The Intolerance of Tolerance

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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. As Gaede puts it in his very useful book, When Tolerance is No Virtue, he writes, “In the past political correctness generally centered on issues that were quite substantive. The Victorians were prudish about sex because they were enthusiastic about bourgeois morality. In the fifties, many Americans were intolerant of any notion that seemed remotely “pink” (socialistic) because they assumed communism to be a major threat to their economic and political freedom. The first is biblical illiteracy. I’ve been doing university missions now for 25 years or so. Twenty-five years ago if I were dealing with an atheist on a university campus, at least he or she was a Christian atheist. That is to say, the god in which he or she was disbelieving was the Christian God, which means the categories were still on my turf. You can’t even presuppose that nowadays. Our critique of this strand of research is methodological. By incorporating prejudice into the measurement of tolerance, these previous studies do not analyze attitudes about the existence of diversity nor do they investigate an “orientation toward groups outside of one’s own” (Dunn et al. 2009:284). Instead, they measure a willingness to accept specific groups as neighbors, which certainly speaks to how respondents feel about these groups and not diversity in general. Measuring attitudes towards a multitude of groups does not change this; these indices only tell us the extent to which one is prejudiced—in other words, if one is prejudiced towards one, two, or many, but always a subsample of out-groups. In summary, this conceptualization defines tolerance as a phenomenon distinct from prejudice and emphasizes reactions to diversity in all forms. However, previous research from this tradition has not measured tolerance in a way that is consistent with that definition. 2.3 Other Concerns: Abstraction and Multidimensionality

I shall argue that although a few things can be said in its favor, the notion of tolerance has changed, and the contemporary tolerance is intrinsically intolerant and is blind to its own shortcomings because it erroneously thinks it holds the moral high ground. It does not. Worse, this tolerance is, perhaps, socially dangerous and is certainly intellectually debilitating. There are better structures of thought for achieving the desired ends. 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. 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.Toleration has been described as undermining itself via moral relativism: "either the claim self-referentially undermines itself or it provides us with no compelling reason to believe it. If we are skeptical about knowledge, then we have no way of knowing that toleration is good." [24] Although the three aspects of tolerance are correlated, additional analyses lead us to conclude that these results are not due to multicollinearity. First, we regress all outcome variables on factor scores to produce variance inflation factors (VIF), which indicate how much of the increased variance of a regression coefficient is due to collinearity. The VIF is approximately 1.5 or lower for all cases, indicating low levels of multicollinearity. Second, we compare the models reported in Table 6 with models where we set all (as well as combinations of) outcome variables on tolerance to be equal (see Marsh et al. 2004). This enables a test of Chi squared difference between models. In no case is the more restricted model better than the less restricted model (i.e., more freely estimated parameters), suggesting no multicollinearity issues. 5.3 Predicting Tolerance in Sweden Doubtless, there are many things that have contributed to this new view of tolerance. To be included in any full-blown discussion would be such phenomena as the changing immigration patterns during the past half century, which have brought to our shores millions of men and women who have contributed to the rich diversity of our citizenry; the invention of the computer and the Internet, which exposes us to all kinds of ideas and stances and perspectives much more rapidly than could have possibly been done a bare generation ago; the invention of the Net itself, not just the computer, which links people together. They enhance the feeling that the world is nothing but a global village, and much more. 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. I always do expository preaching in university missions and provide the text complete with chapter and verses. I have to begin by explaining the big numbers and little numbers. They don’t know the Bible has two Testaments. In many parts of our society, that’s where it is. If you are in a conservative part of the country, God bless you. Go in peace, but that’s not what’s going on on the East Coast or the West Coast, and it’s not what’s going on in our universities.

The mass media are largely formative. Many shrewd commentators … this one has been around for 15 years … have pointed out the shift from a modernist to a postmodernist epistemology was well testified to in the move from the first Star Trek series to the incarnation of the Star Trek: Voyager series.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.” With time, of course, that discipline may revise the methods or reanalyze the foundations. It’s not as if everything is set in concrete. Nevertheless, methodologically, epistemologically, that’s how Western thought has developed. That’s how science has, in large part, developed. There are lots of little kinks that are put in. For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right but found to be otherwise. It is, therefore, that the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my judgment and to pay more respect to the judgment of others.

One version of this older view of tolerance … one might call it the secular libertarian version… has another wrinkle to it. In his famous text, On Liberty, John Stuart Mill opts for a secularist basis to tolerance. “In the domain of religion,” Mill argues, “there are insufficient rational grounds for verifying the truth claims of any religion. The only reasonable stance toward religion is, therefore, public agnosticism and private benign tolerance.” 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.Rawls, John (1971). A Theory of Justice: Original Edition. Harvard University Press. p. 216. ISBN 978-0-674-01772-6. 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. You know, to boldly go where no one’s ever gone before and, thus, define the truth. Despite the splint infinitive, there’s a certain kind of modernist interest in exploring the truth. Program after program in the Voyager series was really quite different. It was designed to show that all cultures are all right; it just depends on your point of view. Postmoderns love narratives (“You tell your story, I tell my story, we all tell our stories”), but they very much despair of the big story that explains everything. Whatever else the Bible is, it is a metanarrative. It’s a big story that explains everything, and sooner or later we have to come to grips with that one as well. Beneke, Chris (2006). Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-530555-5.