In Praise of Intolerance
It’s always fun to go into the city in the Central Valley and get exposed the the Limbaugh-listening, Coulter-reading world out there. At the library, I saw a license plate frame that said “Truth not Tolerance”. To put it mildly, I’m guessing that the owner of that particular car doesn’t agree with me on many points and to me it had the ring of the religious right. Sure enough, a quick little internet search (and here) turned up several sites devoted to the Truth not Tolerance “movement” (if I can call it such). Their core belief could be summed up in a nutshell as the belief that “we” should not “go around showing respect for other people’s false religions and concepts of the Truth.” I don’t happen to believe that myself of course, but I do strongly agree with their slogan, Truth not Tolerance, which in isolation is essentially value neutral. Or more precisely, it says is that tolerance is not on the top rung in the hierarchy of values. That, as it turns out is one of the least controversial things one could say and every thinking person, right, left and center agrees (or should agree) that there are truths and values that outstrip tolerance.
Of course, the religious right minces no words about this and they make it their proud slogan. Even so, we often hear people of every stripe urge tolerance or, in the face of criticism, claim that they are tolerant. Occasionally one hears liberals (and I use that in the derogatory way it is used in Phil Ochs’ song “Love me I’m a Liberal”) speak as though nothing could be more important, but of course it is just unthinking rhetoric. If the right might be defined with “Truth not Tolerance” (and I’m just assuming this person is a religious conservative), the equivalent phrase that resonates on the left is the oft-used “Speak Truth to Power”, adopted from eighteenth-century Quakers. Regardless of the differences in what the speaker of these two quotes may mean, fundamentally they express the same sentiment. Speaking truth to power implies that we as citizens will not sit idly by and tolerate actions on the part of our government when they violate our code of values, what we believe to be true. That, of course, is just one part of the intolerance of the left. The left has traditionally (or at least in the last few decades) been intolerant to racism, sexism, homophobia, social injustice in our courts and economic system. This implies an intolerance of certain specific indviduals – George Wallace, Clarence Thomas for example – and fails to explain the tolerance for Bill Clinton’s abuse of his position to have sex with an intern (don’t get me wrong, it’s not the sex or even the minor lie that shoudl be at issue, but the abuse of one’s position that is intolerable).
So I will cop to many titles, honorable and dishonorable, but in so far as I am tolerant, that says nothing good or bad about my character. The measure of my character depends on whether or not I’m tolerant, but on what I tolerate and how strongly and vociferously intolerant I am with regard to those things that I think are wrong and unjust.
Phil Ochs, “Love Me I’m a Liberal”
I’m not going to type in the whole thing. I know it through a live recording where in the intro, he gives this definition: “The liberals. Ten degrees to the left of center in good times. Ten degrees to the right of center when it affects them personally” (Phil, needless to say, like me though of himself as a whacko lefty, not a liberal). Anyway, here’s the last verse, my favorite:
Once I was young and impulsive
I wore every conceivable pin
Even went to the socialist meetings
Learned all the old union hymns
But I’ve grown older and wiser
And that’s why I’m turning you in
So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal
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