In America, everybody agrees tolerance is a virtue, right?
We may quibble over tolerance for a few ideas or groups, but on the whole, we all believe
the American ideal is that, despite our potentially vehement differences of opinion, we can still
live with each other and get along.
Not so fast.
In the past few years, radical groups – most famously Antifa – have explicitly opposed
the right of free speech for speakers and groups who are even slightly right-of-center.
Publications as big as the New York Times have published op-eds arguing that disagreeable
speech can be violence and thus needs to be prevented.
In October 2017, 58% of Americans told pollsters for the Cato Institute that they believe the
political climate prevents them from saying things they believe.
And according to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, no less than 178 educational
institutions, or 39.6% of higher learning, maintained speech codes that substantially
prohibit constitutionally protected speech.
How did we get here?
While the popularity of such anti-free speech attitudes in America is new, the philosophical
groundwork was laid decades ago.
Meet Herbert Marcuse, an influential philosopher now taught widely in colleges.
He wrote, “under the conditions prevailing in this country, tolerance does not, and cannot,
fulfill the civilizing function attributed to it by the liberal protagonists of democracy.”
Marcuse was one of the leading thinkers of the Frankfurt School, a neo-Marxist school
of social theory and philosophy known best as the source of “critical theory” – an
intellectual tradition that sees the purpose of theory as not only to better understand
the world but to “liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them.”
For these Marxists, that means liberating humans from the economic hierarchy of rich
and poor, but it also means liberating people from cultural hierarchies, such as those related
to race, sex, or other areas where they see imbalances of power between groups. In 1965
Marcuse wrote an essay entitled, “Repressive Tolerance.”
In it, he argues that so long as a society has “institutionalized inequality,” which
he defined as any “class structure” at all, then “the conditions of tolerance are
‘loaded,’” which makes tolerance a weapon that those who are “privileged” wield
to keep their oppressive views in power.
So Marcuse supports tolerance towards “radical extremes, minorities, subversives, etc.”
but opposes tolerance “toward majorities, toward official and public opinion, toward
the established protectors of freedom.”
For him, the purpose of toleration is not to let people discuss ideas and discover objective
truth; but for him objective truth is predetermined: it’s Marxist doctrine.
So if toleration is used to permit any other views, “its rationale no longer prevails.”
He argues “society cannot be indiscriminate… where freedom and happiness themselves are
at stake: here certain things cannot be said, certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain
policies cannot be proposed, certain behavior cannot be permitted without making tolerance
an instrument for the continuation of servitude.”
Marcuse made clear he thought lots of ideas should be suppressed.
He opposed the “toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote
aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and
religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical
care, etc.”
So even basic ideas like the notion the free market may help people better than government
programs ought to be prohibited in Marcuse’s view.
And this speech and assembly is to be taken away as early as possible “at the stage
of communication in word, print, and picture.”
Of course, it’s hard for smaller, less powerful groups to achieve the goal of removing free
speech rights from a majority of persons.
So Marcuse supports the traditional Marxist plan: “large-scale pressure which would
amount to an upheaval,” aka, revolution.
Until that’s achieved, he supports the now traditional “resistance at particular occasions”
and “a policy of unequal treatment [that] would protect radicalism on the Left against
that on the Right, ” which is the Antifa view we now see on campus.
We’re lucky it’s unlikely Marcuse will win in the court of public opinion, or violent
anti-free speech activists will win in actual courts.
But his intolerant ideas remain powerful in certain segments of society, such as academia,
where Marcuse is well-read and Marxism remains an acceptable ideology.
If we aren’t vigilant, Marcuse’s intolerance will continue to spread.
I’m Joseph Klein, thanks for watching.