Popper's "Paradox of Tolerance", part 1
there's a reason every caricature is a cartoon
This essay is too long for some email clients to handle correctly. You may read it at the Substack website. Look for, and click on, “Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance, part 1” which has a posting date of December 22, 2023.
The Ubiquitous Cartoon
If you’ve been on social media for longer than about twenty minutes, you’ve likely seen the above cartoon. It’s generally posted in the comments of every argument about content moderation, usually as a defense of removing material that the poster doesn’t like. It refers to Karl Popper’s “paradox of tolerance” (PPOT), which posits that tolerant societies must be intolerant of intolerance in order to remain tolerant.
This cartoon and the concept have been cited repeatedly on Substack Notes in the last week and a half, as a group of Substackers were petitioning for content moderation. I have two theses about both PPOT and events like the recent Substack controversy.
Misrepresentation: People (like the “Substackers Against Nazis”) who use this cartoon and the idea it represents to argue for content moderation on social media do not understand PPOT properly.
Irrelevance: Their misrepresentation does not, ultimately, matter. Neither a correct understanding of PPOT, which I will offer in the second half of this essay, nor the caricatured misrepresentation of PPOT proferred by would-be censors (like the “Substackers Against Nazis”), can serve as a useful heuristic for what societies like the United States should tolerate. That time has passed.
I will make the “irrelevance” argument in part 1, as it’s easier to understand and will help clarify the “misrepresentation” argument. Part 2 will take on the egregious way that PPOT is misrepresented in controversies like the recent Substack one.
Before I go on — readers must supply their own “not alls.” Obviously, broad categories do not fit every human on earth. Obviously, there are exceptions to the sweeping characterizations that I’m about to make. This long essay would be a thousand words longer if I put in enough “not alls” to please everyone, so I need you to supply your own from here on out. Yes, not all. Truly, I agree with you. Not. All. Not! All! That’s all you get; any further “not alls” you need are on you.
Why Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance No Longer Works in the US
Simply put: PPOT requires reasonable, broadly-agreed-upon, common definitions of certain words: tolerant, intolerant, hate, and violence. Those common definitions in turn serve to create common understandings.
And the US no longer has common definitions or broadly agreed-upon understandings of these words.
That’s a bold statement, but it’s the truth.
The usual refuge in a conflict of definitions is an appeal to the dictionary. That no longer works because dictionaries change definitions in response to the demands of activist Twitter mobs or even individual persons feeling offended. There are multiple examples of this phenomenon.
Consider this definition of female, which invokes “social and cultural roles, traits, and behaviors.” I am a woman, an adult human female with XX chromosomes present in every cell of my physical body.
What I am not, is a stereotypically girly sort of woman. I own zero dresses and skirts. I do not use make-up. My primary interests, while I regard them as rightfully mine and as interests that have everything to do with my unique mix of joys and curiosities and nothing to do with my sex, are more often typical interests of males than females (mathematics, coding, and science fiction). I do not “feel like a woman.” I feel like me. The only social or cultural role, trait, or behavior associated with women that I engage in is that I cry a lot.
By this dictionary’s definition, I am not female.
What use is a dictionary’s definition that would render “not female” someone who menstruates, needs annual pap smears, must be concerned with avoiding pregnancy, is vulnerable to rape, has XX chromosomes, and is in fact an adult woman?
Lest there be any doubt as to exactly why they re-wrote their definitions, the dictionary makes it clear on the page that little girls are most likely to consult:
And yes, they give boys the same treatment, helping brainwash kids into thinking that not even biological reality is solid, reliable, and something they can trust not to change.
Also notice (in the second definitions for each) that “girl” is an identity for any person whose “gender identity” is female, while to be a “boy” according to this dictionary at least requires being a child. Can you guess why? (I can.)
Compare these to the 1828 definition in Webster’s dictionary:
Merriam-Webster has also changed its definition of racism, after a 22-year-old college student asked them to, to reflect the notion of “systemic” racism so en vogue in the US. This is the belief that all black people are inherently victims of racism and all white people inherently oppressors, regardless of class — Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama’s kids are oppressed by white teenagers in West Virginia foster care, who “have privilege over” them. At least they have their whiteness, as Ms. Winfrey, a billionaire, says.
