment. In the West, Christianity was chastened and its tendency towards fanaticism put in check by the philosophers. Athens disciplined Jerusalem. (And of course this began long before the Enlightenment.) Nothing similar happened in the Islamic world. They have no Athens. (Yes, I know all about al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, et al. — that doesn’t alter the main point.) Their world is rife with unreasoning fanatics bent on destroying ‘infidels’ — whether they be Christians, Jews, Buddhists, or other Muslims. We had better wake up to this threat, or one day soon we will wake up to a nuclear ‘event’ in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles which kills not 3,000 but 300,000.

Now one would think that such a ringing statement would be greeted by two cheers of approbation, if not three, from anyone on the Right. To a fanatical right-winger, however, anyone who sees a scintilla of value in anything the least bit classically liberal is an enemy to be banished to the blogospheric equivalent of Siberia. For these ultra-reactionary extremists one cannot be Right enough. And so bonaldo the fanatic says the following:

After affirming his commitment to liberalism, MP asserts that Christianity is a false religion. Truth doesn’t need to be “chastened” or “checked”. Since truth never contradicts itself, the only thing that can check truth would be falsehood.

I have never asserted anywhere on this blog that Christianity is a false religion. The benighted bonaldo, however, takes this to be an implication of what I do say because he fancies himself to be in possession of the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. So fancying himself, he is blind to the importance of toleration, the touchstone of classical liberalism, and blind to the murderous intolerance that religions can breed. He quotes from a second post of mine, How Far Does Religious Toleration Extend?:

To the extent that Islam takes on jihadist contours, to the extent that Islam entails its imposition on humanity, it cannot and ought not be tolerated by the West. Indeed, no religion that attempts to suppress other religions can or ought to be tolerated, including Christianity. We in the West do, or at least should, believe that competition among religions in a free marketplace of ideas is a good thing.

Bonaldo sees something "ironic" in my position: "What about the belief system that suppresses all belief systems that would suppress other belief systems?" He ignores the fact that I have repeatedly said that toleration has limits. I am not advocating universal toleration. That would be incoherent. If one were universally tolerant, one would have to tolerate those who reject the principle of toleration. Said principle, however, is not a suicide pact. A toleration that tolerated every belief system would undermine itself. What I am saying, from the point view of my conservatism, is that:

No religion that attempts to suppress (by killing, imprisoning, or in any way harming) adherents of other religions ought to be tolerated. Toleration has limits. No religion or nonreligious ideology may be tolerated if it doesn't respect the principle of toleration. And so we ought not tolerate a religion whose aim is to suppress and supplant other religions and force their adherents to either convert or accept dhimmi status. Proselytization is tolerable but only if it is non-coercive. The minute it becomes the least bit coercive we have every right to push back vigorously.

Bonaldo speaks of "irony," but I think what he means is that my position is internally inconsistent. But it would be inconsistent only if I were advocating universal toleration – which I am not. It would be inconsistent to maintain both that one ought to tolerate every belief system and suppress the belief system that suppresses other belief systems. But there is no logical inconsistency in maintaining what I do maintain. It is true: I want to suppress radical Muslims when their murderous beliefs spill over into murderous actions. And I extend that to radical religionists of any stripe who act upon murderous beliefs.

But why must we be tolerant? I explain this in On Toleration: With a Little Help From Kolakowski. I also explain there why toleration must not be confused with indifference to truth or relativism about truth. There are too many knuckleheads on the fanatical Right who cannot distinguish between fallibilism and relativism, a distinction explained in: To oppose relativism is not to embrace dogmatism.

I'll be having more to say about ideological extremism later. Lawrence Auster is another prime offender. For just a small taste of his fanatical hostility to conservatives that don't toe his exact party line, see The Trouble with Larry.

On Toleration: With a Little Help from Kolakowski

1. Toleration is the touchstone of classical liberalism, and there is no denying its value. Our doxastic predicament requires it of us. We have beliefs galore but precious little knowledge, especially as regards the large and enduring questions. Lacking knowledge, we must inquire. For that we need freedom of inquiry, and a social and political environment in which inquiry is, if not encouraged, at least allowed. But people who are convinced that they have the truth would stop us. "Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies." (Human All-Too-Human #483) This is typical Nietzschean exaggeration, but there is a sound point at its core: People who are convinced that they have the truth will not inquire whether it really is the truth. Worse, they will tend to impose their 'truth' on us and prevent our inquiry into truth. Many of them will not hesitate to suppress and murder their opponents.

