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Intolerance comes much more naturally to men (here I include women in the term) than tolerance; which is why politically, religiously, philosophically, and morally tolerant societies are not only much less common in history than intolerant ones but require more explanation as to how they arose in the first place.

The first thing to say about tolerance is that it is not the same as indifference, much less a refusal to make moral judgments. Everyone, presumably, can tolerate what he does not care about or what he approves of. In order to be able to exercise tolerance, then, you must have something that you disagree with or disapprove of.

When people say that they are nonjudgmental, a claim usually uttered with the most profound self-satisfaction, they are saying what cannot be true. The claim itself is dependent upon a judgment, namely that one should not make judgments, and is therefore self-contradictory. What they really mean is that they are not, or at any rate deem themselves not to be, censorious, that is to say that they are not the kind of person who rushes to adverse judgment of someone and delights to condemn him or her.

The fact is that intolerance and censoriousness are much more fun than their opposites. Without intolerance and censoriousness, many people would have little to talk about; other than, perhaps, their state of health and the results of their latest medical investigations, what the doctor said to them, etc. Conversations about health rely on the same social compact as that which sustains much of what is posted on the social, or the asocial, media: I pretend to be interested in you if you pretend to be interested in me.

What fun persecution is! A female philosophy student at Cambridge, apparently, has been persecuted because she admitted to reading a book (and naively wanted to discuss it with her fellow students) that denied the evident untruth that a man can be a woman, or a woman a man, though—to take the first case—he can dress, walk, talk, and look like a woman, and in many circumstances pass himself off as such. At the very least, the denial of the untruth is, from the intellectual point of view, perfectly respectable and would have been regarded until very recently as utterly banal. Indeed, it would have been regarded as about as interesting as, say, the assertion that Paris is the capital of France.

Even to entertain the possibility of denying the untruth (or, to put it more emolliently, the doubtful proposition) that a man can turn himself into a woman was enough for her fellow students at Cambridge to turn on her and make her life something of a hell—at least, if her account of what happened or was done to her is to be believed. In the name of tolerance and inclusiveness, she was hounded like a heretic in a theocracy and excluded from society. Newspeak, then, is alive and well, and thriving among those who would no doubt consider themselves freethinkers.

What is here most interesting, and alarming, is that it required no authority, no law or regulation, to bring this situation about. It is not only the kingdom of God that is within you, but the spirit of persecution. This spirit, which is waiting within most if not all of us to emerge when the circumstances are right, has to be controlled, damped down, by an effort of will and intellect. Law alone will not do it.

We desire freedom from speech at least as frequently as we desire freedom of speech, though we may, indeed do, differ as to whose speech we wish to be liberated from. And there is the notoriously difficult question as to how far we tolerate the intolerant, those who wish to impose upon everyone their vision or belief of what is, in their opinion, indubitably the solution to all the problems of mankind. Do you let the intolerant pour their poison indefinitely into the ears of that mankind, especially those of the impressionable young, until the whole society is poisoned, or do you censor them at the risk of being called hypocritical and of not really believing in tolerance at all?

We have always to bear in mind that we wish to preserve our own freedom more than we wish to preserve the freedom of others. Very few are like Voltaire said that he was, namely prepared to defend to the death the right of the stupid to be stupid, the nasty to be nasty, the prejudiced to be prejudiced, etc.—at least, verbally.

The distinction between opinion and conduct is an important one, even though expression of opinion is conduct of a kind. For example, it does not follow from the fact that I do not believe that a man can be or become a woman, at least not by any technique currently available, that I am not content, within limits, to go along with the fiction that he has become a woman—for reasons of kindness, smooth social interaction, etc. After all, humans are complex creatures, and, at least in contemporary societies, one feature or characteristic of them, for example that they desire to change sex, does not, or ought not to, capture the whole of them.

The problem is that this is precisely what ideology seeks to do: to make one such feature or characteristic a lens through which everything must be seen, and to force people to tell lies or say what they do not believe. What is perhaps just as alarming is that opponents of ideology easily become counter-ideologists, which is to say monomaniacs of a different stripe. Before long, they become obsessed by arguments against what is not worth arguing against. This is boring and mentally destructive.

Just as there is a dilemma as to how far the tolerant should tolerate the intolerant, so there is the dilemma as to how much energy one should put into opposing evident but advancing intellectual rubbish. To adapt slightly the well-known words of Hamlet:

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous nonsense,
Or to argue against a sea of drivel,
And by opposing end it…

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is On the Ivory Stages (Mirabeau Press).