The Reasonable Person Test
Some readers, especially those who feel attached to PPOT for the great wisdom it represented before it outlived its time, may be thinking something like “OK, so Merriam-Webster and other dictionaries hired activist college kids. That doesn’t mean we don’t all understand these things. Reasonable people still agree on what these words mean.”
The “reasonable person” (previously, “reasonable man”) test is a legal doctrine that has been around for well over a hundred years. It’s invoked to help adjudicate what a reasonable person can or should do in particular circumstances, and to hold individuals accountable for their failure to meet that standard.
The classic example is a liability case where a truck driver fails to secure his cargo properly, resulting in a spill. Accidents can happen despite taking reasonable precautions, so how many precautions must be taken for a truck driver to be deemed a victim of happenstance and not his own negligence? The important question is the nature of the cargo. Whether he’s transporting cases of bottled water or barrels of hazardous materials, matters. A reasonable person would expect him to use a significantly greater degree of caution in securing his cargo in the latter case.
Using this “reasonable person” idea to decide on matters of hate, intolerance, and whose ideas go too far in that direction and thus warrant deplatforming is tempting, but no longer tenable.
Americans are simply too badly divided. Here are two examples.
The Transwoman Example
Consider the following statement:
Transwomen are men.
How does that statement hit you? How do you react to it?
Your reaction probably fits into one of four categories. Culture War initiates make up three broad groups: if you’re a lefty, you’re probably angry, perhaps too angry to read on. If you’re on the right, you’re probably a combination of relieved and defiant. If you’re in the center, you’re probably groaning. You’re sick of this issue, which always feels like walking a tightrope thirty feet above a shark tank.
But there’s a fourth category, who are the people who will likely struggle to understand the case I am attempting to make: the culture war innocents. These are people with no recent experience of public education, especially at the university level, and who don’t spend much time online, fighting on social media about “social justice” issues. These are the people most likely to believe that commonly held definitions are still a thing, so I am going to be careful to address their unique position.
Why are there so many disparate reactions to this simple statement of truth, “Transwomen are men?”
To the left, the statement is a lie.
They believe their mantra, “Transwomen are women!” and they believe it with total purity. It is simple reality to them, something that only a fool or a bully would deny.
To the left, the statement is also an act of violence.
Yes, violence. They regard my statement as the moral equivalent of punching all trans people in the face, or even of trying to drive trans people to commit suicide.
When people on the left read the cartoon about PPOT, which regards the preaching of “intolerance and persecution” as a category that does not warrant tolerance and protection under the law, they do not regard it as referring to genuine extremists. They do not mean people who argue that all trans people should be put to death or that transitioning should be a crime.
They mean people like me, who simply refuse to affirm that “Transwomen are women.” Or, as they say now, “Trans women are women” — they now demand the space to make it more clear that “trans” is just a modifier for an ordinary woman, like “tall woman” or “vibrant woman”.
Our culture has gone so far on transgender issues that the polite fiction of pretending we didn’t notice someone was trans and letting them go on about living their lives is, itself, considered hateful. Only actively affirming trans “identities” by putting pronouns on your name tags and in your email signatures, using bizarre pronouns when asked to (including they/them for a single individual), and supporting the right of males to compete in female sports and use female showers—including of adult males who identify as females to shower with little girls—makes a person free from “hate”. Even pointing out the inherent unfairness in athletic competition and how non-elite male athletes at the high school level frequently best elite female athletes is regarded as “hate speech.”