My first point, then, is that toleration is a good because truth is a good. We must tolerate a diversity of views, and the people who maintain them, because we lack the truth and must find it, and to do so we must search. But we cannot search if we are under threat from fanatics and the intolerant. Freedom of inquiry and freedom of expression are important because truth is important.

This implies that we must tolerate many views and actions and people who are deeply offensive to us. The 'artist' Serrano of "Piss-Christ" notoriety is a good example. He has a right to express himself as he does, just as we have a right to protest against him. He has no right to taxpayer money, however, and any liberal who thinks that a refusal of government sponsorship amounts to censorship is an idiot pure and simple.

2. But how far does toleration extend? Ought one tolerate those who do not respect the principle of toleration? To me it is self-evident that one ought not. If toleration is truly a value, then one ought to demand it not only of oneself but of others. My toleration meets its limit in your intolerance. I cannot tolerate your intolerance, for if I do, I jeopardize the very principle of toleration, and with it the search for truth.

Radical Islam, in its fanaticism and murderous intolerance, has no claim on the West's tolerance. It is no breach of tolerance on our part to demand that they behave themselves. We must also demand of them that if they want to be tolerated, they must tolerate others, Jews for example. They must not be allowed to benefit from the West's tolerance in order to preach intolerance and hate. Just as they have right to their beliefs, we have a right to ours, and a right to enforce our beliefs about toleration on them if they would live in our midst.

3. Toleration is a value because truth is a value. A toleration worth wanting and having is therefore not to be confused with indifference towards truth, or relativism about truth. Leszek Kolakowski makes this point very well:

It is important to notice, however, that when tolerance is enjoined upon us nowadays, it is often in the sense of indifference: we are asked, in effect, to refrain from expressing — or indeed holding — any opinion, and sometimes even to condone every conceivable type of behaviour or opinion in others. This kind of tolerance is something entirely different, and demanding it is part of our hedonistic culture, in which nothing really matters to us; it is a philosophy of life without responsibility and without beliefs. It is encouraged by a variety of philosophies in fashion today, which teach us there is no such thing as truth in the traditional sense, and therefore that when we persist in our beliefs, even if we do so without aggression, we are ipso facto sinning against tolerance.

This is nonsense, and harmful nonsense. Contempt for truth harms our civilization no less than fanatical insistence on [what one takes to be] the truth. In addition, an indifferent majority clears the way for fanatics, of whom there will always be plenty around. Our civilization encourages the belief that everything should be just fun and games — as indeed it is in the infantile philosophies of the so-called 'New Age.' Their content is impossible to describe, for they mean anything one wants them to; that is what they are for. ("On Toleration" in Freedom, Fame, Lying, and Betrayal, Penguin 1999, pp. 36-37.)

4. To sum up. A toleration worth wanting and having is valuable because truth is valuable. It is threatened in two ways. It is threatened both by those who think that have the truth when they don't and those who are indifferent to truth. What is interesting is that the postmodernist nincompoops who deny truth in the name of toleration are powerless to oppose the fanatics who will impose their 'truth' by force. If all is relative, then the fanatics have all the justification they need to impose their 'truth' on us: it is true for them that they possess the absolute 'truth.'

A Dog Named ‘Muhammad’

There is a sleazy singer who calls herself 'Madonna.' That moniker is offensive to many. But we in the West are tolerant, perhaps excessively so, and we tolerate the singer, her name, and her antics. Muslims need to understand the premium we place on toleration if they want to live among us.

A San Juan Capistrano councilman named his dog 'Muhammad' and mentioned the fact in public. Certain Muslim groups took offense and demanded an apology. The councilman should stand firm. One owes no apology to the hypersensitive and inappropriately sensitive. We must exercise our free speech rights if we want to keep them. Use 'em or lose 'em.

The notion that dogs are 'unclean' is a silly one. So if some Muslims are offended by some guy's naming his dog 'Muhammad,' their being offended is not something we should validate. Their being offended is their problem.

Am I saying that we should act in ways that we know are offensive to others? Of course not. We should be kind to our fellow mortals whenever possible. But sometimes principles are at stake and they must be defended. Truth and principle trump feelings. Free speech is one such principle. I exercised it when I wrote that the notion that dogs are 'unclean' is a silly one.

Some will be offended by that. I say their being offended is their problem. What I said is true. They are free to explain why dogs are 'unclean' and I wish them the best of luck. But equally, I am free to label them fools.

