The paradox challenges us to find a balance between upholding principles of openness and protecting ourselves from ideologies that threaten our foundational values. Trump may test those values.
I'm still having a hard time understanding how 14 million voters for Biden in 2020 decided to not participate in the election with Trump also having fewer votes than in 2020. Those non-voters may have shown great tolerance for the most intolerant person in America presidential history.
Tolerance implies a foundation of values and beliefs from which we judge other values and beliefs to be contrary to our own but worthy of debate and contest in an open society. But the advocacy of those contrary values and beliefs -- ranging across a spectrum from the debatable to the menacing -- as some point crosses lines that define the immediately dangerous (which our laws limiting unfettered speech now recognize) or the subversive (amounting to denials of the foundational values that sustain the free and open society in which we live). The latter requires that we set limits on what we allow as compatible with our foundational values, those "truths we hold to be self-evident," beyond which we must condemn and sanction what negates the unifying principles that define our citizenship.
After reading Lee Bolinger's The Tolerant Society some years ago, I felt that the expansive ideal of tolerance he seemed to espouse would leave us with nothing to stand on, no shared values beyond tolerance itself, no truths we share, no common foundation from which to define and defend our society. Tolerance alone becomes like sand through our fingers, leaving nothing to hold on to.
Nice, provocative post. As a general heuristic for tolerating the intolerant, I like the way John Rawls frames it--give broad latitude for being tolerant, except when tolerance gives way to a real threat.
I'm still having a hard time understanding how 14 million voters for Biden in 2020 decided to not participate in the election with Trump also having fewer votes than in 2020. Those non-voters may have shown great tolerance for the most intolerant person in America presidential history.
Tolerance implies a foundation of values and beliefs from which we judge other values and beliefs to be contrary to our own but worthy of debate and contest in an open society. But the advocacy of those contrary values and beliefs -- ranging across a spectrum from the debatable to the menacing -- as some point crosses lines that define the immediately dangerous (which our laws limiting unfettered speech now recognize) or the subversive (amounting to denials of the foundational values that sustain the free and open society in which we live). The latter requires that we set limits on what we allow as compatible with our foundational values, those "truths we hold to be self-evident," beyond which we must condemn and sanction what negates the unifying principles that define our citizenship.
After reading Lee Bolinger's The Tolerant Society some years ago, I felt that the expansive ideal of tolerance he seemed to espouse would leave us with nothing to stand on, no shared values beyond tolerance itself, no truths we share, no common foundation from which to define and defend our society. Tolerance alone becomes like sand through our fingers, leaving nothing to hold on to.
Nice, provocative post. As a general heuristic for tolerating the intolerant, I like the way John Rawls frames it--give broad latitude for being tolerant, except when tolerance gives way to a real threat.