Category: Toleration

Democracy and Toleration

Jesus and the Powers (N. T. Wright & Michael F. Bird, Zondervan, 2024):

Democracies are compelled to tolerate and enfranchise [give the vote to] people who stand in resolute opposition to the very idea of democracy itself. (164)

This sentence implies that a democracy is a system of government in which the will of the majority decides every question.  If so, then in such a system the majority may democratically decide that their system of government cease being a democracy and become, say, a theocracy.  If so, a democracy may democratically decide to commit political suicide. Democracy taken full strength cancels itself, or al least allows the possibility of self-cancellation. One reasonable inference is that it must not be taken full-strength: it needs support from an extra-democratic source.

Now the authors aim to make a case of "liberal democracy." (p. xvi)  But no democracy worth wanting could have the self-destructive feature I have exposed in the preceding paragraph. A democracy worth wanting must rest on principles that are not up for democratic grabs. I mean such principles as are enshrined in our founding documents: that all men are created equal, that they have unalienable rights, and so on.  For example, the rights  to life, liberty, property, and free speech. These rights do not derive from any collective human decision: they are not up for democratic grabs.  The same goes for what I will call political meta-principles such as the rule of law. The rule of law is not itself a law, but a principle that governs the application of laws.  It the normative principle that no man is above the law, that all are subject to the same laws, and that everyone is to be treated equally under the law.  ABA definition: " no one is above the law, everyone is treated equally under the law, everyone is held accountable to the same laws, there are clear and fair processes for enforcing laws, there is an independent judiciary, and human rights are guaranteed for all."  If I understand due process, it is part and parcel of the rule of law: the latter subsumes the former. It should bother you that prominent leftists have questioned due process.

And so I say: no democracy worth wanting can tolerate those who would work to undermine the principles upon which a democracy worth wanting must rest. This is why I wrote two days ago:

Any sane person who does not intend the destruction of our [democratic, constitutionally-based] republic should be able to see that the values of Sharia [Islamic law] are incompatible with American values, and that no Muslims should be allowed to immigrate who are unwilling to accept and honor our values [and Anglo-American system of law, and renounce Islamic law].

The authors, apparently, disagree: 

We need a political framework that exhibits . . . a willingness to endure strange and even offensive ways of life. [. . .] Victory in liberal democracy is not vanquishing our opponents, but winning their respect, living in peace with them, and affirming their right to their opinion. That means LGBTQ+ people have the right to be themselves, Muslims can be Muslims, Christians can be Christians, Socialists can be Socialists, Greenies can be Greenies. (172)

If so, then Communists can be Communists and must be tolerated. But surely toleration, the touchstone of classical liberalism, has limits. Communism, which aims at the overthrow of the American system of government, cannot be tolerated. Is that not obvious? But then neither can Sharia-based Islam. For both Communism and Islam are antithetical to our founding principles.

At the very end of Article VI of the Constitution, we read:

. . . no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

But of course Communism is not a religion in any reasonable sense of the term as I have argued elsewhere. What about Islam? Isn't it a religion?   Some say it is a Christian heresy (Chesterton). Others say it is a political ideology masquerading as a religion. I say it is a hybrid ideology: both a religion and a political ideology.  I would argue that, since its political commitments are antithetical to American principles, values, and presuppositions, Islam does not count as a religion for the purposes of the application of Article VI, paragraph 3. 

But it will take another 9/11-type event to convince most people of this. Most people are impervious to reasoning such as I am engaging in here; it strikes these sense-enslaved denizens of Plato's Cave as 'abstract' and 'unreal.' But when they are smashed in the face, they will begin to get the point, as they expire in the rubble.

That event is coming. 

Beware of Projecting . . .

. . . your values and attitudes into others. We are not all the same 'deep down,' and we don't all want the same things. You say you value peace and social harmony? So do I. But some are bellicose right out of the box. They love war and thrive on conflict, and not just verbally.  

It is dangerous to assume that others are like we are.  (I am thinking right now of a very loving and lovable female neighbor  who makes the dangerous assumption: she has a 'Coexist' sticker affixed to her bumper.)

Liberal 'projectionism' — to give it a name — can get your irenic self killed.

