The Intolerance of Tolerance

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In addition to questions about tolerance, our survey includes a number of questions associated with prejudice, such as attitudes towards immigrants and homosexuals. We include these so that we can assess whether our items capture something distinct from prejudice. These additional items come from established cross-national surveys and have been validated in previous empirical research. We also ask respondents about their political preferences and voting behavior. As previously mentioned, the survey also includes demographic questions. I circulated them to everybody, and then we got all the people together and we criticized each other’s papers for days. We took notes on all of this, and we revised them all and out popped another book. We did this five times over ten years … five books. It was very interesting. It was interesting just watching people come into a room.

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. Professors in the latter departments are often unreconstructed modernists, or still more commonly, they are modernists with respect to their own disciplines, but postmoderns everywhere else. There are also groups that have sort of gone through a postmodern phase and have come out the other side.I was giving the Staley Lectures in a conservative Christian college, which shall remain nameless to protect the guilty, not too long ago. One of the students came to me after some long discussions on some of these matters and said, “I see the Bible does say things like ‘these are written that you may know, dear old Theophilus, the certainty of the things …’ I see the Bible says that, but I’ve got to tell you, everytime I read that stuff I get really embarrassed. I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t like it. It makes me feel uncomfortable.” With Popper, not to manipulate is more important than truth. With Foucault, manipulation is inevitable in human communication, but in any case, there is no objective truth accessible to us. Tolerance in such a rÈgime must come at the expense of truth, and those who disagree with it must be crushed because they’re intolerant. There’s the irony. The new view of tolerance is quite different. Under the impact of postmodern epistemology, about which I’ll say more in a moment, people are more likely to be thought tolerant if they do not hold strong views. The reason for this is many thinkers in our world are pretty certain the notion of objective truth is incoherent. If there is no objective truth to which all people owe allegiance, precisely because it is intrinsically objective, then strong opinions are no more than strong preferences for a particular version of what we call truth.

Walsham, Alexandra (2006). Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700. Manchester: Manchester University Press. p.233. ISBN 978-0-7190-5239-2. OCLC 62533086. 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.Bobo, L., & Licari, F. C. (1989). Education a 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] Tønder, Lars (2013). Tolerance: A Sensorial Orientation to Politics. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-931580-2.

In The End of Faith, Sam Harris asserts that society should be unwilling to tolerate unjustified religious beliefs about morality, spirituality, politics, and the origin of humanity, especially beliefs that promote violence. Despite problems in the scientific literature, it is generally accepted that tolerance is something necessary for democracies. As Kuklinski et al. ( 1991:3) note: “Few aspects of political life so directly and immediately touch upon the daily lives of common citizens as does their tolerance toward each other.” Footnote 1 To answer some of the pressing, if not existential questions facing multiethnic, democratic societies today, we need a clearer understanding of tolerance—what it is and what it isn’t. And, before we can begin to assess its impact on various aspects of social, economic, and political life, we need better tools to measure it.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.

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. John, Gray (2015). Enlightenment's Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-138-17022-3. OCLC 941437450. 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. a b Walzer, Michael (1997). On Toleration. The Castle lectures in ethics, politics, and economics. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0300070195. OCLC 47008086.Eventually, they take the matter up with Nathan the Wise, who patiently listens to their arguments and then offers his famous judgment. “Let each think his own ring is the true and magic one, and in the meantime, show forth gentleness and heartfelt tolerance toward the others.” There are also some correlatives to this postmodernism. Let me list a few. By correlatives, I mean things that have neither caused it nor been caused by it but both. That is, they have contributed to the development of postmodernism, and they are strengthened by post-modernism, but it’s not a one-to-one relationship. It’s messy. We’ll call them the correlatives of postmodernism. Let me mention three or four.