The Flag: Icon of Tolerance or Intolerance?
This essay began with a Facebook comment.
During Pride Month, someone noted that the pride flag had been flown at Castle Drogo, a National Trust property in Devon. Among the responses, one stood out for being neither hostile nor celebratory. “Inclusivity should be a given,” it said. “It shouldn’t need a flag.”
It is the kind of remark that is easy to scroll past. It carries no malice. It might even be well-intentioned. But it lodged itself in my mind and and wouldn’t let go, because it contains a lot. Central to that are the questions: ‘Given’ by who, and to whom, and what happens to those for whom it has not yet been given at all?
What follows is an attempt to unpack that persons response to the post and to record my thoughts about it. It leads further than I expected. So far in fact, that I have had to split this essay into two parts. Part one, the essay you are reading now, makes a diagnosis: Popper’s paradox, how both sides of the culture war weaponise it, the mechanism of suppression, the complication around differential vulnerability, and the question of whether you can argue a belief out of existence. It ends on the problem: the mechanism is the same whoever runs it, and it has rarely changed what people already believe in their bones.
In 1945, the philosopher Karl Popper identified a problem that liberal societies have never quite known what to do with. If you tolerate everything, he argued, you will eventually tolerate your own destruction. A society that extends unlimited tolerance, even to those who would use that tolerance to dismantle it, is handing its enemies the keys. At some point, tolerance has to draw a line.
Popper’s insight has become one of the most useful tools in the modern argument, and one of the most abused. Both sides of the western culture war have reached for it, convinced they are the ones drawing the necessary line. Looking deeper, the mechanics of this seem to unfold like this: It begins with a conviction, genuine and well-founded, that certain ideas or behaviours are harmful. It moves to the conclusion that those ideas must not merely be opposed but suppressed. It ends with a society in which the range of acceptable thought is policed not by argument but by consequences: losing your job, your platform, your reputation, your community. The content of the forbidden ideas changes over time as society evolves. The structure does not.
Viewed from the left, the argument is that certain ideas are not merely wrong but dangerous. Platforming them causes harm. Those who hold them, on race, on gender, on history, should be removed from positions of influence, deprived of audiences, and made to understand that some opinions carry a price. This is not censorship, the argument goes. This is drawing the line Popper told us we had to draw.
Viewed from the right, the argument is that a culture that cannot defend itself will not survive. Mass immigration, the erosion of traditional values, the silencing of ordinary people who hold ordinary views, these are the real intolerances. Those who wave the banner of inclusion while excluding anyone who disagrees are the true authoritarians. Again, drawing Popper’s line.
From what I can observe, large elements of both sides are sincere. Both believe they are defending an open society against those who would close it. What neither can see is that the mechanisms underpinning the debate are largely the same, whoever or whatever is running it. What both sides consistently miss is that the culture war, for all its noise, is not free-floating rhetoric. It has material and sometimes tragic consequences, enacted most visibly on the bodies and lives of those with the least power to resist it.
Racism, homophobia, and misogyny are not the same kind of thing as a contested view on government policy. The former make claims about the worth, or relative worth, of human beings.
The rise of hate can and does have consequences far more severe than reputational inconvenience or loss. In the culture war, the human cost is not distributed equally. Consider the following: a professional losing a platform. A transgender teenager in a hostile school. A racialised person facing structural discrimination. A person whose legal protections are being quietly dismantled. A family burned from their home. A murder. The impacts on the person at the centre of each of these examples are not equivalent — there are varying degrees of harm involved.
The enforcement machinery that kept overt hatred out of polite public discourse was doing real work, and when it was weakened or even algorithmically changed, it didn’t only free legitimate dissent. It freed everything that had been suppressed alongside it.
It raises a more difficult question though. If suppression was the only thing keeping certain beliefs out of public view, what does that tell us about how deep the change ever was? Something has shifted in the last decade, not in what people believe, but in what they feel licensed to say. The quiet part is being said out loud, at least partly because it was only ever quiet.
Which brings us to the question that I’m not sure either side of the culture war has ever seriously asked. Can you argue a belief out of existence?
Argument changes minds at the margins, among people who were already uncertain, already open, already engaging in good faith, who perhaps were ready to be persuaded. It has almost no power over a deeply held belief, particularly one that is doing emotional or social work for the person holding it. Racism, homophobia, misogyny: these are rarely conclusions reached by faulty reasoning. They are usually identities, or fears, or inherited frameworks, wearing the costume of argument. You cannot debate someone out of something they didn’t reason themselves into.
This is why suppression was always going to fail in the long run. It treated a story as though it were a policy position, something that could be refuted, ruled out of order, made unsayable. The story survived underground, acquiring the additional power of martyrdom, and when the pressure released, it came back louder.
The stories now being told by those saying the quiet part out loud are doing the same emotional work. The story of the culture under siege. The story of the silenced majority. The story of ordinary people punished for ordinary beliefs. Often distorted, often cynically manufactured and manipulated, they land because they follow the shape of genuine experience, and genuine experience is always more powerful than a rebuttal.
The person who wrote that comment about the pride flag on Castle Drogo almost certainly meant no harm. They may even have been right that, in a fully tolerant society, the flag would be unnecessary. The problem is that we do not live in that society yet. The flag is still there because the question it asks has not yet been answered for everyone it is being asked on behalf of. And until it is, the argument about whether it should fly is exactly the kind of argument that the mechanism this essay has described will swallow whole, turning a genuine question about inclusion into ammunition for a culture war that serves neither side.
Before asking what can be done about this, it is worth asking ourselves who benefits from division. That is the subject of part two of this essay. I would be very pleased to hear your thoughts on this difficult and emotive subject.