If you’re a culture war innocent, you’re probably very confused by this. You are probably thinking about one transwoman you met, or even just heard about, a long time ago. The person in your memory is likely a tortured soul who spent years in therapy and had to jump through very serious hoops set up by gatekeepers in the medical and mental health industries before transition was a possibility. The individual had to live, full-time, as a woman for a year before any surgeon would seriously consider taking on the case. This person clearly led a life of enormous difficulty and suffering. You, a compassionate person, have no wish to add to this person’s suffering, nor the suffering of other people like this person, so legal mandates for things like nondiscrimination in housing and employment make sense to you. You see all the discussion about transgender issues now and don’t really know what to think. You probably know of/have heard of at least one “trans child” in your extended circle, which confuses you—you remember when suddenly it seemed like way more people were gay than used to be, and how it really does seem like social acceptance makes minorities “come out” more readily—but the current situation, where your friend’s great-niece, who’s in kindergarten, has three “trans” classmates, seems extreme. Still, your memory of the transwoman from your past makes you want to err on the side of going along to get along, quietly.
A culture war innocent reacting with confusion from the perspective I’ve described (or something close to it) is understandable. Bear with me; I’m going to prove to you that things are entirely different from how you remember.
First, another example. Grindr is a hookup app (primarily used to help gay men find partners for quick sexual encounters.) They used to allow users to filter for “cis man” or “cis woman,” allowing gay men to seek to find men to have sex with (rather than women who take testosterone, have/will have their breasts surgically removed, and identify as men). They no longer allow this filter, because it discriminates against transwomen and transmen.
This is the new standard for what a good person must do—see no difference whatsoever between transmen and transwomen and other men and women—but also must take proactive action to affirm all possible transgender individuals one might run into. That’s why the National Institutes of Health has instructions for you when you meet a new person:
When I tell you that the left regards transwomen to be women — more woman than me, by the dictionary definition — I am not being hyperbolic. I am reporting the simple, fucked-up truth of how far our society has strayed into insanity.
Likewise, the left regards misgendering (deliberately or on purpose using pronouns that refer to a person’s biological sex rather than their chosen pronouns) to be violence. The right to compel others to lie and participate in the fiction that a man who identifies as a woman is a woman, and vice versa, is being held up in some US courts, as well as codified into Canadian law. A teacher who refused to lie and call a female student by male pronouns had to go all the way to the Supreme Court to be vindicated.
The definitions of man, woman, female, male, hate, and violence are no longer commonly agreed upon.
Now for a second example.
The Racism Example
The following pictures are from a former exhibit of the National Museum of African-American History and Culture (part of the Smithsonian).
If you are white then, like me, when you read this your first thought was probably of black friends, family, mentors, or teachers who embodied objective, rational thinking, were always punctual, and were self-reliant hard workers.
I thought immediately of an elderly black woman who lived on the block where I grew up. She was raising a houseful of grandchildren. It is not hard to imagine her reaction if anyone had dared to tell her that her standards—her grandchildren were required to work hard on their homework, self-reliantly do their chores, and assume responsibility for being ready punctually anytime the family left the house—represented whiteness, she would have lit into them with righteous fury.
If any white person said that black people were incapable of demonstrating these traits and qualities, or even less likely to do so, they would rightly be regarded as a racist jackass.
If you’re a culture war innocent, you’re probably very confused by this, as well as by other controversies around diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. You may even believe some of what you hear about “hate” being on the rise — after all, racism and bigotry are bad. Dr. King got it right all those years ago. Content of character is more important than color of skin. Racists are bad people who look at skin color first. That’s why you’re in favor of Affirmative Action and other efforts to combat racism.
So what the heck is this? It seems like racism, itself, but it was created by the National Museum of African-American History and Culture. Huh?
“Racism” is now defined by a movement called “anti-racism,” which means supporting the idea that radical re-organization of US society and norms is necessary. The overriding tenet of “anti-racism” is this: that racism is everywhere, all the time, and affecting every moment of American life.
Robin DiAngelo, author of the anti-racist bible, “White Fragility,” has a handout here you can read for yourself.
Likewise, the notion of colorblindness — treating everyone equally without altering one’s treatment of others based on race — is now defined as racism by many on the left (link has multiple embedded YouTube talks).
White people who do not agree with these tenets proactively are guilty of violence and hate. Yes, even silence is regarded as violence.
These Two Examples Make the Case
Americans are now in a position where key concepts that are crucial to deciding who or what is too intolerant to be tolerated—the primary question that PPOT causes us to face—are no longer something we can agree on.