Coexist sticker

As desirable a desideratum as peaceful coexistence is, it is inconsistent with totalitarian systems. This is why communism and Christianity cannot coexist assuming that they remain true to their defining principles.  (Or at least they cannot coexist in one geographical area over the long term.) They are mutually exclusive worldviews. And of course they are not just comprehensive views of the world and the people in it, but practical systems of prescriptions and proscriptions oriented toward the guidance of human action.  The actional side is paramount in both systems. Old Karl said that the philosophers had variously interpreted the world when the point was to change it. (Karl Marx, Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach).  A serious Christian could say that the philosophers had variously theorized and speculated when the unum necessarium was the salvation of one's immortal soul.  "For what doth it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his own soul?" (Matthew 16-26)  A library of learned disquisitions on the nature of the soul is of no avail if one in the end suffers its loss.

Christianity and Islam are also quite obviously mutually exclusive on both  doctrinal and  practical planes. Note that both in their ideological purity are totalitarian. (Christianity in the West has of course been liberalized to a great extent and is thus no longer ideologically pure.) The two in their pure forms make a total claim on the lives of their adherents. They cannot peacefully coexist in the same geographical area over the long term. The Muslim says to the infidel: either convert to the truth faith, or accept dhimmitude, or be put to the sword. That, for a Christian, is indeed a trilemma: you will be impaled on one of three horns, but you are free to choose which one. 

Can classical liberalism, the touchstone of which is toleration, coexist with any totalitarian ideology, religious or secular? No again. The classical liberal can and will tolerate any ideology as long as it respects the principle of toleration; it cannot, however, tolerate the rejection of this very principle, the principle that defines it. The rub, for the totalitarian, is that if he accepts the principle of toleration, he can no longer remain totalitarian: he will have to adjust his tenets in various ways. Classical liberalism and totalitarian systems are mutually exclusive. 

So where does this leave us? There can be no peaceful coexistence in one and the same geographical area over the long term except under classical liberalism.  For classical liberalism alone is tolerant of deep differences and is alone respectful of our equally deep ignorance of the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters.  Why must we be tolerant? Because we do not know. The classical liberal  is keenly aware of the evil in the human heart and of the necessity of limited government and dispersed power. So he is justified in making war against fanaticism, onesidedness, and totalitarian systems of government whether theocratic or 'leftocratic.'  It would not be a war of extermination but one of limitation. It would also be limited to one's geographical area and not promoted abroad to impose the values of classical liberalism on the benighted tribalists of the Middle East and elsewhere.

Finally, can American conservatism and the ideology of the Democrat Party in its contemporary incarnation peacefully coexist? Obviously not, which is why there is a battle for the soul of America. Either we defeat the totalitarian Left or we face a nasty trilemmatic trident: acquiesce and convert; or accept dhimmitude; or ne cancelled in one livelihood and then eventually in one's life.

Free Speech, Censorship, Toleration, and a Lame Libertarian Argument

Your right to free speech entails my duty not to impede your speech; it does not entail a duty on my part to provide you with a platform. "But then you are censoring me!" In a broad and defensible sense, yes. I am tolerant and so I tolerate you and your beliefs. To tolerate, however, is not to approve but to allow, to put up with, to — wait for it — tolerate. Toleration does not extend to an aiding and abetting of views that I, after years of study and due diligence in the formation of my beliefs, consider false or pernicious.

In any case, it is not my censorship you should fear, but that of the State, especially when a regime of anti-constitutional rogues has  seized control thereof. The State has non-state adjuncts and allies in the private sphere that serve as their enablers and propaganda arms. They are to be feared as well, extending as they do the State's reach into the private lives of citizens as they hollow out the space of civil society which traditionally served as a buffer between Leviathan and the naked individual.  Among the enabling adjuncts and allies: Big Tech, Big Pharma, Mainstream Media.

There is no need for an Orwellian Ministry of 'Truth' within the government when CNN, CBS, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and all the rest serve as propaganda arms of governmental distortion and directives.

At this point a libertarian argument needs to be addressed, one that had some probative force decades ago but in the teeth of current developments is becoming increasingly lame.  A libertarian will point out, rightly, that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects the citizen against the government in respect of the following rights: exercise of religion, free speech, peaceable assembly, and the right to petition in redress of grievances. But the amendment says nothing about the protection of the rights of citizens against private-sector entities. The libertarian argument, however, weakens the more the big corporations with enormous economic and cultural clout infiltrate and influence the government thereby merging with it. 

The merging of woke-Left capital with woke-Left government puts paid to the libertarian argument which , once lame, is now totally non-ambulatory. 

