Please study the following photographs. They depict adherents of the 'religion of peace' making such statements as: Behead those who insult Islam; Freedom go to hell; Be prepared for the real holocaust.
There is a sort of 'culture war' going on between liberals and conservatives in the West. But this minor culture war, as heated as it has become recently, is, despite its importance, as nothing compared to the major war between the West, with its Enlightenment values, and militant Islam. To put it roughly, we in the West are all or most of us liberals, classical liberals. The touchstone of classical liberalism is toleration, as I recall the famous CCNY philosopher Morris R. Cohen writing somewhere. Along the same lines, savor this admirable passage from Bryan Magee's Confessions of a Philosopher (Modern Library, 1999, p. 183):
Freedom is the heart of liberalism, as the word itself implies; and if you really do viscerally believe in freedom you accept that others have a right to do a great many things of which you disapprove, including the holding of a wide range of opinions with which you diagree. In a word, pluralism — a belief in the acceptance of the coexistence of the incompatible — is the essence of liberalism.
This seems right. The essence of classical liberalism is pluralism, and a pluralist is one who permits, which is not to say that he celebrates, the existence and expression of incompatible opinions. It borders on silliness to 'celebrate the diversity of opinions' in the 'marketplace of ideas' — what's to celebrate in discord and contention? — but we must tolerate this diversity. A diversity of opinions cannot be a good thing in itself, but it can be instrumentally good in that, in the abrasion of claim and counterclaim, better justified views may come to the fore. But that will tend to reduce the diversity. To make a fetish of diversity as such is a fallacy of contemporary liberals.
Why must we be tolerant, and thus liberal in a respectable sense of this term? (The term is now one of opprobrium, but for this contemporary liberals have only themselves and their extremism to blame.) The main reason is because no one knows the answers to the ultimate substantive questions. I am using 'know' in a strict sense that entails certainty. No one can legitimately claim to have certain knowledge about the existence or nonexistence of God, the soul, the freedom of the will. No one can legitimately claim to know what the good life for human beings is. And so on.
When Edith Stein, post-Husserl, pre-Auschwitz, was spending her days as a Carmelite nun praying and meditating and writing her impressive Finite and Eternal Being, was she living the good life, or was she living in illusion, wasting her time on empty fantasies? You may think you know the answer to this question, but I say you do not know the answer. Of course, I believe she was living the very highest life it is possible for a human to live, and I can support this belief with an array of arguments. And, having thought about the matter long and hard, I don't expect to be budged from this belief. But I am not about to drive anyone into a monastery or nunnery or blow up the Playboy Mansion.
Of course, I don't claim to know with certainty that nothing can be known with certainty about the ultimate questions; that is an open question and a matter for inquiry. My point is merely that we must be tolerant because we cannot be certain.
To round out these ruminations I must point out that toleration has its limits. Should the UK tolerate the Islamo-fanatics depicted above? No, they should expel the evildoers. Someone who calls for the beheading of those who criticize a religion cannot be tolerated. That is not to say that they should be beheaded, but that they should be removed from the midst of civilized people. Expel them, and do not allow their ilk in. Is that not just common sense? Incitement to violence cannot be tolerated.
One cannot tolerate people who refuse to accept the principle of toleration. The trouble with decadent Europe, I am afraid, is that they do not understand this. They do not see that toleration has limits. They believe in little or nothing, and in the face of fanatically true believers, they will have a hard time of it.