The Paradox of Tolerance
Or, can we really fight intolerance with tolerance?
👋 Hey there! Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! My name is Abhishek.
The Sunday Wisdom is a collection of weekly essays on a variety of topics, such as psychology, health, science, philosophy, economics, business, and more — all varied enough to turn you into a polymath.
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Alright! On to this week’s essay. It’s about 1,700 words.
Q: If you consider yourself to be a tolerant person, what should be your level of intolerance towards the intolerant?
If you are a fairly reasonable person (like me), there’s a strong chance sometimes you can’t make head or tail about why some people are against LGBTQ+ rights.
But, despite that, you are a fairly tolerant human being as well. So it’s very likely that you don’t attempt to educate each and every living person you come across on the street to change their way of thinking — whether it’s about LGBTQ+ rights, gun violence, right to abortion, etc.
But… having said that… you do agree that sometimes you just have to… have to intervene. It might be because it’s someone you know who is harbouring some kind of backward school of thought, or it might be because someone is influencing someone you know negatively.
In any case, let’s take a thought experiment on those lines. Let’s assume someone is influencing a loved one of yours and you’re forced to interfere. What do you do?
At first, you politely ask the coercer to stop. When they don’t, you try to reason with them, hoping to change their mind. But soon you find that they‘re as stubborn as a mule with a PhD. Now you feel tempted to escalate things and start by berating them for imposing their backward beliefs upon others. You even get physical to teach them a lesson (those boxing lessons are paying off eventually). But when these tactics fail, you decide to subject them to public shaming and humiliation; not only them, but their whole family as well — hoping to pressure them into conforming and changing their views.
Finally… when all that doesn’t work upto your expectations, you decide to take it to the very extreme. You decide that the world would be a better place if this person didn’t exist at all. You decide to cancel them from the face of the earth for good. One less stupid person in the world, right?
Now...perhaps you found yourself nodding along with the above actions upto a certain extent, but there comes a point where a line is clearly crossed. At first, these actions may seem somewhat reasonable, but as they become increasingly extreme, fewer and fewer people would condone them.
Unless you happen to be the leader of an extremist regime, no matter how strongly you disagree with their beliefs, you’d be hard-pressed to agree with the final extreme action of eliminating the coercer altogether.
Nonetheless, we all approve of the actions up until a certain escalation level, and this level may vary from person to person. Now my question for you is this: how do you decide at which point the line was crossed? Actually no, that’s not my real question. The real, more deeper question I’m trying to explore is this: if you consider yourself to be a tolerant person, what should be your level of intolerance towards the intolerant?
Before I proceed, let’s make a few things clear. Tolerance doesn’t mean indifference. Tolerance is not cowardice. Also, when you say that you’re a tolerant person or that you strive to be as tolerant as possible, that doesn’t mean that you never disagree with anyone.
Tolerance isn’t saying that everyone is right and no one is wrong. Tolerance is accepting that other beliefs exist and you don’t have to take any action to silence or condemn people that disagree with you. There’s a big difference between that and merely disagreeing with someone.
Tolerance is a virtue indeed. But think about it, tolerance cannot really fight intolerance.
The reason you did anything in the above thought experiment was because the person was proudly spreading intolerant beliefs. You fought intolerance with intolerance.
Nobody is 100% tolerant, not even the nicest of people, and for good reason.
In ancient Greece, there was a philosopher named Protagoras who was a sophist (a group of philosophers who specialised in the art of winning debates and influencing others through language). He is famous for his Refutations which usually begin with the statement, “Man is the measure of all things.” This means that there is no absolute good or bad or just or unjust, only what individual societies and people deem to be just or unjust. In other words, everything goes.
However, this leads to an obvious contradiction. If everyone is right no matter what they say, then what about the person who claims that they are right and everyone else is wrong? This raises the question of whether Protagoras or the person who claims to be right is actually wrong.
Tolerance runs into a very similar problem when taken to the extreme.
As a fairly reasonable person, you don’t go about randomly pick fights with those who don’t agree with you. You don’t get into rows or unnecessary conflicts, at least not without very strong reasons. Tolerance is a virtue for you. Your motto is, “Live and let live.” You believe that without tolerance, there wouldn’t be dissent. And without dissent, it would be impossible to live with others who might have different views than yours.
Therefore the contradiction is this: If tolerance is a virtue that you strive to emulate, then what, if any, obligation do you have when it comes to combatting other people’s intolerant beliefs?
The 20th century philosopher of science Karl Popper has an answer. He does a really good job at shining a lantern on the inherent problem that arises if we simplify things down to: tolerance good, intolerance bad.
In The Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper writes, “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. . . . We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.”
Basically, what Popper is saying is that if all the governments of the world had a meeting one day and decided that from this day forward we’re all going to be tolerant of any set of beliefs regardless of what they are, tolerance is destined to be destroyed.
Think about it. If the tolerant are always tolerant towards people who are intolerant, then the intolerant will gain followers and eventually get the upperhand. At the end, they’ll get rid of all the tolerant.
It’s a simplistic example, but similar to the saying, “Evil prevails when good men fail to act,” intolerance prevails when tolerant men tolerate intolerance.
