SUICIDAL TOLERANCE: championing a judgement free world

The most “woke“ among us champion what might best be called "suicidal tolerance." Why suicidal? Because the foolishness they preach, essentially a judgement and ranking free world, would ultimately eradicate expertise and even tolerance itself.

Whence springs their wooly-headed demand that value judgements and rankings must perish? The main source is their conviction that values are mere “social constructs.” That belief leads them to jump to the conclusion that no culture is better than any other. They ignore, or at least are ignorant of, the elemental fact that some cultures are so intolerant that merely advocating,  tolerance, will get you killed. (Isis comes readily to mind.)

Paradoxically, women are included among the most vocal disciples of this suicidal religion. And the worst offenders are often academic women. One wants to ask these supposedly educated females, so you don’t think it wrong to have some crone excise village girl’s clitoris’s with a razor blade? How about forbidding women to vote? Requiring them to be absolutely obedient to their husbands? Or to meekly suffer death by stoning if men judge you guilty of adultery? Should these hyper-tolerant ladies disapprove of such things they cannot logically insist that cultural practices are value free! But they still do.

In the real world cultural practices often have weighty moral content. Attitudes regarding individualism provide one particularly stark example. The fact that valuing or even tolerating individualism is a moral choice is precisely why some cultures suppress it. They disapprove of the underlying value it places on individual perceptions, judgements and choices. The Taliban, for instance, permit nothing of the kind. These zealous fanatics punish any individuals who question the smallest details of their very narrow interpretation of Islam. They even forbid listening to music, dancing and flying kites — the later a very popular past time with Afghan children. Why? Because they perceive such enjoyment as being immoral.

The fact is that cultural practices often have very weighty moral value. And that is exactly why they are NOT morally equal. Just the opposite. In fact, this moral content is why cultures are more or less dysfunctional. Why? Because of what they will or won’t tolerate and the human happiness or misery that results. 

The Taliban are a sterling example of a dangerously dysfunctional culture. Of course it’s intolerant to make such a claim. But tolerance is not always desirable. After all, some practices, rape, honor killing, and genocide, for instance, are plainly intolerable. Even a Harvard professor should be able to grasp that. Although some don’t.

Let’s dig a little deeper into cultural relativism’s implications. A major one is that this relativism necessarily opposes any rankings based on merit. Do you want your favorite baseball team to acquire a highly skilled pitcher. Would you prefer having your heart surgery performed by a masterful surgeon? Well, according to these believers, you are supporting existing racial and socioeconomic hierarchies. So also does insisting these “woke” individuals be able to tell their ass from third base. And most can’t.

A recent protest by Harvard students illustrates how far this silliness has advanced. Concerned that A’s now make up 60% of all Harvard course grades — up from 24% in 2005 — Harvard has now capped course A grades at 20%. This prompted a student petition asserting that assigning grades on the basis of performance creates “a system of ranking and sorting that mirrors and reinforces existing racial and socioeconomic hierarchies.”

To some extent it does mirror these hierarchies But far from perfectly. If it did, neither upward nor downward mobility would exist and both certainly do. For example, I know a woman who was born in a deep south home with a dirt floor and parents near the bottom of the social hierarchy. But, by dint of academic accomplishment, risk taking, good judgement and damn hard work, she now owns her own accounting firm and also is producing major motion pictures. Are there similar success stories? Of course there are. So the assumption that a system of ranking and sorting simply “mirrors and reinforces existing hierarchies” is plainly false. 

Besides, where would we be without ranking and sorting? We would find ourselves in a competence free world. Heart surgeons selected non-judgementally wouldn’t necessarily know a damn thing about what they were doing. Buildings and bridges would regularly collapse because they were designed by incompetent structural engineers. In short, we couldn’t rely on any specialized expertise whatsoever. What a nightmare.

Clearly a system without judging and ranking belongs in Lala land. So we must vigorously reject the judgement free style advocated by the most “woke” among us. Besides, these folks aren’t really woke at all — they’re dreaming! But as their crackpot social philosophy gains ascendence, their dream is becoming our nightmare.

ARE MUSLIM IMMIGRANTS A THREAT? an historic comparison

Many Americans worry about Muslim immigration. They fear these newcomers will prove culturally incompatible, religiously intolerant, and potentially larcenous. Moreover they imagine them flooding into this country in unacceptable numbers. What should we make of this? 

