No, I know that too. The quote reads: ‘I detest what you say, but I will defend your right to say it to the death.’ Attributed to the French philosopher Voltaire, but that is fake news. The British author Evelyn Beatrice Hall wrote the book ‘The friends of Voltaire’ in 1906, and that is where that famous phrase comes in.
In a more perfect world, Voltaire had invented and pronounced it himself.
What is mentioned here does not only have to do with freedom of expression, but above all with tolerance; that lazy, reclining concept that we in the Netherlands are so happy to use, as long as it costs nothing. ‘Defend to the death’, I believe that there are even few Dutch soldiers to be found who wholeheartedly endorse it.
But tolerating something is essentially not lazy or indifferent. If the matter is really close to your heart, then at the very least there will be gnashing of teeth to get the opponent to speak out with that horrendous opinion. Tolerance grinds. Tolerance takes effort and pain.
Fortunately, we in the Netherlands have strayed somewhat from the discussion about a possible vaccination obligation: the Omikron variant has at least relativized the all-saving idea of the forced injection. I haven’t studied ethics, but I feel in my shoes (okay, moccasins) that mandatory vaccination is a serious violation of fundamental rights. Here a very big bite is taken of the individual freedom to strengthen the collective.
I am writing all this with three corona shots in my upper arm, and I was really flaking on the first two. Do it, poke me. I find it very difficult to put myself in the mind of the antivaxers: an acquaintance who is of that direction explained to me recently, and I began to glow with contradiction. Still listened.
This is the beginning of true tolerance; that you don’t start slapping, but keep your ear open. Then you can walk away shaking your head.
But hold on: Evelyn B. Hall, Voltaire’s ghost voice spoke of “what you say”: a statement, an opinion if need be. Does that defense ‘until death’ also apply to an action? Being against a vaccination is one thing: the one who acts upon it also leaves the world of the word, and abruptly ends up in the world of the deed. Would I “tolerate” a murder, to defend another’s freedom? No, tolerance also has its limit.
And yet the idea that a country is worse off with a general vaccination obligation than without; that you should at least tolerate individual freedoms for as long as possible. That is not even a matter of principle, but above all of patience.
Stephan Sanders writes a column here every Monday.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of January 17, 2022
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