Rising to the defense...................

 ....................................of true liberals.

Here’s another reality understood by Smith – and by F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, Deirdre McCloskey, Richard Epstein, George Will, and all other true liberals: If you fail to instill in people liberal tolerance, and especially if you recruit them into the ranks of zealots attempting to create on earth their vision of heaven, you will then surely turn them into brutes. Single-mindedly devoted to their particular causes, individuals become monsters who recognize others only as comrades and enemies, the former of which are to be allowed no room for deviation and the latter of which are to be brutalized and slaughtered.

-Don Boudreaux

flashing red lights...................

     The complexity of problems facing our society—climate change, mass migration, or the effects of technology, for example—may often seem beyond the competency of elected representatives.  If higher education made for better people with wiser judgment, it might be tolerable to hand great powers for controlling society to highly educated experts.  But as Aldous Huxley observed, scientists and other experts do not own a monopoly on either virtue or political wisdom.

      There are clear dangers in ceding too much power to unelected and unaccountable elites who claim moral authority or expertise backed by higher education.  Rule by the most educated and highly credentialed people is profoundly illiberal, observes Yascha Motunk, a Harvard progressive.  Many elite progressives—the core of the clerisy—might prefer such a model for society, but it would endanger political pluralism, especially when the credentialed elites are overly sure of their own correctness.  A survey commissioned by the Atlantic notes that the highly educated are now arguably the least politically tolerant group in America. 

-Joel Kotkin, The Coming of NEO Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class

On religious toleration......................

     Madison, half Mason's age, improved his language, proposing a crucial change to the clause on religious liberty.  Mason's draft, reflecting a hundred years of liberal thought going back to John Locke, called for "the fullest toleration in the exercise of religion."  Yet this did not seem liberal enough for Madison.  Toleration implies those who tolerate: superiors who grant freedom to others.  But who can be trusted to pass such judgments, even if the judgment is to live and let live?  Judges may change their minds.  The Anglican establishment of Virginia, compared with established churches in other colonies, had been fairly tolerant—except when it hadn't, and then it made water in Baptists' faces.  So Madison prepared an amendment.  "All men are equally entitled to the full and free exercise" of religion.  No one could be said to allow men to worship as they wished:  they worshipped as they wished because it was their right as men.  Madison's language shifted the ground of religious liberty from a tolerant society or state, to human nature, and lifted the Declaration of Rights from an event in Virginia history to a landmark of world intellectual history.

-Richard Brookhiser,  James Madison

First sign...................................

“It's an universal law-- intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.”   


-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

And also incoherent........................

“our tolerance of our own tolerance is making us intolerant of other people’s intolerance, which is intolerable. And, unlikely as it sounds, this has now become the highest, most rarefied form of multiculturalism...."

-Mark Steyn, as quoted here

The cycling of history............

For neither the first nor the last time in history, heady success sowed some of the seeds of its own demise, and what had been a court that proudly displayed its community's wealth and superiority began to be perceived as a self-indulgent and narcissistic court unwilling or unable to tend directly to the governance of that community.

-Maria Rose Menocal,  The Ornament Of The World:  How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created A Culture Of Tolerance In Medieval Spain

Got to love it...........................

............a representative from the Tolerance Committee visits Kurt.

The paradox of tolerance....................

Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.

-Karl Popper, as excerpted from here

image via

The core.................................................

"The more radical possibility - the one that takes us to the core of the 'negative' approach to happiness - is that there might be something more fundamentally problematic about the goal of security;  and that real happiness might be dependent on being willing to face, and to tolerate, insecurity and vulnerability."
-Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote:  Happiness For People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

Tolerance...................................

"Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them."
-Karl Popper