As Provost, Prof. James holds one of the university’s most senior positions. That made it all the more troubling to see how weak a grasp she has on the concept of free speech, something universities are required to uphold in the Education and Training Act.  

Prof. James’ piece is a series of reflections on Victoria’s panel discussion on free speech, which was held last year. ‘This event,’ she correctly says, ‘stirred strong feelings.’ But she then goes on to describe the event and the response to it in terms that can generously be described as misleading.  

Prof. James summarizes the response to Victoria’ free speech event as follows (to use her punctuation):  

What surfaced, from one direction, was genuine anxiety about amplifying views that might cause harm.  What this provoked from the other direction was, at best, a mischievous and provocative misinterpretation of the word “postponed” (swapping it for that most charged of words; “cancelled”).  At worst it was vitriolic petulance, best summed up in the quote, by one of the parties; “Good news, kids. It’s OK; words aren’t violence.”  

How Prof. James knows how genuine the anxiety about certain people’s views was is not clear. It is worth noticing, though, that many of the claims that student activists made about how worried people were about speech strained credulity.   

A few students, for example, were described as ‘freaking out’ over ‘right-wing voices,’ those voices apparently belonging to Free Speech Union director Jonathan Ayling and one of us (Michael), neither of whom are especially right-wing. VUWSA President Marcail Parkinson, for her part, said she was concerned that students would not have been able to ‘avoid that area’ – that is, the Kelburn campus’ central ‘Hub’ – ‘if they didn’t feel comfortable being around the debate.’   

But it seems hard to believe that anyone would be seriously discomfited by Ayling or Michael’s speech. Ayling spent three years at Vic, and Michael spent a decade there, both fairly recently. In neither case have there been reports of serious trauma being caused by their speech.   

Prof. James asserts that this ‘genuine anxiety’ provoked ‘at best, a mischievous and provocative misinterpretation of the word “postponed” (swapping it for that most charged of words; “cancelled”).’   

‘Postponed,’ of course, usually implies that the event is question has remained basically the same, but has simply been shifted to a different date. That is obviously not what happened in the case of Victoria University’s ‘free speech’ event. The original event was going to feature four speakers and be held in the Hub, a public area at the heart of Victoria’s Kelburn campus. The event that actually took place featured eight speakers and was held in a lecture theatre. It also had a changed format that ensured there was no exchange of arguments among the panellists. Most reasonable people would agree that saying that the original event was ‘cancelled’ would be perfectly fair.   

It is also not true to describe the response to the cancellation of the first event as ‘at best…mischievous and provocative.’ Sean Plunket invited VUWSA President Marcail Parkinson onto The Platform to discuss the cancellation. Jonathan Ayling was able to remind VUW leadership via the The Post that universities have an obligation to ‘allow for ideas to be thoroughly tested and for robust debate to occur.’ And Michael was able to make a number of important points about Victoria University, free speech and diversity, both in The Post and in an episode of our Free Kiwis! podcast.  

Finally, Prof. James describes a social media post by the Free Speech Union stating that ‘words aren’t violence’ as ‘vitriolic petulance.’ If the Provost of Victoria University views a simple statement of fact as ‘vitriolic petulance,’ what does that suggest about the climate for free speech there? At the very least, Prof. James’ reaction should remind us that what New Zealand academics describe as ‘harmful’ or ‘violent’ speech is often simply speech that they disagree with.

Prof. James goes on in her piece to reflect on the way ‘the internet has provided incredible ease of connection, and simultaneously created communication cul-de-sacs, that trap people in isolated cliques and sycophantic claques.’ She notes that free speech is protected in the UN Declaration of Human Rights alongside freedom of thought, and interestingly takes from this an ‘encouragement to pause before we express our opinions.’ And she reflects on how her ‘privilege is being in the white majority’ and in ‘revelling in robust argument,’ something she somewhat unexpectedly characterizes as ‘my approach to debate.’  

Prof. James ends her article with ‘a last word on words’ that deserves to be quoted in full:  

when I was walking to work a few mornings ago a pile of leaves was swirling down the curb and my mind said, “there is the wind”. The wind, though, was all around, strong and invisible and shaping the way I leaned into is as I walked.  We choose to notice some words, the lively, swirling ones; or the ones that blow stinging dust into our eyes.  We need to remember to notice all the other words; that have shaped our environment, our thoughts, and twisted some of us into beautiful, windswept oddities.  

This kind of lyricism is obviously something that recipients of Oko are free to spend some portion of their mornings on if they feel so inclined. But there are at least two things about James’ ‘thing about words’ that we found quite disturbing.  

The first is that this is an article sent to all academic staff by a very senior administrator (i.e. boss) at one of our leading universities. It is on the freedom of speech, the keystone principle of both liberalism and democracy, and a topic on which there is (understandably) an enormous literature in fields such as political theory, the philosophy of law, and intellectual history. Obviously, a full panoply of footnotes and scholarly references wouldn’t have been appropriate in an op-ed in a staff newsletter. But some indication that James wasn’t thinking about this most important of topics for the first time might have been reassuring.  

This is especially the case in view of the fact that we have been having a debate about free speech and academic freedom across the English-speaking world for at least a decade now (though admittedly this debate has tended to be more lively outside the academy than inside it, for obvious reasons).   

We have tried to contribute to this debate ourselves, most substantively in the report we released with the New Zealand Initiative last year. In it, we presented a number of surveys of academics and students, a selection of anonymous testimonies from academics, and a catalogue of incidents involving academic freedom that have taken place on our campuses over the past decade.   

Prof. James doesn’t have to cite our work. But the fact that she seems to feel no need to even mention any of the now overwhelming evidence that we have a problem with free speech at New Zealand universities is interesting, to say the least. ‘Can the modern University be the place where robust, relevant debate can happen?’ she asks, before immediately answering her own question, astonishingly blithely, ‘We already are!’   

It is of course true that a lot of ‘robust, relevant’ debate does take place at our universities. But it is also true (as several different surveys have now shown) that substantial numbers of academics and students feel uncomfortable discussing a few crucial topics, including the Treaty of Waitangi and the nature of sex and gender.   

Prof. James’ column appeared at just the right time, as the government was preparing its revisions to the Education and Training Act, revisions that will include enhanced protections for academic freedom. Draft legislation has now been released.   

What Prof. James’ column shows, yet again, is that New Zealand universities cannot be trusted to uphold their statutory or ethical obligations to academic freedom and the freedom of speech. Senior administrators either do not understand free speech, actively dislike it, or are not willing to openly defend it, and the same can be said for a good proportion of New Zealand’s academics. As Prof. James’ piece reminds us, they are often not even willing to educate themselves on the issue or to engage with the now plentiful evidence that academic freedom in under threat in an honest way.  

