7. Tolerance, Democracy, and Majoritarianism
In this short chapter, the focus is quite narrow. My aim is to show how reflecting on a variety of moral issues shines a little more light on the issues of tolerance and intolerance.
Morality and Truth
I have repeatedly argued that the new tolerance is nestled into some vision of truth largely shared by the culture or at least by the cultural elites. The issue then becomes what breaches of that vision can be tolerated, and whether social or even state coercion should ever be imposed when that vision of truth is violated, and if so, under what circumstances. Something similar could be said for the domain of moral conduct: in the older way of looking at things, certain conduct was approved and other conduct was frowned upon (invariably based on a complex mix of tradition, revelation, the state's instinct for its own preservation, cultural consensus, and the like). Questions of tolerance and intolerance were tied to the extent to which departure from such cultural norms might or might not be acceptable. Transparently, issues of truth and issues of morality were tied together. For example, it was morally wrong for, say, two men to sleep together, or for a man and a woman to commit adultery, because God had given the truth about how his image-bearers ought to behave. By contrast, the new tol erance has been largely cut free both from a well-articulated vision of truth and from binding culture-wide moral standards, and thus pretends to be the ultimate arbiter in both of these realms.
I have tried to show that these pretensions are sadly hollow. Because most of my attention in the previous chapter fastened on questions of truth, however, I paid only glancing attention to questions of morality. The supporters of the new tolerance, as we have seen, commonly think that they are advancing a higher morality. We must see clearly that this is not so.
The evidence surfaces in many forms. Consider, for instance, the increasing reluctance of many people under the influence of the new tolerance to take seriously the word "evil." One recalls the exchange between Dennis Miller and his fellow comedian Kathleen Madigan. It took place on Miller's CNBC television show on 7 September 2004. The discussion concerned the terrorists who killed more than two hundred people at a Russian school just a short while earlier. Miller asserted that it was right to label this act "evil"; Madigan disagreed. The discussion developed, in part, as follows:
MILLER: Isn't it true, Kathleen, that Liberals, when they say the word `evil' feel creeped out, because they tend to intellectualize it and ... they don't want to thump the Bible, so they won't say evil. But when you shoot a kid 45 times ... is there a place on the face of this planet holier than a grade school on the first day of school? We've got to go to the mat with these people.
MADIGAN: Evil. It's just a word. Like, for me it just brings up Catholic grade school, nothing good comes up in my head. I say wacked, how about wacked?
MILLER: No, evil. This is one time I can't join the joke. We have to concede that these people ... [interrupted]
MADIGAN: I'm serious! I just think that word has a connotation that brings too much religion to it in my head. Yeah, these are bad people, it's awful, but when [President Bush] gets up there and goes `they're evil and we're the good think it definitely brings this whole religion thing into it that he's got going on in his head.
GUEST: So what?
MADIGAN: So, that's not what's going on in my head, so I don't agree with it.
A little over thirty years ago, the media could use the word "evil" without embarrassment. In a moving essay in Time, devoted to reflecting on the horrific slaughter in Cambodia perpetrated by Pol Pot and his collaborators, David Aikman wrote:
Of course, if we cannot bring ourselves to classify the most horrendous genocide as evil, we are unlikely to think through ways in which all human beings are evil, ways in which the germ of the moral darkness lies within all of us. When James Waller published his book, arguing that evidence shows that the Nazi Holocaust was carried out by ordinary people and not a nation of sociopaths,3 reviewers went to extraordinary lengths to show that the thesis simply had to be wrong.' For obviously if the thesis is right, ordinary people can easily become sociopaths. Frankly, Waller more closely reflects biblical insight than do his critics. For although the Bible delights in "common grace" - the grace that God graciously distributes commonly to people - it is ruthlessly realistic about what lies in the human heart (e.g., Romans 3:9-20).
