Tolerance Even for Those Who Would Destroy You?

Bölüm metni

You say you are open to every view — until someone sits across from you who wants your view erased altogether. At that point patience stops being generosity and starts looking like a door left open to whoever means you harm. So where exactly does tolerance end: at the words, at the harm, or at the moment you can no longer afford it?

Picture a residents' meeting in an apartment block. The dullest hour and a half of the year: service charges, roof insulation, lift maintenance. Then someone takes the floor and says something nobody saw coming: I don't think certain people should be living in this building. A silence falls. And everyone in that room, in that instant, feels two things at the same time. The first is that this man has a right to speak as well; this is his home too. The second is that this man has just put other people's right to be here up for discussion. In other words, the idea we are being asked to bear is an idea that proposes doing away with bearing anything at all.

This is how the most uncomfortable question of an entire tradition of thought seeps into ordinary life, slipping in between the agenda items on roof insulation. How far does tolerance go? Is it to be extended even to the one who wants to destroy it? Before we ask that, we need to scratch at the word itself, because in Turkish the word hoşgörü is a recent one, and slightly misleading. Before it, people said müsamaha, they said tahammül, they said tolerans. Its counterpart in Western languages comes from the Latin verb tolerare, and its meaning is precisely this: to carry, to shoulder, to endure. So at the root of the word there is no smile; there is weight. Tolerance is not finding something agreeable. It is carrying something you do not find agreeable, in spite of that.

This distinction looks like a small matter of language, but everything hangs on it. Because the thing tolerance is most often confused with is indifference. If I have no curiosity at all about what my neighbour eats, which team he supports, which god he believes in, then looking past it costs me nothing. There is no virtue there, only disinterest. Tolerance, on the other hand, can only stand on top of an objection. If I find something wrong, even harmful, and in spite of that I hold back from banning it, from silencing it, from punishing it, then I really am carrying a weight. Which means tolerance is not the problem of the indifferent person but of the person with convictions. Someone who believes in nothing has nothing to tolerate either.

And beneath that weight there is also a hidden insult, which Goethe stated as plainly as anyone. In the notebooks where he gathered his reflections and maxims, he writes that tolerance ought really to be a temporary attitude; it must lead to acceptance, to recognition, because merely to put up with someone, he says, is to insult them. A very harsh sentence, but there is something right in it. To tell a person "I can endure your existence" is not to tell them they are your equal. It is to speak from somewhere above, from a position that holds the power to permit. That is why tolerance is at once one of the greatest achievements in human history and one of its most arrogant words.

So now we have seen two things at once. Tolerance is not indifference; it is a burden. And the side carrying that burden holds a certain power over what it carries. Which means the real question changes shape. The question is no longer how patient a good person ought to be. The question is this: what will a society that holds this power do about an idea that has written the abolition of that society into its programme? If it endures, there may be nobody left to do the enduring once the enduring is over. If it refuses to endure, then at the very moment of refusal it begins to resemble the thing it refused.

This deadlock is not one person's failure of character; it is a crack in the structure of tolerance itself. And the interesting part is this: the first people to notice the crack were not tolerance's enemies but its greatest defenders. Almost every one of the men who established tolerance as a principle drew a line at the edge of the principle with his own hand. Looking at where they drew that line will tell us something about the apartment meeting as well.

In 1685, the French king Louis the Fourteenth revoked the arrangement that had given the country's Protestants a limited guarantee for roughly a century. The result was one of the largest refugee waves Europe had ever seen; hundreds of thousands of people left their homes, their workshops and their graveyards and fled to Holland, to England, to Prussia. At that moment there was living in Holland an English physician and philosopher who had himself left his country under political suspicion: John Locke. In Amsterdam, at the harbour, in the churchyards, he saw that exhausted French-speaking crowd. And he wrote a letter.

Under its Latin title Epistola de Tolerantia — in English, A Letter Concerning Toleration — it was printed in 1689 without the author's name on it. Locke's real move in that text was not, as many assume, to say that people should be nicer to one another. He said something far colder and far more destructive: force simply does not work in matters of religion, as a technical matter. Because the state has prison at its disposal, it has fines, it has exile, it has the sword; all of these change behaviour. But faith does not reside in behaviour, it resides in the inner conviction of the mind. You can make a person say any sentence you like under torture; you cannot make him believe that sentence. Religious coercion is therefore not only cruel but futile. In this domain, the state cannot by its very structure reach the end it wants with the instrument it has picked up.

This was a very powerful argument, one that tied tolerance not to compassion but to reason. And as soon as Locke had built it, he marked out its limits with his own hand. Towards the end of the letter he lists a few exceptions. Those who do not believe in God cannot be tolerated, he says, because in his view the binding force of an oath rests on a divine sanction, and society cannot trust the word of a man who does not recognise it. Another exception covers those who have given their allegiance to the political authority of another country; here Locke has in mind, indirectly, the Catholics of his own day, and as an explicit example he mentions a Muslim whom he takes to be bound in obedience to the mufti at Constantinople, as he puts it. Neither of these exceptions has anything to be said for it to modern eyes; both are far too heavily loaded with the political fears of the period. But the third exception is of an altogether different kind, and it is strikingly modern. Locke says that a doctrine which refuses to grant toleration to others has no right to demand toleration for itself.