So make no mistake: senior administrators at our universities have neither the wit nor the wherewithal to restore genuine academic freedom themselves. It is vital not only the academic freedom legislation that is currently before the house passes, but also that it has teeth, and doesn’t naively trust our largely anti-free speech university managers to police themselves.

The post Another high-ranking Victoria University of Wellington administrator doesn’t understand free speech   appeared first on Open Inquiry.

This is our reply to Nic Smith:

In a column that appeared in The Post on 23 February, Victoria University of Wellington Vice-Chancellor Nic Smith criticizes the coalition’s commitment to have universities adopt a free speech policy.  

Smith notes that ACT Party leader David Seymour ‘has previously criticised universities for declining to host certain speakers and argued the institutions should lose funding if they don’t “protect free speech.”’ The vice-chancellor then states that ‘one inference of all this is that anyone who wants to speak on campus should be able to do so.’  

But it wouldn’t actually be valid to infer from Seymour’s criticisms of recent deplatformings at New Zealand universities that he thinks that ‘anyone who wants to speak on campus should be able to do so.’  

You can, of course, think that Vice-Chancellor Jan Thomas was wrong to prevent Don Brash from speaking to a student politics club in August 2018 (for example) and at the same time recognize that random people can’t simply turn up at a university without an invitation and expect to get a hearing.

Smith has set up a classic straw man. Unfortunately for him, it’s a straw man that he addresses the rest of his column to. ‘While it may seem antithetical to some,’ he declares, ‘I do not agree that universities platforming all-comers will help.’ But it’s not clear who exactly has been proposing this.

The vice-chancellor goes on, though, warning that ‘an all-comers approach will actually reduce our capacity to expose relevant truths and understand the world in new ways,’ and that ‘everybody having a platform will diminish our capacity for people to talk respectfully together about difficult topics and discuss conflicting ideas.’

It might well be the case that allowing absolutely anyone to speak on campus would make debating ideas on campus more difficult – even if the vice-chancellor doesn’t advance any actual arguments for that proposition.  

But again, we haven’t heard anyone insisting on an ‘all-comers approach’ to academic freedom in this country over the past few years.

What we are aware of is anger over episodes such as the de-platforming of Brash, the cancellation of the Feminism 2020 event (also at Massey), and the deplatforming of gender-critical feminist Daphna Whitmore at Auckland University of Technology (AUT) in 2022.  

Smith doesn’t mention any of these cases though. Perhaps that’s because they make clear that the problem we have isn’t with ‘all-comers’ making debate on campus impossible. It’s with people with widely held views being prevented from debating certain issues.  

It is true, of course, that certain types of speech aren’t usually covered even by the strongest free speech laws. In US First Amendment law, for example, drowning out a speaker with heckling is usually considered a violation of the speaker’s rights.

So have the likes of Brash and gender-critical feminists been drowning out speakers at our universities with heckling?  If so, Smith might have some evidence for his fears about on-campus debate being limited by invited speakers.  

In fact, of course, it is the likes of Brash who tend to be heckled. When the former National Party leader was eventually allowed to speak at the University of Auckland in September 2018, NewsHub reported that the event ‘was marred by ugly scenes…with protesters immediately heckling him over a megaphone as he attempted to take part in the debate.’

When British gender-critical women’s activist Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull tried to speak in Auckland last year, she was surrounded by a crowd that jeered and shoved her, had tomato juice poured on her head, and eventually had to escape from the area with a police escort. That event wasn’t on a university campus, but it’s hard to imagine things would have gone differently if it had been.

And when seven Auckland academics sent a letter to The Listener magazine in 2021 politely expressing doubts about inserting mātauranga Māori in the science curriculum, two faced an investigation by the Royal Society, one was forced to resign from his administrative position, and another was temporarily removed from teaching.

It should come as no surprise that when Heterodox New Zealand (a group of dissident academics) and the Free Speech Union have conducted surveys of undergraduates and academics over the past couple of years, they found that substantial numbers of responding academics didn’t feel comfortable discussing hot-button topics like the Treaty of Waitangi and gender.  

Why doesn’t Smith address any of this? It probably isn’t because Smith (who made his academic reputation making computer models of the heart) simply doesn’t understand the issues. Could it be that the vice-chancellor, like a lot of people at universities these days, feels intimidated?

You might think that the vice-chancellor, who was paid $368,750 by the taxpayer-funded institution last year, should simply bite the bullet and risk offending a small number of bolshie students and staff. The Education Act does, after all, require universities to uphold academic freedom, and Smith is effectively Vic’s CEO. That even Smith doesn’t dare address the real problem speaks volumes about the situation that our universities now find themselves in.

It also speaks to the need for the kind of legislation that the coalition aims to introduce – and, in fact, for more robust measures as well.

 Just as in medieval universities, plenty of good work gets done, and most university workers aren’t particularly zealous. But there are limits on what you can and can’t discuss, and over time this has significantly distorted the university’s core purpose.

If this government stops at simply asking universities to commit to a free speech policy and leaves them to police themselves, managers like Smith will simply carry on posing as defenders of free speech while caving in to zealots at every turn. With few left on campus who are willing to oppose the zealots, why wouldn’t the managers act in this way?

What we need, in addition, is an academic freedom bill of the sort that has been successfully introduced in the UK. This enables staff and students whose rights have been breached to seek legal redress. It also sets up a ‘free speech czar’ (currently Dr. Arif Ahmed) who can make sure that universities are doing the job that they are paid to do – providing a genuinely open space for learning and investigation.

Cover photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

The post The problem with the vice-chancellor’s ‘free speech’ column appeared first on Open Inquiry.

Over the past few years, a cartoon has been doing the rounds on social media. It depicts the philosopher Karl Popper laying out his ‘paradox of tolerance.’ The cartoon is based on a long endnote in Popper’s great work The Open Society and its Enemies (which was written in New Zealand), and on this paragraph in particular:

Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal (OS I, 265).

For the most part the text of the cartoon simply paraphrases sections of this paragraph (Popper’s ‘we should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law’ becomes ‘any movement that preaches intolerance and persecution must be outside the law,’ for example). But it also leaves out two sentences (running from ‘In this formulation’ to ‘fists or pistols’), which suggest that the intolerant should be suppressed only when they resort to violence rather than argument. Though this has been widely pointed out, Popper continues to be cited (including in this country) in support of the view that we should clamp down on intolerance even when it stops short of violence. 

