Let's stop "tolerating" the abuse of our language and common sense

Howard Rotberg is not content to relocate Tennyson's lotus eaters:

My forthcoming book, Exploring Vancouverism: The Political Culture of Canada's Lotus Land views the "Lotus Land" culture of Vancouver, where organized religion has its fewest proponents on a per capita basis in all of Canada, as a culture that has abandoned the yardsticks of Good versus Evil. The mariners in Alfred Tennyson's great poem, "The Lotos Eaters" land on the idyllic shores of a Lotus Land where life on the beautiful beaches is complemented by the intoxication of eating the "Lotos" leaves brought by the natives. Soon the mariners decide not to go back to Greece and resume their struggles for good versus evil, because, after all, what pleasure do they derive from that struggle, as compared to life in Lotus Land.

In fact, if one checks out the on-line Urban Dictionary, (www.urbandictionary.com),

one sees that there is a term being used by young people, called Tolerism, but it is defined as: One's skill in consuming massive quantities of alcohol without displaying obvious signs of drunkenness.

I suggest that in our wider culture, Tolerism is the skill in consuming massive quantities of political correctness, and moral and cultural relativism, without displaying the obvious signs of the drunken leniency toward, and even taking pleasure in, the slow ascendancy of Islamist values of terrorism, breach of human rights, and attempted reversals of the wonderful liberties and advances made in western societies, where church and state have been successfully separated, and an enormous degree of freedom reigns.

The drunken Tolerists, with the abymsal ideology of Tolerism threaten all that we have accomplished.

That's from Part I of Howard's essay on the ideology of Tolerism. It's a powerful way of summing up the moral sickness that has flowed from our descent into cultural and personal non-judgmentalism, all in the name of a "tolerance" which cannot mean very much if you yourself do not have a clear centre, a clear sense of right and wrong, from which to truly tolerate other positions. If you have given up on that hard, Eurocentric, heteronormative stuff, you know, good and evil, then you can't really be tolerant. True tolerance comes from recognizing the limits of your own ability to know good and evil; but to get there, first you have to try to know as much as you can...

In fact, once you have given up thinking hard about good and evil, in a world where human reality is such that there nonetheless is always such a thing as good and evil, better and worse, you must descend into a mythic consciousness and ritual practise that will positively require the public rendering of a whole array of sacrificial victims to replace your society's former, more rational, more "Eurocentric", more monotheistic, approach to learning about right and wrong, and hence about true tolerance of your own limits in knowing right and wrong. And in becoming religiously dependent on a culture of victims, i.e. on a mythological system of many victims, or gods, you will become relatively more evil - i.e. more in need of bloody rituals - than were our immediate forebears in Western modernity.

If all gods are equal, if that's your idea of "tolerance", then the inevitable conflicts between the gods cannot be mediated rationally but must be proven in the fatalistic flow of events, though "observation" on who, today, but maybe not tomorrow, is the noble victim and who the ennobled or ignoble sacrificer (or vice versa). And since such "observation", your unscientific questing after signs of divine favour, will become so important to you, you will act to anticipate it by encouraging events to move in the direction of rendering more victims, not that you will be very aware of what you are doing.

So we should definitely welcome Howard's redefining of "tolerism". In Part Two of his essay, Howard notes:

Treating very bad behaviour with excessive leniency, and even taking unrestrained pleasure in that behaviour, hardly seems to me an admirable ideology. Yet, over and over again, we are told that "Tolerance" is our most important value. I disagree.

Now, when talking to Tolerists, I avoid the Israel-Arab problem entirely and I just ask them what they would have done with Hitler and the Nazis. Would it have been an admirable and tolerant position to be lenient with the Nazis?

If you think that the Tolerist mind gives in at that point, I have news for you. I have now heard the argument, made in all seriousness by a highly educated (but morally infantile) Vancouverite, that the Nazis were, in his opinion, the result of the Allies after World War 1, imposing draconian terms on the losing Germans. To this Tolerist, then, in an astounding leap of tolerist logic, the Americans were responsible for World War Two and even the Holocaust!

The Tolerists have infected so much of our Cultural Elites. Here is the example of PenCanada which gave its inagaural 2005 Paul Kidd Award for Journalistic Courage to an anti-American ranter named Paul William Roberts, as if it takes courage nowadays to join the chorus of anti-Americans. Roberts succeeded in getting a three page excerpt from his nonsensical book carried by the Globe & Mail, which shows the current reach of Tolerism.

Follow the above link to read Howard's letter to the Globe and Mail condemning their publication of Roberts' infantile polemics. Finally, in his latest post, Howard considers how the British love for the masochistic has led them to be the world leaders in "tolerism".