The Intolerance of Tolerance

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From the point of view of Marxist historiography, once it is established for Marxists that a historical scientific view of things … that is, a scientific view of history grounded on cultural movement and economic analysis … is true, then if you have some kind of Christian coming in saying, “I don’t really believe it’s true. I think you also have to take into account the power of God and the Reformation and all of that,” then obviously, they’re such twits that no matter how bright they are in their test scores they can’t possibly be admitted to a university. Tausch, Arno (2017). "Are Practicing Catholics More Tolerant of Other Religions than the Rest of the World? Comparative Analyses Based on World Values Survey Data". SSRN Electronic Journal. doi: 10.2139/ssrn.3075315. ISSN 1556-5068. In that sense, there are quite a few people … popularizers like Tom Oden, but also more serious analyses like that of Netland and a number of others as well … who are convinced that postmodernism is not really a useful label. It’s really modernism gone to seed. There’s some truth to that.

From quite a different tradition, Michel Foucault, one of the founders of modern postmodernism, developed this perspective at length. All claims to explanation or understanding always entail what he calls totalization, and totalization is invariably manipulative and destructive. Foucault was shrewd enough to recognize that if his explanation is true, it is true even of his own explanation. You can be ever so religious on Sunday; it just doesn’t matter a fig. In a culture in which evangelicals now have the same divorce rate as the rest of the culture, that’s secularization. I don’t care how many people go to church. It’s secularization. It doesn’t matter what you believe anymore. It just doesn’t matter. Fourthly, precisely because it did not depend on revelation, except what you can discover to be revelation, it became methodologically rigorous. It becomes the foundation for what we mean by modern science. It becomes methodologically rigorous. All of this, until very recently, still dominates all our universities. So if you write a dissertation on some topic the issue of the grade you get or whether or not you pass or fail will turn, perhaps, not even quite as much on your conclusions as on the rigor of the methodology you apply to the task. Today’s political correctness, however, is intolerant not of substance, but of intolerance itself. Thus, although the politically correct would have a great deal of difficulty agreeing on what constitutes goodness and truth, they have no trouble at all agreeing that intolerance itself is wrong. Why? Because no one deserves to be offended.” I want to use most of the rest of my time in this first session to talk about … 2. The sea change that helped bring about this new tolerance. Because there was not necessarily any huge empirical element to this view of epistemology, at the street level it was regularly and regrettably tied to a great deal of magic and superstition, but in one sense it leaves the central presupposition being the omniscient God. That is its strength. Its weakness is, nevertheless, in a fallen world there is very little way of testing anything except by appeal to authority.

Forst maintains that tolerance may also be respect for diversity or esteem for diversity. In Forst’s third conception of tolerance, individuals show respect for diversity by viewing disparate groups as morally and politically equal even though they may differ fundamentally in beliefs, practices, and lifestyles. In his fourth conception, tolerance is esteem or appreciation for diversity. According to Forst, esteem is a more demanding reaction to diversity than respect. This version of tolerance means viewing others’ beliefs, practices, or lifestyles as something valuable and worthy of ethical esteem even though they are different from one’s own. Thus, we call the second and third expressions of tolerance respect for difference and appreciation of difference. Walsham, Alexandra (12 October 2017). "Toleration, Pluralism, and Coexistence: The Ambivalent Legacies of the Reformation". Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte - Archive for Reformation History. 108 (1): 181–190. doi: 10.14315/arg-2017-0121. ISSN 2198-0489. S2CID 148602448. Curry, Thomas J. (1989). Church and State in America to the Passage of the First Amendment. Oxford University Press; Reprint edition. ISBN 978-0-19-505181-0.

You begin with the “I,” you being with this focus on self, you begin with self-reverentiality, and then you ultimately don’t have any mooring. You don’t have any gauge. You don’t have any lever on which to wield Archimedes lever at all. As a result, modernism is inevitably going to drift to postmodernism. Fifthly, that meant you were pursuing truth that partook of ahistorical universality. That is to say, truth that is true everywhere, in every time … ahistorical, transcultural universality. It’s easiest to see in the domain of the hard sciences, partly because the international scientific community has common language. Laursen, John Christian; Nederman, Cary, eds. (1997). Beyond the Persecuting Society: Religious Toleration Before the Enlightenment. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 978-0-8122-3331-5. It’s worth pointing out he was not the first person to say that sort of thing. Saint Augustine had said something rather similar more than a millennium earlier. He had said, si fallor sum, “If I err, I am.” Saint Augustine never connected this with a vast theory of epistemology, and so it never became a slogan in the Western world.If I have the right tools as I approach the biblical text, if I ask the right questions, if I bring the right rigor and the right discipline, then as I approach the text, I will ask certain kinds of things and it will give me true answers. If I ask the wrong kinds of things, or I don’t have the right kind of rigor, then it might give me wrong answers, so you’ve got to keep refining hermeneutics. Though not formally legally binding, the Declaration has been adopted in or has influenced many national constitutions since 1948. It also serves as the foundation for a growing number of international treaties and national laws and international, regional, national, and sub-national institutions protecting and promoting human rights, including the freedom of religion. Many empirical studies of tolerance begin with the assumption that particular groups are widely disliked or, at the very least, viewed with skepticism (Bobo and Licari 1989; van Doorn 2016; Gibson and Bingham 1982; Gibson 1998). An important example is Stouffer’s ( 1955) seminal work on tolerating non-conformity (e.g., socialism and atheism) in the United States. In his study, examples of tolerance include the willingness to extend rights such as freedom of speech to these “non-conformist” groups. Verkuyten and Slooter ( 2007) study tolerance of Muslim beliefs and practices among Dutch teenagers. They motivate their choice of out-group with reference to the general status of Islam in Dutch society. The main issue with this “unpopular groups” strategy is that it is impossible to distinguish empirically between people who support rights for groups they dislike and people who support rights because they are positively disposed towards the group in question (Sullivan et al. 1979).