Popper’s cartoon has taken on something of a life of its own on the internet, with counter-cartoons replacing Nazis with Islamists, anti-capitalists, or even Chinese communists. But the many blog posts and think-pieces that purport to show what Popper really thought about tolerance and intolerance rarely look beyond the paragraph we’ve quoted above, and almost never venture beyond the first volume of The Open Society and its Enemies. 

In this piece, we draw on a wider range of Popper’s writings, including personal letters, to shed more light on what the philosopher’s views on toleration actually were. As we shall see, Popper’s views on this topic hardly constitute a fully thought-out theory. Where exactly we should set the limits of toleration in speech and action is still very much a question that citizens of contemporary societies will have to answer for themselves. At the same time, Popper’s thinking about tolerance does offer some guidance about where we should draw the lines around toleration. 

What did Popper actually say about tolerance?

Much of what Popper had to say about tolerance was written simply in support of toleration in general, as a feature of the ‘open societies’ he wished to promote. On the most general level, Popper saw tolerance as a necessary condition for the kind of pluralism that any liberal society would have to accommodate. As he put it in a 1945 letter to the Australian neurophysiologist John Eccles, ‘We must build a world in which different creeds, different religious and different moral creeds, must be able to live together in peace’; to this end, ‘a common denominator’ was needed ‘such as tolerance of everybody who is prepared to tolerate’. ‘Democracy will tolerate everyone except the intolerant,’ the University of Canterbury student magazine CANTA reported ‘Dr. Popper’ as saying, as ‘the right to be different is of fundamental importance.’ By the same token, open societies should ‘avoid imposing any particular social philosophy on people’ and ‘give people a chance to choose’ between different values.

Popper sometimes saw tolerance as something that flowed naturally from a recognition of our fallibility as human beings. Popper was fond of quoting the first line of Voltaire’s entry on tolerance in his Philosophical Dictionary (1764), which runs (to use Popper’s own translation), ‘What is tolerance? It is a necessary consequence of our humanity. We are all fallible, and prone to error. Let us then pardon each other’s follies’ (CR, 8; ATOS, 314).

Unsurprisingly, Popper often linked this general human quality of fallibility with his more specific theory of fallibilism, which emphasized the uncertainty of even our best knowledge and the importance of being open to different views – while also leaving all views open to criticism. Rationalism, he writes in the second volume of The Open Society, ‘is bound up with the idea that everybody is liable to make mistakes’ and therefore ‘with the idea that the other fellow has a right to be heard’; it thus implies ‘the recognition of the claim to tolerance, at least of all those who are not intolerant themselves’ (OS II, 238). A more concise formulation of this view can be found in a 1973 letter: ‘This fallibilism’ (that is, scientific or rational fallibilism) ‘has important moral consequences; tolerance is one of them’.

If toleration, for Popper, goes hand in hand with a scientific mindset, it is also an enemy to (and perhaps an antidote for) any notion that one’s ideas are specially favoured, either by the ‘historical inevitability’ of a particular worldview; or, indeed, by divine sanction. Popper warned against simply dismissing certain views as ‘outdated,’ a term that, as he told the humanist Paul Kurtz in a 1973 letter, he viewed as itself outdated. And in a 1981 letter to a Professor Stubbins he condemned Luther’s 1525 On the Bondage of the Will as ‘essentially directed against toleration, against non-violence and peace, and for the implied thesis that he is God’s instrument – that his words are The Word of God.’

This kind of millenarian certainty aside, Popper saw religious views as entitled to a certain level of toleration. ‘We must be tolerant,’ as he put it in a 1971 letter to the French biochemist Jacques Monod, ‘even towards what we regard as a basically dangerous lie.’ ‘And we should be seriously tolerant,’ he added in a 1980 letter to Kurtz, ‘of anyone who honestly expresses religious views.’ Indeed, he had written to Kurtz in his earlier letter, ‘we should not only declare but show our own tolerance towards tolerant religion and tolerant ideologies.’ 

Popper stressed that critical rationalists in particular should try to practice this kind of religious tolerance. He agreed with Paul Kurtz and Edwin H. Wilson’s second Humanist Manifesto (1973), he wrote them, that ‘we must not become dogmatic and churchlike ourselves.’ In a 1946 essay he wrote that, ‘a tolerant society must tolerate…irrationalism, as long as it is not an aggressively intolerant brand of irrationalism’ (ATOS, 136). And in another essay written two years later, Popper reasoned that while a ‘strongly emotional intolerance’ seemed to be ‘characteristic of all traditionalism,’ what critical rationalists should seek to do was to ‘replace the intolerance of the traditionalists with a new tradition – the tradition of tolerance’ (CR, 132).

Can democracy tolerate the intolerant?

What did Popper mean by ‘democracy will tolerate everyone except the intolerant’ and other variations on the ‘paradox of tolerance’? One clue is provided in a sentence we’ve just quoted, where Popper states that we should tolerate all irrationalism that isn’t ‘aggressively intolerant’ (our emphasis).  In a 1963 lecture on ‘The Open Society and the Democratic State,’ Popper spoke about people ‘who preach intolerance and who, at the same time, accuse the tolerant of hypocrisy, because they’ – the tolerant – ‘are not prepared to tolerate every aggressive form of intolerance’ (ATOS, 240).  Note the importance of aggression, something that Popper underlined in his 1973 letter to Kurtz: ‘we must not behave aggressively towards views and towards people who have other views than we have,’ he wrote, ‘provided that they are not aggressive.’

It’s not completely clear what Popper means by ‘aggression’ here – does the ‘they’ in that last phrase refer to people or to views? – but the fact Popper says that we must not behave aggressively makes it likely that what he had in mind wasn’t simply an aggressive argument or tone of voice, but aggressive actions – that is, something close to, or even identical with, coercion or violence. 

Other evidence points towards the conclusion that Popper’s main worry was coercive violence. Popper often said something to the effect that we should recognize ‘the claim to tolerance, at least of all those who are not intolerant themselves’. There’s an appeal to reciprocity here, an appeal that Popper occasionally made more explicit. ‘Voltaire saw very clearly,’ Popper wrote in his 1981 essay ‘On Toleration,’ that ‘toleration must be mutual: that it is based on reciprocity’ (ATOS, 314).  In his 1963 lecture ‘The Open Society and the Democratic State,’ Popper reiterated that ‘there can be no obligation upon the tolerant to tolerate the intolerant,’ and added that he had in mind ‘those who do not reciprocate’ (ATOS, 239).  