Let's make an historical comparison. In the 19th century lots of Americans were similarly concerned about the Irish Catholics who were flooding into what then was an overwhelmingly Protestant America. 

A major concern was that these immigrants were obedient to a foreign autocrat — the Pope — who led an authoritarian and anti- Protestant institution. They doubted that a people accustomed to such religious authoritarian intolerance, could ever learn to live in America. In fact they feared these Catholics might band together and become another America. And their concern was magnified by the exceedingly large numbers of these immigrants. By the dawn of the Civil War the Catholic presence in America already exceeded the total population of the U.S. just 70 years previously. And their numbers swelled much, much further as the 19th century advanced. 

This was an awful lot of culturally different people for the U.S. to absorb. But ultimately, despite widespread discrimination, these Irish Catholic immigrants proved capable of blending in. They understood, embraced, even exploited democracy, and by the third generation provided the nation with the 35th President of the United States, the very Irish-American John F. Kennedy, .

How have the Muslims done in contrast? First off, there has never been an America without Muslims. But most of the early arrivals were slaves and soon lost their Muslim religion. These days most Muslims arrive direct from Muslim lands. They pledge no allegiance to the equivalent of a Pope, nor even embrace a unified religion. In fact they harbor bloody disagreements about what it takes to even be a Muslim. But the one thing they aren't is Christian. And that makes a decided difference in how they are both received and perceived.

One distinction should be made immediately. Are they Islamists? What's the difference? Muslims follow Islam, a religion based on the Qur'an and the teachings of Muhammed. They encompass some two billion people of many different cultures and political views. Islamism, in distinction, is a political ideology holding that their interpretation of Islam should play a decisive role in both government and society. In fact a small number of Muslims of the Islamist persuasion have turned out to be murderous terrorists. Those who crashed passenger planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon being the most prominent. Yes, these perpetrators were Saudi nationals. But many Americans still link terrorism of this sort to Muslims in general. And this is why a sizable segment of Americans fear Muslim immigration.

So what about Muslim immigrants fitting in? Will they prove absorbable or forever marginal — even alien? That depends in the above distinction. Islamists are a clear, present and future danger. Muslims, in general, are not. But the present reality is that a substantial number of Americans believe the United States is, and should remain, a Christian nation. For these folks, non-Christians are, ipso facto, un-American. In fact a substantial number of them also believe that the United States was founded as, and should remain, a Christian nation. 

This is false. Nevertheless, it is continually preached by far right Christian-nationalists including some well-known TV evangelists. These "patriots" ignore, or are ignorant of, the fact that many of America’s most influential founders, for instance Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Ethan Allen and Thomas Paine, were deists or rationalists, not textbook Christians. Moreover our founders agreed that the United States should NOT adopt a state religion. But none of this gives pause to those who subscribe to the Christian-America myth.

What about the fear that Muslims threaten to overwhelm us by sheer numbers. At present, this is factually groundless. Muslim immigrants constitute a tiny number of new arrivals compared to the historic flood of Irish Catholics. In fact they amount to less than 5% of all immigrants entering America. Moreover Muslims account for less than 1% of America's population.   

Clearly, though, Muslims and Christians do not always share a happy coexistence. Nor do many Muslims fit cozily into the Western way of life. The most fanatical among them, the Islamists, a small minority to be sure, actually aim to convert all of America to Islam — if necessary, by the sword. Minimally they want to install their version of Sharia Law in place of current law. But these true believers presently constitute a relatively small minority of Muslim immigrants. 

But here is something else to consider. Some Somali-Americans massively defrauded Minnesota, Maine and the United States government out of billions and billions of dollars in what was intended as aid. This massive fraud causes some Americans to link criminality and exploitive, ungrateful citizenship to Muslims collectively. But remember, the Irish-American experience proves Muslims have no corner on immigrant criminality. Some immigrant Irish became criminals of the first magnitude; and the "Irish Mob" was one of the nation’s most notorious organized criminal conspiracies. And, of course, some later arriving Italian-Americans proved equally capable of organized criminality. Somali immigrant’s have no patent on this kind of behavior. But people believe they do, and that belief is true in its consequences. 

 Looking back, many Americans once initially thought Irish-American Roman Catholic immigrants were a distinct threat. This proved false. Will Muslim immigrants also attain, even desire, the same degree of acceptance? We shall see.