Don't let the fact that Kevin Spacey's character is a psychopath distract you from the disturbing truth that he speaks.
Showing posts with label tolerance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tolerance. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 14, 2015
Sunday, February 1, 2015
T.S. Eliot on Technological Provincialism
In our age, when men seem more than ever prone to confuse wisdom with knowledge, and knowledge with information, and try to solve problems of life in terms of engineering, there is coming into existence a new kind of provincialism, not of space, but of time; one for which history is merely the chronicle of human devices which served their turn and have been scrapped, one for which the world is the property solely of the living, a property in which the dead hold no shares. The menace of this kind of provincialism is, that we can all, all the people on the globe, be provincials together; and those who are not content to be provincials, can only become hermits. If this kind of provincialism led to greater tolerance, in the sense of forbearance, there might be more to be said for it; but it seems more likely to lead to our becoming indifferent, in matters where we ought to maintain a distinctive dogma or standard, and to our becoming intolerant, in matters which might be left to local or personal preference.
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Source: T.S. Eliot, "What Is a Classic?," in Selected of T.S. Eliot, ed. by Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975).
Monday, October 20, 2014
Tolerating People vs. Tolerating Sins
In the story of the woman caught in adultery (John 8:1–11), Jesus tells the woman, "Neither do I condemn you." People usually stop there when recounting the story, but it doesn't end there. Our Lord then tells the woman, "Go and sin no more."
Why do people stop before the last line? Because they usually tell this story as an example of what compassion and tolerance look like. They say, with Pope Francis, "Who am I to judge?" They end up mistaking compassion with blindness, and divesting mercy of truth, they end up with self-congratulation that will lead them all straight into Hell.
Christ made a judgment of this woman's behavior but not her being. Look at His words:
"Neither do I condemn you" in your very being, which is good, created in God's image, and called to a life of union with Him. No matter what you do or fail to do, I love you in your being, being a person, being a creature, called to be a daughter.
"Go and sin no more" because what you are doing and have been doing will lead you only to destruction. If you therefore value your life and what is good, you will do what is good because our actions follow our desire and our values.
Christ tells the woman to stop sinning. By implication, Christ is judging her actions and saying, "You have been sinning." We might say in protest, "Who are you to tell me what to do?" But Christ is truth, and He knows better. Christ doesn't threaten her because He doesn't need to. Why doesn't He need to? Because he made clear the distinction between who we are and what we do. Who we are is good, but what we do is not always good.
Compassion is for people, not for actions. Tolerance is for people, not for actions. Actions and beliefs are open to praise or rejection. People are more than their actions and beliefs, and their value is determined by neither.
Why do people stop before the last line? Because they usually tell this story as an example of what compassion and tolerance look like. They say, with Pope Francis, "Who am I to judge?" They end up mistaking compassion with blindness, and divesting mercy of truth, they end up with self-congratulation that will lead them all straight into Hell.
Christ made a judgment of this woman's behavior but not her being. Look at His words:
"Neither do I condemn you" in your very being, which is good, created in God's image, and called to a life of union with Him. No matter what you do or fail to do, I love you in your being, being a person, being a creature, called to be a daughter.
"Go and sin no more" because what you are doing and have been doing will lead you only to destruction. If you therefore value your life and what is good, you will do what is good because our actions follow our desire and our values.
Christ tells the woman to stop sinning. By implication, Christ is judging her actions and saying, "You have been sinning." We might say in protest, "Who are you to tell me what to do?" But Christ is truth, and He knows better. Christ doesn't threaten her because He doesn't need to. Why doesn't He need to? Because he made clear the distinction between who we are and what we do. Who we are is good, but what we do is not always good.
Compassion is for people, not for actions. Tolerance is for people, not for actions. Actions and beliefs are open to praise or rejection. People are more than their actions and beliefs, and their value is determined by neither.
Sunday, May 25, 2014
God's Love and "Anything Goes"
Yes, God loves us but not in the way that He therefore accepts everything we do or fail to do. God's love is not a passive acceptance of "who we are," whatever that phrase is twisted around to mean. His love for us extends to our being insofar as we have being, but God cannot love disorder (for disorder is the lack or twisting of being from what it properly should be), and anything disorderly present in our being therefore cannot be the object of God's love. God loves us precisely by showing us what sin is in all of its ugliness (our disorder), calling us out of it, and giving us an abundance of means to do so. God loves us by helping us to take responsibility for our lives.
Wednesday, May 21, 2014
Tolerance is Imposition
There cannot be a "non-imposing" worldview. A person may in fact or in the concrete circumstances of his life not bother anyone else with what they do, but this fact may be due simply because of a lack of opportunity to stand up for anything. To demand tolerance is to make an imposition as vigorous as the Christian demand for repentance and conversion. Of course, repentance and conversion cannot be forced but only urged. Christian dogmas imply an ethical standard that has political effects, touching upon issues within medicine, science, and human relations (e.g. marriage). To tell another person that they cannot force their views on others is itself a forcing of a view, namely, the view that we shouldn't force our ideas on others. Thus the internal logic of tolerance is incoherent and self-destructive.