But what did not reciprocating tolerance look like exactly? In ‘On Toleration,’ Popper spoke of minorities ‘who are unwilling to reciprocate the tolerance offered to them by the majority: minorities who accept a principle of intolerance; who accept a theory of the necessity of violence and who may even act violently.’ Later in the same essay he wrote that ‘toleration can only exist on a basis of mutuality,’ and that ‘our duty to tolerate such a minority ends when the minority begins to act violently’ (ATOS, 315).  In ‘The Open Society and the Democratic State,’ he argued that ‘though we should guarantee freedom of opinion to all those who are prepared to reciprocate, we must not include in this guarantee those who seriously propagate intolerance or violence’ – and here ‘or violence’ seems less to present an alternative than to explain what he means by ‘intolerance.’ Something similar seems to be going on in ‘On Toleration’ when he speaks of ‘intolerant ideologies: ideologies that entail the principle that all who dissent from them must be suppressed by force’ (ATOS, 313). 

In ‘On Toleration’ Popper does also write that ‘our exaggerated fear that we who are for toleration might ourselves become intolerant has led to the mistaken and dangerous attitude that we must tolerate everything, perhaps even acts of violence; but certainly anything that falls short of an act of violence’ (ATOS, 314). Does this imply some skepticism about the idea that everything short of violence should be tolerated? 

In our view, Popper probably means that movements that make very credible threats of violence might also be criminalized, even if they have not yet committed ‘an act of violence’ (and here we might recall of his mention, in ‘On Toleration,’ of minorities ‘who may even act violently,’ and his warning that our duty to tolerance ends ‘when the minority begins to actviolently’ – our emphasis; ATOS, 315). Later on in ‘On Toleration,’ Popper says that ‘we need not tolerate even the threat of intolerance; and we must not tolerate it if the threat is getting serious’ (ATOS, 315) – by which he seems to mean intolerance that has become violent, or clearly threatens to.

This focus on violence as the key criterion for reciprocal intolerance on the part of the state is something that Popper reiterates on a number of occasions, especially in his paper on the open society and the democratic state. He reiterates the point with some lively examples, starting with a story about tigers. ‘I once read a touching story of a community which lived in the Indian jungle, and which disappeared because of its belief in the holiness of life, including that of tigers,’ he told the essay’s original audience in Delhi. ‘Unfortunately the tigers did not reciprocate.’

Popper’s other example in this lecture was a more serious one: ‘the German republic before 1933 – the so-called Weimar Republic – tolerated Hitler; but Hitler did not reciprocate’ (ATOS, 239). If the cartoon we began this piece with gets one thing right, it was that Popper’s thinking about intolerance was profoundly marked by his experience as someone of Jewish origin (although raised as Lutheran) who escaped the looming shadow of Hitler in 1937.  

At the same time, Popper’s Open Society would be an excoriation of – and a warning against – both the great totalitarianisms of the twentieth century: Fascism and Communism. In a crucial passage in ‘On Toleration,’ Popper described the impact of both these movements on his thinking from his brief period as a young socialist on:

I shall never forget how often I heard it asserted, especially in 1918 and 1919, that ‘capitalism’ claims more victims of its violence on every single day than the whole social revolution will ever claim. And I shall never forget that I actually believed this myth for a number or weeks before I was 17 years old, and before I had seen some of the victims of the social revolution. This was an experience which made me for ever highly critical of all such claims, and of all excuses for using violence, from whatever side. I changed my mind somewhat when Goering, after the Nazis had come to power by a majority vote, declared that he would personally back any stormtrooper who was using violence against anybody even if he made a little mistake and got the wrong person. Then came the famous ‘Night of the Long Knives’ — which is what the Nazis called it in advance. This was the night when they used their long knives and their pistols and their rifles…After these events in Germany, I gave up my absolute commitment to non-violence: I realized that there was a limit to toleration (ATOS, 316).

Violence matters

Note again the focus on violence, with the Nazis’ ‘long knives and pistols and rifles’ here expanding on the ‘fists or pistols’ of the endnote in The Open Society. It is violence that finally made the young Popper recognize that there are limits to tolerance: not hurtful speech, not the rabid antisemitism of 1930s Vienna, and not even the overthrow of German (and Austrian) democracy. 

And in fact, even when Popper’s focus was primarily on democracy, it is still arguably violence that is, in the final analysis, his real concern. Earlier in the same essay, Popper talked about ‘a party that conspires – perhaps partly openly, or quite secretly – to abolish democracy’; ‘to such a party,’ he says, ‘we must not submit, even if it has gained a majority.’ As in the passage above, the reference is to the German elections of July 1932, in which the National Socialists had won a simple majority; but here Popper makes clear that his over-riding fear is that ‘the abolition of democracy will lead…to arbitrary action, and to violence’ (ATOS, 315).

Such fears accord with Popper’s theory of democracy, according to which democracy is simply the type of government ‘of which we can get rid without bloodshed’ (OS II, 124). The main point of democracy, in other words, is simply to enable us to change our government without violence. Similarly, the main point of toleration for Popper seems to have been to allow individuals to pursue their own interests and live their own lives without coercive interference.

But if practising toleration is a reciprocal affair (we should tolerate others who are willing to tolerate us in turn), so is policing its boundaries. This is why Popper, in the crucial autobiographical passage quoted above, tells us, in the same breath, that the Nazis’ violence led him both to give up his ‘absolute commitment to non-violence’ and to realize that there was ‘a limit to toleration.’ To spell out the implications of this in full, what Popper is saying is that a liberal democratic state is justified in using coercion against those who threaten it, or its citizens, with violence.

In a 2019 piece in The Dominion Post, journalist Will Harvie revisited the crucial footnote in The Open Society that we began with to argue that Popper wasn’t, in fact, concerned solely with violence – with those that resorted to ‘fists or pistols’ in response to arguments. Harvie emphasized the endnote’s final sentence, in which Popper says that ‘we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.’ Harvie concludes that ‘it’s not just violence’ that Popper would have banned; ‘it’s incitement.’

Harvie is clearly correct that Popper advocates criminalizing incitement to violence. But we should note that the three types of violence Popper mentions in this connection – murder, kidnapping, and slavery – are rather egregious ones. And we should also notice, once again, what Popper stops short of recommending. He doesn’t recommend a ban on speech that is grossly offensive, ‘harmful,’ or even that might constitute ‘group libel’ (the New Zealand legal philosopher Jeremy Waldron’s conception of ‘hate speech’). 