Toleration Misunderstood

Some of my conservative Facebook friends applauded the meme below. Such applause is ill-advised. Toleration (tolerance) in a pluralistic society such as the one we live in is essential if we are to live together peaceably, something we are obviously not doing at present. There are two claims below. The first, that tolerance is not Christian is, if not obviously untrue,  not obviously true,  and I would have no trouble showing that tolerance, properly understood, is akin to such Christian virtues  and attitudes as patience, forbearance, forgiveness, and the like. My present interest, however, is solely in the second claim, or rather suggestion, that a commitment to toleration includes a commitment to the toleration of grave and known evil. This is  a mistake that many on the Right make. It shows a failure to understand what toleration is. 'Toleration' is not a dirty word, and that to which it refers is a beautiful thing, the touchstone of the classical liberalism of the Founders.  The Founders knew history and knew of the religious wars in which people literally tore one another apart in conflicts over religious practices and beliefs. Thus they enshrined religious liberty — which includes the liberty to have no religion — as a high value in the First Amendment.

Essential to toleration is a tripartite distinction between (a) beliefs and practices consonant with the prevailing orthodoxy, (b) beliefs and practices at odds with this orthodoxy but tolerable by its adherents, and (c) beliefs and practices that are intolerable.  (See here.) If you understand (c), you understand that toleration has limits, and that Archbishop Chaput has gone off the rails.

For a deeper understanding of this topic see the following two Substack articles: 

On Toleration: With a Little Help from Kolakowski

Toleration Extremism: Notes on John Stuart Mill

 

Toleration not a Christian virtue

Christianity has civilized us . . .

. . . but it has also weakened us.  Our virtues, which once were strengths, are now weaknesses.  Some of our virtues have come to vitiate as much as some of our vices. 

We in the West no longer crucify malefactors or break them on the wheel. We now wring our hands, absurdly, over whether lethal injection is "cruel and unusual punishment."  A nation that has lost the will to execute its worst and most destructive criminals is a nation not long for this earth.  Can the will to live exist in a people who under no circumstances can muster the will to kill?

One of the fruits of civilization is toleration, that touchstone of classical liberalism.  It is a beautiful thing. It becomes a weakness, however, when it extends to the toleration of those who crucify and behead and throw homosexuals off of buildings.

Crucifixion in Islam:

It is all too common to view the practice of crucifixion as a form of torture and execution from antiquity which hasn’t been used in nearly two millennia, yet this is hardly the case. In fact, crucifixion is a standard means of execution in Saudi Arabia, and there is a growing movement among Islamists to bring back crucifixion as the preferred means of punishment for a variety of crimes, including apostasy from Islam, “fitna,” which is a pliable term which can refer to unbelief or mischief-making, or anything which goes against Islam and Shariah. This is explicitly taught in the Qur’an:

The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His messenger and strive to make mischief in the land is only this: that they should be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off… (Qur’an 5:33).

Ominously for Christians, strongly associated with fitna is “shirk,” the associating of partners with Allah. Believing Jesus to be the Son of God is, for Muslims, one of the worst forms of shirk, and is therefore punishable by death, including crucifixion. (There is a dark irony here, as Muslims do not believe Jesus was crucified, yet they prescribe crucifixion as punishment for Christians.)

Read it all. Disturbing images.

Pakistani Humanist Denied UK Asylum . . .

. . . after failing to identify Plato! Holy Guacamole! (HT: Karl White)

A Pakistani man who renounced his Muslim faith and became a humanist has had his application for asylum in the UK rejected after failing to correctly answer questions about ancient Greek philosophers.

The Home Office said Hamza bin Walayat’s failure to identify Plato and Aristotle as humanist philosophers indicated his knowledge of humanism was “rudimentary at best”.

This is very strange in several ways. For one thing, how could anyone with even a passing acquaintance with the divine Plato call him a humanist? Later in the piece we get a definition that is on the right track:

In a letter in support of Walayat’s asylum application, Bob Churchill, of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, said: “For many, the broad descriptive ‘humanist’ is just a softer way of saying atheist, especially if you come from a place where identifying as atheist may be regarded as a deeply offensive statement.”

My astute readers don't need it explained to them why Plato is not a humanist by this definition.