The Indian freedom struggle (or any freedom struggle for that matter) is a great example of fighting intolerance with intolerance. This might sound counterintuitive, but Mahatma Gandhi, the symbol of nonviolence himself, considered it “unmanly” to tolerate unjust laws, albeit his fight against intolerance was a bit unorthodox.
Alright! Having established that unlimited tolerance is not a virtue, that we must push back against intolerance when necessary, let’s go back to my original question: How do you decide your level of intolerance towards intolerance? Or, in other words, where do you draw the line?
Now, lucky for me, I’m not a philosopher, so I don’t have to give a very logical answer on the lines of utilitarianism, or consequentialism, or deontology, or anything even remotely related to them. I’m sure to run into a tonne of logical problems if I even make an attempt.
Instead, I’m gonna go ahead and say that all of us (fairly reasonable folks of the 21st century) already have a pretty good sense about where to draw the line. Even though we cannot exactly define it using logic, metric, or formulae, we have a pretty good sense about what to do in which context.
For starters, if you don’t agree with someone’s beliefs, you have the best option of just letting it be. For examples, others might have different religious, theologically, ideological, moral, or political views than yours, and it’s totally okay.
But if you genuinely believe that someone is harbouring backward beliefs (for example, anti-LGBTQ+ rights is a very backward belief in my opinion) and maybe they need a different perspective, you can definitely talk to them, nothing wrong with that. You can coerce that person too.
But if people aren’t really harmed on account of their beliefs (for example, a lot of people treat astrology as an exact science), then you can let it be.
But if their beliefs and subsequent actions might be harmful (for example, someone is trying to create a secret society akin to the beliefs of KKK or ISIS), you can always go to the law. If that doesn’t work, and you’ve tried every possible means, and there’s literally no other option left, you can consider taking matter into your own hands (that’s kind of what every revolutionary in history did).
Now, I strongly believe that not everyone has the mental constitution to make this judgement call. Some people are truly lost cause. But if you are reasonable enough to understand that tolerance is a virtue as long as it doesn’t let intolerance get the upperhand; if you are reasonable enough to understand that even though you are using intolerance to fight intolerance, the context is important; if you are reasonable enough to understand that throwing a 5kg stone causes significantly more harm than throwing 5kg of pebbles, I’d wager you are mentally capable enough to use your best judgement and draw the line depending on the context.
Executing someone for not supporting LGBTQ+ rights is not the same as executing someone for committing genocide. Context is everything.
Before I end, let me share this beautiful couplet on intolerance by the most revered Bengali polymath and poet of all time, Rabindranath Tagore:
অন্যায় যে করে আর অন্যায় যে সহে
তব ঘৃণা যেন তারে তৃণসম দহে।
Those who commit injustice and those who tolerate it,
Let them blaze like hay in the fire of your disdain O Lord!
Today I Learned
Ask yourself what it would be like to have been blind from birth.
Really think about this for a moment. If your guess is “it would something like blackness” or “something like a dark hole where vision should be,” you’re wrong.
To understand why, imagine you’re a scent dog such as a bloodhound.
Your long nose houses two hundred million scent receptors. On the outside, your wet nostrils attract and trap scent molecules. The slits at the corners of each nostril flare out to allow more air flow as you sniff. Even your floppy ears drag along the ground and kick up scent molecules.
Your world is all about smelling.
One afternoon, as you’re following your master, you stop in your tracks with a revelation. What is it like to have the pitiful, impoverished nose of a human being? What can humans possibly detect when they take in a feeble little noseful of air? Do they suffer a blackness? A hole of smell where smell is supposed to be?
Because you’re a human, you know the answer is no.
There is no hole or blackness or missing feeling where the scent is absent. You accept your reality as it’s presented to you. Because you don’t have the smelling capabilities of a bloodhound, it doesn’t even strike you that things could be different.
The same goes for people with colour blindness: until they learn that others can see hues they cannot, the thought does not even hit their radar screen.
Timeless Insight
If you find an event that is true in more than one field, you’ve probably uncovered something particularly important. The more fields it shows up in, the more likely it is to be a fundamental and recurring driver of how the world works.
For example, you are bound to learn more about money and investing by reading things that have nothing to do with investing, such as sociology, psychology, history, etc.
Restricting your learning to a narrow lens means you’re less likely to uncover the biggest and most important parts of the field.
Diversify your learning.
What I’m Reading
The good life is a complicated life. For everybody. The good life is joyful… and challenging. Full of love, but also pain. And it never strictly happens; instead, the good life unfolds, through time. It is a process. It includes turmoil, calm, lightness, burdens, struggles, achievements, setbacks, leaps forward, and terrible falls. And of course, the good life always ends in death.
— Robert Waldinger, Marc Schulz, The Good Life
Tiny Thought
Most good outcomes come from a minority of the actions you take, so it’s normal if most of what you do doesn’t work out.
Before You Go…
If you’re finding this newsletter valuable, share it with a friend, and consider subscribing. If you aren’t ready to become a paid subscriber yet, but feel like I’ve done a good enough job writing today’s issue, you can also support me by buying me a cup of coffee. ☕️
Until next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋
PS: All typos are intentional and I take no responsibility whatsoever! 😬