Look at where that sentence sits: inside the founding text of tolerance, placed there as tolerance's own limit. Which means the answer to our question comes out of the hand of the first man to ask it seriously, as a marginal note, as early as the seventeenth century. Tolerance is conceived here not as a one-sided gift but as a mutual agreement. Everyone who sits down at the table promises to protect the table itself.

About 170 years later, in 1859, John Stuart Mill took up the same question, this time by way of thought and speech rather than religion. The criterion he set out in his book On Liberty is still at the centre of the argument today: society acquires the right to interfere with a person's action only when that action harms others. Harming oneself is not, on its own, sufficient grounds. And when it comes to speech, Mill cuts this principle at a subtle point. The famous example in the book is this: the opinion that corn dealers starve the poor is protected when it is written in a newspaper, because there it is a claim and can be argued with. The same sentence, shouted in front of an angry crowd gathered at the corn dealer's door with torches in hand, is no longer an opinion; it is the fuse of an action.

Mill's line falls in a very important place. The line lies not in the content of the idea but in what the speech does. How much you dislike a thought can never be grounds for banning it. But if a piece of speech has left the realm of argument and entered directly into the mechanics of a harm, it has stepped outside what is protected. Put Locke's criterion of reciprocity next to Mill's criterion of harm and you have a rough but workable scale: every idea that agrees to stay at the table is protected; the hand that moves to overturn the table is not.

This debate is often told as something Europe invented in the seventeenth century. But the experience of living together is much older than that, and part of that experience belongs to this part of the world.

One of the shortest chapters of the Qur'an, the surah al-Kafirun, closes with a final sentence of refusal and of separation: lakum dinukum wa liya din. To you your religion, and to me mine. The tone of that sentence is remarkable. It does not propose a compromise, a common ground, a synthesis; on the contrary, it accepts the difference in all its sharpness, and precisely from there it draws out the possibility of living side by side. Elsewhere in the same text, in verse 256 of the surah al-Baqarah, there is a more direct statement: there is no compulsion in religion.

What that verse means has been one of the subjects of debate in Islamic thought for centuries. But from the standpoint of Turkish intellectual history, an important line of interpretation runs through Abu Mansur al-Maturidi, who lived in Samarkand and died in 944. Maturidi's view of faith can be summarised like this: faith is the assent of the heart. The answer to the question of where it is located is therefore not what the tongue says or what the body does. The political consequence of that theological point is immediate: an assent obtained by the sword is not faith, because the sword cannot reach the place where faith resides. The argument Locke built in the seventeenth century by saying coercion is futile had a very close relative built in the tenth century in Transoxiana, inside a completely different language and a completely different set of concerns.

Alongside the idea there is also a practice. Under the order established by Ottoman administration after 1453, different religious communities lived with their own internal law, their own courts, their own schools. In 1454 Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror re-established the Greek Orthodox patriarchate in Istanbul and granted the patriarch broad authority over his community. In 1463, in Bosnia, in the charter he issued to the Franciscan friars, he had it written that their churches would not be touched and that the friars would be free to come and go. For centuries, during a period when Europe was tearing itself apart in religious wars, this order kept multilingual and multireligious crowds in the same cities.

But it would be wrong to describe that experience as something other than what it was. This order was not equality; it was hierarchy. Non-Muslim subjects paid the cizye, the poll tax; their testimony in court was weighed differently; they lived under a series of restrictions ranging from dress to the permitted height of a building. Legal equality was not even set out as a goal until the Reform Edict of 1856. What existed here, in other words, was not equal citizenship in the modern sense but the administration of difference. In the well-known lines attributed to Yunus Emre, it is said that whoever does not look upon the 72 nations with the same eye is, even if he is a learned teacher, in truth a rebel against the divine; that is the high standard of a mystical ethic, not the description of a legal order.

And here is the truly interesting point: this order, too, had a very clear line. A different faith, a different language, a different form of worship were all permitted. The one thing that was not permitted was raising a hand against the order itself. Rebellion fell outside the frame, and the penalty for it was heavy. Which is to say that no arrangement for living together that we meet in history has ever been unlimited. Every one of them has a threshold. Locke's threshold was reciprocity, Mill's threshold was harm, the Ottoman threshold was the order itself. The question has never been whether there should be a limit. The question is always this: where will the line be drawn, and who will draw it?

