TOLERANCE AS AN END

When Tolerance Becomes Intolerance: Religion Increasingly Pilloried in the Public Square (Zenit.org, 2003-05-24)

The note by the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith points out that Christians and non-Christians alike can contribute to the democratic process. "The life of a democracy could not be productive without the active, responsible and generous involvement of everyone, 'albeit in a diversity and complementarity of forms, levels, tasks and responsibilities'".

Yet, the document notes how, "the value of tolerance is disingenuously invoked when a large number of citizens, Catholics among them, are asked not to base their contribution to society and political life--through the legitimate means available to everyone in a democracy -- on their particular understanding of the human person and the common good". [...]

A commentary on the note by moral theologian Robert Spaemann observed that when tolerance becomes a supreme value "it is transformed into intolerance of what alone, in reality, gives tolerance its value: the sacredness of conscience."

Writing in the English weekly edition of L'Osservatore Romano of March 12, Spaemann explained that firm convictions are important because the dignity of the human person is based on a reference to the truth. If we adopt a purely relativist position we run the risk of falling into either anarchy or tyranny, he said. Arguing in favor of measures that respect an order founded on the nature of the human being is not imposing a religion on anybody, but is rather a defense of human dignity.

Elsewhere, Robert Kraynak in his book "Christian Faith and Modern Democracy" explains that a defects of modern liberal democracy is its tendency to promote a limited conception of the good life, reduced to a one-dimensional materialism of middle-class society. The dominant schools of modern liberalism, Kraynak writes, "have followed a flawed strategy of trying to vindicate human dignity by denying the objective existence of a greatest good, thereby allowing each person or nation to determine its own identity."

What Christianity can offer to remedy this is a concept of dignity based on the creation of human beings made in the image of God and redeemed by Christ. The rich doctrinal resources of Christianity "rescues liberalism from its descent into nihilism and breathes into it moral and spiritual vitality," Kraynak contends. Excluding this valuable Christian contribution from politics would only impoverish democracy.

No one has ever been more forthright about the intentional demoralizing of human society that is the intent of toleration than the British philosopher John Gray:

The first signs of postmodern political institutions are most clearly observable in Europe. The institutions of the European Union are not the institutions of a modern state writ large. The EU is not, and will not become, a modern federal state. It is an association of nation states that have embarked on a common project of shedding much of the sovereignty that distinguished the modern, "Westphalian" state. This project embodies the wager that nineteenth-century balance-of-power relations between the Union's nation-states can be rendered redundant in the context of the EU's common institutions.

The wager this project entails is on the possibility of enduring and stable political institutions that do not presuppose a common political culture and are not legitimated by a unifying ideology. This is the postmodern dimension of the European project. It is the attempt to found political institutions whose cultural identities are not singular, comprehensive, or exclusive (after the fashion of nineteenth-century nationalism and twentieth-century weltanschauung-states), but complex, plural, and overlapping.

This is not the project of privatizing cultural identity in the realm of voluntary association that is advanced in the standard liberalisms of today. That project, in practice, can only entrench the dominant cultural identity of a generation or more ago. This project instead attempts to enable plural identities to find collective expression in overlapping political institutions. The institutions of the European Union constitute the single most convincing exemplar thus far of the postmodern project of founding political legitimacy not on a common national culture or on any universalist ideology, but on a common acceptance of cultural difference. In East Asia, the fascinating experiment that is underway in Singapore may amount to an exercise in postmodern state-building and the conditions of postmodernity may have been present for generations in Japan. There may be a future for postmodernity in East Asia by virtue of the fact that some of its diverse cultures have modernized very successfully without thereby accepting any Enlightenment ideology.

It is in this historical context that an amended Hobbesian liberalism of fear may be salient. The animating interest of European institutions, as they have developed over the past 30 years or so, is an interest in peaceful coexistence without loss of cultural diversity. This points to the first radical revision that is needed in the Hobbesian view-namely, an acknowledgment of the political relevance of the human need for strong and deep forms of common life. Hobbes's thought needs to be fertilized with the insights of Herder. The abridgment of Hobbesian individualism that this entails is plainly considerable and necessitates consideration of how participation in common cultural forms can find political expression.

Mr. Gray, in his book, Two Faces of Liberalism, speaks of the task before us the creation of a modus vivendi. Like Rodney King, his plea is that we all just find a way to "get along". That this means we completely subject ourselves to political institutions, that our nations subject themselves to transnational institutions, that we abandon the idea that life has a purpose and that truth exists, etc., matters not in the least to him. All that matters is that everything be tolerated so that there is no tension in our increasingly diverse society.

Two things about this vision seem especially problematic. The first is that it assumes that men are responsible enough not to take advantage of this kind of complete tolerance, that having once granted that people are entitled to think and do whatever they want in their own lives that they'll not behave in ways which even the most tolerant among us can not stand. Second, it assumes benevolent government, since with no cultural norms and traditional morals to guide behavior there'll be nothing left but government power to restrain men. Though we find nothing attractive about this vision even if it could be realized, we suspect that what would follow would be not a utopia but something closer to the prediction of Os Guinness, The Dust of Death (1973):

With the death of absolutes, the prospects are grim for any lover of justice, freedom, and order. Western culture will lurch drunkenly between chaotic lawlessness and countering authoritarianism, in which some particularly abysmal vacuum of confidence could finally issue in a supreme dictatorship, mocking the Western aspirations for democracy as ineffective and demonstrating the strong alliance between technology and the state. Until then, violence -- blood brother of such a totalitarianism -- will play ts fateful part, naked or disguised, in an inevitable power struggle on all levels.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 25, 2003 8:19 AM