write essay democracy peaches tolerance
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here are two basic positions where tolerance as political strategy and moral viewpoint is rejected or made redundant. We are hostile to tolerance when we hold that we are defending an objective truth—religious or secular—which should also be defended and maintained by means of political and legal power. And tolerance become superfluous also when the affirmation of plurality becomes total, and tolerance identical to a vive la difference. As recent developments in my own country—the Netherlands—have demonstrated, the political outcome of this last position is remarkably enough not necessarily an all-inclusive relativistic tolerance. It may just as well be one of intolerance towards ‘believers’ of all kinds, in short: tolerance becomes polemical and belligerent. Turning to religious fundamentalism or ultra-orthodoxy could then become a possible (extreme) reaction to this relativistic and subjectivist position, as demonstrated in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novel The Penitent. Between these two positions of hostility or indifference towards tolerance, we can situate that democratic attitude which may rightly be called ‘tolerance’. As ethical position, the tolerant citizen accepts the democratic disjunction between my (private) truth and the symmetrical justice between citizens. As political strategy, a tolerant democratic regime is based upon a political act of exclusion of what I will here call ‘political fundamentalism’.
Keywords: (In)tolerance, Difference, Truth, Political and existential fundamentalism, Hypocrisy, Subjectivism, Exclusion
‘I won’t have much to say about the arrangements that get ruled out entirely—the monolithic or totalitarian political regimes’, the American political philosopher Michael Walzer informs us in the Introduction to his On Toleration (1997). This narrowing of his theme has not remained unchallenged. If Walzer is only interested in regimes and discourses already becharmed by tolerance, his compatriot Stanley Fish wonders, is there still a problem? Should not tolerance as political strategy and moral viewpoint be proof against precisely the troublesome cases, ‘those forms of thought indifferent or hostile to the tolerance that is his subject?’ (Fish 1999)
‘Toleration makes difference possible’, says Walzer, ‘and difference makes toleration necessary’.1 There are indeed two basic positions where tolerance as political strategy and moral viewpoint is rejected or made redundant. We are hostile to tolerance when we hold that we are defending an objective truth—possibly even still to be partially realized in historical-philosophical terms—which should also be defended and maintained officially, by means of political power. What Walzer calls ‘difference’ in this instance represents a denial or deviation from objective truth, or an obstacle to historic necessity. Whoever denies this truth ought to be punished as ‘dissident’, re-educated, or should merely be tolerated in the way we temporarily tolerate irregularities until the i‘s are crossed and the t’s are dotted again.
We nowadays tend to associate ‘fundamentalism’ and ‘theocracy’ with religious regimes. Yet much of the twentieth century saw a grim confrontation with another monolithic truth-regime, the scientistic or rationalistic one of ‘concrete socialism’. Also here a truth was elevated to the throne of power, and not only were those who refused to profess this truth (‘dissidents’) imprisoned or exiled, the regime also exacted a price of ubiquitous hypocrisy.2 Here intolerance is not the result of an eruption of the irrational such as is often associated with religious fanaticism and militant devotion, but precisely of the ‘illusion of the omnipotence of reason’ (Finkielkraut 1995), of assuming that the method and rigour of the natural sciences could simply be transposed to the domains of the social and political. In short, removing the religious foundation from a society apparently does not suffice. And hypocrisy was already the by-product of those societies which at the beginning of the modern era continued the strive towards religious homogeneity. (I) In conclusion to my essay I will show that the establishment of a truth-regime has continued to remain a temptation to modern democracies confronted by an increasing social and cultural diversity.