Every worldview implies an ethical standard because every worldview says something about what it means to be a human living on earth. Not every worldview, therefore, is congruent with or complementary to every other worldview. Some are diametrically opposed.
Some may attempt to solve the antithesis between two worldviews through a higher synthesis, but such a synthesis implies the particularity of each worldview, i.e. that each worldview that has been synthesized contained enough elements of particulars and not enough metaphysical principles that gave intellectual coherence to the particulars.
If someone tells you not to shove your ideas on others, you can simply ask and point out, "By telling me not to shove my ideas on others, what are you doing to me now? Shoving your idea on me that others shouldn't shove their ideas on others."
Every worldview implies an ethical standard because every worldview says something about what it means to be a human living on earth. Not every worldview, therefore, is congruent with or complementary to every other worldview. Some are diametrically opposed.
Some may attempt to solve the antithesis between two worldviews through a higher synthesis, but such a synthesis implies the particularity of each worldview, i.e. that each worldview that has been synthesized contained enough elements of particulars and not enough metaphysical principles that gave intellectual coherence to the particulars.
If someone tells you not to shove your ideas on others, you can simply ask and point out, "By telling me not to shove my ideas on others, what are you doing to me now? Shoving your idea on me that others shouldn't shove their ideas on others."
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
Human Rights Campaign, the Discourse of Equality, and the Joker
Although I don't pay much attention to the same-sex marriage movement as well as its related equal rights movement for the LGBT community, it's almost impossible to avoid these things in our society. There are two facets of the complementary movements that I've noticed that I would like to comment on: 1) its discourse that capitalizes on the ambiguity of key words; and 2) its values that supervene upon this ambiguity.
As with all discourse, there are key words and phrases that set the same-sex equality movement discourse apart from others. One can see these phrases collected or implied on the Human Rights Campaign website, for example, or in their nearly-ubiquitous equal sign logo. This list could go on, but here are some that come off the top of my mind: same, sex, movement, equality (and equal), right(s), human, marriage, love, partners, gays (and variants), choice, freedom, self-determination, tolerance, acceptance, advocate, attraction. These are the positive words, but there are also negative words, such as homophobia, bigot (and variants), fag, queer, unnatural, Bible, intolerant, un-accepting, religion, dogmatic, judgmental, and other vulgar or graphic terms.
Interestingly, when one looks at the broadest of these key terms, the discourse under examination becomes almost indistinguishable from other discourses of a similar kind, such as the pro-choice movement, libertarian thought, modern political liberalism/progressivism, secular advocacy, the advocacy of scientism, etc. These are worldviews similar to what Husserl called the Lebenswelt. They are discourses that collectively organize the perception and appropriation of reality in a way that "makes sense" or that attempts to minimize cognitive dissonance, such as the reality of physical and genetic difference between male and female species, the reality of death, or, above all, the reality of God.
But if these broad key words are shared, then there is a foundational post-Enlightenment political-philosophical discourse that roots those words and makes sense of them; we could call it a "cenoscopic discourse" that gives birth to particular discourses. And these key words are necessarily ambiguous. For example, what is meant by same/equality? The answer is self-evident to a person who unquestioningly subscribes to the discourse. Its answer is as natural as a fish in water, but notice that in order to answer the question, such a subscriber will consult other key words within the same discourse. The web of key words is thus self-reinforced, hearkening back to Descartes' important contribution to the modern mind: self-produced certitude and all the solipsism that follows from that, culminating in Bertrand Russell's own admission of solipsism: "We can witness [only] what goes on in our heads, and [not] anything else at all" (1959: 26). It is literally impossible to think outside the box of a discourse without awareness and external light leading to Lonerganian insight.
The questioning may continue: what does love mean? In what way can one love be "equal" to another? Who/what adjudicates the validity or equality of any love? Why isn't the desire that leads to rape or pedophilia equal to the love that leads to same-sex or heterosexual relationships? Of course, such a question will cause a knee-jerk negative reaction, culminating in accusations of intolerance, judgmentalism, dogmatism, and bigotry. The reason is that even though the question does not declare any explicit judgment, it implies certain judgments that are contrary to the same-sex discourse. These judgments, one could say, are alien, are analogically homophobic to the homo-accepting Lebenswelt, and hence such judgments are seen as a threat. In fact, everyone understands at least implicitly that to frame a question in a certain way requires firstly a certain way of looking at things, because the frame implies the framer and vice versa; this is the possibility for rhetorical and loaded questioning. Discourse is a frame. The question reveals the frame just as the frame of a picture gives finality to the picture itself. A picture without frames, without borders, becomes indistinguishable from the Real.
These questions, however, reveal the ambiguity of the same-sex discourse and its key words. It reveals that such words are not simply used analogically but ambiguously or even worse, equivocally (perhaps because its users are nominalists). And the discourse and all related discourses rely absolutely upon such ambiguity. It is imperative that no one knows what love is, what "nature" is, what it exactly is that one "chooses" or "self-determines" but simply that one has "choice." It is like the anarchic Joker from Nolan's The Dark Knight, who says, "Do I look like a guy with a plan? [...] I'm a dog chasing cars. I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it! You know, I just do things." Oddly enough, the Joker's own discourse falls right into the modern political-philosophical discourse that I've been describing thus far. It is essential to the project (or "plan" or "scheme") that human rights remain floating values that one can pick and choose like apples from a tree, the tree being...what? And who planted it?
