Dear visionaries,
Steven asks what my point was, and despite the monkeyshines, I do have one. Tolerant liberals like to play a pea and shell game with words like tolerant. Just like everyone else in the world, tall and short, Republican and Democrat, left and right, Christian and pagan, such liberals tolerate certain things and do not tolerate others. Nothing remarkable here, just the way the world is. The distinguishing mark of any group is the standard that establishes what they tolerate and what they do not.
And yet such liberals want to stand in the glow of a mythical universal tolerance, as though that were possible. When they are finally forced to bring their definition of tolerance down to a practical level, admitting that they are tolerant and intolerant in just the same identical way everybody else is, they start to show distinct signs of irritability. The last two posts from that quadrant have been positively snippy. Are liberals any more tolerant than others? Of course they are not. They are more tolerant of certain things, to be sure, just as we are more tolerant than they are of others. They can handle gay pride parades better than I can. I can handle psalm singing better than they can. What separates us is the standard, not the tolerance. I have raised this question before, by the way.
No virtue was ever found in a transitive verb. When we throw an incomplete sentence out that says that “John tolerates blank” we do not yet know if he is a saint or a scoundrel. What does he tolerate? Ice cream? Child molesters? Noisy neighbors? Topless car washes? Indignant housewives? Neo-Nazis? But then, when we come to praise or blame him, we are invoking a standard. And the standard that defines the right and wrong limits of tolerance cannot be tolerance itself.
Here’s a thought experiment. Suppose the local government school supporters come after us again in the spring, swinging another levy above their heads, all of them painted blue and yelling that eerie battle cry of theirs. Suppose we organize to stop their nefarious pillaging of our larders. What should we call such a group? On the principles hammered out by the liberals, we should call it something like Nice People United.
Cordially,
Douglas Wilson
“Apologetics in the Void” are repostings from an on-going electronic discussion and debate I had some time ago with members of our local community, whose names I have changed. The list serve is called Vision 20/20, and hence the name “visionaries.” Reading just these posts probably feels like listening to one half of a phone conversation, but I don’t feel at liberty to publish what others have written. But I have been editing these posts (lightly) with intelligibility in mind.