"The Intolerance of Tolerance": Something I wish I could have written

A few days ago I posted about "Pride Month" and how disgusted a lot of us have become with having sexual deviancy shoved into our faces during the month of June.  That post came following another in which I addressed the matter of someone accusing me of "bigotry" because of my beliefs about homosexuality.

The entire situation can be summarized by this statement I heard a number of times from the opposition: "We will not tolerate intolerance!"

I've been familiar with Karl Popper's "paradox of intolerance" for quite awhile now, going back to a philosophy class that I took in college at Elon.  The gist of it is that a society must be intolerant of intolerance, or else there is no tolerance at all.  To a point, I can agree with that.

To a point, mind you.

But the reality has been for a very long time, that the "tolerant" have been abusing the paradox as a weapon against those who have even the slightest disagreement with them.  The so-called "tolerant" - who are almost invariably of the "left side" of the ideological spectrum - do not seem capable of consideration of the viewpoints of others.  They instead are locked inside a fragile bubble, an "echo chamber", of their beliefs.  Any contradicting statements to their tenets are a dire threat to them, and are to be destroyed with all due vehemence.

How is there any dialogue possible, with people who think and behave like that?

In my own case, I did not initiate attack on anyone.  I did however profess sincere opposition to the beliefs of those people about social matters.  Matters which have corrupted and are destroying long-established and respected social institutions.  There is no such of a thing as "gay marriage", I will always believe.  Per the characteristics of true marriage, such a thing is impossible.

However, expressing that is enough to get labeled "bigot" and "intolerant" by individuals who are far more closed-minded than they realize about themselves.  They cannot oblige a person even merely thinking such a notion.  Anyone who does, they believe, should be destroyed.  And they are such gleeful bearers of the pitchfork and torch.

George Orwell had a word for where this "intolerance of intolerance" would lead to.  That word is "thoughtcrime".  And that is what these policemen of allowable ideas have deviated into becoming: the watchful overlords of all concepts that a person might contain within the few square inches of his or her brain.

They come in many shapes and sizes: from the common "street thugs" that came to this blog over the course of the past week, to polished elites who occasionally descend from their towers to share their alleged "wisdom" on networks like CNN.  They share the same motivation: seek out and destroy dissidents.  They would have been excellent Stasi agents during the heyday of East Germany.  They possess a collective consciousness: dare defy one and they all come swarming in to counter-attack.

Such people are capable of "feeling".  They are incapable of thinking.  Especially for themselves.  And so it is that the merest slight against their common beliefs turns them into raging berserkers, fueled by the lust to destroy anyone who dares oppose their fragile ideology.

There is your true "intolerance", ladies and gentlemen.  There are your real bigots.

I decided to spend a few hours today investigating further the concepts of tolerance and intolerance.  And in doing so I came upon a fascinating essay from a few months ago by one Greg Koukl.  Writing for the website Stand to Reason, Koukl addresses the fallacies of "tolerating no intolerance" and in doing so provides a counter to the assumed absolutism of Popper's paradox.

Koukl's essay is "The Intolerance of Tolerance".  Here is an excerpt:

"Most of what passes for tolerance today is nothing more than intellectual cowardice, a fear of intelligent engagement. Those who brandish the word “intolerant” are unwilling to be challenged by other views, to grapple with contrary opinions, or even to consider them. It is easier to hurl an insult—“you intolerant bigot”—than to confront an idea and either refute it or be changed by it. In the postmodern era, “tolerance” has become intolerance."

That is one selection from the essay and I am delighted to have come across it this afternoon.  It's a bit long, but well worth your time if you ever, like me, are confronted with so-called "tolerance" often hiding behind anonymity.

Thank you, Mr. Koukl.  You have put it in better words than I would have ever come up with.  You make me wish now that I had majored in philosophy.

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Epitaph for Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke was laid to rest yesterday in Sri Lanka. According to the story, his tombstone will soon be engraved with the following words...

Here lies Arthur C Clarke.

He never grew up and did not stop growing.

That's about the most succinct description of a life well-lived - and a life worth living - that I've ever read.

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The newspaper clipping from last night's LOST

At the beginning of last night's Lost, Jack (was it just me or did he start looking more and more like Charles Manson as the episode progressed, especially later on with the denim jacket and heavy drugs) sees a newspaper article while flying on the plane. He tears it out and takes it with him and it's seen in most of the "flashbacks" that follow. As we know, it was a news story about someone's death: presumably this is the person in the casket. But who is it?

Well, someone (apparently this came from The Tail Section) got a real good high-def screenshot of one of the very few times that there was a decent enough close-up of the clipping. Here it is:

It looks like the name being referred to could be "Jeremy Bentham". Which as it turns out, with Lost's penchant for naming characters after real-world philosophers, is probably it. Who was Jeremy Bentham? From Wikipedia...

Jeremy Bentham (IPA: ['benθəm] or ['bentəm]) (February 15, 1748 O.S. (February 26, 1748 N.S.) – June 6, 1832) was an English jurist, philosopher, and legal and social reformer. He was a political radical and a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law. He is best known as an early advocate of utilitarianism and animal rights who influenced the development of liberalism.

Bentham was one of the most influential utilitarians, partially through his writings but particularly through his students all around the world. These included his secretary and collaborator on the utilitarian school of philosophy James Mill, James Mill's son John Stuart Mill, and several political leaders (and Robert Owen, who later became a founder of socialism).

But check this out...

Among his many proposals for legal and social reform was a design for a prison building he called the Panopticon. Although it was never built, the idea had an important influence upon later generations of thinkers. Twentieth-century French philosopher Michel Foucault argued that the Panopticon was paradigmatic of a whole raft of nineteenth-century 'disciplinary' institutions.

And what was the Panopticon prison supposed to be, exactly? Again from Wikipedia:

The Panopticon is a type of prison building designed by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell if they are being observed or not, thus conveying a "sentiment of an invisible omniscience." In his own words, Bentham described the Panopticon as "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example."

Sounds suspiciously like some of the stuff that's been going on with the Island.

Ever since last night I thought that the person in the casket was someone we already knew. But it looks like it's going to be someone we haven't seen yet. And my guess is they have a major connection to the purpose of the Island.

Methinks Lindelof and Cuse (the producers of Lost) have given us plenty to pursue and contemplate and fill up the Internets with crazy theories about between now and next winter!

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