Why Defend Tolerance and not Intolerance?

Jacques commented:

. . . I'm reluctant to say that tolerance needs defending more than intolerance.

The Muslim world is intolerant of many things that should be tolerated, such as 'paganism' and atheism. But then, the Muslim world is also rightly intolerant of all the worst things about our culture. They don't tolerate blasphemy-for-the-sake-of-blasphemy. If halfwits with 'education' degrees want to teach their young children that it's great to be 'gay' or 'trans', and maybe they should try it out, Muslims will not stand for it. They don't tolerate rape and murder just because stopping it would have 'disparate impact' across races. Don't we want to defend their intolerance in these respects?

[. . .]

I basically agree with Jacques although the penultimate sentence of the above quotation needs to be toned down and qualified.  But it is certainly true that "the Muslim world is also rightly intolerant of all the worst things about our culture."  I have argued this myself:

Thursday, February 10, 2011

What Do We Have to Teach the Muslim World? Reflections Occasioned by the Death of Maria Schneider

I was one of those who saw "Last Tango in Paris" when it was first released, in 1972.  I haven't seen it since and I don't remember anything specific about it except one scene, the scene you remember too, the 'butter scene,' in which the Marlon Brando character sodomizes the Maria Schneider character.  Maria Schneider died last week at 58 and indications are that her exploitation by Brando and Bertolucci scarred her for life.

Islamic culture is in many ways benighted and backward, fanatical and anti-Enlightenment, but our trash culture is not much better. Suppose you are a Muslim and you look to the West.  What do you see? Decadence.  And an opportunity to bury the West. 

If Muslims think that our decadent culture is what Western values are all about, and something we are trying to impose on them, then we are in trouble.  They do and we are.

Militant Islam's deadly hatred of us should not be discounted as the ravings of lunatics or psychologized away as a reflex of envy at our fabulous success. For there is a kernel of insight in it that we do well to heed. Sayyid Qutb , theoretician of the Muslim Brotherhood, who visited the USA at the end of the '40s, writes in Milestones (1965):

     Humanity today is living in a large brothel! One has only to glance
     at its press, films, fashion shows, beauty contests, ballrooms,
     wine bars and broadcasting stations! Or observe its mad lust for
     naked flesh, provocative pictures, and sick, suggestive statements
     in literature, the arts, and mass media! And add to all this the
     system of usury which fuels man's voracity for money and engenders
     vile methods for its accumulation and investment, in addition to
     fraud, trickery, and blackmail dressed up in the garb of law.

A wild exaggeration in 1965, the above statement is much less of an exaggeration today. But setting aside the hyperbole, we are in several  ways a sick and decadent society getting worse day by day. On this score, if on no other, we can learn something from our Islamist critics. The fact that a man wants to chop your head off does not mean that he has nothing to teach you.  We often learn more from our enemies than from our friends.  Our friends often will spare us hard truths.

Companion post: What Ever Happened to Linda Lovelace?

..............

Jacques' challenge to me I take to be the following:  Why do you defend tolerance and not intolerance when, as ought to be obvious to any sensible person, there are things that we ought to tolerate and things that we ought not tolerate?  Equivalently, why is tolerance in general better than intolerance in general?  An anonymous commenter adds support to Jacques' challenge:

All sides can say "it is important that the right kinds of things are tolerated and important that the wrong kinds of things are not tolerated". Isn't that the only sense in which you, or anyone, is a proponent of "tolerance"?

I don't think so.  In order to determine what is tolerable and what is not we must inquire, we must examine, we must canvass various options.  For this we need the help of others.  We need to read their writings and hear their voices.  We need access to a broad base of historical and other knowledge.  We ought therefore to tolerate a wide variety of views in order to understand the issues and possibly arrive at the truth about them. 

We don't know what all to tolerate and what all not to tolerate. Should we allow (tolerate) immigration from Muslim lands at the present time?  That is a serious question.  The answer is not obvious.  If you claim to know the answer you are blustering.  This is a legitimate topic of open inquiry.  Among the conditions of the possibility of open inquiry is toleration of opposing points of view.

So, even to get clear about what toleration is and is not, to get clear about its limits, to get clear about how it gears into other values, to get clear about what our first-order moral commitments ought to be, we need a space in which there is the free exchange of ideas, a space that is possible only under the aegis of toleration, and not in the precincts of Islamic fundamentalism or Leftism.

Suppose you say to me, "Look, free exchange of ideas is just one more thing that we ought to tolerate; but that is not a reason to defend tolerance in general rather than intolerance."  Well, I think it is.  For how do you know that free exchange of ideas ought to be tolerated?  That is something that needs to be investigated.  Tolerance is the space within which alone these questions can be addressed and possibly resolved (though I am not sanguine about resolutions); as such, tolerance and its conditions are not just further things that ought to be tolerated.

Related articles

Gluttony: Another Sign of Decline

Why the Left Will Not Admit the Threat of Radical Islam (Revised and Expanded)

Is Paris a 'No Go' Zone?