In fact, everything we know suggests Popper would have been strongly against this narrower view of the limits of toleration. He himself, remember, privately conceded to more zealous rationalists that religion might well be ‘a dangerous lie,’ and yet he repeatedly argued not only that we should tolerate religious views, but even that we should accord them a certain measure of respect. This makes it extremely unlikely that he would have endorsed the idea that certain opinions should be censored or ‘de-platformed’ for causing ‘hurt,’ ‘dismay’ or ‘harm’ (to use some terms that have been in frequent use in recent debates about free speech in this country). 

In fact, Popper wrote in a 1980 letter to Kurtz that even ‘those aspects of religions and other institutions, which openly subscribe to intolerance, are, perhaps, best fought by a respect for and tolerance of those aspects, which are not intolerant, even though we may not agree with their views or sympathise with their practices’. In other words, whenever possible, we should try to counter even clearly intolerant views by tolerance and reason. Popper tried to make this clear in the endnote on the ‘paradox of tolerance’ that we began with, when he cautioned that ‘in this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.’ In ‘On Toleration,’ Popper reiterated the point, writing that as long as intolerant groups ‘discuss and publish their theories as rational proposals, we should let them do so freely,’ and that, when it comes to people who ‘try to justify the use of violence’ we should simply ‘refute’ their theories (ATOS, 315).

Besides setting a high bar for what counts as ‘intolerance,’ (essentially violence or direct incitement to violence), Popper also stressed that we should resort to coercive suppression of intolerant movements only as last resort. ‘We should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force’ (Popper’s emphasis) he says in the endnote on tolerance, ‘for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.’ This is what takes us to the famous declaration that ‘we should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.’

Reasoned deliberation when possible

In a 1978 letter to the Routledge editor Rosalind Hall, who was requesting permission to re-print some of the paragraph we began with, Popper insisted that he would ‘permit this quotation only if the whole paragraph is quoted, including the words: “Less well known is the paradox of tolerance.”’ The reason, Popper said, was that ‘I want it to be clear that this is proposed by me only incidentally and not as my main statement about tolerance.’

The best candidate for Popper’s ‘main statement’ on tolerance is undoubtedly his 1981 essay ‘On Toleration’; but though we have quoted liberally from it here, the essay soon strays from its purported topic. (A lecture on ‘Toleration and Intellectual Responsibility,’ first given in the same year, covers very similar ground: ISBW, 188-203). It is perhaps not surprising that his single, suggestive note on ‘the paradox of tolerance’ in The Open Society has attracted so much attention, debate, and attempts at co-optation. By surveying a broader range of Popper’s writings, we hope to have shed more light both on that all-important endnote and on Popper’s views about toleration more generally.

Popper thought the limits of tolerance lay where arguments give way to violence (that is, to ‘fists or pistols’). In cases where violence was offered, directly incited, or promised, Popper saw coercion by the liberal democratic state as a justified sort of reciprocity. State coercion, though, was something that should be considered only as a last resort, when violence was obvious or imminent; in all other cases, even when an ideology might strike us as intolerant, we should try to counter it with rational criticism and discussion. 

Reasoned deliberation is, in the final analysis, the antithesis of violence. As Popper put it in the second volume of The Open Society, ‘one does not kill a man when one adopts the attitude of first listening to his arguments’ (OS II, 238). This makes toleration key in the maintenance of modern, pluralistic societies, which will inevitably contain a variety of different beliefs and perspectives, some of them fervently opposed to each other. Toleration follows, besides, from a recognition that we are all fallible: our own chosen beliefs and enthusiasms may, after all, turn out to be wrong, so it would be wrong to try to impose them on others.

Popper would not have countenanced limiting the expression of different viewpoints on the ground of offence or even of ‘harm.’ He would almost certainly have argued strongly against the recent proposals by Jacinda Ardern’s Labour government to outlaw ‘incitement of hatred and discrimination’ against a series of different groups (including groups defined by religious beliefs, ethical beliefs, and political views). 

But Popper’s basic position – that we should tolerate all views and movements that stop short of violence or direct incitement to violence – is not itself a party-political one. The idea that we should not tolerate violence applies equally to any movement that exchanges words for blows. By the same token, Popper’s recommendation that we should tolerate all ideas and life-choices that fall short of violence challenges us to be tolerant of movements across the whole broad spectrum of modern political discourse – if they eschew violence.

In the final analysis, Popper’s proposal that we should tolerate each other up to the point of violence doesn’t constitute an exhaustive account of where we might have to set limits on speech or expression. As the Victoria University legal scholar Eddie Clarke has noted, in a few situations our current laws do enforce some penalties against speech even in the absence of violence (in cases of perjury, say). 

Nevertheless, Popper’s writings on toleration, including his famous ‘paradox of toleration,’ remind us that coercion is as good a place as any to set a hard limit for toleration. Setting the bar as high as coercion leaves citizens space to develop their own ideas and life-paths freely. We should therefore approach any limits to expression below this high bar with some scepticism.  

This emphasis on violence as the line we must not cross puts Popper firmly in the main stream of liberal political thought running through Max Weber (with his emphasis on the state as the possessor of a monopoly on force) as well as John Stuart Mill (who similarly insisted that citizens should be free to develop their ideas uncoerced by others). This tradition of thinking about tolerance is one that has played a large part in the success and development of liberal democracy as a governmental system and a way of life; and it is one that we in today’s New Zealand might take more account of as we continue to debate the nature and limits of toleration. 

ATOS = J. Shearmur and P.N. Turner (eds.), After the Open Society: Selected Social and Political Writings (London: Routledge, 2008)

CR = K.R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1963)

ISBW = K.R. Popper, In Search of a Better World: Lectures and Essays from Thirty Years (London: Routledge, 1984) 

OS = K.R. Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies (2 vols., London: Routledge, 1945)

Unpublished material derives almost entirely from the Karl Popper Archive at the University of  Klagenfurt, Austria. It is used with the full permission of the University of Klagenfurt/the Karl Popper Archives. The letter to Eccles comes from the Eccles archive in the Institut für Geschichte, Theorie und Ethik der Medizin, Heinrich-Heine-Universität, Düsseldorf. All rights reserved. 

Header image: The widely-circulated cartoon about Popper’s ‘paradox of tolerance.’ Source: Pictoline.com

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This approach is taking us in a dangerous direction. There is an urgent need to move away from the emerging culture of fear, cancellation and caricature, and towards patient and in-depth discussion and debate using reason, evidence, logic. We need to move beyond the knee-jerk social media-style outbursts and emotional tirades. But how do we remove the fear of being attacked for having differing views? Well, we need to relearn how to have challenging conversations. But first, we need to defuse the pejorative bomb. Let’s talk about how to do this.