Perhaps the Pakistani man should be given asylum. But there is a far more important, an 'existential,' issue:

If the Brits had any sense they would curtail the influx of Muslims into their homeland, at least for the time being, until the Muslim world reforms itself.  (This assumes that Brits still care about their wonderful culture which is parent to our American culture.) Far too many Muslims, not having gone through the Enlightenment, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, retain their backward fanaticism, a fanaticism and 'true belief' that makes them extremely dangerous to civilized and skeptical and sometimes decadent Brits who are prone to doubt and therefore not inclined to defend their superior culture.  As we read:

Apostates are subject to discrimination, persecution and violence in Pakistan. In March last year, a student who had stated he was a humanist on his Facebook page was murdered at his university. 

Blasphemy is punishable by death under Pakistani law. In August, 24 British politicians wrote to the Pakistani government urging it to repeal its draconian blasphemy law, which has been used against religious minorities and humanists.

Immigrants bring their culture with them. If those with antithetical values are allowed to immigrate in huge numbers they will not assimilate, even if a few of them are willing and able to assimilate.  And then the Brits will have in their midst subversive elements who believe the evil nonsense described in the quotation immediately preceding. Eventually, the invaders will take over the host country.

Now how stupid is that?  No comity without commonality. Do the U. K. and Europe have a death wish?

Think about it. You have a superior culture that allows itself to be destroyed by an inferior culture that exploits features of the superior culture that make it superior. I am thinking of such classically liberal Western values as tolerance, religious liberty (which includes the liberty to be irreligious), and free speech. 

We must not allow our virtues to vitiate us. For then our virtues become vices. The values mentioned have limits. For example, does religious toleration extend to a religion which is also, and indissolubly, a destructive political ideology antithetical to Western values?

This is a crucial question, but have you ever heard anyone raise it? Now you have.

If Agreement is Out of Reach . . .

. . . then I think there are two conclusions to be drawn. The first is that we ought not allow into our midst individuals and groups with radically different values and commitments.  The second is that we ought to be as tolerant as we can of the differences among those we do admit into our midst.

No comity without commonality.

No comity without toleration.

Equanimity, Arizona Style

Keep calmThe Brits may want to rethink their gun laws in the light of recent events.

Katie Hopkins lays into Sadiq Khan, mayor of London.

Keep calm and carry on?  Keep calm, and carry one!

By the way, are there any cities or towns in Muslim countries that have Christian or non-Muslim mayors or other government officials? Just asking!

Should we tolerate the intolerant? Should we, in the words of Leszek Kolakowski,

. . . tolerate political or religious movements which are hostile to tolerance and seek to destroy all the mechanisms which protect it, totalitarian movements which aim to impose their own despotic regime? Such movements may not be dangerous as long as they are small; then they can be tolerated. But when they expand and increase in strength, they must be tolerated, for by then they are invincible, and in the end an entire society can fall victim to the worst sort of tyranny. Thus it is that unlimited tolerance turns against itself and destroys the conditions of its own existence. (Freedom, Fame, Lying, and Betrayal, p. 39.)

Read that final sentence again, and again.  And apply it to current events.
 
Kolakowski concludes that "movements which aim to destroy freedom should not be tolerated or granted the protection of law . . . " (Ibid.) and surely he is right about this. Toleration has limits. It does not enjoin suicide.  
 
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The Incompatibility of Islam with the West

From an astute correspondent:

So we come back to the concept of Sharia, which you rightly mentioned in one of your posts. This is really the thing where Islam stands out from other religions, the idea that religious belief should be the basis of law. Here I found Islamic Law: The Sharia from Muhammad's Time to the Present (Hunt Janin, André Kahlmeyer) useful. The concept of Sharia is essential to Islamic belief. See Sura 33:35—36. Islam means ‘submission’: the primary duty of human beings is to submit totally to the will of God. The sharia shows the faithful how this submission should be put into practice in daily life. 

[The sharia] does not grow out of, and is not moulded by, society as is the case with Western systems. Human thought, unaided, cannot discern the true values and standards of conduct; such knowledge can only he attained through divine revelation, and acts are good or evil exclusively because God has attributed this quality to them. In the Islamic concept, law precedes and moulds society; to its eternally valid dictates the structure of State and society must, ideally, conform.

Notwithstanding the great outpouring of books and articles which have appeared in the wake of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., the Islamic world is still not understood in the West today. The sharia is, beyond any question, one of the most important concepts of Islam, but most non-Muslims know almost nothing about it.

