Observing Intolerant Society, Intolerantly Observing Society

Tolerance has been a defining feature of the self-description of modern, civilized society. Yet contemporary societies—Japan prominently among them—exhibit unmistakable tendencies toward intolerance. This chapter argues that the standard sociological response—diagnosing a failure of civilization—is itself part of the problem. By applying second-order observation to the tolerance/intolerance distinction, the chapter demonstrates that the diagnosis of intolerant society is itself an intolerant observation: it uses the same asymmetrical code it purports to critique. Drawing on Norbert Elias’s theory of the civilizing process, Robert K. Merton’s concept of dysfunction, and Niklas Luhmann’s concept of societal self-description, the chapter proposes an alternative account: the rise of intolerance is a paradoxical consequence of civilization, not a failure of it. The civilizing process generates structural conditions in which suppressed irritations concentrate in specific social spaces—families, classrooms, workplaces, and online platforms—and social media amplifies the discharge of these concentrations. The chapter further distinguishes three analytically separate processes—civilization, modernization, and societal evolution—whose conflation generates the observational confusion from which intolerance discourse suffers. The broader implication is methodological: whenever sociology diagnoses a social problem using a normatively charged distinction, it risks reinforcing precisely the condition it seeks to analyze.