Defusing the pejorative bomb

There are two ways to defuse this bomb. One is that a slur is reclaimed as a compliment or a badge of identity as people begin to stand up to bullying behaviour. For something as serious as racism, such an outcome would be disastrous. I fear this outcome and you should too. The other is that we choose to stop deploying the pejorative bomb. That requires us to do three things.

Step one: provide specifics

First, we need to stop claiming that racism is systemic or rampant in NZ. As a minority member of society, I can say, hand on heart, that New Zealand is not a country riddled with nasty racist people. Racism is far from absent, but it’s not rampant either. Most New Zealanders are decent people and we’re all getting better at living in a multicultural world. The vast majority of people aspire to see our country continue to improve. How does one respond to claims of structural or systemic or rampant racism when no details are given? Such sweeping generalisations don’t provide a means of finding solutions because they only serve to get peoples’ backs up, particularly if you deny those you accuse any right of reply. So, by all means, point to a specific problem and propose a solution. And be prepared to discuss both the problem and a range of solutions.

Step two: we need to understand what is and what is not racism

These days, many people seem to have a very black and white idea of what constitutes racism. But reality is never as simple as we might wish it to be. Here are a few examples that draw from my own experience.

As a student, I often heard the trope that Asians are good at passing exams because we just memorise facts—Asians cannot think for themselves. That stereotype was common in my student days—so much so that Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani provocatively titled a series of essays, ‘Can Asians Think?’ This trope has often been rolled out in discussions of high Asian scores for competitive entrance exams, in NZ and abroad. The starting point for an Asian is that we know that some hold an underlying assumption about our ability; despite good grades, we are assumed to lack other (more important) qualities. Perhaps, on the basis of race, we don’t fully deserve to be there. This is to confuse an individual with a stereotype. Each of us painted with that stereotype has to demonstrate, one person at a time, why the stereotype doesn’t hold. 

In the weird world of the 2020s this narrative has been replaced: Asians are now being recast by some as ‘white-adjacent’. This means that, because of our perceived success, we not only do not need any help, we are also now part of the power base, so discrimination against us is justified in order to ‘make room’ for those who are genuinely unprivileged.

What’s the issue with this? Well, ‘Asian’ is a very broad term – it covers enormous cultural and ethnic diversity, and in different parts of the world, the term refers to very different ethnic groups. Asians are not all alike. Some have come here as refugees from among the poorest countries in the world, with little education, and limited opportunities. Some are descendents of people who first arrived here in the 1800s. Some are comparatively recent arrivals. Some, like me, are part something else. 

Asians are aware of our many differences, and we are sometimes known to have fun with them; I was at the hospital recently and had to work hard to keep a straight face when talking to an excellent and very professional Filipino nurse. Why? Because the playful portrayal by Filipino-American comedian Jo Koy of the Filipino ambition to become a nurse popped into my head! This is surely a stereotype? Yes, it is. So isn’t it racist to laugh and share it? No, not if we take Jo Koy’s lead. By inviting us to laugh with him, he lifts up his community; we learn something and share in a love letter to a community, a humanising in-joke.

By contrast, to uniformly label or treat all Asians as ‘white-adjacent’ is an astonishing use of racial stereotyping. While the term originated in the US, I have heard this viewpoint from people here in NZ who specifically claim to be champions of minority groups. These individuals are frequently from the majority group, cast themselves in their role as champions of the less fortunate, and, in their self-proclaimed benevolence, have taken it upon themselves to decide who needs help, who can be ignored because they have it good enough, and who has too much privilege, all using a flimsy proxy: race.

For someone who has grown up with the, ‘Asians are good at exams but are not able to think’ trope, this strikes me as a very poorly thought out position. 

Step 3: check your privilege-checking. Can you really determine privilege by skin colour?

Let me end with a very personal example that touches on the complexities of privilege and why we can’t assume it follows race. After moving to NZ, I had a difficult time at school. In my final year of primary school, I had only one friend. He had just arrived from another school and we were thrown together by circumstance. His family were rough around the edges working class folk and, when I first met them, they were living out of a caravan. By contrast, members of both sides of my family—Japanese and British—are university educated. My friend’s family were always friendly, and made me feel welcome. There was however one thing they did which really annoyed me. They gave me a nickname based on my Japanese ancestry. I detested it because I didn’t want anyone to draw attention to my difference, but it stuck. These are the type of people one might often hear being pejoratively labelled ‘white trash’. This is accurate: they were white, my friend’s stepfather literally worked in ‘trash’, and they were from that slice of society that is short on privilege—certainly lower than my university-educated family. But they were far from being trash. My friend went on to get a university education and is successful in his chosen calling. 

This reframing of who is privileged and who is not by the New Racists is allowing privileged members of the activist class to inadvertently punch down on people who look like me but don’t have my ‘white adjacent’ status. Is an Asian refugee who fled an oppressive regime more privileged than a successful, well-educated Māori academic? I would argue that it is hard to quantify and compare privilege. Perhaps we should spend less time trying to work this out from proxies and talk to people instead.

Then there is the deliberate punching down (yes, you read that correctly) on people who in the eyes of the New Racists look white and privileged but who, like my friend and his family, are actually starting from close to the bottom and doing it tough. But they are still white, you might say, they still have privilege. Yes, they do. That ‘white’ family are the only people who get to call me by the nickname they gave me—Fuji. 

An alternative to punching up and dropping pejorative bombs

So what’s the alternative? Calm, evidence-based discussion and debate, and making an attempt to understand the reasons behind someone disagreeing with you. It helps to remember that the world is a complex place and ‘good and bad’ or ‘right and wrong’ are not always easy to establish. It also helps to be wary of overly-simplistic solutions, and to accept that sometimes we will be in disagreement on contentious matters.

Here are some personal measures I intend to take in conversations going forward; I hope you will consider doing the same.

I will tell people that it’s OK to

• Talk about race and to discuss the difficult stuff without fear of recrimination.
• Say something that you subsequently regret or realise is inappropriate.

If I don’t think something you say is appropriate

• I’ll tell you why. 
• If you apologise, I’ll accept your apology. And vice versa.

I won’t

• Shut down your right to state your opinion, even when I disagree with you.
• Get distracted by the way you deliver your message – you don’t need to sugar coat it or tread carefully.
• Presume to know what will or won’t hurt others or act to censor you on their behalf.
• Try and shut down or win an argument by calling you names.