………………

I wholly endorse the foregoing as an understanding of Islam.  Islam is a hybrid ideology: both a religion and a political system. Sharia, or Islamic law, is essential to it.  Coming from God, it cannot be questioned by man: man must submit to it.  The primary meaning of 'Islam' is submission.  God's law must be imposed on all and woven into the fabric of everyday life.  There is no provision in Islam for mosque-state separation.  But that is to put it in the form of an understatement.  Islam positively rules out mosque-state separation.

John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion (Yale UP, 1989, pp. 48-49):

From the point of view of the understanding of this state of islam [submission to Allah] the Muslim sees no distinction between the religious and the secular.  The whole of life is to be lived in the presence of Allah and is the sphere of God's absolute claim and limitless compassion and mercy.  And so islam, God-centredness, is not only an inner submission to the sole Lord of the universe but also a pattern of corporate life in accordance with God's will.  It involves both salat, worship, and falah, the good embodied in behaviour.  Through the five appointed moments of prayer each day is linked to God. Indeed almost any activity may be begun with Bismillah ('in the name of Allah'); and plans and hopes for the future are qualified by Inshallah ('if Allah wills').  Thus life is constantly punctuated by the remembrance of God.  It is a symptom of this that almsgiving ranks with prayer, fasting, pilgrimage and confession of faith as one of the five 'pillars' of Islam.  Within this holistic conception the 'secular' spheres of politics, government, law, commerce, science and the arts all come within the scope of religious obedience.

What Hick calls a "holistic conception," I would call totalitarian.  Islam is totalitarian in a two-fold sense.  It aims to regulate every aspect and every moment of the individual believer's life. (And if you are not a believer, you must either convert or accept dhimmitude.) But it is also totalitarian in a corporate sense in that it aims to control every aspect of society in all its spheres, just as Hick points out supra.

Islam, therefore, is profoundly at odds with the values of the West.  For we in the West, whether (old-time) liberals or conservatives, accept church(mosque)-state separation.  We no doubt argue heatedly over what exactly it entails, but we are agreed on the main principle.  I regularly criticize the shysters of the ACLU for their extremist positions on this question; but I agree with them that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . . ."  This implies that the government shall not impose any religion upon the people as the state religion.

This raises a very serious question.  Is Islam –  pure, unEnlightened, un-watered-down, fundamentalist, theocratic Islam — deserving of First Amendment protection?  We read in the First Amendment that Congress shall not prohibit the free exercise of religion.  Should that be understood to mean that the Federal government shall not prohibit the  establishment and  free exercise of a  totalitarian, fundamentalist  theocratic religion in a particular state, say Michigan? 

The USA is a Christian nation with a secular government.  Suppose there was a religion whose aim was to subvert our secular government.  Does commitment to freedom of religion enjoin toleration of such a religion?

Obviously not!  Sharia is essential to true Islam.  But Sharia is subversive of our system of government.  So we are under no obligation from the Constitution to tolerate Sharia-based Islam. The Constitution is not a suicide pact.  This implies that Muslims who do not renounce Sharia should not be eligible for positions in the government.

"But this violates Article VI of the Constitution!"  No it doesn't.  There we read that "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."  But this cannot possibly be interpreted in such a way as to allow into the government elements subversive of the system of government the Constitution defines.

Why is Islam incompatible with the West?  It is because Islam violates the separation of the religious and secular spheres.  But why should they be kept apart? One reason is that we in the West have come to realize over the centuries that no one can legitimately claim to know the answers to the Big Questions about God, the soul, the purpose of human existence, the nature of the good, and so on.  Only if one were absolutely certain of the answers to these questions would one be justified in imposing them via state power on everyone and forcing everyone to live in accordance with them.  If we know that the Bible is the inerrant word of God and that God has condemned sodomy, and sanctioned the killing of sodomites, then we would perhaps be justified in outlawing sodomy and punishing it by death as it is indeed punished in some ten Muslim countries.

But surely no one of us KNOWS that God exists, let alone that God has revealed himself to man, let alone in a particular book or set of books, let alone inerrantly.  Not knowing these things we have a good reason to tolerate homosexual and heterosexual sodomites, subject to certain restrictions, e.g. 'between consenting adults,' etc.  We have  reason to allow such behavior as legally permissible even if it in fact morally impermissible.  For again, even if sodomy is is in fact morally impermissible because condemned by God ,  no one can legitimately claim to KNOW that it is.   

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