The Virtues of Intolerance
Ever seen a statue of Lady Justice?
She was the Goddess of Justice in Roman mythology. She is typically depicted with a blindfold to show that she’s impartial and has scales to weigh the evidence between guilt and innocence.
That’s what we typically expect judges to do, right? Some judges may be tough, and some may be lenient, but whatever the case may be, we expect a judge to rule in favor of the innocent, punish the guilty, and be impartial. If a judge were to say, “Every person deserves a 2nd chance, so everyone who comes before me is innocent” or “I think people get away with a lot of crimes they don’t get caught for, so I rule everyone guilty,” we’d be outraged and demand they be removed from their job (at least I hope we would).
However, our society has become a little bit like one of the broken judges in that example when it comes to tolerance.
As a society, we have decided that tolerance is an unalloyed good. We talk about it like it’s something that’s only positive. Even if they don’t really live up to it, people on the Left love to brag about how tolerant they are. Before reading this column, when was the last time you heard anyone speak out against the idea of tolerance? For some people, the answer to that question may be, “Never.”
Yet is there a bad side to tolerance? Absolutely there is. In fact, I’d argue that you can see the bad side of tolerance reflected in what’s happening all across our society.
Still, before we get into that, is tolerance all bad? Not at all. There are a lot of great and small positive behaviors, attitudes, and concepts that involve tolerance in some form or fashion.
A colorblind society. Integrated schools. Minding your own business. Religious freedom. Giving a certain basic amount of respect to other religions and cultures. Free speech. Different strokes for different folks. “You do you.”
We could go on.
Similarly, we could point out a lot of great and small negative behaviors, attitudes, and concepts that involve intolerance in some form or fashion.
Racism. Segregated water fountains, schools, and restaurants. Religious persecution. Fat shaming. The Indian Caste System. “The Troubles” in Ireland. Ethnic-based slaughters of all sorts, all around the world.
All of this is fairly basic. Most everyone reading this could have taken a little time and come up with some fairly similar examples.
However, this is only HALF of the story.
We can just as easily come up with times when intolerance is perfectly appropriate and times when TOLERANCE has been a big problem.
As an example, this represents a common theme you see about New York City:
Why is it like this? Because people in New York are way too tolerant. They’re tolerant of people trashing the subways. They’re tolerant of crazy homeless people acting like lunatics in the street. They’re tolerant of street hustlers harassing people. They treat all kinds of bad behavior with kid gloves there. The Japanese consider that kind of behavior selfish, disgusting, and unacceptable and they don’t tolerate it.
Similarly, no city should tolerate junkies and bums putting tents on the sidewalks:
If you pay taxes, why should you have to walk through that on the sidewalks you paid for? Why should women and children have to walk through that? That’s not something a city should tolerate.
Similarly, there was a time in our country when doing weird, perverted things around kids wasn’t tolerated. Yet, what do we see today? Drag queens reading to kids and prominent liberals across the country championing the idea of showing books with explicit gay sex scenes to kids:
For a long time in America, you might catch a beating or end up in jail for showing something like that to somebody’s kid – and guess what? They were 100% right to be that intolerant of that kind of behavior and our society would be much better off if we were that intolerant of it, today.
Here’s another obvious example of what tolerance looks like. Is it good? Certainly, some people would say “Yes,” but they’re absolutely wrong:
Although I haven’t seen the reality show Intervention in quite a while, one of the running themes of it used to be kids turning into junkies, being enabled by everyone around them, then finally getting help when the people that love them stop tolerating their behavior and demand that they get help. That’s the whole idea behind “tough love” or even parenting in general. A parent may always love their child, but there are certain behaviors they can’t tolerate. Either the behavior is just so bad it’s intolerable or, for the good of the child, they need to punish them. Who has ever heard this phrase before?
Why do politicians not just tell us lies, but extremely obvious lies? Because we tolerate it. Why did we have violent riots and looting all across America in 2020? Because we tolerated it. Why do we have illegals crossing into America by the millions? Because we tolerate it. If we were to say (and mean), “We will use force, including deadly force to stop people from crossing our borders illegally, no one who comes here illegally will ever become a citizen and we will jail anyone we catch,” illegal immigration would drop down to a trickle overnight and millions of illegals would voluntarily self-deport. Like a lot of problems, the first step of fixing it is to raise our standards and become intolerant of bad behavior.
Again, the whole point of this is not to convince anyone that tolerance is bad per se. It’s not. However, tolerance taken to an extreme is a very bad thing. It’s not smart, good, or virtuous to be limitlessly tolerant of bad behavior. Every person, every society, everywhere needs a healthy balance between tolerance and intolerance to thrive. In America, we’ve become way, way, way too tolerant of bad ideas, bad behavior and bad people. For our society to get healthy again, that needs to change.