May 8, 2002
PERRY ON PIM :
There is no right to demand acceptance... but there is indeed a right to demand tolerance (Perry de Havilland, 5/09/02, Libertarian Samizdata)The invaluable Perry de Havilland, the one libertarian in blogdom who we always take seriously, has posted some answers to my questions about whether Pim Fortuyn should be considered a libertarian and whether he was a victim of intolerance, a practitioner of intolerance, or both :
Tolerance...is not a value neutral condition, far from it in fact. To tolerate something is to not accept it. One does not tolerate one's friends, one accepts them. I tolerate people listening to heavy metal music even though I thing most of it is drivel for the simple reason it is none of my damn business what other people listen to. It only becomes my business if they are playing it loudly in the next house at four o'clock in the morning but then it is not a matter of 'tolerance' any more, it is a matter of unwillingly imposed real cost regardless of the type of music involved. I tolerate smokers because if they want to kill themselves and smell like ashtrays, that is there business not mine. I do not accept it as a good idea however. What is wrong is to use the violence of the state to prevent people doing what they want to themselves and others of a like mind and there is the problem with some conservative Christians and more or less all radical Muslims: they want to criminalise what they see as sin rather than criminalise the violation of the objective rights of others. Opposing that is not intolerance because tolerance does not mean tolerating intolerance, any more than it is tolerance to tolerate anything which actively seeks to violate your self-ownership. If you believe homosexuality (or eating pork or looking at pictures of naked women) is a sin, well fine, that is up to you, feel free to not engage in gay sex (or pork dinners or Playboy). If that then induces you to vote for people who will use the violence of the state (laws) to discriminate against homosexuals (or ban pork butchers and Playboy magazine), well that is not fine.Just remember that what is sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander. In a democratic state, no one group ever monopolies power for ever. If the people who, on the basis of religious non-acceptance, want to legally disadvantage (i.e. no longer tolerate) certain people because of their sexual peccadillos use their transitory political clout to actualise that, don't be too surprised if one day the object of that discrimination tries to use the state to legally discriminate against the religions which are seen as the source of the intolerance towards them. In a democratic state, any large cohesive voting bloc with intolerant rather than just non-accepting views is a potential threat. The more truly democratic a system is, the greater such threats are.
While I disagree with much of that (and we've agreed in the past to respectfully disagree about much), I think he is on to the central dynamic that was at work in all this. Pim Fortuyn apppears to have been interested in just one thing, that Dutch society continue to accept a range of behaviors, mostly concerning sexual activities and abortion, which have traditionally been banned in the West. The rising population of Muslims represents a threat to this permissiveness, so Mr. Fortuyn wanted to stop the tide. He would more than likely have failed, because the demographic vise of plummeting European birthrates (in which the homosexuality and abortion he advocated must be seen to play some part) and high Islamic birthrates would have probably shifted power to the immigrants and their heirs in the not too distant future, even if all new immigration was brought to a halt. Democracy in Europe is the long term enemy of libertinism because soon enough the majority of voters will be Muslims. But Mr. Fortuyn did something that is especially dangerous when he began stirring up animosity toward these immigrants--a member of a group that has been met with intolerance in the past he determined to match the specter of resurgent intolerance with an intolerance of his own--for race hatred, as Americans found to our eternal sorrow, has a way of poisoning an entire society and claiming unintended, as well as intended, victims.
For several days now I've been wondering how to connect the assassination of Mr. Fortuyn to that of Robert F. Kennedy almost exactly 34 years earlier. Perhaps the connection is this : although the perpetrators of both crimes surprised us--as the anti-immigrant Mr. Fortuyn ended up being killed by a radical leftist rather than a Muslim, and RFK was assasinated by a Palestinian for his support of Israel, rather than by a white supremacist for his support of civil rights--mightn't we say that in the America of the 60s and the Europe of the 00s the siren song of violence, playing in the background, made such acts more likely? Doesn't the tone of social discourse have to have some effect on how a citizenry behaves, on what kind of actions they're willing to countenance? In consciously appealing to Man's basest instinct, the fear and loathing of the other, didn't Mr. Fortuyn help to create a general atmosphere of fear and loathing? And in tarring him as a Nazi, rather than addressing the legitimate concerns that he raised, didn't the European Left add to this pollution? When a society reaches a point where the most ready recourse is to hate speech rather than to democratic dialogue, where you seek to dehumanize and demonize your political opponents, is it any wonder that the most marginal and unbalanced members of that society start acting out the virulent rhetoric around them?
Mr. Fortuyn is not responsible for his own murder, and I assume (not really knowing enough about him to be certain) that it was not justified, but to the degree that hatred is now a very real part of Dutch politics and to the degree that he helped make possible that disturbing phenomenon, it seems fair to say that he at least contributed to his own demise. Let us hope (and pray) that he does not leave too many more victims in his wake.