Once the category of evil disappears, our moral discernment has no structure. Strong fiber is reduced to mush; the skeleton of moral reasoning is taken out, and what is left is jelly-like protoplasm. We end up not only with rampant ethical relativism but with the anemic inability to feel or express moral outrage over pervasive immorality.5 The failure to recognize the evil in our own hearts is precisely what convinces so many of us that our opinions and motives are above reproach while those who contradict us are stupid or malign. A healthy dose of Augustinian realism about sin, as Mark Ellingsen puts it, could make America a better place: indeed, that is why the founding fathers cared so much about checks and balances, about constitutional limitations, about division of powers: they did not trust anyone precisely because the founders had a robust notion of sin.6 If in our environment the virtue of (the new) tolerance becomes absolute, then ostensibly moral discussions are brought round to this one consideration. For example, in a recent report by the Australia Institute titled "Mapping Homophobia in Australia," we are told that 62 percent of evangelical Christians are homophobic. The evidence? People were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement, "I believe that homosexuality is immoral." If they agreed, they were classified as homophobic.? In other words, there was no moral engagement with the complexities surrounding human sexuality, but merely a label used to brand an entire class of people with the supreme shame: in tolerance. Again: Millions call themselves "pro-choice" in the matter of abortion. But that is coherent for them because abortion itself is morally neutral, and therefore the choice is devoid of moral significance except for its availability to the sovereign freedom of the individual will." Small wonder that we have arrived at the place where our medical experts can help generate life in the womb, and can kill a baby about to emerge from the womb, with no moral differentiation. It is merely a matter of personal choice.
Clearly, we must hone in for a while on:
Morality and Relativism
One of the finest brief statements of relativism of which I am aware is the address byJohn Piper, "The Challenge of Relativism," delivered at the Ligonier Conference in 2007, and subsequently developed and published.9 With his permission, I reproduce or adapt some of his points here, before turning the discussion to our own concerns.
Piper begins by asking, "How is the bad thing called relativism different from good ways of thinking relatively?" We may conclude that someone is tall or short relative to another person: in many domains, such thinking is not only a useful way of thinking but an indispensable way of thinking. When we make such comparisons, people on all sides have some kind of measurement standard in their minds, so the relative height or shortness of two people is agreed on the basis of a shared standard.
But relativism is different. For moral relativism to exist, one or more of the following statements must be true:
(1) There is no external or objective standard of truth.
(2) The standard may be out there, but we cannot know it.
(3) The standard is out there, but we cannot know what it means.
(4) The standard exists and we can know what it means, but we simply do not care.
Consider the statement, "Sexual relations between two human males is wrong." Two people might disagree over the truthfulness of this statement and still not be relativists. For instance, they might both hold that the Bible is God's authoritative Word and that it establishes an external, objective standard on this matter, but might disagree as to what the Bible says. Relativism arises when there is no standard, or when the standard is said to exist but we cannot knowwhat it means (or any of the four points listed above). Perhaps the saddest (and certainly the ugliest) relativism is found under the fourth point. It is a kind of pragmatic relativism: we acknowledge the standards but insist on doing things our own way - in much the same way that we can have a pragmatic atheism (we know that God exists but we act as if he doesn't).
Relativism is the view that no one standard of true and false, right and wrong, good and bad, beautiful and ugly exists that is valid for everyone. Relativists may be happy to talk about my truth and your truth, but rarely about the truth. Convictions and conduct flow not from some objective standard but from personal or communal standards. Piper argues that pragmatic relativists exist in every culture: consider Matthew 21:21-27, where Jesus' opponents will not face the truth and so find ways to duck it, even to say untrue things in order to preserve their own lies. The tragic reality of our generation in the West (though certainly not everywhere in the world) is that we have codified and authorized relativism to such a degree that interest in truth and morality alike, in any enduring and objective sense, has largely dissolved.
