I just read a reference to Leo Strauss as the man who called our attention to the inherent contradiction of liberalism. I had always given credit to Sidney Hook, having read his seminal 1954 argument when I was in college a while back.
The issue is becoming increasingly a serious matter that most people have not confronted (and which is commonly confused with relativism or moral cowardice). I call this the challenge of tolerance: can we be tolerant of intolerance?
Hook argued persuasively that the Communist Party should not be tolerated....
Hook argued persuasively that the Communist Party should not be
tolerated as a political party in the United States because the party’s
goal was to eliminate democracy. The Communist Party was never banned
from the national polls (a few states banned the party) because the
U.S. Constitution makes no provision for political parties in the first
place. While the Communist Party in the United States was an
insignificant force, it was part of a global movement that was growing
and succeeding well into the 1980s. America never confronted the
issue.
The issue has arisen again, this time it concerns radical Islam. Radical Islam created the first test of Hook’s proposition. When Radical Islam came to power in Iran with Rouhollah Khomeini in April 1979 it ended democracy (but still kept elections with a window-dressing government). The same occurred in Algeria in December 1991 when radical Islam won the first round of voting and prepared to eliminate democracy … until the new government was displaced by a coup. A non-Islamist Arab, Adolph Arafat, did the same thing in 1996 in the West Bank, making himself dictator for life. The joke in Arab countries is that Arab democracy means one man, one vote, one time.
We see the issue of tolerance for the intolerant being ruefully ignored in
Lebanon with Hizbollah armed and allowed to participate in elections,
and in the West Bank-Gaza with Hamas. A party that intends to destroy
democracy (fully armed) is tolerated in both places. The tolerance
always has a reason (‘the intolerants will become more responsible if
they are elected’). But the reality is quite different. They are
intolerant people and their worldview does not include tolerance. There
is no evidence to the contrary; there is no evidence that tolerance can
win over intolerance.
Tolerance does not require acceptance of intolerance. Tolerance is not a miracle cure: ‘Love the monster and the monster will dissolve.’ Curing intolerance is simply an unexamined premise, an unsupported proposition … a sentimental fallacy.
In parenthesis I mention that the tolerance/intolerence issue is confused with relativism and moral cowardice.
Tolerance, relativism and moral cowardice are confused. There is common mistaken notion that tolerance, which accepts a wide range of views, behaviors and perspectives, is the same thing as intellectual relativism which posits that all intellectual positions are based on the perspective of the person holding the position. These two concepts are not the same.
Tolerance is what makes democracy work. It is a positive value in and of itself. Tolerance generates a variety of views and opinions that in turn create the kind of debate and vitality that result in learning and political cooperation. Intolerance cannot enter such a debate because it refuses to learn and prohibits authentic cooperation.
Relativism is a recognition that knowledge always has an individual
component because we learn from our unique experiences. Because
knowledge and perspective have a significant component of individual
experiences that are highly dependent on the individual in time,
geography, language and many other elements, people must differ in the
way we see the world.
We cannot expect a person born into a poor broken Baptist farm family in rural Georgia in 1885 to see the world the same way as a person born in 1950 in a prosperous Boston suburb and who graduated from M.I.T.
The issue of tolerance/intolerance is unrelated to relativism.
Then there is moral cowardice. Moral cowardice is the pervasive view that: 'Everything is just fine with the status quo,' ' Democracy can withstand anything,' 'It's not my problem to deal with these issues,' 'I don't want to hurt people's feelings.' Moral cowardice has nothing to do with tolerance or relativism ... it just stands by itself, unrelated to either.