New kid in town

[Douglas <dougwils@moscow.com>]

Dear visionaries,

Carl Westberg asks what my point was, and despite the monkeyshines, I do
have one. Tolerant liberals play a pea and shell game with words like
tolerant. Just like everyone else in the world, tall and short,
Republican and Democrat, left and right, Christian and pagan, such
liberals tolerate certain things and do not tolerate others. Nothing
remarkable here, just the way the world is. The distinguishing mark of
any group is the standard that establishes what they tolerate and
what they do not.

And yet such liberals want to stand in the glow of a mythical universal
tolerance, as though that were possible. When they are finally forced to
bring their definition of tolerance down to a practical level, admitting
that they are tolerant and intolerant in just the same identical way
everybody else is, they start to show distinct signs of irritability. The
last two posts from that quadrant have been positively snippy. Are
liberals any more tolerant than others? Of course they are not. They are
more tolerant of certain things, to be sure, just as we are more tolerant
of others. They can handle gay pride parades better than I can. I can
handle psalm singing better than they can. What separates us is the
standard, not the tolerance. I have raised this question before,
by the way.

No virtue was every found in a transitive verb. When we throw an
incomplete sentence out that says that "John tolerates
blank" we do not yet know if he is a saint or a scoundrel.
What does he tolerate? Ice cream? Child molesters? Noisy neighbors?
Topless car washes? Indignant housewives? Neo-Nazis? When we come to
praise or blame him, we are invoking a standard. And the standard that
defines the possible virtues in tolerance cannot be tolerance
itself.

Here's a thought experiment. Suppose the local government school
supporters come after us again in the spring, swinging another levy above
their heads, all of them painted blue and yelling that eerie battle cry
of theirs. Suppose we organize to stop their nefarious pillaging of our
larders. What should we call such a group? On the principles hammered out
by the liberals, we should call it something like Nice People
United.

Cordially,

Douglas Wilson