Liberal tolerance tolerates terrorism

A reader writes:

Dear Mr. Auster:

In January, 2003, with uncanny foresight, you wrote, “These inversions of decency and sanity are not the work of anarchists. They are the logical consequence of the central credo of modern Liberalism: that ALL INTOLERANCE AND DISCRIMINATION MUST BE ELIMINATED… The problem described here points to its own solution, which is to abandon the modern liberal ideology that identifies morality with powerlessness, and return to traditional moral standards. Unlike today’s cultural Leninism that defines men’s moral worth as the inverse of their perceived degree of power or of their attachment to established ways of life, traditional morality judges the intrinsic moral qualities of men’s actions, and so is capable of seeing and stopping real evil when it appears. By contrast, as I said at the beginning, a people that defines the good as tolerance MUST INEVITABLY end up tolerating evil, even the evil of terrorist killers.”

Now read this article, “The Dangers of Multiculturalism,” and you will see that we in the West have indeed ended up tolerating the evil of terrorist killers.

Keep up the good work.

Thanks very much to the reader. However, I think the main thrust of Wesley Pruden’s column is more hopeful, namely that the English are beginning to turn away from the non-judgmental acceptance of Muslim extremism.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 03, 2005 05:56 PM | Send