another world

Right now, the sky is blue and the sun is lounging on the horizon, as it does for hours on sunny winter mornings, glowing through this thin layer of icy fog that's crouching over yesterday's snowfall. The feeling of otherness is amazing.

Intolerance is not the crime

I was having this very interesting discussion on IM with ukelele and it seemed worth talking about here. I am undoubtedly not the first person to catch on to this, but I have not heard anyone else in my cohort discuss it (though I'm sure they've all noticed the annoying phenomenon I'm about to describe).

A favorite slur, typically used by liberals against conservatives, is "intolerance": the failure to accept differences as normal and healthy in a diverse society. People who profess certain views - opposition to the normalization of homosexuality, for instance - are accused of being "intolerant," and this is taken to be roughly synonymous with "jack-booted Nazi."

But the problem is, intolerance is not the crime. Here's why.

Talk of values is nonsensical without a discussion of scope. Scope for a value system can vary along an axis from absolutism ("everyone must follow my rules") to relativism ("my rules apply only to me, and other people should only be judged by their own rules"), with mid-points like "Americans shouldn't torture POWs; sure, the enemies do it, but we're better than that" and "No daughter of mine is going to leave the house in a tube top." What is crucial for this discussion is that it is only sensical to challenge another's behavior on moral grounds if you believe he is within the scope of your moral universe. Moral relativism may be very much in fashion in the liberal world -- and indeed, intellectually it is just as hard to justify moral absolutism as it is to justify a belief in God; nevertheless, the fact remains that when one person accuses another of violating some important value, the accuser (whether he acknowledges it or not) is treating that value as an absolute within the sphere containing himself and the accused.

Now here's the rub. When you hold a value with a certain scope, and someone within that scope violates the value, the only morally consistent thing to do is to challenge that person's behavior; so when liberals challenge anti-gay groups, they're doing the only thing they _can_ do. But there's an obvious retort, well-used by the right, that such challenges constitute intolerance themselves! Now what?

The trouble is -- the right wing is right on this one. It is intolerant to speak out against the teachings of religious groups who preach that homosexuality is an evil. It has to be. To be tolerant of such teachings would itself be a moral failure.

It looks like a sticky bind -- the only moral option is intolerance of what we have called intolerance, but doesn't that make us hypocrites? Well, not exactly; the key is that we're using the wrong word. Intolerance of evil is totally appropriate -- the key point of difference between liberals and conservatives is not tolerance versus intolerance, but on how evil ought to be defined. And I think -- here's the bad news for instinctive relativists like me -- I think the only thing to do that is at all internally consistent is to pick a value system and stick to it. If you wish to have a value system that can make meaningful judgments about the world, the intellectually-rigorous way to criticize people who violate your norms is not by calling them intolerant, but by telling them they've got bad value systems, and they should adopt yours instead.

It looks like an abandonment of the high ground, to be sure -- liberals tend to hate no one more than they hate obvious evangelists -- but I gotta tell you, it's high ground we never really had anyway.

If this isn't something you've got the stomach for, from here it looks like the only intellectually honest alternative is to resign yourself to detached observation of the world, eschewing attempts to change it. All activism is arrogance. It has to be. Moral behavior in the face of contradiction requires a certain degree of arrogance.

Incidentally, I'm not sure which path I prefer.