BECAUSE STATISM REQUIRES IT:

The age of intolerant tolerance: The meaning of tolerance has mutated in recent years. (Mick Hume, 8/19/05, spiked)

If the slogan of the Second World War 60 years ago was 'Victory', the slogan of the war on terror in Britain today appears to be 'Tolerance'.

Almost before the last bomb had exploded in London on 7 July, government ministers, opposition leaders, London's mayor, police chiefs and anybody else who could get the media's attention were all emphasising the need for tolerance in our society. In the weeks since then, the demand for tolerance towards all communities and faiths, especially Islam, has become a mantra repeated on all sides. If you did not know better, you might think that the bomb attacks of 7 and 21 July were aimed at mosques rather than trains and buses.

Tolerance might sound like a worthy aim. Normally, I like to imagine myself as tolerant as the next angry middle-aged libertarian Marxist. But this is something different. Some of us are finding it increasingly hard to tolerate the way that appeals to British tolerance are being used to justify intolerant censorship and repression.

The pattern goes like this. Tony Blair says that we have to meet the extremist threat by 'championing our values of freedom, tolerance and respect for others'. Then his ministers announce new plans to criminalise 'indirect incitement' of terrorism, along with tougher proposals to outlaw 'incitement to religious hatred'.

The government must have a different dictionary than I do. Mine defines tolerance as 'broad-mindedness' or 'permitting free expression of views one does not share'. In the Whitehall Newspeak edition, however, tolerance appears to mean the opposite. In order to defend our tolerant society we apparently have to ban views that most people do not share. Welcome to the age of intolerant tolerance. [...]

The meaning of tolerance has mutated in recent years. First, it became a central plank of the official doctrine of multiculturalism. As examined elsewhere on spiked, the celebration of multiculturalism and 'diversity' has served as a substitute for any more coherent worldview within the British elite (see The price of multiculturalism, by Michael Fitzpatrick). That is why, when they try (and generally fail) to define what British values might mean today, politicians will invariably emphasise the importance of tolerance. In this context, it always ends up sounding as if they are saying, 'Our central value is that we tolerate the values of others'.

More recently, however, and especially since the bombings of 7 July, it has become clear that this emphasis on tolerance is more than a vacuous retreat into non-judgementalism. It is also a threat. In order to maintain the fragile status quo in our fragmented society, the authorities are telling us not to rock the boat. Their idea of tolerance thus involves suppressing opinions or ideas that might cause offence or controversy. This is the doctrine of what we might call illiberal liberalism, summed up by the trite phrase 'I can tolerate anything except intolerance'. Or as New Labour's Welsh secretary Peter Hain put it after the bombings, 'We will not tolerate people abusing Muslims' (with 'abuse' now being so widely defined as to mean anything you don't like). The message to all of us is 'Be tolerant - or else!'

The authorities are trying to use the doctrine of intolerant tolerance to keep the lid on things and hide the empty hole at the heart of the debate about British values. But in the end it can only make matters worse.

As AJ Conyers says in his excellent book, The Long Truce: "Toleration in its modern form is the solvent that dissolves the bonds of interdependency. It therefore makes society fit for the "new" ordering and regulating powers of the state."

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 6, 2006 6:10 AM