The man who asked that question with its full weight was an Austrian philosopher who had fled Europe in the middle of a world war and was teaching in New Zealand. In a note to the seventh chapter of his book The Open Society and Its Enemies, published in 1945, Karl Popper wrote the most quoted paragraph anyone has written on the subject. Unlimited tolerance, he says, leads to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend it without limit even to those who are intolerant of tolerance, we end up unable to defend the tolerant society and, along with it, tolerance itself; we will have allowed it to be destroyed.

Popper was not saying this in a vacuum. Right in front of his eyes was the wreckage left by a movement that had come to power using every freedom a constitution granted it, and that had abolished that constitution the moment it arrived. For him the paradox of tolerance was not an academic puzzle but a description of what had just been lived through.

But most of the people who quote Popper skip the rest of that same note, and the whole subtlety is in the rest of it. Popper writes explicitly that it does not follow from this that we should always suppress the expression of intolerant philosophies. So long as we can meet them with rational argument and keep them in check through public opinion, he says, suppression would be most unwise. The case in which we reserve the right is a much narrower one: if the other side refuses to meet us at the level of reason, if it forbids all argument from the outset, if it teaches its own followers to answer arguments not with arguments but with fists and with guns, then the situation changes. Popper's criterion, in other words, is not the content of the idea but whether the idea accepts entering into argument at all. It is looking, remarkably, at the same place as Locke's reciprocity and Mill's line of harm.

In 1971, in A Theory of Justice, John Rawls took up the same problem in colder legal language and arrived somewhere similar: a tolerant community should not give up tolerating the intolerant unless it sincerely and with reason believes that its own security is genuinely in danger. The qualifiers there — genuinely, and with reason — are the words carrying all the weight.

This idea also has an institutional counterpart, and it is called militant democracy. The term was coined in 1937 by the jurist Karl Loewenstein, himself another German refugee: democracy must possess legal instruments with which to defend itself against those who want to destroy it. After the war this thought went directly into constitutional text. Article 21 of the German Basic Law states that parties which, by their aims, seek to abolish the free democratic basic order are unconstitutional, and it leaves the power to make that ruling in one place only: the Constitutional Court. That power has in fact been used twice: a far-right party was banned in 1952, and the communist party in 1956.

The most instructive case, though, is the one that was not banned. In 2017 the same court rejected an application to ban a far-right party. The reasoning was not that it found the party's aims innocent; the court stated plainly that those aims were incompatible with the constitutional order. The reason for the rejection was this: the party had no potential to achieve them. The danger, in other words, did not carry enough weight to bring the institutions down. That ruling is almost a word-for-word application of the sentence of Popper's that everybody skips. We are tolerating the intolerant, because we can deal with them by arguing and at the ballot box.

And here we arrive at the most dangerous link in the whole chain. The very power offered as the solution to the paradox is also the power most open to abuse. Because every government is structurally inclined to describe the opposition in front of it as people who want to destroy the order. In the hands of someone who picks up this justification, the paradox of tolerance turns very easily into a pretext for abolishing tolerance. That is exactly why the criterion has to be procedural rather than emotional. "I find this idea dangerous" is not a criterion; anyone can say that about any idea. The criterion must be concrete and open to outside scrutiny: is there a call to violence, is there a programme for abolishing elections, is there a declaration that the courts will not be recognised, is there an aim of placing the other side's existence outside the protection of law? When it is not kept this narrow, a democracy defending itself and an authority that merely says it is defending itself become impossible to tell apart.

And where all of this seems very remote, the same matter comes to us in its everyday form. A social media platform deciding which content to remove, a university arguing about whom to invite as a speaker, a parents' meeting at a school boiling over; the same structure is present in all of them. And in all of them there is the risk of falling into one of the same two errors: either putting up with everything and letting the table be overturned, or declaring everything we cannot put up with to be "intolerant anyway" and shrinking the table with our own hands.

If we go back to the residents' meeting we started with, the answer this tradition gives is not "be patient" and not "silence him". The answer is closer to this: tolerance is not a feeling, it is a contract. There is only one condition for sitting at the table, and that is recognising the table. Finding your neighbour's opinion ugly is not enough to throw him out; arguing with him, trying to persuade him, outvoting him — that is what these are for. But if that opinion aims to abolish other people's right to be at the table, and if it has moved to do so not through argument but through actual force, then it is not we who are withdrawing tolerance. The one leaving the table is the side that refuses to recognise it.

This is not a comforting answer. Because we have to judge where that line falls each time anew, inside the concrete case, with no exact ruler in our hands; and every judgement carries a margin of error. Perhaps that is the real legacy of tolerance: it gives us no peace of mind, it gives us a duty. The duty of continuing not to resemble the thing we are defending ourselves against while we defend ourselves. And the duty of building institutions, building courts, writing procedures, so that the authority to draw that line is not left in the hands of whoever would most like to abuse it. For as long as tolerance remains the virtue of well-meaning people, it is fragile; it only comes to mean something when it is turned into rules that will stand up even in the hands of people who mean harm.

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