National Review Online (which, by the way, is an excellent and highly respectable website) has an article* today on the concept of tolerance and its boundaries as a peacemaker. I can't possible summarize the article and then keep this post short, so I simply submit that it really deserves a look. I do offer this quote from the article:
"Tolerance is a cardinal virtue when it entails parties disagreeing over questions of beliefs, values, and culture, but respecting the rights of their opponents to live and politic within the confines of the American constitutional order. However, in today’s colleges and universities, tolerance has too often evolved into a watery, uncritical acceptance of illiberal behavior." (emphasis supplied).
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Source: National Review Online [Frederick M. Hess].
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1 comment:
Jeremy,
I thought this was a great post, and it resonated with something I just read from French philosopher Alain Badiou, in his book Being and Event. Badiou claims,
"If truths exist, they are certainly indifferent to differences. Cultural relativism cannot go beyond the trivial statement that different situations exist. It does not tell us anything about what, among the differences, legitimately matters to subjects" (B&E, xii).
In other words, it's vacuous to pretend that differences themselves are the essences of life, and that all differences are of equal value simply by virtue of their difference-ness, that there's nothing beyond difference. Tolerance, like you said, might to a degree be a good thing, but it must be framed within a much larger vision of the good.
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