The Intolerance of Tolerance

Product Information

Popper, Karl. "chapter 7, note 4". The Open Society and Its Enemies. Vol.1. ISBN 978-0-691-21206-7. OCLC 1193010976.

In his 1882 essay " What is a Nation?", French historian and philosopher Ernest Renan proposed a definition of nationhood based on "a spiritual principle" involving shared memories rather than a common religious, racial, or linguistic heritage. Thus members of any religious group could participate fully in the nation's life. "You can be French, English, German, yet Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, or practicing no religion." [14] In the twentieth century [ edit ] There are also some correlatives to this postmodernism. Let me list a few. By correlatives, I mean things that have neither caused it nor been caused by it but both. That is, they have contributed to the development of postmodernism, and they are strengthened by post-modernism, but it’s not a one-to-one relationship. It’s messy. We’ll call them the correlatives of postmodernism. Let me mention three or four. Coffey, John (2000). Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558–1689. Longman Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-582-30465-9. Thinkers operating with a postmodern epistemology on the whole are more likely to be found in English departments and sociology departments and anthropology departments and the like, religion departments especially, and often history departments than in physics, chemistry, engineering, math, computer science departments. Dworkin, Ronald (14 February 2006). "Even bigots and Holocaust deniers must have their say". The Guardian . Retrieved 2 January 2023.

What the Educational System Can Do

In some universities, the most challenging department is the English department, followed pretty closely by cultural anthropology, and after that three or four notches down by sociology and so on. That’s the way it is. Which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t go after them, I’m just saying objectively that’s the way it is. The mass media are largely formative. Many shrewd commentators … this one has been around for 15 years … have pointed out the shift from a modernist to a postmodernist epistemology was well testified to in the move from the first Star Trek series to the incarnation of the Star Trek: Voyager series. Oberdiek, Hans (2001). Tolerance: between forbearance and acceptance. Rowman and Littlefield. ISBN 978-0-8476-8785-5.

What you have then is a profound commitment in discipline after discipline to truths that partake of ahistorical universality, so that even where you have a discipline which is changing stuff all the time, like biblical studies, where you move from the beginning of the century to various forms of source criticism, tradition criticism, redaction criticism, and now the new literary criticism … all these things. It’s presented again and again, until the last 20 years ago, as progress in the science. We advance a new conception of the phenomenon in question and define tolerance as a value orientation towards difference. The fundamental question is not whether one puts up with something disliked but how one responds to the existence of diversity itself. This definition is abstract and analytically distinct from other concepts. Footnote 4 Our focus is on subjective reactions to difference; thus, this conceptualization does not require dislike of or identification of potentially objectionable groups, ideas, or behaviors. In practice, this definition is consistent with the approach to tolerance that does incorporate forbearance into its definition. From the point of view of Marxist historiography, once it is established for Marxists that a historical scientific view of things … that is, a scientific view of history grounded on cultural movement and economic analysis … is true, then if you have some kind of Christian coming in saying, “I don’t really believe it’s true. I think you also have to take into account the power of God and the Reformation and all of that,” then obviously, they’re such twits that no matter how bright they are in their test scores they can’t possibly be admitted to a university. The reason why a lot of Christians, for example, were excluded from university education was exactly the same that you would exclude someone from university education in a science faculty in the West. If despite spectacular GPAs and spectacular test scores and all the rest, he said, “I do have to tell you, I don’t believe in the atomic theory of matter” he’s not going to get into a chemistry course in the Western world. It’s not going to happen. You’re going to wonder what sort of kook this is. If I have the right tools as I approach the biblical text, if I ask the right questions, if I bring the right rigor and the right discipline, then as I approach the text, I will ask certain kinds of things and it will give me true answers. If I ask the wrong kinds of things, or I don’t have the right kind of rigor, then it might give me wrong answers, so you’ve got to keep refining hermeneutics.

Intolerance

Once you’ve moved to “I” being the beginning point, then it’s no longer quite so sure how you get there. You’re no longer appealing to revelation. There was equal certainty that in fact human beings can know the truth, can know it truly, and thus, the pursuit of truth is still held up as a desideratum, as a summum bonum.… It’s something to pursue. Truth is both desirable and attainable. The expression plausibility structure was coined by sociologist Peter Berger in his book, The Heretical Imperative. He uses it to refer to structures of thought widely and almost unquestioningly accepted throughout the culture. One of his arguments is that in tight monolithic cultures, like Japan, the reigning plausibility structures may be enormously complex because so many people share so many things in common. As a result, there may be many stances that are widely assumed, more or less unquestioned.

