The Intolerance of Tolerance

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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. a b c d van Doorn, Marjoka (2014). "The nature of tolerance and the social circumstances in which it emerges". Current Sociology. 62 (6): 905–927. Oberdiek, Hans (2001). Tolerance: Between Forbearance and Acceptance. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. p.vi. ISBN 978-0-8476-8785-5. OCLC 45604024.

There is, of course, also rising secularization. That needs to be understood. This does not necessarily mean there are fewer people who go around calling themselves Christians. It just means it doesn’t matter. Secularization, as understood by sociologists, is not the process by which we abandon religion; it’s the process by which we squeeze religion to the periphery of life. 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. Well, it seems to me that, perhaps, we might consider the possibility that the blessed apostle Paul might, perhaps, have been construing things in a slightly different way. He might, perhaps, have been thinking such and such.” The brother from Norway weighed in, “Of course, that’s not what he thought! I mean, anybody can see it means such and such! After all, Luther said it!” Meanwhile, my Japanese brother is wondering what group of barbarians he’s fallen into. All of this is before you get to any of the substance.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). If you begin with this view of tolerance and then elevate this understanding to the supreme position in the hierarchy of moral virtues, the supreme sin is intolerance. Intolerance now is understood to be any questioning or contradiction of the view that all opinions are equal, that all worldviews have equal worth, that all stances are equally valid. To question such postmodern axioms is, by definition, intolerant. For such questioning there is no tolerance whatsoever, for it is classed as intolerance and is, therefore, to be condemned. Toleration is when one allows, permits, or accepts an action, idea, object, or person that one dislikes or disagrees with.

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. Rawls, John (1971). A Theory of Justice: Original Edition. Harvard University Press. p. 216. ISBN 978-0-674-01772-6. 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. Now you begin with the “I,” but far from being assured that this “I” grants an access to truth, we recognize the very subjectivity of the “I” means we have no easy access to truth. That is the shift in postmodernism. It doesn’t deny you begin with the “I,” or in some forms of postmodernism the communal “we,” but at the end of the day it says that unnecessarily limits our perspective and, therefore, any access to truth.

In a highly diverse culture, like that which dominates much of the Western world, the plausibility structures are necessarily far more restricted for the very good reason we don’t have all that much in common. The plausibility structures that do remain tend to be held with extra tenacity, almost as if people recognize that without such structures the culture would be in danger of flying apart.

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. The reason why a lot of Christians, for example, were excluded from university education was exactly the same that you would exclude someone from university education in a science faculty in the West. If despite spectacular GPAs and spectacular test scores and all the rest, he said, “I do have to tell you, I don’t believe in the atomic theory of matter” he’s not going to get into a chemistry course in the Western world. It’s not going to happen. You’re going to wonder what sort of kook this is. We measure tolerance in two different samples. The first is a random sample of the Swedish population (aged 18 years and older). We administered the survey via the national postal service in spring of 2016. We sent the survey once without reminders. Our response rate is 27.6%, which generated a sample of 1107 individuals. The respondents are comparable to the general population in Sweden in regards to gender (49.7% women) and average age (50.9 years). People with higher education are slightly underrepresented in our sample. In 2016, 27% of the Swedish population had three or more years of tertiary education, while only 19% of our respondents above 25 years have at least 3 years of tertiary education. Footnote 5 11.1% of the sample is foreign-born, which is lower than the 17.9% of the total population born abroad in 2016, but not surprising given the survey was administered in Swedish. 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. In 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states:They don’t want to consider themselves postmoderns anymore, but when you try to probe to find out what their epistemology is, as far as I can see, it’s merely subjective eclecticism. There’s a bit of this and a bit of that. Thus, there is no etiology that is controlling the flow. It’s astonishingly pragmatic and eclectic. Moreover, vast numbers of citizens who could not define epistemology if their lives depended on it inevitably adopt some epistemology or other or mix of epistemologies coherent or otherwise. For the same reason we cannot speak anymore of truth in ahistorical universal terms under postmodernism. Part of the irony is where as modernism was drifting toward increasing philosophical materialism, as far as I can see, the new postmodernism is more interested in this vague thing called spirituality, with both good and bad results. It’s far more interested in alternative realities than merely the physical world, but it is open to every kookish thing under the sun, too.

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. Religious toleration may signify "no more than forbearance and the permission given by the adherents of a dominant religion for other religions to exist, even though the latter are looked on with disapproval as inferior, mistaken, or harmful". [4] Historically, most incidents and writings pertaining to religious toleration involve the status of minority and dissenting viewpoints in relation to a dominant state religion. [5] However, religion is also sociological, and the practice of toleration has always had a political aspect as well. [6] :xiii My point is both Mill and Lessing think there is objective truth out there. After all, there is at least one magic ring, but their rationalist and secular presuppositions drive them to infer in some domains, at least, the truth is not accessible. One can think something or other is true and argue the case, but if one cannot prove this something is true in a manner that conforms to the verification standards of public knowledge, the best stance is simply benign tolerance. Others researchers, however, explicitly describe tolerance as the absence of prejudice. Dunn and Singh ( 2011) define intolerance as “a negative general orientation toward groups outside of one’s own” (p. 319). The degree of tolerance is derived from the respondents’ willingness to accept as their neighbors social groups such as immigrants, drug users, homosexuals, or Jews. Evans ( 2002) focuses exclusively on racial prejudice and negative attitudes towards homosexuality, interpreting the absence of such attitudes as an expression of “focused tolerance.” For others, the equating of tolerance with positive out-group attitudes appears to come down to semantics. “Tolerance,” then, is not defined or operationalized, but only used to summarize positions on different indicators of prejudice (Crepaz and Damron 2009; Craig and Richeson 2014; Rustenbach 2010).

Three Elements of Tolerance

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. That means the reason for being tolerant is not that we cannot know which ring is magic, nor the best way to find out which ring is magic is by free discussion, but rather since all the rings are equally magic or non-magic, it is irresponsible to suggest any of the rings is merely imitation and without magical power. We must be tolerant not because we cannot distinguish the right path from the wrong path but because each path is equally right.