With some people being conciliatory is a mistake. They interpret your conciliation and willingness to compromise as weakness. These people need to be opposed vigorously. For the councilman to apologize would be foolish.

Toleration Extremism: Notes on John Stuart Mill

Here are two passages from Chapter Two of John Stuart Mill's magnificent On Liberty (emphases added):

But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. [. . .] We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.

[. . .]

Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion, but object to their being "pushed to an extreme;" not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case. Strange that they should imagine that they are not assuming infallibility when they acknowledge that there should be free discussion on all subjects which can possibly be doubtful, but think that some particular principle or doctrine should be forbidden to be questioned because it is so certain, that is, because they are certain that it is certain. To call any proposition certain, while there is any one who would deny its certainty if permitted, but who is not permitted, is to assume that we ourselves, and those who agree with us, are the judges of certainty, and judges without hearing the other side.

Evaluation of the First Passage

I say that we value them because we value truth and because the freedom to speak, publish, discuss, and inquire are means conducive to the acquisition of truth and the rooting out of falsehood. It follows that we do not value them, or rather ought not value them, for their own sakes or unconditionally. We ought to accord them a high value only on condition that they, on balance, lead us to truth and away from falsehood.

So the Holocaust denier, who abuses the right to free speech to spread what we all know (if we know anything about the past) to be falsehoods, has no claim on our toleration. For again, there is no unconditional right to free expression. That right is limited by competing values, the value of truth being one of them. The value of social order is another.

Now of course I am not claiming that all, or even most, known falsehoods are such that their propagation ought to be suppressed. Let the Flat Earth Society propagate its falsehoods to its heart's content. For few take them seriously, and their falsehoods, though known to be falsehoods, are not sufficiently pernicious to warrant suppression. Obviously, government censorship or suppression of the expression of opinions must be employed only in very serious cases. This is because government, thought it is practically necessary and does do some good, does much evil and has a tremendous capacity for unspeakable evils. It was communist governments that murdered 100 million in the 20th century. And when the Nazis stripped Jews of their property and sent them to the Vernichtungslager, it was legal. (Think about that and about whether you want to persist in conflating the legal and the moral.)

Mill's mistake, as it seems to me, is that he allows NO cases where such suppression would be justified. And that is a position whose extremism condemns it. Toleration extremism, to give it a name.

Evaluation of the Second Passage

There are plenty of counterexamples to Mill's bizarre principle that "unless reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case."

We conservatives are lovers of liberty and we share common ground with our libertarian brethren, but here we must part company with them.

Krauthammer’s Situational Libertarianism

I have argued more than once that toleration has limits. See, for example, The Danger of Appeasing the Intolerant and other entries in the Toleration category. I am pleased to see that the astute Charles Krauthammer has argued something similar. He calls his position "situational libertarianism":

     Liberties should be as unlimited as possible — unless and until
     there arises a real threat to the open society. Neo-Nazis are
     pathetic losers. Why curtail civil liberties to stop them? But when
     a real threat — such as jihadism — arises, a liberal democratic
     society must deploy every resource, including the repressive powers
     of the state, to deter and defeat those who would abolish liberal
     democracy.

     Civil libertarians go crazy when you make this argument. Beware the
     slippery slope, they warn. You start with a snoop in a library, and
     you end up with Big Brother in your living room.

     The problem with this argument is that it is refuted by American
     history. There is no slippery slope, only a shifting line between
     liberty and security that responds to existential threats.

Krauthammer mentions Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War and FDR's internment of Japanese during World War II, and points out that after the crises were resolved, liberties were restored.

It is worth noting that there is no logical necessity that one slide down any slippery slope. One can always dig in one's heels. Slippery slope arguments are one and all invalid. But there is more to argument than deduction, and so the topic is a large and hairy one. See Eugene Volokh, The Mechanisms of the Slippery Slope.

Tolerance and Assimilation

We don't have to prove to Muslims that we are tolerant; they have to prove to us that they are willing to assimilate.

David Harsanyi

He has his head screwed on Right. See his The Tolerance Canard.

On Religious Pluralism and Religious Tolerance

If you are an adherent of a given religion, why ought you tolerate other religions? We must tolerate other religions because we do not know which religion is true, if any is, and this would be something very important to know if it could be known. So we must inquire, and our inquiry will be aided by the availability of a a number of competing religions and nonreligious belief systems.

