Intolerant Tolerance - Is Rational Public Discussion Still Possible?

Paul Adams

It was not some goofball but obscure pastor somewhere, but the presiding bishop of the Episcopalian Church USA (ECUSA), Jefferts Schori, who recently gave a sermon in Venezuela that has provoked questions such as, Is this the worst sermon ever preached? and (on my part, I admit) Have the Episcopalians in the US gone completely mad? Here are Fr. Barron's comments, delivered not with a rending of garments but with his characteristic chuckle.



Additional commentary by Fr. Barron, who addresses among other questions that of whether such a patently ridiculous and silly sermon is even worth paying attention to:



Other writers have commented on the increasingly bizarre nature of this abandonment in our times of critical thinking or any resort to reason or evidence - and the substitution of intolerant bullying - in the name of tolerance and diversity.  See for example the article by Australian sociologist Michael Casey on "The Puzzle of Intolerant Tolerance" and the interview with him here.

Now D.A. Carson, "a well-known Reformed theologian and exegete," has, in the words of James Kalb's review, "written a clear and well-reasoned analysis of today’s imperialistic tolerance from an Evangelical and classically liberal standpoint.

Kalb explainss,

He tells us that the new understanding of tolerance has meant a shift from accepting the right of others to hold dissenting views to demanding acceptance of such views as equally valid. It thus implies a shift from free discussion of conflicting truth claims to suppressing conflicts by silencing truth claims. This shift, he says, makes the new tolerance intellectually debilitating as well as blind, intolerant, and socially dangerous.

The shift is from a concern with truth and the common good to a radical individualism and subjectivism that conflates diversity as situation with diversity as a principle, that celebrates lifestyle diversity as such.  In this view diversity of family structures is to be welcomed.  We are supposed to talk of "families" rather than "the family," as if the natural family in which the children who result from the bodily union of their married parents are raised by those parents were just one kind of family among many alternatives and preferring it or wishing to promote and protect it were a form of intolerance or bigotry.   Not without reason Carolyn Moynihan calls this celebration of 'family diversity' "the world's most dangerous idea." Gone is the right of the child declared by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as spelled out in the Convention on the Rights of the Child adopted by the U.N. as recently as 1987 according to which every child has "as far as possible, the right to know and be cared for by his or her parents" (Article 7).

As Kalb notes in summarizing Carson's argument,

The result was a tolerance that looks only to itself, or perhaps individual freedom, as the highest standard. As the author puts it, the current form of tolerance is “largely cut free from both a well-articulated vision of truth and from binding culture-wide moral standards.”

The result has not been a state of ultimate freedom but a tolerance that makes rejection of absolutes an absolute. That, of course, is self-contradiction. As the author notes, the “truth question catches up with all of us,” and secularism has turned out as absolutist and dogmatic in its commitments as any other system. It is more so than most since it denies that it has dogmatic certainties and so feels no obligation to articulate and defend itself against objection. Instead, it relies on the “manipulative bludgeoning” of accusations of intolerance.

The new tolerance thus puts irrationality and bullying at the heart of public discussion. The results are as bad as might be expected. The new tolerance can’t deal with evil, for example, so serious discussion of human life and the public good becomes impossible. That leads to practical problems. The author notes, for example, that the idea of truth is necessary to resist tyranny, giving twentieth-century tyrannies and unpleasant features of Japanese life as examples. Nor can democratic procedures solve the problem. If rational discussion is impossible democracy becomes unworkable, and power inevitably flows upward to manipulative and irresponsible elites.

The author notes that the Christian emphasis on truth makes Christianity intolerant and therefore illegitimate by the new definition of tolerance.

Carson is right about the irrationality of this new notion of tolerance, one which rejects the notion of truth (except in asserting the truth of its own view about truth) and so makes itself impervious to reason and evidence and excludes them from public discussion.  But as Kalb says, there is a need to go further, to a sociological, theological, and philosophical understanding of how it can be that such an irrational, indeed bizarre form of tolerance

 has become so immensely powerful among intelligent, thoughtful, responsible, and well-educated people. More needs to be said of the logic of a modern outlook that views human relations technologically, and identifies what is good with what is desired. For those who hold such an outlook it is  natural to divinize individual subjectivity, which leads to an extreme concern for feelings, and to reject as irrational traditional forms of social organization, which involve sexual and cultural distinctions as well as conceptions of ultimate truth. Put those two tendencies together and the result is today’s politically correct version of tolerance. The author rightly points out many ironies of the present situation. Its ultimate irony, however, is that the current craziness springs from the utilitarian and technological outlook that is now considered so purely rational.

