Islam, America’s Survival, And Popper’s Paradox
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Put another way, does America have a duty to tolerate that which threatens it?
As someone who regularly examines culture and politics, I often write about problems and, on occasion, offer solutions. Sometimes the solutions are relatively straightforward and obvious, like suggesting to the GOP that, if they don’t pass the SAVE Act and bring about something resembling honest elections, they’re going to get their a***s handed to them in November.
Other solutions, I recognize, are far more complex than my 30,000-foot take on the issue. This is certainly the case when I suggested the government should get out of the wealth redistribution business. Knowing that there are thousands of programs handing out trillions of dollars annually, just suggesting the government should get out of the business of taking money from Peter to give to Paul seems a bit trite. And it might be, but trying to explain a problem and proffer a detailed solution in under 1,200 words is a bit challenging, at least it is for me.
But that doesn’t mean that I’m going to stop highlighting issues and making suggestions. And that gets me to the subject of this essay, which is how far America can allow Islam to grow within its borders.
One of the most important and challenging issues, from both cultural and political perspectives, is tolerance. What should we tolerate? How much of it should we tolerate? And, perhaps most importantly, what shouldn’t we tolerate… and why not?
For years, I’ve struggled with the idea of limits on tolerance, but I didn’t really have a definition for it. I do now. I recently saw a post about Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance, something with which I was unfamiliar. I looked it up and immediately recognized it as the perfect distillation of exactly what had been running through my head: Does society have a duty to be tolerant to that which seeks to destroy said society?
For a long time, America clearly understood the answer was “no.” The obvious example is communism. America knew that communism was a threat, and Congress did what it could to thwart the party and extinguish the idea itself. Under the Smith Act (Alien Registration Act of 1940), it became illegal to act
with intent to cause the overthrow or destruction of any such government, prints, publishes, edits, issues, circulates, sells, distributes, or publicly displays any written or printed matter advocating, advising, or teaching the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying any government in the United States by force or violence…
The party was outlawed, and leaders were thrown in jail, and while being a communist wasn’t technically illegal, just being one could get you fired or blacklisted, both in Hollywood and beyond. Eventually, the Supreme Court, in Yates v. United States (1957), narrowed Smith, ruling that abstract advocacy of revolution or teaching doctrine was protected by the First Amendment. Only advocacy directed at inciting imminent illegal action could be punished.