It’s probably no longer interesting – let alone contentious – to say that western secular democracy is undergoing a bit of a crisis. There are pressures, both internal and external, which are trying to force a fundamental change.

There’s several examples of such pressure; the resurgence of post-Communist authoritarian countries like China and Russia, the rise of the far right, radical Islam. The characteristic that these all share is they don’t play by ‘our’ rules. They don’t respect the conventions and niceties which define secularism. This makes us, the reasoning goes, ill-equipped to defend ourselves against them.

According to many, the correct response to this is to not tolerate these things. On the surface of it, this is an argument I agree with. I’ve argued before that if you properly analyse the concept of a tolerant society, it can only be understood as one where intolerance isn’t tolerated.

That sounds contradictory, but it isn’t. It’s like saying that existence is everything that exists, except all the things that don’t. Our language makes it foggy, that is all. Possibly an example of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. It isn’t clearly coherent or true until you step back and look at it as a meta-condition of the system.

But that’s as far as my agreement goes. The many who say we shouldn’t tolerate, for example, radical Islam, actually mean we should wage war on it. Their justification for this is that if we don’t, it will destroy our society. It’s a flaw inherent to the lint-brained version of secularism that race-traitors like me adhere to. So we should be quasi-secular, only tolerating ideas that we like enough to be tolerant of. When being tolerant is easy.

This also sounds somewhat plausible. Until you really think about it. Because when you do, it becomes clear it’s just victim-blaming on a cultural scale. The problem isn’t that ‘my’ idea of secularism – which is, obviously, proper secularism – can’t protect itself against these threats. No. It’s that these threats are what you end up looking like if you aren’t properly secular yourself. The problem is with them, not me.

So are we doomed to give up on the idea completely, being forced into some compromise? Maybe. But not necessarily. I think we’ve already proved the system to be far more resilient than the critics give it credit for.

The reality is, our society is nowhere near as sanitised as we believe it to be. Secularism hasn’t been a success because it eradicated racism or sexism, but because it adapted to them. It undermined the force of their arguments. When they spoiled for a fight, it didn’t give them one. At least not in the sense touted under the guise of ‘ethno-culturalism’ or Making America Great Again. It didn’t wipe them out, it suppressed their ability to compete on a memetic level. They have been cornered, re-shaped into detrimental traits, and are now fighting to survive.

Yet these other ideas were there from the outset. Not only that, but they were the dominant norm. They dictated the environment within which the pattern of concepts we call ‘secularist’ evolved and against which it had to compete. Now those other ideas are on the decline, while ‘ours’ have delivered the greatest technological, ethical, and cultural successes in the history of our species.

That doesn’t mean further adaptions to the way we implement secularism aren’t needed or won’t happen. They most certainly are and will. But the terms in which we couch them should be carefully considered and limits on them clearly drawn. This includes recognising the threats – internal and external – for what they are. First and foremost is the realisation that authoritarianism and religious fundamentalism are displaying a problem that lays within them, not within us.

We have to be alert to these threats. Radical Islam must be addressed. Russia represents a tangible threat to the western way of life. But the greatest threat to those other ways of thinking is secularism. The thing we seek to defend is also the best weapon in our arsenal for doing just that.

Which is exactly why those things attacking it are trying to make us retreat from it. It’s the antithesis of blind faith and absolute control. It’s actually the most dangerous idea there is, because it is capable of out-competing all the others. It can adapt to them in ways they cannot adapt to it. They seek to change it because they know that, if they do not, it will change them.