When someone on the political left insists that “hate speech” isn’t free speech, he or she likely means nothing like what you or I would mean if we said “hate speech.” He or she means, essentially, “speech that I hate.”
The United Nations defines “hate speech” thusly:
I would regard the NMAAHC exhibit above as meeting this definition, as it attributes to a group, based on their race, the pejorative notion that they are inherently lacking in things like objective, rational thought and hard work.
Yet it would never occur to me that I should have the right to deplatform the NMAAHC, for any reason, and certainly not “hate speech” — because I know that other people disagree, and disagree strongly.
Substackers Against Nazis
The most recent controversy in which this cartoon is being cited, with the usual misunderstanding of Popper’s ideas, is on Substack, where a group of authors calling themselves “Substackers Against Nazis” have been petitioning the owners to start deplatforming people they don’t like.
The letter itself only references the handful of white supremacist Substacks, who were first located by the author of an Atlantic article, and which were so obscure that it took searching on “extremist Telegram channels” to find them at all.
For the record, I’ve been on Substack nearly every day since they launched Notes, their Twitter clone, and I’ve never once seen or had the algorithm suggest to me even one post or newsletter that’s even remotely Nazi or white supremacist in nature — defining those terms as “promoting Nazi ideologies” and “advocating for a white ethnostate,” and “preaching the superiority of white people over people of other races,” just as I define racism as “propagating a belief in the superiority of one race over another.” Even people in support of their letter are a bit mystified.
(I have cropped out the names on the screenshots to avoid complaints about my sending them “hate.”)
Why doesn’t it matter that these alleged newsletter are a minuscule part of the Substack ecosystem? Because many of the signatories have made it abundantly clear that this isn’t about deplatforming “Nazis,” but about wanting “harmful content” moderated — which means turning Substack into a place where the diversity of opinion is limited to that which no leftist regards as “harmful” or “hate speech.”
As the previous examples have shown, the gut-level response that so many people—even including me at times—want to allow themselves, of “Well harm and hate speech are bad, so what’s the issue?” is flatly dangerous. “Harm” and “hate speech” are not ideas they define the way anyone reasonable does.
Here are just a few examples of signatories to the letter admitting that they regard “Nazis” as people who disagree with them on “social justice” issues. All are screenshots I collected on Substack Notes, the Twitter clone that’s part of the Substack website.
One signatory freely admitted, in a commentary post, that getting “Nazis” banned is just the first step of the real goal:
By “disinformation merchants,” he probably means the successful Substacks of members of the FLCCC and other medical professionals who were COVID dissidents. But the important part of this quote is the admission that the “Nazis” are the tip of the iceberg. They want more, and if Substack ever bends the knee, another group will be next.
Another signatory regards anything that could potentially result in an “endangered” life as warranting an end to free speech:
Remember how the left defines “violence” and ask yourself if there’s anything at all that would survive a free speech purge on these grounds.
“TERF” is an acronym that once meant “trans exclusive radical feminist” — an adherent to second-wave feminist philosophy that did not regard transwomen as women — but now is just a shorthand for “anti-trans bad person.” If you have a strong stomach, do some google searches for “punch a TERF” and remind yourself that by leftist definitions, those results are not violence. (But my saying “Transwomen are men,” is violence.)
And when a counter-letter went around Substack, many signatories of the pro-censorship letter were quick to point out that “TERFs” signed it — because to them, failure to believe that transwomen are women is part and parcel to “Nazism.”
Again, a signatory admitted they want the censorship of “hate speech,” not just “Nazis”, and asserts that it’s “NOT a matter of free speech,” as leftists do not regard people who engage in “hate speech” (as defined by them) as deserving free speech:
When I was arguing against this proposed censorship on Substack Notes, a few of them accused me of being against the proposed censorship because I feared it would affect me. They were correct, and they proved my thesis. As my content is not remotely white supremacist or “Nazi” in any sense — I write about mathematics, the books I read, and my experiences (none of which involve supporting national socialism or advocating for a white ethnostate), these were tacit admissions that it was about censoring the non-Woke, not about purported “Nazis.” I appreciated their honesty.
