Sir Karl Raimund Popper
July 28th, 1902
On the 25th of May, 2023, an individual named Seth Keller posted a video on TikTok, blaming politicians for all of society’s ills. Which, on reflection, seemed perfectly fair comment and something that any tolerant society is able to accommodate. Tolerance of dissent is one of the cornerstones of any free society and although Keller was British and the British ideal of a free society isn’t codified in quite the same way as it is in America (who think they have a monopoly on ‘freedom’), even constitutional monarchies don’t crumble when people redress their governments via Chinese spy apps.
Keller, however, wasn’t done there and decided to further his displeasure by driving his car at speed into the security gates protecting the public from the hellhounds of Downing Street in an effort to take his dissent right to the very heart of the Prime Minister’s residence via the plastic frontage of a Kia Ceed. The gates buckled but held and he was promptly arrested by armed police. Obviously, any society’s tolerance of this level of dissent is sorely tested by such an act. A tolerant society has to be intolerant of such acts.
It then transpired that Keller was carrying a mobile phone containing child pornography and that he had used it to access such material via the internet on 339 occasions and all notions of tolerance, rightly, went out of the window. No tolerant society can tolerate such behavior.
At his trial, Judge Christopher Hehir, assessing the attempted vehicular assault on the leader of nation whilst having his pockets stuffed full of child porn, decided that a suspended sentence of 15 months was in order meaning that as long as Keller behaved himself for 2 years, he was free to go. Oh, and he was banned from driving for 18 months.
The taught guitar string of tolerance twanged a sorrowful note.
In January of this year, a former police officer, Matthe Longmate, arrived in court before Judge Hehir, clutching a holdall of clothes, ready to be sent to prison. Convicted of the crime of having sex with a drunk woman in his police car, thereby abusing his position of authority to take advantage of a vulnerable person, society’s tolerance had reached breaking point. Such crimes eat at the very soul of any tolerant society. How can we be a safe, strong, reasonable society if serving police officers can pick up drunk women and abuse them under the guise of driving them home?
Hehir gave Longmate a 12-month sentence, which he suspended for a year, and Longmate burst into tears and went home.
The tarnished brass trombone of tolerance played a sad glissando.
In July of this year, Hehir again had some dangerous criminals before him. Five people, all of whom looked like the organizing committee of a particularly boring, but nicely catered, regional parish book fair were before him on the heinous charge of plotting to carry out peaceful protests that would close the M25 motorway for a while. The M25 is Britain’s busiest motorway and the disruption would have been major, had they carried it out. But it would have been peaceful and either way, they didn’t even actually get around to it. They are climate change protestors and their message was simple. They wanted the government to engage in a dialogue about the future of fossil fuels in the country, particularly their plans to expand the North Sea oil drilling operation. The government of the time had recently gone back on its own pledges to make climate change a priority because, bombing in the polls and with an election looming in the next year, they decided to switch tactics and appeal to the frothy-mouthed, swivel-eyed, climate change denying loony right-wing of British society by setting fire to otters and making everyone drive coal-fired, diesel spewing behemoths. It was a desperate tactic by a desperate government which didn’t work.
Thinking that they had no other way of getting their message across, the five protestors conspired to break the law peacefully. Obviously, a tolerant society cannot tolerate law breaking and they were rightly punished. Judge Hehir gave one of them five years in prison and the others four years each.
The Moog Synthesizer of tolerance caught fire.
The swivel-eyed crowd, driven by hatemongers in the press, bayed in delight. Everyone else, the majority of society, was stunned. And it brings up the question of what a society can tolerate if judges decide that child porn carrying domestic terrorists are free to go but people who sell scones and worry that the Earth is dying have to go to prison for five years for not doing anything.
What can a tolerant society tolerate? And does a tolerant society become intolerant by not tolerating the intolerant? Let me just read that back, make sure I got that right….
If you want a perfectly tolerant society, and everyone does, then do you have to tolerate everything, including those that are intolerant?
I don’t know. I’m just a humble historian sitting at a keyboard. But luckily, I don’t have to know the answer, because Karl Popper did.
Karl Popper was born in Vienna on 28th July, 1902, to Simon and Jenny Popper, Lutherans of Jewish descent. Karl's uncle was the Austrian philosopher Josef Popper-Lynkeus and his family had close ties with that of Sigmund Freud. His father was a lawyer with a huge personal library and it was there that the young Karl took an interest in philosophy, science, history and politics.
He left school at 16 but attended, as a guest, lectures in mathematics, physics, philosophy, psychology and the history of music at the University of Vienna. It was through his reading and these lectures that he became a staunch supporter of social liberalism for the rest of his life.