I will

• Try to listen carefully to what you have to say, even if it is challenging for me to do so.
• Endeavour to discuss difficult topics and debate with you firmly, but fairly.
• Endeavour to sort out the content from the emotional reaction either you or I have to your delivery. I expect you to do the same.
• Tell you if I disagree with you, but I’ll use evidence to back up my position.
• Have the courage to concede when you are right. 
• Treat you as my equal. That means I will sometimes disagree with you.
• Avoid using pejorative insults or outbursts. 

As an educator I will

• Endeavour to teach others how to discuss and debate constructively.
• Not demean students by presuming I need to protect them from hurtful statements. 
• Teach students how to defend themselves calmly, and with evidence.
• Empower students to think rationally and clearly, and to debate based on evidence. 
• Teach students the value of changing one’s views in light of evidence.

As a colleague I won’t

• Act to get you removed from some position of responsibility, kicked out of your job, or bullied by others, simply because I don’t agree with you.
• Scapegoat someone so as to protect myself.
• Bow to the demands of bullies, no matter what form they take.

Photo by Romain Gal on Unsplash https://unsplash.com/photos/4G_C_qKwi6s

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The current law does not, however, seek to penalise or restrict all harmful speech. The political mood in some parts of our country seems to regard this as a problem. Local government organizations and universities, for example, have introduced codes of conduct that prohibit speech that causes harm. Sometimes this is qualified as speech that causes harm to vulnerable groups.

Who could object? For those in favour of restrictions on harmful speech, the answer seems to be that only people who actually want to cause harm (or are heedless to the harm they cause) would object. And of course, those would be pretty nasty people, who should face penalties, such as denial of access to public facilities, education or employment. And maybe they should face the sanction of the law too, as implied by the government’s proposal in 2021 to broaden the definition of hate speech. That proposal has now been shelved, but the government is proceeding with plans to regulate online content in the interests of reducing the risk of harm, even though current law already contains provisions against online bullying and dissemination of illegal material such as child sexual abuse content. 

In fact, some even say that restrictions against harmful speech are necessary in order to maintain the conditions of open debate and democracy. How can people engage in a debate if speech that harms them is given free rein? They thus appear to accept much of the case for free speech as repeatedly advanced by successive generations of advocates, from J.S. Mill to Jonathan Rauch, Karl Popper to Jacob Mchangama: that free speech is essential to personal liberty, that knowledge advances through contestation and critique, that the possibility of progress requires allowing critiques of policy and law, and that those who lack material power are especially reliant on robust protections for free speech. 

Can we have all that, without accepting speech that causes harm, particularly harm to vulnerable groups? It is an appealing proposition. ‘The bliss of freedom enjoyed by those who have power should never mean the right to cause pain to those who are comparatively powerless. And no one’s exercise of free speech should make another feel less free.’ The words of the late Dr Moana Jackson reverberate widely.

Threats, denigration and a lack of respect for the truth rapidly undermine civic discourse and create a toxic atmosphere of political polarization and worse. But is a civility norm the equivalent of one that penalises harmful speech?

Both rest on some underlying shared understanding of what is civil and what is harmful. But harm is a much more expansive notion. It is not just that the experience of harm is subjective. One could say the same of civility. Different cultures have strikingly different rules of civil conduct. Most New Zealanders are pretty rude if judged by the standards of cultures that require a great deal of deference to age or social status, where failing to use honorifics and speech markers that reinforce status differences can cause offence. 

Hearing the words that your spouse no longer wishes to remain married to you, for example, is likely to cause significant harm. ‘Broken heart syndrome’ is a physical response to emotional distress. Pain itself – as captured by neuroimaging – is multidimensional and includes emotional state, anticipation and expectations of pain. Sexual and social rejection is harmful and can cause lasting damage.

And yet most of us – at least those of us outside the incel community – will recognize that we all have the right to reject unwanted sexual advances and to move away from friendships and relationships. And we have that right even if asserting our boundaries causes non-trivial harm to those we reject or whose wishes conflict with ours.

These examples are not far removed from the contentious issues that we now see triggering code of conduct complaints or other moves to shut down speech. In 2021, complaints of ‘harm’ were used to prevent discussion of upcoming legislation at council-owned community facilities. In this case, the ‘harmful’ discussion was one that featured objections to legislation that would allow any individual to change the sex recorded on their birth certificate simply by making a declaration. It took a High Court ruling to overturn one Council’s refusal to allow use of its premises for discussion of the bill before parliament. While the law has  now passed (despite most public submissions being opposed to it), the issue is one that continues to generate controversy. The definition of what is a woman may be one that tears apart the British Labour Party, with accusations of harm and hate speech regularly made against those who wish to stick to a definition based on biological sex. 

The issue here is not simply that we live at a time when conflicting views about what is a woman generate rage and anxiety. The issue is that we live at a time when many people regard certain beliefs to be harmful, no matter how politely the heretical belief is expressed. If debate itself is harmful, there is no acceptable way to say that humans cannot change sex or that, for some purposes, sex rather than gender identity is what matters. 

Opinions that run counter to the current establishment orthodoxy are frequently condemned as harmful in themselves, no matter how they are expressed. Take a heretical stance on the status of the Treaty of Waitangi, the relationship between mātauranga Māori and science, the limits of religious freedom, or the conflicts between individual liberty and the needs of people with disabilities.. and see the accusations of racism, bigotry and ‘able-ism’ flow in. 

Such denunciations can be seen as ‘pejorative bombs’ – a way of shutting down debate. This is not conducive to rational discussion of conflicting rights and views; but an open society can live with people calling each other names and passing judgement on the morals of others. We should encourage civil expression, particularly in workplaces and educational establishments (where rules against bullying and harassment should curtail certain types of personal denunciation), but ultimately the right to launch ‘pejorative bombs’ falls within an individual’s free speech rights, subject only to limitations of the current law against libel, threats of violence or incitement to violence.

The more serious damage comes from trying to prevent the expression of ‘harmful’ views. I admit to some scepticism as to whether any actual harm is caused by heretical opinions on the constitutional status of the Treaty of Waitangi or whether ‘woman’ is a category that anyone can freely identify into. But I can accept that some people really do feel harmed by hearing things they don’t like, and if they feel harmed then possibly they have indeed been harmed, depending on the measure one uses. Either way, it is impossible to maintain an environment conducive to free expression if debate become bogged down in attempts to prove, or disprove, the harmfulness of speech. 

Everything comes with a trade-off. Some speech can indeed cause harm, but the price of trying to restrict harmful speech beyond the current limits set by law is too high.

