Posted: 08 May 2013 11:09 PM PDT
America is becoming a
more tolerant nation, we are told. Each new thing that we learn to tolerate
makes us more progressive. But tolerance is a relative thing. For every new
thing we learn to tolerate, there is a thing that we must stop tolerating.
Tolerance
does not usher in some tolerant anarchy in which we learn to tolerate all
things. Rather tolerance is a finite substance. It can only be allocated to
so many places. While a society changes, human beings do not fundamentally
change. They remain creatures of habit, bound to the poles of things that
they like and dislike, the people that they look up to and look down on.
The balance of tolerance and intolerance always remains the same no matter
how progressive a society becomes. A tolerant society allocates its
intolerance differently. There is no such thing as a universally tolerant
society. Only a society that tolerates different things. A tolerant society
does not cease being bigoted. It is bigoted in different ways.
America today tolerates different things. It tolerates little boys dressing up
as little girls at school, but not little boys pointing pencils and making
machine gun noises on the playground.
The little boy whose mother dressed him up in girlish clothes once used to be
a figure of contempt while the little boy pretending to be a marine was the
future of the nation. Now the boy in the dress is the future of the nation
having joined an identity group and entirely new gender by virtue of his
mother's Münchausen-syndrome-by-proxy and the aspiring little marine is
suspected of one day trading in his sharpened pencil for one of those weapons
of war as soon as the next gun show comes to town.
The Duke of Wellington once said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the
playing-fields of Eton. What battles will the boys playing on the playgrounds
where dodgeball is banned and finger guns are a crime win and what sort of
nation will they be fighting to protect?
The average school shooter is closer to the boy in the dress than the
aspiring marine, but the paranoia over school shootings isn't really about
profiles, it's about personalities. It's easier to dump the blame for all
those school shootings onto masculinity's already reviled shoulders than to
examine the premises. And mental shortcuts that speed along highways of
prejudice to bring us to the town of preconceived notions are the essence of
intolerance.
The trouble with tolerance is that there is always someone deciding what to
tolerate. It is a natural process for individuals, but a dangerous one for
governments and institutions.
In one of George Washington's most famous letters, he wrote to the Hebrew
Congregation at Newport that, "All possess alike liberty of conscience
and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken
of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another
enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights."
The letter is widely quoted, including on a site that bills itself as
"Tolerance.org", mainly for its more famous quote of, "the
Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to
persecution no assistance". But the tolerant quoters miss the point.
George Washington was not advocating transforming the United States
government into an arbiter of tolerance in order to fight against bigotry; he
was decrying the very notion that the government should act to impose the
condescension of tolerance on some perceived inferior classes.
Tolerance is arrogant. A free society does not tolerate people, it allows
them to live their own values. And a tolerant society is not free. It is a
dictatorship of virtue that is intolerant toward established values in order
to better tolerate formerly intolerable values. A free society does not tell
people of any religion or no religion what to believe. A tolerant society forces
them all to pay for abortions because its dictators of virtue have decided
that the time has come to teach this lesson in tolerance.
An open society finds wisdom in its own uncertainty. A tolerant
society, like a teenager, is certain that it already knows all the answers
and lacks only the means of imposing them on others. It confuses its
destruction of the past with progress and its sense of insecurity with
righteousness.
To the tolerant, intolerance is the most powerful act possible. They solve
problems by refusing to tolerate their root causes. School shootings are
carried out with guns and so the administrative denizens of the gun-free
zones run campaigns of intolerance toward the physical existence of guns, the
owners of guns, the manufacturers of guns, the civil rights groups that
defend gun ownership and eventually toward John Puckle, Samuel Colt, John
Moses Browning and the 82nd element in the periodic table.
None of this accomplishes a single practical thing, but it is an assertion of
values, not of functions. The paranoid mindset that cracks down on little
boys who chew pop tarts into deadly shapes, little boys who point pencils and
fingers at each other, is not out to stop school shootings, but is struggling
to assert the intolerance of its tolerant value system over the intangible
root of violence.