What Happens If They Win
A world that caters to leftist notions of “harm” and “hate speech” is a world where nothing can get done without endless tedium and in-depth emotional probing for any possible sense in which anything can be regarded as harmful.
For a very small example, here’s a one-minute clip from a Democratic Socialists of America meeting, where normal behavior in a large conference room is too much for one “comrade” to bear so he/him asks everyone to change to suit he/him, but he/him fails to live up to Woke standards in how he/him makes the request, so another “comrade” has to correct he/him’s language in the request for everyone else to change.
Can you imagine what kind of infrastructure Substack would need to eliminate “harmful content” as defined by these people? The jobless rate might go down, but by the time Substack provided unlimited paid mental health days, gender-affirming-care full healthcare coverage for every member of their polycules, and everything else such people would demand, they’d have to increase their cut so massively that Substack newsletters would start costing you $60 a month, not $60 a year.
What Was the Motivation?
So far Substack isn’t bending the knee. Sherman Alexie had a great post addressing the motivation of the writers who went on this crusade:
He asks a great question, and one to which I believe I know the answer.
Attempts of this nature—to exercise control over others while virtue-signaling to each other, performing virtue and goodness in public for the admiration of other leftists—is their version of practicing a religion or otherwise engaging in community.
I don’t really care what they do, until it starts to affect me.
That’s why this whole event has been frustrating: I don’t want to have to care about them or their religious beliefs, but their desperate desire to get Old Twitter rules set up at Substack made me have to care, and to pay attention to boring NPCs spouting Woke copypasta to impress each other with their moral goodness.
They’re against Nazis, y’all. What an impressive moral bar they set for themselves to cross, huh?
Conclusion
The Woke misrepresent and misapply Popper’s idea of tolerance—and they do so egregiously. I will go into depth on this in Part 2.
But that is, in fact, beside the point.
The paradox of tolerance, as a heuristic for a society, depends on broad agreement about reasonable meanings of words like hate, violence, tolerance, intolerance.
Americans no longer agree on the definitions of these words to a degree sufficient to support this heuristic. The left has broadened the definitions to the degree that recognizing reality constitutes a type of “Nazism” and “hate.” They are thus inherently untrustworthy as to what constitutes “hate” and “hate speech.”
We’re going to have to find some other way to navigate whose ideas deserve deplatforming and whose don’t.
Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance worked for a more mature, sane time in the body politic.
That time is now past.
Can we get ourselves to a point where it would once again represent a heuristic of wisdom appropriate for use in a society with widely diverse viewpoints?
I, for one, am not hopeful.
Did you enjoy this essay? Paid annual subs are on sale through Christmas, and the money goes to reducing my student loan balance — no, I’m not sitting around waiting on Grandpa Joe to forgive them.
I’m a data scientist who would rather be a math teacher but, being unwilling to brainwash kids into Woke nonsense, am presently unqualified to teach in the US. So I bring my “math is fun and anyone can learn it” approach to mathematics here to Substack in my series, “How to Not Suck at Math,” (first five entries not paywalled, links at the top of part 5, here).
I also write about other things. My posts are mostly cultural takes from a broadly anti-Woke perspective—yes, I’m one of those annoying classical liberals who would’ve been considered on the left until ten seconds ago. Lately I’ve regained a childhood love of reading and started publishing book reviews. My most widely useful essay may be this one, about how to resist the demon of self-termination.
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Thank you for this...I think of many examples you provide as I'm penning a letter to my son's head of school. I'm not sure the school realizes that she taught her 9th grade biology students that biological sex does not exist. Teacher uses exactly the now muddled definitions you provide to argue this. When it degraded into her telling students her "spouse" has had a vasectomy, it only confirmed my apoplexy.
It was interesting to see Sherman Alexie’s take on this. Every time I think I’ve had it rough in life, I read some of his biographical stuff. It’s amazing what he has endured and come out the other side with a sense of humor. A good place to start is his book “The absolutely true diary of a part time Indian”.