Assistant Village Idiot, a blog which in temperament is quite similar to Maggie's Farm (as is YARGB), literally stole a chapter from my as yet unpublished book in their recent piece on "The Vice of Tolerance."
Read it. My comments:
"Tolerance" in its PC form is usually manifest as administrative or even legal threats against specific "intolerances," in a "thought police" format. Thus the moral authority of official "tolerance" is undone by its own intolerance and use of force of some kind. College campuses and large corporations are two places where such nonsense is rampant. I can guarantee you that if you hang a Confederate flag out of a dorm window, someone will come knocking, but a Hezbollah flag - no. Or it would be OK for a Moslem teacher to bring her Koran to school with her, but no Bible for the Christian teacher. So "tolerance" is a euphemism for selective intolerance, and is surely a vice, at at least a politically-motivated scam, of some sort.
How is it dishonest? Because there is no valid underlying principle. The charge of intolerance can be directed in any chosen direction: it can be directed towards someone expressing something, or it can be directed towards someone who is "insensitive" to someone who is "offended" by something, or it can be directed against the "offended" who is, by definition, "intolerant." For example:
A teacher wears her cross necklace to school. An atheist kid's parents complain to the Principal. They Principal tells the kid that she can wear a "Proud Atheist" button to school if she wants. OK - you could direct the charge of intolerance to the teacher, who is "indifferent to offending". Or to the kid, who is "intolerant" of the teacher's "culture and beliefs," or to the Principal, who could be charged with "creating a culture of intolerance." Take your pick. Just charge anyone with it that you do not want to tolerate.
This notion of "tolerance," seems to be a subset of a fashionable "tolerance ethic" which attempts to turn traditional ethics and judgements upside-down by glorifying the refusal to discriminate (judge) about much of anything: quality, morals, behavior, taste, manners, intelligence, fund of information, depth, maturity, curiosity, energy, thoughtfulness, right vs. wrong, good vs. evil, correct vs. incorrect, personality type, selfishness, humor, honor, refinement - all of the things that need to be assessed whenever we encounter another human and might need to deal with them in some way. Note that I refer to individual characteristics - classes of people are not in my vocabulary, because they mean nothing to me: gay, black, brown, white, old, young, ethnic, etc - I don't care much about those surface items. They are stupid and meaningless distinctions for most purposes.
AVI makes several good points, so you should read it all. One is that tolerance is a Christian virtue. No, not at all. (Everyone has a divine spark, but that doesn't mean that I want their spark near my life.) Another is the point that tolerance is a passive virtue - if it is a virtue. Indeed. It requires no behavior and no action, and, in fact, it is indistinguishable from indifference.
The list of things I will not tolerate in my life would be fun to write, but negative, and there would not be enough space here. The same goes for the list of things I welcome into my life, which would be more of a pleasure to write down. All I will say is that I will not tolerate enforced "tolerance," poor manners, arrogance, lying and manipulation, ignorance, and poor grammar (except on blogs, which are generally colloquial speech, dashed off in a spare moment).
