Pride and the end of tolerance
I can't but see this as a move to make it less likely we can all get along
Mark Mitchell, who is the author of a very good book on the philosophical origins of Woke politics that I have used in class, has a good short piece in the Feb. issue of Touchstone on the move away from tolerance on the cultural left. (You need a sub to see it.)
I’ve heard a number of activists talk about this move from tolerance to celebration. Tolerance, Mitchell explains, yet implies something untoward in the thing being tolerated. We don’t generally talk of tolerating things we openly affirm and love. We tolerate those things about which we are conflicted or troubled but recognize nonetheless as outside the realm of things that can or should be openly disapproved and/or as pertaining to the behaviors and characteristics of at least some people who should not be denigrated as people even if some aspects of their persons are recognized as outside of generally understood moral parameters.
The move to tolerance here was, it seems, temporary. The goal was perhaps always uniformity of thought. Even if this wasn’t the desired end at the outset, it is the destination the logic of the evolution of the politics of the Woke left determines.
You cannot tolerate any longer. That was once the goalpost, but it has been moved, or it is in the process of being moved. Now you must enthusiastically embrace, not just qualifiedly acquiesce to or with some reservations accept as an unavoidable reality. If you do not, you are on the wrong side of history and you will at some point be marked for vigorous attention from the agents of cancellation, official and unofficial.
This is part of a broad movement to reduce the number of plausible, reasonable, and morally acceptable positions on cultural politics. Previously, it was morally fine—even admirable—for a person who admitted feeling vaguely ill at ease about certain sexual identities and practices, perhaps because of religious convictions, and who strongly embraced traditional such identities and practices and the institutions that protected them to be able yet to show compassion for those outside those traditional patterns, to refuse to hate them, even to love them, and indeed to advocate for and participate in their protection from those who would hate and harm them. And all while still standing firm on the traditional institutions and refusing the demand that those institutions be altered to accommodate a very tiny minority’s insistence that an entire social institution be transformed to meet their desire.
Now that position is on the way to being beyond the pale. Only full celebration is sufficient. All other positions reduce ultimately to hate. I have seen this articulated by people on my campus many times in recent years. Students inform me that it is taught in many of the Studies courses.
Reflect on the broad political and social meaning of this.
Whatever your own position on the question of non-normative sexuality—whether you think it a pathology of some kind, or a sin, or believe it might have multiple causes in environmental abnormalities beyond the agency of the individual involved and it is therefore to be acknowledged as a possible effect of a personal history without necessarily believing basic institutions need be remade to accommodate it, or see it as just one more naturally occurring orientation no more or less morally correct or incorrect than any other, or believe those with such identities are morally superior because of the ostracism they sometimes face or because they are helping the planet by not making more babies, or whatever—try to imagine what’s going to happen to the country when this “tolerance is not enough” position on the question becomes fully accepted by the cultural elite.
Elites have much power to get their way by economic bullying and shutting people out of the communicative technologies and media that today are the equivalent of the telephone in my youth. I think we are not far from the point at which such active intolerance of the tolerance position will be the official position of virtually all schools, all mainstream media, the entirety of the tech and other elite industries.
How will the existing pluralism of the country on this and related questions survive?
Multicultural societies are precarious machines. Especially when they have become what we have: a society without a cultural center at all but only a conglomeration of different cultures floating around in a space large enough to prevent them crashing together constantly, but insufficiently large to eliminate the possibility—even the probability—of very serious collisions. Conflict within such societies can be intense and dangerous because of the lack of agreement on even some very basic matters.
What we have going on here, in my view, is an effort by the Woke left to move the pluralism of our culture on this question forcibly to a more unified position. Ordinarily, a more unified culture is more stable, but only when that stability has emerged organically. Trying to force it from above is not going to achieve what the Woke want to achieve. Too many people who are okay with tolerance but who are not going to be made to celebrate things they find unworthy of celebration will not respond to force with happy acquiescence.
This can only make things worse, in my view.
Perhaps the biggest problem with the Woke left is the disconnect between their purported valorization of difference and the practical things they actually do on the matter. You may differ in a thousand ways with respect to your identity for these folks, but if you differ from their ideological dogma that enjoins hatred of traditional morality and the desire for its destruction (they might put it as “the righteous and appropriate hatred of hatred”), your difference will cause you problems.
The rule is: “EMBRACE DIFFERENCE—except when it comes to the basic maxims of Wokeism; there, totalitarian uniformity is expected and, where possible, enforced.”