"But you,
You can do better than that."
"Better Than That" - Marina And The Diamonds
That author was Karl Popper. Mostly known for his theories on science and its development, as well as for his rivality with the Vienna Circle, he proposed a rational correction to Voltaire's postullate of absolute tollerance based on empyrical observation: he added to it the logical premise implying that tollerance towards intollerant views would put that same tollerance in danger. Or, in other words, if, in twenty years, we let that man called Adolf Hitler speak and freely win the ellections in his country, we may be messing up big time.
That way, Popper got to the conclusion that, in order to protect tollerance, some views threatening it must be deprived of it: tollerance should not be applied to attacks against it. That brought an authoritarian but also clarifying turn to the debate: from then on, the absolute tollerance paradigm proposed by Voltaire did not seem so inherent, and a further analysis of what should be allowed and what shouldn't replaced it.
Some say complete tollerance does not work because people are not mature enough to actually take their own decisions. Then another debate should be on whether or not defining maturity over those standards can really be considered tollerance...
That debate, however, does not belong here.
No comments:
Post a Comment