If love is an empty placeholder, then why not call it "equal" as well? If sex/gender are indistinguishable, then what is marriage? Yes, the destruction of distinctions leads inevitably to a discourse of "tolerance," which is impossible on its own terms. The discourse of tolerance, as is any discourse by its very terms, is intolerant of other discourses. A discourse, to be distinguishable from other discourses, must be intolerant in its foundation.
Yet again, discourses can be either ideoscopic or cenoscopic, particular or general, but that is another topic.
As with all discourse, there are key words and phrases that set the same-sex equality movement discourse apart from others. One can see these phrases collected or implied on the Human Rights Campaign website, for example, or in their nearly-ubiquitous equal sign logo. This list could go on, but here are some that come off the top of my mind: same, sex, movement, equality (and equal), right(s), human, marriage, love, partners, gays (and variants), choice, freedom, self-determination, tolerance, acceptance, advocate, attraction. These are the positive words, but there are also negative words, such as homophobia, bigot (and variants), fag, queer, unnatural, Bible, intolerant, un-accepting, religion, dogmatic, judgmental, and other vulgar or graphic terms.
Interestingly, when one looks at the broadest of these key terms, the discourse under examination becomes almost indistinguishable from other discourses of a similar kind, such as the pro-choice movement, libertarian thought, modern political liberalism/progressivism, secular advocacy, the advocacy of scientism, etc. These are worldviews similar to what Husserl called the Lebenswelt. They are discourses that collectively organize the perception and appropriation of reality in a way that "makes sense" or that attempts to minimize cognitive dissonance, such as the reality of physical and genetic difference between male and female species, the reality of death, or, above all, the reality of God.
But if these broad key words are shared, then there is a foundational post-Enlightenment political-philosophical discourse that roots those words and makes sense of them; we could call it a "cenoscopic discourse" that gives birth to particular discourses. And these key words are necessarily ambiguous. For example, what is meant by same/equality? The answer is self-evident to a person who unquestioningly subscribes to the discourse. Its answer is as natural as a fish in water, but notice that in order to answer the question, such a subscriber will consult other key words within the same discourse. The web of key words is thus self-reinforced, hearkening back to Descartes' important contribution to the modern mind: self-produced certitude and all the solipsism that follows from that, culminating in Bertrand Russell's own admission of solipsism: "We can witness [only] what goes on in our heads, and [not] anything else at all" (1959: 26). It is literally impossible to think outside the box of a discourse without awareness and external light leading to Lonerganian insight.
The questioning may continue: what does love mean? In what way can one love be "equal" to another? Who/what adjudicates the validity or equality of any love? Why isn't the desire that leads to rape or pedophilia equal to the love that leads to same-sex or heterosexual relationships? Of course, such a question will cause a knee-jerk negative reaction, culminating in accusations of intolerance, judgmentalism, dogmatism, and bigotry. The reason is that even though the question does not declare any explicit judgment, it implies certain judgments that are contrary to the same-sex discourse. These judgments, one could say, are alien, are analogically homophobic to the homo-accepting Lebenswelt, and hence such judgments are seen as a threat. In fact, everyone understands at least implicitly that to frame a question in a certain way requires firstly a certain way of looking at things, because the frame implies the framer and vice versa; this is the possibility for rhetorical and loaded questioning. Discourse is a frame. The question reveals the frame just as the frame of a picture gives finality to the picture itself. A picture without frames, without borders, becomes indistinguishable from the Real.
These questions, however, reveal the ambiguity of the same-sex discourse and its key words. It reveals that such words are not simply used analogically but ambiguously or even worse, equivocally (perhaps because its users are nominalists). And the discourse and all related discourses rely absolutely upon such ambiguity. It is imperative that no one knows what love is, what "nature" is, what it exactly is that one "chooses" or "self-determines" but simply that one has "choice." It is like the anarchic Joker from Nolan's The Dark Knight, who says, "Do I look like a guy with a plan? [...] I'm a dog chasing cars. I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it! You know, I just do things." Oddly enough, the Joker's own discourse falls right into the modern political-philosophical discourse that I've been describing thus far. It is essential to the project (or "plan" or "scheme") that human rights remain floating values that one can pick and choose like apples from a tree, the tree being...what? And who planted it?
If love is an empty placeholder, then why not call it "equal" as well? If sex/gender are indistinguishable, then what is marriage? Yes, the destruction of distinctions leads inevitably to a discourse of "tolerance," which is impossible on its own terms. The discourse of tolerance, as is any discourse by its very terms, is intolerant of other discourses. A discourse, to be distinguishable from other discourses, must be intolerant in its foundation.
Yet again, discourses can be either ideoscopic or cenoscopic, particular or general, but that is another topic.
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