Repressive Tolerance
The visit to the NY Tolerance Center yesterday and the escalating subway searches here, have me thinking about the relationship between tolerance, fascism and civil liberties.
In 1965, Herbert Marcuse wrote an essay called "Repressive Tolerance." I really like this bit:
Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left. As to the scope of this tolerance and intolerance: . . . it would extend to the stage of action as well as of discussion and propaganda, of deed as well as of word. The traditional criterion of clear and present danger seems no longer adequate to a stage where the whole society is in the situation of the theater audience when somebody cries: “fire.” It is a situation in which the total catastrophy could be triggered off any moment, not only by a technical error, but also by a rational miscalculation of risks, or by a rash speech of one of the leaders. In past and different circumstances, the speeches of the Fascist and Nazi leaders were the immediate prologue to the massacre. The distance between the propaganda and the action, between the organization and its release on the people had become too short. But the spreading of the word could have been stopped before it was too late: if democratic tolerance had been withdrawn when the future leaders started their campaign, mankind would have had a chance of avoiding Auschwitz and a World War.
There is a way in which "tolerance" as some sort of content-free concept, set apart from any sort of socio-political context becomes, like patriotism, the last refuge of scoundrels. I think that an understanding of "tolerance" that equates the terrorist acts of 9/11, which were attacks against a super power with attacks against minority group members, falls into what a misuse of the very notion of tolerance and becomes, what Marcuse terms, repressive tolerance, a perversion of tolerance:
The conditions under which tolerance can again become a liberating and humanizing force have still to be created. When tolerance mainly serves the protection and preservation of a repressive society, when it serves to neutralize opposition and to render men [sic] immune against other and better forms of life, then tolerance has been perverted.
True in 1965, still true in 2005.
In 1965, Herbert Marcuse wrote an essay called "Repressive Tolerance." I really like this bit:
Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left. As to the scope of this tolerance and intolerance: . . . it would extend to the stage of action as well as of discussion and propaganda, of deed as well as of word. The traditional criterion of clear and present danger seems no longer adequate to a stage where the whole society is in the situation of the theater audience when somebody cries: “fire.” It is a situation in which the total catastrophy could be triggered off any moment, not only by a technical error, but also by a rational miscalculation of risks, or by a rash speech of one of the leaders. In past and different circumstances, the speeches of the Fascist and Nazi leaders were the immediate prologue to the massacre. The distance between the propaganda and the action, between the organization and its release on the people had become too short. But the spreading of the word could have been stopped before it was too late: if democratic tolerance had been withdrawn when the future leaders started their campaign, mankind would have had a chance of avoiding Auschwitz and a World War.
There is a way in which "tolerance" as some sort of content-free concept, set apart from any sort of socio-political context becomes, like patriotism, the last refuge of scoundrels. I think that an understanding of "tolerance" that equates the terrorist acts of 9/11, which were attacks against a super power with attacks against minority group members, falls into what a misuse of the very notion of tolerance and becomes, what Marcuse terms, repressive tolerance, a perversion of tolerance:
The conditions under which tolerance can again become a liberating and humanizing force have still to be created. When tolerance mainly serves the protection and preservation of a repressive society, when it serves to neutralize opposition and to render men [sic] immune against other and better forms of life, then tolerance has been perverted.
True in 1965, still true in 2005.
posted by Jessie Daniels at
9:19 AM