If we coerce dissenters into silence because their views are harmful, we will no longer live in a society that seeks to advance knowledge and resolve differences through reasoned debate. 

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Should the use of racist, ageist or sexist slurs against members of a perceived privileged group be employed on behalf of another group? Should  ‘punching up’ be considered a necessary means to reach a noble goal? 

I argue that this tactic, even if employed with the best intentions, is wrong and dangerous. And it can provoke a response that leaves society worse off. I will do this by talking a little about my own experiences of growing up as a member of a minority group in New Zealand. In a follow-up article, I suggest some better alternatives to ‘punching up’.

The changing face of racism

As a part Asian growing up in New Zealand in the 1980s I experienced plenty of racism. It was overt, and involved physical and verbal abuse. I am proud of my heritage but there were certainly times where, had I been able, I would have gladly erased the Japaneseness from my physical appearance. I couldn’t control that, but I did insist that my mother stop putting (delicious) Japanese food in my lunchbox! By the the time the 1990s rolled around, I no longer felt the desire or the need to hide my ethnicity. New Zealand was becoming much more multicultural, and intolerance was receding. Don’t get me wrong, I still encountered overt racism, ignorant statements, faux pas, and an abundance of things that I could have rolled my eyes at, but my experience of everyday life in NZ was becoming much more positive. I no longer viewed my Japanese heritage as a badge of shame. One might say that this is all part of growing up. The taunts and physical attacks of the playground give way to maturity and decency, in the main.

In the 2020s, things have changed again. Discussions of race are everywhere, but this change has not entirely been for the better. Strangely, I have caught myself feeling tempted to exaggerate my minority status, not out of pride, but for protection.

The reason is simple: some of the people who are championing support for minorities are actually making things less safe, less open, and potentially more dangerous for the minorities they claim to be lifting up. The primary reason is an intimidatory tactic designed to shut down discussion and debate. 

This tactic? Deploying what I call the pejorative bomb. 

What is a pejorative bomb? In part, it is old-fashioned name-calling, of the type I and many minorities have experienced, but it is aimed at the majority, accusing them for instance of being racist.

Let me first explain something about name-calling. Many people fear being called names. Bullies who use this tactic are clever: they know exactly how to hit you where it hurts and it is challenging to fight back against this type of behaviour. Growing up, I had to regularly endure pejorative references to my ethnicity. I couldn’t do much about that as my ethnicity was something I had no control over.

But what I am calling pejorative bombs are different. A pejorative bomb uses the tactics of the bully, but it is being used as a way of shutting down debate by attacking someone’s physical attributes: age, sex or ethnicity. An example is the term ‘pale, stale, male’, to pejoratively dismiss the views of an older white man.

Indeed, I am struck by the increase in the casual use of terms like racist, white supremacist, old white male, and colonist, to name a few, by educated adults who see themselves as supporting minorities. They use these terms as a way to shut down or even preemptively kill off discussion. Often these pejorative bombs are being mouthed by people who are themselves white. 

Having spent a chunk of my formative years dealing with bullies, and having had to think about race my entire life, I can tell you that the latter requires careful, considered thinking and reading. The former? Well I can spot a bully from a mile away. Believing one has the moral high ground and that this justifies acting like a bully still makes you a bully.

What our aversion to being labelled racist reveals about society

Why is this type of insult so effective at silencing people? 

Ironically, it works because so few people are genuinely racist.  Hence people genuinely fear being labelled racist. This is a big change: once upon a time, stating this fact when one was on the receiving end of racist slurs had zero effect. It was simply laughed off because it meant nothing to the perpetrator. The insult works today precisely because so few people harbour genuinely racist views any longer. Instead, most people are mortified to be associated with such views. Granted, people do put their foot in it from time to time, but their intent is most often not to insult. There are of course still people out there who are genuinely racist, but our society has improved enormously on matters of race in my lifetime.

Calling people racist works so well because, for someone who is white, it’s the ultimate insult: denying it is as futile as not responding – the fact has been stated, leaving it pinned on you as a badge of shame. The strategy being employed here is so effective at shutting down debate that it in turn clears the way for change to be pushed through by fiat. When wielded by people with influence, change can be pushed through even if we don’t agree, because the majority feels intimidated. That’s crafty, and in the worst instances where it is used, it is a tool for antidemocratic change.

The pernicious effects of name calling

This brings us to the unintended consequences. My concern is that open, reasoned, and frank discussion and debate are becoming more difficult because of this nefarious strain of bullying. This has two impacts. First, it actually makes it harder for minorities to hold diverse views. Instead, we are all being coerced into conforming to a specific set of views that a particular group demands we hold. 

Even worse, agitating on behalf of minorities risks making minorities the focus of a future backlash.

Working out how to get along in a multicultural milieu despite our differences is a difficult problem that requires careful thought. Working out how to improve society is also difficult. It requires challenging conversations and listening to a diverse range of views; some enticing solutions may actually be bigger problems in disguise. The discussion we need is not happening, in part because of the use of the bully’s approach to shutting down diverse opinions. 

It is one of the strangest ironies that shutting down diverse opinions is being championed in the name of promoting diversity. Witness the rise of the slur, ‘race traitor’, a peculiar concept that refers to a person of a particular race who is deemed to hold an opinion that is contrary to what someone else expects someone of that race to hold. This is a terrible stereotype of racial groups as necessarily uniform in thought, a caricature that a group of people should think the same on the basis of something as biologically meaningless as their skin colour.

That the term race traitor has been used by alt-right white supremacists and by left-wing ‘antiracists’ alike illustrates that such groups are intolerant of diversity of opinion, and underscores the tribal nature of such movements: if you are not with us you are against us. 

Both usages appear disturbingly alike, but let’s think about this for a moment.

Society largely views white supremacists with ridicule, but I fear that the New Racists will give them a new lease of life: the frequent, and frequently unwarranted, pejorative attacks on white people who are not racists, but not ardent antiracists, can engender a counter position: people can get fed up, their hearts can harden towards the minorities that the vocal antiracists purport to be in support of. These people don’t necessarily become racists, but if an antiracist can decide it is justified to call someone a race traitor, well, anything is possible. 

The direction we are heading seems astonishing to me and other minority ethnic academics like Dr. Melissa Derby. In an excellent article on the late Martin Luther King, she reminds us of one of his most seminal insights. King said, “We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools”. It’s high time we heeded that advice.

The header image for this article was taken from Unsplash (https://unsplash.com/photos/KflQqYcFknk).

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