This combination of voluntarism and determinism, of subjectivism and mechanics, was a key theme of John Paul II (e.g., Fides et Ratio; Theology of the Body) and of Benedict XVI (Regensburg Address in 2006; Address intended for La Sapienza University in Rome in 2008).  See also Michael Waldstein's not-to-be-missed lecture on "Faith, Science and Pope Benedict XVI's Regensburg Address" and his marvelous introduction to his English translation of JP II's Theology of the Body.  No-one has better pursued these themes, utterly central to understanding modernity and our current cultural catastrophe, in an accessible or popular (but not dumbed down) way, than Fr. Robert Barron.

Totalitarian liberals - a follow-up to Obama's HHS power grab

In the words of John Paul II (Veritatis Splendor, N. 101):

Today, when many countries have seen the fall of ideologies which bound politics to a totalitarian conception of the world — Marxism being the foremost of these — there is no less grave a danger that the fundamental rights of the human person will be denied and that the religious yearnings which arise in the heart of every human being will be absorbed once again into politics. This is the risk of an alliance between democracy and ethical relativism, which would remove any sure moral reference point from political and social life, and on a deeper level make the acknowledgement of truth impossible. Indeed, “if there is no ultimate truth to guide and direct political activity, then ideas and convictions can easily be manipulated for reasons of power. As history demonstrates, a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism”.  

 A good reminder that not only are tyrants and totalitarians always ethical relativists, like Nietzsche reducing truth to power, but also ethical relativists inevitably have totalitarian tendencies.  It becomes all about using coercive state power to impose your views on what you see as a backward populace.

Michael Gerson has a good article in the Washington Post about how "Obama plays his Catholic allies for fools."  The HHS mandate was delivered with a sneer, Gerson suggests.

Both radicalism and maliciousness are at work in Obama’s decision — an edict delivered with a sneer. It is the most transparently anti-Catholic maneuver by the federal government since the Blaine Amendment was proposed in 1875 — a measure designed to diminish public tolerance of Romanism, then regarded as foreign, authoritarian and illiberal. Modern liberalism has progressed to the point of adopting the attitudes and methods of 19th-century Republican nativists. 

 It is a move so patently contemptuous of religious freedom and respect for conscience that it leaves those Catholics who provided Catholic cover for Obama with some explaining to do--not least the president of Notre Dame.

Consider Catholicism’s most prominent academic leader, the Rev. John Jenkins, president of Notre Dame. Jenkins took a serious risk in sponsoring Obama’s 2009 honorary degree and commencement address — which promised a “sensible” approach to the conscience clause. Jenkins now complains, “This is not the kind of ‘sensible’ approach the president had in mind when he spoke here.” Obama has made Jenkins — and other progressive Catholic allies — look easily duped.

As John Paul II had warned, there is in this radical secularism embraced by this Administration as well as other political leaders across Canada and Europe, a growing intolerance of any kind of institutional pluralism, a profound shift in the understanding of liberalism.  It amounts to a turning away from America's founding principles and Constitution, from a democracy that depends on the strength of mediating associations and institutions that are not dominated or suppressed by the state.  As Gerson concludes,

Obama’s decision also reflects a certain view of liberalism. Classical liberalism was concerned with the freedom to hold and practice beliefs at odds with a public consensus. Modern liberalism uses the power of the state to impose liberal values on institutions it regards as backward. It is the difference between pluralism and anti-­clericalism. 

The administration’s ultimate motivation is uncertain. Has it adopted a radical secularism out of conviction, or is it cynically appealing to radical secularists? In either case, the war on religion is now formally declared. 

