Tolerance, by banning judgment, has cancelled itself out

A moronic article touting the teaching of “tolerance” to young children was posted today at Lucianne.com, and nobody was falling for it. This comment was especially good:

Tolerance Requires Judgment

Notice that we can’t tolerate a person unless we disagree with him. We don’t “tolerate” people who share our views. They’re on our side. There’s nothing to put up with. Tolerance is reserved for those we think are wrong.

This essential element of tolerance—disagreement—has been completely lost in the modern distortion of the concept. Nowadays, if you think someone is wrong, you’re called intolerant.

This presents us with a very curious problem. Judging another person wrong makes one intolerant, yet one must first think another is wrong in order to be tolerant. It’s a “Catch-22.” According to this approach, true tolerance is impossible.

- Gregory Koukl

In other words, liberalism, by destroying the concept of truth and insisting on non-judgmental acceptance of every belief and every person, replaces true tolerance with totalitarian uniformity.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 17, 2004 04:24 PM | Send