LIBERAL ENTROPY:

On tolerance (David Warren, January 12, 2003, Ottawa Citizen)

What has happened in Canada, and elsewhere in the West, is the systematic abandonment by people who still consider themselves to be "liberal", of every principle for which liberalism once stood. And at the root of this, I think, is the transformation of "tolerance". It has ceased to be a rational and defensible principle, and become instead a war cry for the demolition of anything that remains in our social order.

For if you read John Locke, in his "Letter Concerning Toleration", the classical liberal account of the matter, you enter a different world of mind than any we would recognize today. I am not a Lockean liberal myself, but like my late Canadian hero George Grant, I will immediately concede that, "There are worse accounts of justice than you will find in John Locke."

Locke takes it for granted, as all liberals once did, that a society has a shape and nature, that it is not a vacuum; he refers expressly to a "Christian commonwealth". Moreover he allows that this Christian order is founded on a profound knowledge - not an opinion about, but knowledge -- of right and wrong. He identifies toleration with the highest Christian aspirations, but does not take it as a good in itself, and does not dream that it can be either absolute or relativist.

In his "Letter" and elsewhere, Locke builds the position of the civil magistrate -- his view of what we will allow and not allow, what we will enfranchise and not enfranchise -- on what is reciprocal. We can tolerate all those who tolerate us.

In his day in England, for instance, he will tolerate Roman Catholics in practice, because they do nothing in their churches that would not be legal in their homes. But he nevertheless excludes them from full citizenship; and not because he is an anti-Catholic bigot but because Catholics did not then recognize England's Protestant succession. He defended the full enfranchisement of various Protestant non-conformists, because they did recognize it. He excluded Jews and Atheists, because they could not fully accept a civil order founded in Christian belief. To the modern reader this seems shocking; but one can see the reasoning in it.

Times change, & it is quite right that we have accepted the enfranchisement of Catholics and Jews and even Atheists. The condition was, they pledge allegiance, and thus agree to share in upholding the civil order as much symbolized as ruled by Crown in Parliament.

Today we have not merely forgotten the condition, but have actually reversed it.

Here's a portion of the Letter that touches upon these points:

I say, first, no opinions contrary to human society, or to those moral rules which are necessary to the preservation of civil society, are to be tolerated by the magistrate. But of these, indeed, examples in any Church are rare. For no sect can easily arrive to such a degree of madness as that it should think fit to teach, for doctrines of religion, such things as manifestly undermine the foundations of society and are, therefore, condemned by the judgement of all mankind; because their own interest, peace, reputation, everything would be thereby endangered.

Another more secret evil, but more dangerous to the commonwealth, is when men arrogate to themselves, and to those of their own sect, some peculiar prerogative covered over with a specious show of deceitful words, but in effect opposite to the civil right of the community. For example: we cannot find any sect that teaches, expressly and openly, that men are not obliged to keep their promise; that princes may be dethroned by those that differ from them in religion; or that the dominion of all things belongs only to themselves. For these things, proposed thus nakedly and plainly, would soon draw on them the eye and hand of the magistrate and awaken all the care of the commonwealth to a watchfulness against the spreading of so dangerous an evil. But, nevertheless, we find those that say the same things in other words. What else do they mean who teach that faith is not to be kept with heretics? Their meaning, forsooth, is that the privilege of breaking faith belongs unto themselves; for they declare all that are not of their communion to be heretics, or at least may declare them so whensoever they think fit. What can be the meaning of their asserting that kings excommunicated forfeit their crowns and kingdoms? It is evident that they thereby arrogate unto themselves the power of deposing kings, because they challenge the power of excommunication, as the peculiar right of their hierarchy. That dominion is founded in grace is also an assertion by which those that maintain it do plainly lay claim to the possession of all things. For they are not so wanting to themselves as not to believe, or at least as not to profess themselves to be the truly pious and faithful. These, therefore, and the like, who attribute unto the faithful, religious, and orthodox, that is, in plain terms, unto themselves, any peculiar privilege or power above other mortals, in civil concernments; or who upon pretence of religion do challenge any manner of authority over such as are not associated with them in their ecclesiastical communion, I say these have no right to be tolerated by the magistrate; as neither those that will not own and teach the duty of tolerating all men in matters of mere religion. For what do all these and the like doctrines signify, but that they may and are ready upon any occasion to seize the Government and possess themselves of the estates and fortunes of their fellow subjects; and that they only ask leave to be tolerated by the magistrate so long until they find themselves strong enough to effect it?

Again: That Church can have no right to be tolerated by the magistrate which is constituted upon such a bottom that all those who enter into it do thereby ipso facto deliver themselves up to the protection and service of another prince. For by this means the magistrate would give way to the settling of a foreign jurisdiction in his own country and suffer his own people to be listed, as it were, for soldiers against his own Government. Nor does the frivolous and fallacious distinction between the Court and the Church afford any remedy to this inconvenience; especially when both the one and the other are equally subject to the absolute authority of the same person, who has not only power to persuade the members of his Church to whatsoever he lists, either as purely religious, or in order thereunto, but can also enjoin it them on pain of eternal fire. It is ridiculous for any one to profess himself to be a Mahometan only in his religion, but in everything else a faithful subject to a Christian magistrate, whilst at the same time he acknowledges himself bound to yield blind obedience to the Mufti of Constantinople, who himself is entirely obedient to the Ottoman Emperor and frames the feigned oracles of that religion according to his pleasure. But this Mahometan living amongst Christians would yet more apparently renounce their government if he acknowledged the same person to be head of his Church who is the supreme magistrate in the state.