Diversity As A Core Value – What Does It Mean To Value Diversity?". emexmag.com . Retrieved 10 June 2016. If you begin with this view of tolerance and then elevate this understanding to the supreme position in the hierarchy of moral virtues, the supreme sin is intolerance. Intolerance now is understood to be any questioning or contradiction of the view that all opinions are equal, that all worldviews have equal worth, that all stances are equally valid. To question such postmodern axioms is, by definition, intolerant. For such questioning there is no tolerance whatsoever, for it is classed as intolerance and is, therefore, to be condemned. First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our infallibility. Secondly, though the silenced opinion is an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied. Thirdly, even if the received opinion is not only true but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. Not only this, but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience. [13] : 95 Renan [ edit ] RenanGervers, Peter; Gervers, Michael; Powell, James M., eds. (2001). Tolerance and Intolerance: Social Conflict in the Age of the Crusades. Syracuse University Press. ISBN 978-0-8156-2869-9.

Third, scholars that focus on attitudes towards groups not only conflate prejudice with tolerance but also disregard people’s ability to support diversity in the abstract. Sniderman et al. ( 1989:27) call this outright dismissal of principled tolerance a deeply cynical and pessimistic view of “the willingness of the average citizen to embrace, disinterestedly and consistently, a foundational value of democratic politics—tolerance.” We contend that at the very least this is an empirical question worthy of investigation. Without measures of tolerance in the abstract, we simply do not know. In France, especially, you had movements that really came through development of linguistics. For want of time, I won’t go down that rabbit warren. It interests me a great deal. In my view, there’s a great deal in contemporary linguistics we just cannot do without. There have been some wonderful discoveries that have been made. On the other hand, as they have moved to the more radical forms of deconstruction, there is an awful lot of silliness built into it as well.

Billiet, J. B., & McClendon, M. J. (2000). Modeling acquiescence in measurement models for two balanced sets of items. Structural Equation Modeling: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 7(4), 608–628. Vogt, W.P. (1997). Tolerance & Education: Learning to Live with Diversity and Difference. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, Inc. Furthermore, while modernism says knowledge of the truth is both desirable and attainable, postmodernism says it is not attainable and it is not even desirable. That is to say, it’s not attainable precisely because we are so finite we can’t cross those barriers. It’s become more sophisticated. We’ll put contexts in which we can know truths in simple ways and simple formulas and how to build airplanes or something like, but in terms of the large structures of thought that enable you to give a metaphysical undertaking of reality, you just can’t do it. Forst maintains that tolerance may also be respect for diversity or esteem for diversity. In Forst’s third conception of tolerance, individuals show respect for diversity by viewing disparate groups as morally and politically equal even though they may differ fundamentally in beliefs, practices, and lifestyles. In his fourth conception, tolerance is esteem or appreciation for diversity. According to Forst, esteem is a more demanding reaction to diversity than respect. This version of tolerance means viewing others’ beliefs, practices, or lifestyles as something valuable and worthy of ethical esteem even though they are different from one’s own. Thus, we call the second and third expressions of tolerance respect for difference and appreciation of difference. Tolerance is also recurrent in research on prejudice, especially in analyses of attitudes towards immigrants and ethnic minorities. Here the use of tolerance is not necessarily theoretical, and intolerance and prejudice are generally regarded as equivalents. For example, Togeby ( 1998) uses tolerance interchangeably with broadminded views and (absence of) ethnocentrism, making an empirical distinction between positive attitudes towards immigrants coming to the country (prejudice) and positive attitudes towards immigrants already living in the country (tolerance). Other prejudice scholars conceive of tolerance constituting positive attitudes toward immigrants as well as by an abstract ideological belief in and endorsement of equality (Van Zalk et al. 2014; Miklikowska 2016). Hainmueller and Hiscox ( 2007), who study tolerance as a mediator of the education effect on immigration attitudes, operationalize tolerance by an “… array of different measures of individuals’ values and beliefs” (p. 429). The item most explicitly tied to tolerance captures views on laws against promoting racial or ethnic hatred, with more positive attitudes indicating greater tolerance.