It's not about preventing school shootings, but about asserting a value system
in which there is no place for the aspiring marine, unless he's handing out
food to starving children in Africa in a relief operation, serving as a model
of gay marriage to rural America or engaging in some other approved, but
non-violent activity.
To understand the NRA's argument about the moral value of a gun deriving from
the moral value of the wielder would require a worldview that is more willing
to accept a continuum of shades, rather than criminalizing pencils and pop
tarts for guilt by geometric association. A free society could do that, but a
tolerant society, in which everything must be assigned an unchanging value to
determine whether it will be tolerated and enforced or not tolerated and
outlawed, cannot.
A tolerant society is as rigidly moralistic as the most stereotypical band of
puritans. It is never at ease unless it has assigned an absolute moral value
to every object in its world, no matter how petty, until it represents either
good or evil. If good, it must be mandated. If evil, it must be regulated.
And everything that is not good, must by exclusion be evil. Everything that
does not lead to greater tolerance must be intolerable.
The FDA is proposing to regulate caffeine. The EPA is regulating carbon
emission and encouraging states to tax the rain. Schools are suspending
students for the abstract depiction of guns on such a symbolic level that
Picasso would have trouble recognizing them. There is something medieval
about such a compulsive need to impose a complete moral order on every aspect
of one's environment.
These policies take place in the real world and in response to assertions of
real threats, but they are largely assertions of values. The debates over
them tap into a clash of worldviews. That is as true of Newtown as it is of Boston.
The same tolerant liberalism that can see deadly menace in a pencil or a pop
tart, is blind to the lethal threat of a Chechen Islamist. If a gun is
innately evil, then a member of a minority group, especially a persecuted
one, is innately good. The group certainly remains above reproach.
The arrogance of tolerance does not allow for ambiguity. There is no room for
guns in schools or profiling of terrorists. Instead all guns are bad and all
Muslims are good. In the real world, it may take bad guns to stop good
Muslims, but the system just doubles down on encouraging students to recite
the Islamic declaration of faith while suspending them for chewing their pop
tarts the wrong way.
Liberal values are at odds with reality and they are not about to let reality
win. In their more tolerant nation, there is more room than ever for little
boys who dream of one day setting off pressure cooker bombs at public events
in the name of their religion, but very little room for little boys dreaming
of being the ones to stop them.
As a society we have come to celebrate the helplessness of victimhood and the
empowerment of "speaking out" as the single most meaningful act to
be found in a society that has become all talk. The new heroism is the
assertion of some marginal identity, rather than the defense of a society in
which all identities can exist. That is the difference between freedom and
tolerance.
The little boy in a dress has put on the uniform of tolerance while the
little boy making rat tat noises with a pencil is showing strong signs of
playing for the wrong team. The wrong team is the one that solves problems by
shooting people, rather than lawyering them to death or writing denunciations
of them to the tolerance department of diversity and othering.
The
complainer is the hero and the doer is the villain. Reporters and lawyers are
the heroes because they are the arbiters of tolerance. Soldiers and police
officers are the gun-happy villains because they respond to realities, rather
than identities. They unthinkingly shoot without understanding the subtext. A
free society is practical. It acts in its own defense. A tolerant society
acts to assert its values. The former fights terrorists and murderers, while
the latter lets them go to show off its tolerant values.
A free society teaches little boys that the highest value is to die in defense
of others. A tolerant society teaches them that it is better to die as
recognized victims than to become the aggressor and lose the moral high
ground.
This is the clash of values that holds true on the playground and on the
battlefield of war. On the playground, little boys are suspended for waving
around pencils and on the battlefield, soldiers are ordered not to defend
themselves so that their country can win the hearts and minds of the locals
in the endless Afghan Valentine's Day of COIN that has stacked up a
horrifying toll of bodies.
In their cities, men and women are told to be tolerant, to extend every
courtesy and to suspect nothing of the friendly Islamists in their
neighborhoods. It is better to be blown up as a tolerant society, they are
told, than to point the pop tart of intolerance on the great playground of
the nanny state.
Daniel Greenfield is a New York City based writer and blogger
and a Shillman Journalism Fellow of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
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