Liberalism, Marriage, and the New Intolerance

Taking Rites Seriously: Political Liberalism and the Problem of Marriage By Francis J. Beckwith    FRIDAY, 06 JANUARY 2012 Political Liberalism, as we know it today, is not even three decades old. It began to develop in the early 1980s in the writings of several well-known philosophers that included Thomas Nagel, Ronald Dworkin, and John Rawls. The purpose of their project was to offer the political culture an intellectually respectable way to sequester the policy goals of the fledgling movement of religious conservatives while at the same time claiming that their project is consistent with an older liberalism that allows for full political participation by all citizens. The Political Liberal correctly observes that the differences between citizens on the culture-owar issues – e.g., abortion, marriage, euthanasia – stem from their contrary, though reasonable, worldviews or comprehensive doctrines (as Rawls would put it). Rawls concedes that his understanding of “reasonable” is “deliberately loose.” “We avoid excluding doctrines as unreasonable,” writes Rawls, “without strong grounds based on clear aspects of the reasonable itself. Otherwise our account runs the danger of being arbitrary and exclusive.Political liberalism counts many familiar and traditional doctrines – religious, philosophical, and moral – as reasonable, even though we could not seriously entertain them for ourselves. . . .” (Emphasis added) So, for example, the prolifer opposes abortion because he believes that all human beings, including the unborn, are by nature persons and thus have intrinsic dignity regardless of their size, level of development, environment, or degree of dependency.  The typical prochoicer, on the other hand, maintains that not all human beings are persons, because a person is a being who has the present capacity to exercise certain person-making functions like self-consciousness, rationality, the ability to communicate and have desires, and so forth. Because the fetus for most of its gestation lacks these functions, it is not a person and thus it is permissible to abort it.  Both positions, according to the Political Liberal, are reasonable, for they are derived from reasonable comprehensive doctrines and neither is unassailable. Thus, it would be as equally unjust for the government to coerce a prochoice citizen to carry a pregnancy to term as it would be for it to coerce a prolife citizen to procure an abortion. This is because a citizen cannot be coerced on a matter of fundamental rights based on reasons he is reasonable to reject. Political Liberalism’s sole purpose, we are told, is to accommodate citizen diversity on these contested questions while nurturing a political culture of respect and tolerance, the latter of which would be reflected in the government’s restraint in coercing and marginalizing citizens based on where they stand on these contested questions. The question lurking in the debate over whether or not marriage law should recognize same-sex couples seems almost like a paradigm case of the sort of dispute for which Political Liberalism was invented: what is the proper function of our sexual powers and its relationship to the nature of marriage?  How one answers this question is inexorably tied to what one understands to be true about the nature of men and women, the conjugal act, and the permanence of the marital bond. Such understandings, to conscript Rawls, are informed by those “many familiar and traditional doctrines – religious, philosophical, and moral” that Political Liberalism counts “as reasonable.”  Thus, it would seem to be inconsistent with Political Liberalism to allow any government coercion and marginalization of citizens who, as a matter of conscience (often grounded in religious conviction), cannot acquiesce to the legitimacy of same-sex marriage.  Consider just one example. In Massachusetts, soon after the state’s Supreme Judicial Court in 2003 required that the state issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, Catholic Charities, which was at the time in the child adoption business, was told by the state that it could no longer exclude same-sex couples as adoptive parents, even though the Catholic Church maintains that same-sex unions are deeply disordered and sinful. Because it could not as a matter of conscience compromise its moral theology, Catholic Charities ceased putting children up for adoption. Catholic Charities believes that its mission is to find for each child under its care an adequate replacement for her mother and father. This is grounded in the belief that a human child is the sort of being that has by nature a mother and a father, just as it is the sort of being that has the essential property to exercise rational thought (even if it never acquires the ability to exercise it).  Thus, if we have an obligation not to interrupt a child’s ability to exercise rational thought, we also have an obligation not to deny unjustly a child her mother and father. Because Catholic Charities believes it is morally required to treat all children with equal dignity and respect, this means that no child should be denied a mother and a father or a replacement for each if it is in fact possible to do so.  Including same-sex couples as adoptive parents, according to Catholic Charities, violates the equal dignity and respect of the children who have been placed in its care. Although everyone does not share this perspective, it is certainly just the sort of reasonable comprehensive doctrine that Political Liberalism is supposed to protect. But as we have seen since 2003, everything from public education, to rental law, to employment law, to family law, to government funding and to the tax-exempt status of religious academic institutions falls within the orbit of a state’s interest in making sure that same-sex marriage dissenters are coerced, punished, or marginalized if they refuse to treat same-sex marriage as licit as male-female marriage.  Thus, the Political Liberal, if he wants to remain consistent, should stand in solidarity with those who dissent from same-sex marriage.  Francis J. Beckwith is Professor of Philosophy and Church-State Studies at Baylor University. He is one of four primary contributors to the forthcoming Journeys of Faith: Evangelicalism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Catholicism and Anglicanism (Zondervan, 2012).  © 2012 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org

Retrieved January 6, 2011 from http://www.thecatholicthing.org/?task=view