He worked a few odd jobs before going back to university and, in 1928, graduating with a PhD in Psychology. He married his colleague Josefine Anna Henninger in 1930. Fearing the rise of Nazism and the threat of the Anschluss, he started to use the evenings and the nights to write his first book Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie (The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge). He needed to publish a book to get an academic position in a country that was safe for people of Jewish descent and in 1935, he took unpaid leave to visit the UK. In 1937, Popper finally managed to get a position that allowed him to emigrate to New Zealand, where he became lecturer in philosophy at the University of New Zealand in Christchurch. It was here that he wrote his influential work The Open Society and Its Enemies.
Popper is famous for many things and if I was to write a biography it would take more words than I have for this article. It was he who postulated the idea of falsifiability in science - the principle that science can never be used to prove something, because once you do, the science has effectively stopped, but that it can be falsified. Essentially, if you can never prove that something is true, but you can prove that it is false. Although this approach still has its critics, it remains a fundamental part of the philosophy of science.
But what we’re interested in is the argument Popper called the Intolerance Paradox. In it, Popper tries to explain how a perfectly tolerant society can remain tolerant without having to tolerate the intolerant.
It has long been an argument of some people with extremist views - like Nazis - that by not giving their views equal measure in society, we are not being the tolerant and rational people we claim we are. The pedlars of such ideologies demand an equal place at society’s banquet because, after all, freedom of speech and all that. And if we boil tolerance down to its component parts then that is a rational argument. If we are tolerant then we should tolerate everyone. Even those who would not tolerate us in return.
The problem with that level of tolerance is obvious. If you tolerate those who would not tolerate you, then those people will destroy you and then, obviously, you end up with an intolerant society.
Karl Popper framed the argument beautifully.
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 most 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. 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.
In a nutshell, a tolerant society can tolerate the intolerant as long as the intolerant can be reasoned with, as long as the intolerant are willing to engage in rational argument and as long as public opinion allows it.
And what the five climate protestors were doing, although illegal, was not against those principles. They were asking for rational argument and reasoned debate and public opinion, whilst against their methodology is firmly in favor of the overall message that ‘hey, you know…the fucking planet is dying’.
What society cannot debate is rabid TikTok manifesto spewing maniacs in cars who engage in child abuse. No public opinion is in favor of this at all. No rational argument will counter such behavior.
And this is the reason that, whatever we think of Just Stop Oil, whether they be throwing orange colored cornstarch at Stonehenge or laying down in front of your BMW on your way to buy some sausages from Walmart, their actions can be tolerated by a reasonable society.
It’s not only important that we tolerate them, even if we find their actions illegal, but imperative to a tolerant society that we do. Even though this happened in the UK, it is one of the fundamental cornerstones of the 1st Amendment. Freedom of speech means that a tolerant society must tolerate that which it finds un-nerving or upsetting because that is the price paid for freedom. Freedom isn’t a bouquet of flowers and if it is, it’s one that comes with a lot of thorns among the petals. Freedom is scary, but that is a necessary part of it.
A tolerant society must have dissent and it functions better when it does. And as long as you can keep everything in check with rational argument, then society will be a tolerant and strong one.
When Popper talks about those “not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument” and those that “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.”, it’s clear who he was talking about, especially considering the time and place he wrote these words. He’s talking about the Nazis.
But you could also, remarkably easily, transpose those comments to several infamous orange-faced politicians of today, one of whom in particular I won’t have to name for you.
Ok, Donald Trump.
Donald Trump is not ready to meet anyone at all on the level of rational argument. Or even any argument. Neither does he encourage his followers to listen to any rational argument because it’s ‘fake news’. And if dissenters voice their opinions back at him, his followers are encouraged to use their fists to ‘get him out of here’ and he’ll pick up the legal bill for what happens next.
And as Popper said, the way you deal with this is “We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal.”
We don’t need to tolerate these people for the simple reason that they will not tolerate us.
Just Stop Oil will tolerate us and therefore, we must tolerate them. Viktor Orban won’t. Donald Trump won’t.
Karl Popper moved to the United Kingdom to become a reader in logic and scientific method at the London School of Economics, where, in 1949, he was appointed professor of logic and scientific method. He became a British citizen and retired from academic life in 1969.
In 1985, he returned to Austria with Josefine so that she could be among her relatives during the last few months of her life. She died in Vienna in November of that year. He returned to the UK and, still working on academic papers, died aged 92 on 17th September, 1994. His ashes were buried in the Lainzer Tiergarten, next to his wife.