From the perspective of the Bible, relativism is treason against God and his Word. That the God of the Bible exists establishes the possibility of truth; that he is a revealing God establishes the possibility of knowing that truth. Relativism regularly plays games with language, encourages doctrinal aberration, cultivates duplicity, and pretends to be humble while authorizing astonishing arrogance. Relativism promises freedom but enslaves people: it refuses to acknowledge sin and evil the way the Bible does, and therefore it never adequately confronts sin and evil, and therefore leaves people enslaved by sin and evil. Even at societal levels, it is an invitation to destruc tion, for if everyone does that which is right in their own eyes, the end is either anarchic chaos or cultural cries for more laws in order to establish stability - ultimately even a call for a dictator.
Morality and Tolerance
The effect of this change is striking. It used to be that the moral issues held a central place in public discourse, and part of that discourse dealt with how much deviation from those moral standards could be tolerated. Increasingly, however, the rights and wrongs of the old moral issues receive scant attention while the public discourse focuses on what sanctions should be imposed on those who do not "tolerate" (definitely the new sense!) the abolition of what were once the moral standards. In other words, the primary "moral" line drawn through Western culture declares that those who "tolerate" just about anything are good, and those who do not are bad and therefore should not be tolerated.
The most striking test case is homosexuality. Not for a moment should anyone deny that the evidence as to what "makes" a homosexual is extraordinarily complex. Few have matched the care and objectivity of the study by Stanton L. Jones and Mark A. Yarhouse.11 In popular discourse, however, virtually none of that complexity is allowed to surface in the public square. It is everywhere assumed that people are simply born that way, and that's all there is to it. Even if that were the case - and the evidence simply will not allow such shallow reductionism - it would not in itself establish that the practice of homosexuality is a good thing, absent a number of other assumptions.
My intention at the moment is not to document the way evidence is regularly presented in highly manipulative fashion (e.g., the media find one homosexual couple who have loved each other dearly for forty years, and contrast it with a scrappy heterosexual couple on their respective third marriages laced with physical abuse, without probing the abundant statistics of how infrequent homosexual fidelity is), but to observe how the media regularly blacken the character of anyone who entertains the possibility that homosexual behavior is not a good thing. One remembers, for instance, that when President George W. Bush proposed James Holsinger for the post of Surgeon General, someone discovered that twenty years earlier Holsinger had voted with the majority of the United Methodist Judicial Council to continue the ban on ordaining practicing homosexuals. The Boston Globe demanded that Bush withdraw the nomination of Holsinger, since "no one should go into the job with a record of discriminating against people because of their sexual The Washington Post was positively derisive.13 At no point was the issue of homosexual practice itself seriously discussed. Rather, all the focus was on the "intolerance" of Holsinger, which in much editorial opinion was ground for banning him from high office. In the name of tolerance, his appointment was not to be
Similar intolerance is no less common in Europe. In the autumn of 2004, Rocco Buttiglione, Italy's representative to the European Union, was rejected as its commissioner for justice on the ground that he is a Catholic who agrees with his church's stance on homosexuality. At his hearings he carefully distinguished between what is immoral and what should be criminal, but of course the EU authorities could not allow any deviation from their secular agenda, for this would mean fostering intolerance.
Again, in 2010 Kenneth Howell found himself in difficulty with the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. At the time, Howell was both Director of the Newman Center's Institute of Catholic Thought and adjunct professor in the University. He was teaching a course titled "Introduction to Catholicism and Modern Catholic Thought." In response to discussion in the classroom regarding homosexuality, on 4 May he distributed a three-page email to his students clarifying some points of Catholic thought on the subject, dealing with natural law theory, and with the subject line "Utilitarianism and Sexuality." A month later, a student who was not taking the class, but who had seen the email sent to one of his friends who was taking the class, complained to Howell's department head in the University, arguing, among other things, "Teaching a student about the tenets of religion is one thing. Declaring that homosexual acts violate the natu ral laws of man is another."15 The argument is itself very revealing: religion has no right to deal with moral questions - and meanwhile, the real offense is the suggestion that something is wrong when a lot of people think it is right.