Lastly, those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God. Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all; besides also, those that by their atheism undermine and destroy all religion, can have no pretence of religion whereupon to challenge the privilege of a toleration. As for other practical opinions, though not absolutely free from all error, if they do not tend to establish domination over others, or civil impunity to the Church in which they are taught, there can be no reason why they should not be tolerated.

One recognizes here some of the reasoning by which Robert Bork, in his famous (infamous?) Indiana Law Journal essay——excluded advocacy of
communism and purveying of pornography from the protections of the First Amendment. With regards to communism, he made the seemingly self-evident point that it would be absurd to think that the Constitution is intended to protect those who seek to overthrow it.

Harvey Mansfield makes a similar point when he argues for the supremacy of the Constitution in America:

In Mansfield's words, "although the Constitution is based on the state of nature, it is not a natural constitution in the sense of being determined by nature. It had to be constituted, and the choice between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists was a real one. . . . [A]fter the Constitution was constituted, it produced a way of thinking — a culture — favorable to itself." That means "the American regime is not simply a theoretical, impartial republic modeled on mankind's necessities. It has its own character and has made its own culture."

I paraphrase: The Constitution was written to secure the natural rights named in the Declaration. But once written, it took on a life of its own, independent of the doctrine that gave rise to it. The Constitution, and no longer the principle that "all men are created equal," now became our regime,
our arche or principle, our authoritative beginning that shapes and forms us and makes us what we are. We now understand ourselves (or once did), Mansfield argues, as a constitutional people, no longer as a revolutionary people standing up against oppressive government in the name of our natural rights. In this respect, says Mansfield, America moves beyond Locke and even against Locke, whose Two Treatises concluded with a warm celebration of the right of revolution. "To a constitutional people," writes Mansfield, "overturning the Constitution is unthinkable. On this point The Federalist is opposed to John Locke, who speaks rather lightly of establishing a new constitution."

According to Mansfield, the result of this transformation from a natural-rights republic to a constitutional republic is that our politics are much less vulnerable to the kind of destructive moralism that we see in the French Revolution. The French, in Mansfield's view, made the mistake of taking the idea of equality too seriously. They tried to "finish" the modern revolution initiated by Locke and the other adherents of social compact theory. They failed to put an end to their revolution by constitutionalizing it, as the American Founders did. As a result, the French lived out the full destructive implications of the modern doctrine, while the Americans were spared that destruction. In Mansfield's analysis, sober forms take the place of dangerous moral absolutes. That is, the form and formalities of constitutionalism take the place, in America, of insatiable appeals to a standard of "natural rights [held] over the government."

Mansfield believes that to the extent that Americans understand themselves as a constitutional people, as opposed to a people dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, they will be better able to appreciate the need for inequality in human life. So he concludes that we should celebrate the Constitution, and everything that goes with it, such as forms, formalities, and responsibility. These things are admittedly not quite virtue, but they point us in the direction of virtue. That is about as far as one can go in that old-fashioned direction under the conditions of the modern state. As for the Lockean theory of the founding, Mansfield does not deny that it was there, but he thinks it would be unwise to make too much of it, especially in our time, when all the forces seem to be pushing us in the direction of more and more equality.

Given this perspective it seems fair to wonder why a constitution that establishes its own forms, formalities, responsibilities, character, and culture should be understood to be amenable to the destruction of those very things, should, as Mr. Warren says has occurred in Canada, tolerate the "demolition of anything that remains in our social order." Thus, while it may be appropriate to tolerate an individual's atheism, statist Islamism, communism, homosexuality, racial separatism, etc. so long as these things remain private, as soon as they start to organize around these ideas or to inflict them on the broader regime our tolerance should end. And we should never do more than merely tolerate them. One may choose to be an atheist, but the resulting inability to swear and be bound by an oath should have consequences for that individual, not for society at-large. Or, one may be a homosexual, but the state need not therefore confer some official status on homosexual relationships nor even bar the rest of society from treating such individuals differently than they do others. In a sense, toleration is appropriate to precisely the degree that the beliefs/behaviors being tolerated are insignificant to the culture that the Constitution established. To the degree that they begin to have a significant impact they should not be tolerated or else we may lose the very culture that our system is designed to vindicate.

Mr. Warren refers, I think appropriately, to the alternative--to a system where those who can not conform themselves to the prevailing culture get to demand that the culture change--as nihilism:

If I were to choose a single word to describe this disease, it would be "nihilism". In broad political terms, it is the position you reach when you have evacuated from public life anything that has intrinsic meaning; when you approach, in effect, the intellectual equivalent of the heat death of the universe.

"One view is as good as another, one ideal is as good as another, one way of life is as good as another, and who is to judge?"

Having started with a State which is intended to impose and preserve a certain civic order, one may end by denying even the possibility of order and instead using the awesome powers that were only grudgingly conferred upon the state because it promised order to protect the disorderly, to, in effect, create disorder. This result is an obvious perversion of the purposes for which men enter into a shared civil society.

MORE:
-REVIEW: of The Long Truce: How Toleration Made the World Safe for Power and Profit by A.J. Conyers (David Gordon, The Mises Review)
-ESSAY: John Locke: From Absolutism to Toleration (Robert P. Kraynak, March 1980, The American Political Science Review)
-ESSAY: Religious Liberty as a Paradigm: For the Development of Human Rights (Alexandra Merrett, The Centre for East-West Cultural and Economic Studies)

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 13, 2003 12:24 PM