Third, scholars that focus on attitudes towards groups not only conflate prejudice with tolerance but also disregard people’s ability to support diversity in the abstract. Sniderman et al. ( 1989:27) call this outright dismissal of principled tolerance a deeply cynical and pessimistic view of “the willingness of the average citizen to embrace, disinterestedly and consistently, a foundational value of democratic politics—tolerance.” We contend that at the very least this is an empirical question worthy of investigation. Without measures of tolerance in the abstract, we simply do not know. Murphy, Andrew R. (1997). "Tolerance, Toleration, and the Liberal Tradition". Polity. The University of Chicago Press Journals. 29 (4): 593–623. doi: 10.2307/3235269. JSTOR 3235269. S2CID 155764374. Note well the cumulative effect of such definitions. Heresy is no longer possible, except for the view that there is such a thing as heresy. “That’s heretical.” No absolutism is permitted, except for the absolute prohibition of absolutism. Tolerance rules, except there must be no tolerance for those who disagree with this particular definition of tolerance. Thus, tolerance becomes the most massively intolerant movement in Western culture. Considering our three expressions of tolerance are correlated, it is possible that a one-factor model actually describes the data better or at least as well as the three-factor model. However, results indicate that this is not the case (CFI: 0.85, RMSEA: 0.13). We also ran analyses using a third item for respect (“It bothers me that some people have different traditions and lifestyles”) but its inclusion leads to slightly worse fit in the Swedish sample (CFI: 0.958, RMSEA: 0.068) and poor fit in the cross-national sample. Thus, we choose the most parsimonious 8-item model.

We advance a new conception of the phenomenon in question and define tolerance as a value orientation towards difference. The fundamental question is not whether one puts up with something disliked but how one responds to the existence of diversity itself. This definition is abstract and analytically distinct from other concepts. Footnote 4 Our focus is on subjective reactions to difference; thus, this conceptualization does not require dislike of or identification of potentially objectionable groups, ideas, or behaviors. In practice, this definition is consistent with the approach to tolerance that does incorporate forbearance into its definition. It’s extra rules that are put in, extra foundations that we’ve come to discover, and we’re moving as a body to new insights and deeper grasps. The model is still from the hard sciences. It’s very difficult for somebody to get a hearing who comes along and says, “Good grief. This is a really silly thing. It’s not an advance at all. It’s a retrograde step. Very technically impressive, but at the end of the day, it butchers the text and should be thrown out forthwith.” Hanson, Charles P. (1998). Necessary Virtue: The Pragmatic Origins of Religious Liberty in New England. University Press of Virginia. ISBN 978-0-8139-1794-8. This postmodern approach to tolerance sports another wrinkle in the domain of religion. For various reasons, despite all the predictions of the naturalists, there is a rising interest in something rather ill-defined called spirituality, but because there is no reason to think one particular approach to spirituality captures the truth in any objective sense, there is a drift toward the view that all perspectives on spirituality are equally valid.

Moreover, there were three or four movements in Western culture that came together and contributed to this shift. People have been thinking about these things for a long time. Immanuel Kant was no postmodernist, but on the other hand, he made the distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal. To “put up with” in political terms translates into allowing the expression of objectionable ideas (Sullivan et al. 1979), or more specifically, to extend social rights related to political participation and freedom of speech to groups one dislikes or disagrees with (Mondak and Sanders 2005; Rapp 2017). The “objection criteria” is at the core of this conceptualization, as “… one cannot tolerate ideas of which one approves (Gibson 2006, p. 22).” Tolerance, in this sense, is a sequential or twofold concept (Rapp and Freitag 2015), where the crux of the matter is the initial position of like or dislike.First, unlike premodernism, it begins with the “I.” That is, it begins with a finite knower. Premodern epistemology begins with God. In that sense, premodern epistemology is much more like Van Tillianism. There are some big differences, but in that respect it’s much more like Van Tillianism. It’s more like we ask the question of a text, but the answer we hear … whether it’s right or wrong or indifferent, it’s what we hear … subtly shapes us so we’re now slightly different so when we approach it the next time around we’re just a bit different and ask slightly different things with slightly different sets of tolerances, so we go around and around in what came to be called the hermeneutical circle. Postmodernism either overturns or modifies all six of those parameters. It’s impossible, in my view, to get a very good grasp of postmodern epistemology without seeing that sort of thing, whether it’s cast in these terms or otherwise. The reasons for it are complex. Some of them turn on the intrinsic weakness of the system itself. That’s why there are some very reputable thinkers who treat postmodernism not as a new epistemology but merely modernism gone to seed. It’s just the extrapolation of it. People long recognized before Thomas Kuhn that sometimes people made leaps of logic and jumped to a new insight. It didn’t all fall out logically. Nevertheless, in terms of establishing something as truth, you still sought your self-evident truths, your axioms, your foundations, and then you developed your methodological rigor, and then you turned the crank and out popped the truth. In his book, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper argued that the belief that you have the Truth is always implicitly totalitarian. The utterance, “I am sure I have the Truth” easily drifts towards the tyrannous conclusion, “Therefore, I must be obeyed, and I have the right to crush you if you do not obey.”