Comments

[Anonymous]

"Suppose you say to me, "Look, free exchange of ideas is just one more thing that we ought to tolerate; but that is not a reason to defend tolerance in general rather than intolerance.""

That would indeed be my response. Your rebuttal is that we require toleration for the space of inquiry that allows the possibility of attaining knowledge of what should be tolerated. The value assumptions embedded in here are that (a) it is morally good or required for a set of people to have a particular epistemic state - in this case genuine knowledge - of what should be tolerated and not tolerated, and (b) that this epistemic state is acquired through open inquiry, which requires toleration of diverging thoughts and opinion.

But these are both value claims that a proponent of "toleration" in itself could reject or, at least, interpret in importantly different ways. Starting with (b), why think that this desirable epistemic state is achieved through open inquiry rather than divine revelation or a close reading of a certain religious text, or some other method? And even if some type of inquiry is required, _who_ should be part of this inquiry? Anyone, or just a select group of people who have the correct basic guiding principles and beliefs that will keep them from going astray? It's clear that you want to include a lot of people in this community of inquirers who are tolerated. But why? Toleration itself doesn't require that, even if it does require (a) and (b). One could argue further that genuine knowledge rather than some other type of epistemic state is not morally required for beliefs about what should be tolerated, thus challenging (a). But even if you think that some genuine knowledge of this is required for toleration, this says nothing about whether this is only required for, say, one person who sets the rules for the state and gets his knowledge from divine revelation, or whether many people need to be able to obtain this knowledge.

So, again, it seems that the kind of toleration conditions that you want to defend against the left and the Islamists are actually rooted in specific value commitments that are distinct from toleration itself.

[Elliott]

"In order to determine what is tolerable and what is not we must inquire, we must examine, we must canvass various options."

I agree. I would add that the traditional principle of toleration seems to require objective truth and objective (or at least universal) morality. If there is no objective falsehood and no objective (or at least universal) moral wrongness, then there is nothing significant to tolerate, nothing to examine, debate, compare, contrast, etc. And if persons are not of value and their rights to form their beliefs not important, then there would be no good reason to tolerate their views.

I would also add that that the 'tolerance' of normative moral relativism is problematic. For in NMR, tolerance (of any sort) is morally right in society A if it is part of the social code in A. But intolerance (of any sort) is morally right in society B if it is part of the social code in B. In NMR, 'tolerance' is merely custom, and "custom is king" -- as Pindar and Herodotus are said to have claimed.

[Bill Vallicella]

Thanks, Elliot. I basically agree.

[Jacques]

"we need a space in which there is the free exchange of ideas, a space that is possible only under the aegis of toleration, and not in the precincts of Islamic fundamentalism or Leftism."

But the kind of 'toleration' needed for the (valuable, useful, rational or truth-conducive) free exchange of ideas involves intolerance of some ideas, some people. For example, if there were no comment moderation on this blog, there might be hundreds of comments from hyper-ventilating Leftists accusing us of being Nazis and haters; there might be hundreds of comments from well-meaning but philosophically unsophisticated people who would persistently fail to grasp the host of principles and distinctions that all of us are taking granted. In order for our free exchange of ideas to facilitate inquiry or knowledge or mutual understanding, we have to exclude those kinds of comments and people.

Notice also that, in some Leftist or Muslim fundamentalist thread, all kinds of ideas and people would be tolerated that are not tolerated here. In some respects, the space of Leftist or Muslim fundamentalist discourse is more tolerant (or open or free) than ours. And in other respects, ours is more tolerant (or open or free) than theirs. So again it seems that the real issue is not tolerance or intolerance, but the specific kinds of tolerance and intolerance that we may justifiably endorse.

True, we need to inquire and consider views of others in order to figure out which specific kinds we ought to endorse; but even in doing *that* we have to start from some fairly specific range of views and arguments and values that we regard as being at least somewhat plausible. If we were tolerant of every conceivable view or argument or value system -- if we didn't simply reject many of them out of hand -- the inquiry could never get off the ground.

[Bill Vallicella]

Anon,

I agree that I am committed to something like your (a) and (b). You say some proponent of toleration might reject them. So what? I'm defending my concept of toleration, not his.

In addition, we cannot discuss (a) and (b) if I do not tolerate your dissent.

>>Starting with (b), why think that this desirable epistemic state is achieved through open inquiry rather than divine revelation or a close reading of a certain religious text, or some other method?<<

I am open to the possibility of divine revelation. But as you know there are competing 'revelations.' So we are thrown back upon our own resources: we must inquire into which of the putative revelations is the true one. In Christianity, the Trinity is a revealed truth, but in Islam it is not a truth at all. So we need to compare and contrast and study and examine. But for that to proceed we need access to the different holy books and the different theological and philosophical works.

But unless there is tolerance of opposing views we cannot make the comparative study.