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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
January 12, 2003
On tolerance
I keep trying to think my way out of the recycling bag in which we seem to be trapped in Canada. For many people who share my political and cultural outlook -- Neanderthal to many who don't share it -- almost everything we see around us is wrong. Even before they open their mouths on any important issue we have learned from experience to expect something very discouraging to be said by almost any figure in authority in this country from cabinet ministers to justices of the Supreme Court to the leaders of "mainstream" churches to the talking heads on TV to what one hears echoed around one in any public tavern. Things "demoralizing" in the strict sense: things that sound like and on closer examination are assaults on the moral principles that once bound this society together. Let me begin by sparing the reader a long list of examples. It would be harder for me to think of something that was not an example. Let me also dismiss from consideration anything that is happening abroad even though the disease of moral intellectual and spiritual surrender is rife throughout the Western world. Canada is a large enough canvas. If I were to choose a single word to describe this disease it would be "nihilism". In broad political terms it is the position you reach when you have evacuated from public life anything that has intrinsic meaning; when you approach in effect the intellectual equivalent of the heat death of the universe. "One view is as good as another one ideal is as good as another one way of life is as good as another and who is to judge?" Now the mystery is that as we approach something resembling pure nihilism we don't get freedom from views or ideals or ways of life nor do we get much variety. Instead we get a kind of diffuse homogenous sludge. The mystery is that complete nihilism is not accessible to man as no form of perfection is available to us. What we get instead is a series of minimal default positions and vestigial hangovers from older ways of thought that suddenly rise to tremendous power in the near-vacuum. For the truth is nature abhors a vacuum as much in moral as in physical space. To put it another way we only get people "playing" at nihilism for the real thing can exist if anywhere only in hell. Up here we must settle for a reasonable facsimile. By now I hope my reader is getting impatient to know what I think the ideal is that emerges with such power as nihilism is approached. And if I had to put that in one word I would choose tolerance . >From being a passive thing one part of a comprehensive whole of many ideals and many aspirations tolerance becomes the only ideal. Then it ceases to be passive and becomes very active tearing away at anything still standing from the time when our society was quite the opposite of nihilist -- when it was in the case of Canada consciously Christian consciously Western consciously British and Parliamentary consciously industrious and chaste and loyal even proud of its heritage. Canada was never the only country in the world. There were other countries that had other heritages. But we were naturally partial to our own for when we lose that we lose what we are; the very word "Canadian" becomes a detached label. What has happened in Canada and elsewhere in the West is the systematic abandonment by people who still consider themselves to be "liberal" of every principle for which liberalism once stood. And at the root of this I think is the transformation of "tolerance". It has ceased to be a rational and defensible principle and become instead a war cry for the demolition of anything that remains in our social order. For if you read John Locke in his "Letter Concerning Toleration" the classical liberal account of the matter you enter a different world of mind than any we would recognize today. I am not a Lockean liberal myself but like my late Canadian hero George Grant I will immediately concede that There are worse accounts of justice than you will find in John Locke. Locke takes it for granted as all liberals once did that a society has a shape and nature that it is not a vacuum; he refers expressly to a "Christian commonwealth". Moreover he allows that this Christian order is founded on a profound knowledge - not an opinion about but knowledge -- of right and wrong. He identifies toleration with the highest Christian aspirations but does not take it as a good in itself and does not dream that it can be either absolute or relativist. In his "Letter" and elsewhere Locke builds the position of the civil magistrate -- his view of what we will allow and not allow what we will enfranchise and not enfranchise -- on what is reciprocal. We can tolerate all those who tolerate us. In his day in England for instance he will tolerate Roman Catholics in practice because they do nothing in their churches that would not be legal in their homes. But he nevertheless excludes them from full citizenship; and not because he is an anti-Catholic bigot but because Catholics did not then recognize England's Protestant succession. He defended the full enfranchisement of various Protestant non-conformists because they did recognize it. He excluded Jews and Atheists because they could not fully accept a civil order founded in Christian belief. To the modern reader this seems shocking; but one can see the reasoning in it. Times change & it is quite right that we have accepted the enfranchisement of Catholics and Jews and even Atheists. The condition was they pledge allegiance and thus agree to share in upholding the civil order as much symbolized as ruled by Crown in Parliament. Today we have not merely forgotten the condition but have actually reversed it. We even pass laws to prevent us from speaking out against any group that would subvert our social order in the name of "tolerance". We have toleration turned upside down. And this is so true that I cannot give you specific examples today without putting myself and my newspaper in danger of the law. The whole liberal tradition of "proceduralism" has thus been entirely undermined. At the root of the mess we see all around us is that our liberals themselves have rejected liberalism and embraced nihilism instead. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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