KEITH C. BURRIS LAMENTS THE GROWING WAR ON TOLERANCE, PLURALISM
Acouple years ago, a friend of mine invited me to have lunch with a friend of his who was an LGBT activist. In the course of our conversation, something like the following was said: I don’t believe in tolerance. It is a weak virtue. I don’t want to be “tolerated,” I want to be accepted and affirmed.
I took her point. To be accepted and affirmed is a wish of every human being. Acceptance is a great moral and religious value — maybe the greatest.
But tolerance, properly understood, is the greatest political value — the grease that keeps the machinery of an open society running.
And there is a war on tolerance in our society right now.
Perhaps you haven’t heard about the “Berkeley puncher.” The story has not had the legs of the Lincoln Memorial incident in which a high school boy was accused, and roundly condemned, by much of the media of being confrontational with a Native American. And also of smirking disdainfully. And both were attributed by some to racist impulses.
The story turned out to be far more complicated. The boy was a frightened innocent whose teachers should have pulled him out of the situation. He actually behaved with admirable restraint.
The Berkeley situation really is a case of hate speech and hate action — attempting to suppress the speech of another by violent means.
A young man named Hayden Williams was manning a booth on the University of California, Berkeley, campus for a group called Turning Point USA, an organization that promotes free markets and limited government. He displayed a sign that said: “Hate crime hoaxes hurt real victims.” That seems a pretty unobjectionable sign — especially on a college campus known as the birthplace of the 1960s free speech movement.
Two other young men approached the booth. One accused Mr. Williams of “encouraging violence.” Mr. Williams said he was not encouraging violence, and he certainly was not. Mr. Williams then tried to film the encounter with his phone, whereupon a struggle for control of the phone broke out and one of the two men hit Mr. Williams. But before the assailant departed he called Mr. Williams a “racist bitch,” and hit him again, hard — a haymaker right to the eye. He walked away muttering another unprintable word.
And, oh, he also told Mr. Williams he would shoot him.
Now that hate crime discredits all leftists or critics of Turning Point USA no more than the man who knocked down a BBC reporter (from behind) at a Trump rally discredits all MAGA hat-wearers or Trump voters. But the fact is that we have a president who calls members of the press “the enemy of the people,” and we have students and even professors who applaud a pamphleteer getting punched.
On left and on right acts of hate are sanctioned, even encouraged, by a larger constituency.
We have forgotten the fundamental value of tolerance — of accepting, championing, the same right to speak, assemble and think for your neighbor as you would assert for yourself.
The First Amendment guarantees not just the right to speak, but to think. It is our bulwark of toleration.
Toleration is a practice based on a premise, the premise being that no one has the truth for there is no one truth. John Stuart Mill wrote: “If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”
The philosopher Isaiah Berlin called the recognition of each person’s right to think his own thoughts pluralism.
Pluralism, the notion that there are many types of people in this world and many ways to pursue truth and happiness, is the psychological basis of tolerance. It creates, by appreciating the other person, habits of civility and deference that will outlast momentary differences.
Pluralism embraces nuance, distinction and intellectual diversity.
Beware, said Berlin, monism — one reality, one coherent, consistent truth and, almost inevitably, one tribe. Monism obliterates nuance and distinction and wages war on the singular soul.
Berlin wrote: “All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men...”
Monism makes the indefensible defensible. It’s OK to knock down a photojournalist. It’s OK to punch a young Republican. It’s OK to call an opponent a snowflake or a deplorable, or, ugly, stupid, un-American, or a racist.
But pluralism makes it possible for us to live together.
I keep coming back to my Dad and his best friend, Bill. Dad was a Truman Democrat and Bill was a Goldwater Republican. They agreed about nothing, politically. But they were great neighbors and pals who worked together on the local cancer crusade and many other civic endeavors. Each man not only accepted the different world view of the other, but rejoiced in it.
That’s toleration. And that’s America, in its essence, and at its best.