The department head, Robert McKim, argued that the University has an interest in not making students feel uncomfortable, which of course brought the meaning of "intolerance" to a new level of plasticity. Before the brouhaha had ended, Howell, backed into a corner, defended his right to teach as he did on the ground of his First Amendment right to free speech. The University fired him, but sufficient uproar ensued that eventually the University hired him back. The reason why Howell prevailed, of course, was not because his moral arguments became convincing to the University authorities, but because both those who found Howell's email reasonable and those who found it despicable converged in protest against what they saw as the University's disregard for academic freedom: in short, the university was intolerant in its defense of tolerance. That was the only "moral" issue.
In short, whether one is seeking high political office or attempting to maintain an unpopular position in an academic environment - to say nothing of wanting to win a beauty queen pageant, as the experience of Carrie Prejean shows - enormous pressures are mounted to keep out, in the name of tolerance, those who hold, however courteously, that homosexual practice is wrong.
These are the milder instances of denunciation against those who question the unobjectionable nature of homosexual relations. The wilder examples - and there are many - are common and cruel.16 In addition to the irony that these are often offered in defense of (the new) tolerance, there is a sadder irony: genuine homophobia, with its own wanton cruelty, when it is lumped together with mere affirmations that homosexual practice is wrong, begins to get a free pass because the charges against the latter group are sooner or later seen as the empty and scurrilous hate-mongering they are. Perhaps no one has commented on this more trenchantly than the social critic Camille Paglia:
For gays to demand that sincere Christians cease lobbying Washington about the increasing liberal drift of government policy shows colossal historical amnesia. For pity's sake, it was the flamboyant, thunderous activism of evangelical Protestant ministers in the 19th century that powered the abolitionist movement and led to the end of slavery in the United States. (Of course, these massively documented facts were concealed in Steven Spielberg's Liberal Hollywood Lite version of "Amistad.") ...
Similarly, eloquent Protestant ministers like Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesse Jackson have been central to the modern Civil Rights Movement, which secured voting rights for AfricanAmericans and opened the way to the election of a rising number of black politicians at the local, state and federal levels. So gays should quit bitching about Southern Baptists exercising their constitutional right to free speech about homosexuality, which is indeed condemned by the Bible, despite the tortuous casuistry of so many self-interested parties, including clerics. I have been warning and warning for years that the insulting disrespect shown by gay activists to religion - which has been going on for 20 years virtually unchecked on TV talk shows, with their biased liberal hosts - would produce a backlash over time....
As a libertarian, I believe that government must stay out of our private lives. As an atheist, I believe that government has no business sanctifying the unions of some persons (heterosexuals) but not others (homosexuals), particularly when certain benefits (such as employer-sponsored spousal health-insurance) flow to one group only.
And Still There Is Evil
Supporters of the new tolerance seem to think that if everyone were as tolerant as they are, the world would be a far better place. We might even end war.
In reality, the genuine gains achieved by the new tolerance are slender in comparison with the losses. It has been moderately successful at diminishing demeaning epithets - "wogs," "chinks," and expressions of the same order. Even there the price is a certain kind of totalitarian political correctness. More serious, however, is the way the new tolerance swamps penetrating discussion about truth and morality: tolerance is widely perceived to be more important and more enduring than either. The result is a greater tendency to believe lies and to come adrift in immorality. Even in the political arena, as many wags have pointed out, the motto printed on United States cur rency needs to be rewritten: E Pluribus Unum ("From the many, one") has defacto become EPluribus Plurus ("From the many, many"). Many a Christian church and many a Christian parachurch organization devotes more attention to promoting its diversity than to fostering godly unity, even though in the Bible the diversity is not so much commanded as presupposed, while the unity is a desirable goal. Meanwhile, cultures in other parts of the world often see in Western (new) tolerance, not a mature and civilized culture worth emulating, but a childish and manipulative culture that refuses to engage with serious moral issues, and that is a danger to their own worlds owing to the power and reach of digital production.
Far from bringing peace, the new tolerance is progressively becoming more intolerant, fostering moral myopia, proving unable to engage in serious and competent discussions about truth, letting personal and social evils fester, and remaining blind to the political and international perceptions of our tolerant cultural profile.