By Jock Mulligan
Ah, sure, another big-shot book, another philosopher spinning webs finer than a North Monaghan spider in a bog-hole. Popper – A grand, severe German name, like a shovel hitting stone. And what does he tell us, this man who saw the great world go mad in the 20th century, like a pub full of lads on a Sunday that forgot the clock?
It’s about tolerance. And what is tolerance but letting the noisy eejit down the street have his say without a slap in the jaw, even if he’s roaring pure, unadulterated tripe about your ma, your sister, or your brother’s debt? It’s the grand, slatterly freedom of the open society, like a wide-open gate to a field. Anyone can walk in.
One of my favourite but fucking frustrating writers, Paddy Kavanagh, blessed and tormented soul that he was, knew a thing or two about the parochial vision and the poison that grows up from the good soil. He’d see the man who calls himself a neighbor and then sows thistles in your field, all while whistling a pious tune.
Popper says the trouble is, the field is too open. The tolerant man, God bless his trusting heart, assumes goodwill. He thinks everyone who comes through the gate is just looking for a nice patch of grass to lie down on. A bloody awful mistake that is, like leaving a tin of biscuits unguarded in a barracks.
The Grinding Stone and the Gossiping Jaw
The intolerant, the greedy little chancers, they’re not interested in the grass, you see. They’re looking for gate hinges to smash. They use the sweet gift of free speech—that beautiful, loud, drunken right to open your trap – as a crowbar. They exploit the openness. It’s like Behan would tell you: “If you give a man enough rope, he’ll not just hang himself, he’ll try to rig a few of you up with him, just for company.”
They start small, these fellows. A nudge, a sneer, a little whisper that your neighbor isn’t quite right. Not all there, ye see. Not one of us… They normalize the exclusion, that quiet little shove away from the fire. And the public? Ah, the general public. They’re like a flock of sheep on a long, slow day. They just drift with the loudest, brassiest noise. They see a fellow saying a vile thing, and because no one drags him out and belts him one, they think, Ah, maybe that’s the way it is now. Maybe it’s just a bit of craic.
The moral ground, it’s not a rock. It’s a soft field, and it erodes. It shifts and runs off, lost to the sea under the constant pissing rain of hostility disguised as harmlessness. The free speech they cry for isn’t expression; it’s a bloody action. It’s a well-aimed punch disguised as a chat. It has consequences, like a shilling spent on the wrong kind of drink.
What is Freedom, Anyway? A Pint or a Cage?
So, this Popper asks the hard question, the one that’ll keep you awake when the moon is high and the whiskey is low: How do we preserve the freedom without handing the keys to the enemies of freedom?
That’s the catch. The paradox. If you tolerate the man who wants to destroy all tolerance, you’re an eejit. You’re inviting the fox to guard the hen-house, and then you’re wondering why your feathers are flying.
Brendan Behan, who knew the inside of a jail cell as well as the inside of a pint glass, understood that you can’t have liberty without drawing a line. A society, a good one, a messy, noisy, free one, must be a bloody vigilant society.
It means having the moral clarity—the cold, hard clarity you get when you’ve scraped the mud from your eye and can finally see what’s what. It means looking at the hate-speech monger and saying, “No. That is not talk, that is sabotage.” It means a refusal to mistake the snarling dog for a playful puppy.
For the love of God, the freedom of speech was never meant to be the freedom to build a cage for everyone else. It was meant to be the freedom to sing, to complain, to argue, to live – without fear of the bully.
So, here’s the lesson, from Popper: You must be intolerant of intolerance. You must slap the bigot down, not because you hate free speech, but because you love it more than he ever could. A field must have a strong fence, or soon enough, all that remains is weeds, and the good, green grass is gone.
“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.” – Karl Popper, 1945.
