The Limits of Tolerance

A free-speech lawyer and a scholar of democracy sat down to test how much intolerance a tolerant society can survive.

'A tolerant society, I would insist, must extend its tolerance even to views it finds repugnant.'

'With respect, that principle contains the seeds of its own destruction.'

Rahman invoked the famous paradox: unlimited tolerance leads to the disappearance of tolerance.

'If we tolerate those who would abolish tolerance, we license the very people who will silence the rest of us.'

'I take your point, and yet the cure you propose may be worse than the disease.'

Feldman, a civil libertarian, feared that any exception would be captured by whoever held power.

'Once a state may ban dangerous ideas, it will define dangerous to mean inconvenient.'

'If I may put it bluntly, that argument protects the arsonist in the name of protecting speech.'

The paradox of tolerance, they agreed, cannot be dissolved simply by declaring oneself in favour of freedom.

'A right that is used to destroy all other rights cannot be absolute, or it becomes a weapon against itself.'

'Perhaps, but the difference between advocacy and action is exactly the line a free society must guard.'

'To hate an idea is not yet to act, and punishing the thought is the first move of every tyranny.'

'I hope you will forgive me for saying that this line looks clearer from a comfortable seat than from a targeted community.'

Here Feldman paused, conceding that tolerance can be a luxury unevenly distributed.

'You are right that words can wound, and that the powerful invoke free speech to shield their cruelty.'

'Still, I would rather answer bad speech with better speech than hand the censor a precedent.'

'And I would rather draw a narrow line now than discover, too late, that we drew none.'

What both refused was the comfortable illusion that the problem has a costless solution.

'To be clear, I am not proposing that we silence dissent; I am asking where dissent ends and incitement begins.'

'That is a question worth asking, provided we remember that the same net, once cast, catches the fisherman too.'

The image of a net that ensnares its own maker captured the reflexive danger they both perceived.

'Every limit we place on others is a limit we hand to our own future opponents.'

'Granted, yet a society with no limits at all hands victory to whoever is most willing to break the rules.'

Neither the absolutist nor the restrictionist could claim the argument entirely, for each had exposed a real cost in the other.

'Tolerance, it seems, is not a principle we can apply mechanically, but a balance we must keep re-striking.'

'And a balance, if it is honest, will sometimes leave both of us uneasy.'

That shared unease, the willingness to be unsettled by a good objection, pointed past the quarrel itself, toward the deeper question of why we bother to argue at all.