The Intolerance of Tolerance

Where did the drift come from? Carson resists a single villain and instead traces a convergence. Part of the story is the West's long, genuine, and admirable memory of religious wars and persecution — the sense that certainty, once it holds power, spills blood. From that memory grew a reasonable instinct: keep the state neutral, let people believe as they will. So far, this is the old tolerance, and Carson honours it.

But layered onto that instinct came a philosophical mood. As confidence in objective truth thinned — especially in questions of morality, meaning, and religion — the idea took hold that these are matters of private preference rather than of true or false at all. If nobody can really know, then to assert is to overreach. Tolerance stops being the way we handle disagreement and becomes the belief that there is nothing substantial left to disagree about. Difference gets rebranded as taste, and taste cannot be argued, only respected.

Here Carson presses the argument to its sharpest edge, and the title of the book stops being a paradox and becomes a description. A tolerance that treats all views as equally valid cannot itself tolerate the view that some are not. It must make an exception, and the exception is enormous: everyone who holds a settled conviction about truth, morality, or God. The doctrine of accepting everything ends up rejecting a great many people — often loudly.

The logical knot is real. The claim "all positions are equally valid" is itself a position, and it does not treat its rivals as valid; it treats them as intolerant. So the new tolerance quietly smuggles in the very thing it forbids — a firm, non-negotiable belief about what is right — while denying it the same status. It is intolerance dressed as its opposite, and Carson's complaint is partly that it will not admit as much. The old tolerance knew it had convictions and defended others' anyway. The new one pretends to have none.

Step back from the individual cases and the underlying question comes into view: what was tolerance ever meant to protect? Not agreement — a society of people who already agree needs no such virtue. Tolerance was built precisely for the situation where convictions collide and no one is willing to give theirs up. Its whole purpose was to let those collisions happen in the open, in words rather than in force, so that people who thought each other wrong could still share a city, a parliament, a classroom. It presupposed the disagreement it was designed to survive.

Which is why Carson thinks the new version quietly abolishes the thing it claims to perfect. By insisting no one is really wrong, it removes the collision it was supposed to manage. There is nothing left to tolerate, because there is officially nothing at stake. And an idea sold as maximally generous ends up shrinking the room in which anyone can hold a conviction at all — the believer, yes, but also the atheist who thinks religion false, the reformer who thinks the status quo unjust, anyone whose position depends on somebody else being mistaken.

Return to the word almost no one will argue against. Carson's wager is that our reluctance to question tolerance is exactly what has let its meaning change under our feet. Because the term sits so high, we defend it reflexively and stop asking which version we are defending — the civic habit of living alongside people we think mistaken, or the flat decree that no one can be mistaken at all. The first is difficult and worth keeping. The second, he argues, is neither as kind nor as neutral as it sounds, and it turns hardest against those who most need protecting: the ones with something they actually believe.