But toleration has limits. No religion or nonreligious ideology may be tolerated if it doesn't respect the principle of toleration. And so we ought not tolerate a religion whose aim is to suppress and supplant other religions and force their adherents to either convert or accept dhimmi status. Proselytization is tolerable but only if it is non-coercive. The minute it becomes the least bit coercive we have every right to push back vigorously. But equally, we ought not tolerate the ideology of the New Atheists if and to the extent that they aim to suppress religion. But is there any such tendency among the New Atheists? Here is Stephen Prothero (God Is Not One, Harper 2010, p. 321) on Sam Harris, one of the 'Four Horsemen' of the New Atheism:

Harris then attacked the ideal of religious tolerance as "one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss." "Some propositions are so dangerous," he wrote in a chilling passage, "that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them." For Harris, religious tolerance is almost as dangerous as religion itself. Belief in God is not an opinion that must be respected; it is an evil that must be confronted.

Like me, Harris believes that toleration has limits. Of course it does. But Harris and Co. draw the line in the wrong place, and they do so because they are not merely opposed to fanatical religion, jihadist religion, religion that violates freedom of inquiry and autonomy of thought, but to religion as such. For them, religion itself is the problem. But this is a shockingly puerile view that ignores the vast differences among religions, differences that Prothero's book does a good job of setting before us in all their richness.

On an approach more nuanced than that of the New Atheist ideologues, one grasps that some religions are tolerable, some are intolerable, some antireligious ideologies are tolerable, and some are not. If the fulminations of Harris and friends spill over into actions that involve the suppression of religion, then he and his ilk are intolerable and ought to be opposed with vigor.

My view is not merely that most religions and anti-religious ideologies ought to be tolerated, but that the existence of these competing worldviews is a good and enriching thing in that it helps us clarify and refine and test our own views and practices and helps us progress toward truer and more life-enhancing systems of thought and practice.

Legality and Propriety: What One Has a Right to Do is Not Always Right to Do

What do the following have in common: Flag burning, Koran burning, suspending a crucifix in urine and calling it art, building a mosque near Ground Zero, calling a black person 'nigger,' affixing a 'Fuck Your Honor Student' bumpersticker on your car?

They are all offensive, but they are all legal.

Flag burning. If you steal my flag and burn it, then you violate my property rights and do something illegal. If you burn a public flag, then that is illegal on grounds of vandalism. If you burn a flag you own but in a way that causes a public disturbance or endangers members of the public, then those acts fall under other existing statutes. But if you buy an American flag and burn it on your property, then you are within your legal rights. You are in the vast majority of cases a contemptible punk if you do so, and I have a right to my opinion on this score. But you are within the law. That is why calls for a flag-burning (or rather anti-flag-burning) amendment to the U. S. Constitution are pointless and just so much political grandstanding. Such appeals are just another way politicians evade the job of making tough decisions about matters of moment.

Ought flag burning come under the rubric of protected speech? Logically prior question: Is it speech at all? What if I make some such rude gesture in your face as 'giving you the finger.' Is that speech? If it is, I would like to know what proposition it expresses. 'Fuck you!' does not express a proposition. Likewise for the corresponding gesture with the middle finger. And if some punk burns a flag, I would like to know what proposition the punk is expressing. The Founders were interested in protecting reasoned dissent, but the typical act of flag burning by the typical leftist punk does not rise to that level. Without going any further into this issue, let me just express my skepticism at arguments that try to subsume gestures and physical actions under speech. But the main point is that we don't need a flag-burning amendment and we ought not have a general legal prohibition on the burning or other desecration of privately owned national symbols if the burning or other desecration is done in a way that does not violate existing laws.

Koran burning. If it is legal to burn the flag in certain circumstances, then it it legal to burn the Koran or any book in similar circumstances. If you own a copy of the book, you can do anything you want with it. You can use it for toilet paper. So if the Gainesville yahoo wants to organize a Koran burning on private property with privately-owned copies of the Muslim holy book, that must be tolerated no matter how stupid and offensive it is.

But there must be no double standards. If you condemn Koran burning, then you ought to condemn crucifix desecration and flag burning. And if you tolerate the latter, then you ought to tolerate the former.

The media both Left and Right are piling on Terry Jones, the Gainesville pastor, while failing to see that his brand of red-necked push-back is exactly what one should expect in the face of Islamist provocation.

And there must be no kow-towing to Muslim hypersensitivity.

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