It turns out that the liberal doctrine of ‘inclusiveness’ may disguise an obsequious brand of hegemony. That liberalism embraces certain dogmatisms should not surprise anyone - belief systems are defined partly by their contraposition to other belief systems. But belief-system coexistence is not an easy thing, if it is possible at all. Liberals, when they break faith with full-bodied tolerance, are every bit as dangerous as the wild-eyed jihadists of media-lore.
Many liberals (in the classical sense) are contemptuous of all orthodoxies, even as they fail to see their own. In their absolute adherence to relativity of all belief, they share a feature common to all fundamentalists - intolerance– cloaked in the mantra of tolerance. Most insidiously, liberals are intolerant of anyone seeking to impede their forays into another’s sacred terrain, a phenomenon termed (most notably by Wendy Steiner) as the “liberal paradox”.
Liberal tolerances allow other belief systems to exist but also allows the secularist to weave lampoons, parodies, and pastiches from sacred texts. But to take offence or, worse still, to try to prevent the secular desecration of what one holds sacred is itself intolerable. In his essay, aptly named, ‘Is Nothing Sacred?’ a defiant Salman Rushdie declares rather bluntly: “Nothing is sacred in and of itself.” A Rushdie style liberal reserves the right to cobble his own realities, even if it means defacing relics from another’s (often Islam’s) holiest preserves.
For those who hold nothing sacred, rummaging about the bazaar of belief systems conforms to the very essence of civility. In the liberal’s mind, vestigial recourse to a sacred realm is a superstition from which believers must be disabused. Therein lays the chief battleground of the current ‘war of civilizations’. If we in the West come to understand anything about ourselves, then surely it must be that tolerance is a force hell-bent on a mission of sacrilege.
The devout Muslim’s resistance to liberal incursions is borne from the fear of profane defacing the scared. And a certain fear is justifiable, even before modernity’s dubious wares are accounted for: rampant drug abuse, fractured families, endless pornography. Perhaps it bears noting that Auschwitz followed the Enlightenment and not vice-versa. In large part, the West has succeeded simply in substituting old problems with new ones. And the response from Muslims seems to be “We saw you profane your sacredness with your so-called Enlightenment and advancement. Now you wish to rifle our sacred content. Thanks but no thanks. We won’t allow it.”
While Islam has become the cause celebre of liberals looking for the Muslim Martin Luther, the offense against Islam was hardly a whole cloth creation. Whereas the secular humanist wants merely to rummage about sacred texts, the fundamentalist often wants to kill the secular humanist. So there is an incommensurateness of response. But where does it come from? Medieval backwardness? Craziness of conviction? Careful thinkers need to recognize the overwhelming tendency towards condescension on the part of the West.
To reverse that course, we must be tolerant of those who perceive ranging tolerance as an affront. We must not trample deeply-held beliefs, even if this means bridling our own imaginative forays. If our exercises in the spirit of tolerance strike large swathes of humanity as intolerable, shouldn’t that spur a certain respectful reticence? Perhaps it is the height of tolerance to curb ones public utterances in deference to the sensibilities of a neighbour? If not, the doctrine of tolerance may ultimately prove to be intolerable. http://www.thewesternmuslim.com/index.php/Life/articles/intolerable_tolerance/
Many liberals (in the classical sense) are contemptuous of all orthodoxies, even as they fail to see their own. In their absolute adherence to relativity of all belief, they share a feature common to all fundamentalists - intolerance– cloaked in the mantra of tolerance. Most insidiously, liberals are intolerant of anyone seeking to impede their forays into another’s sacred terrain, a phenomenon termed (most notably by Wendy Steiner) as the “liberal paradox”.
Liberal tolerances allow other belief systems to exist but also allows the secularist to weave lampoons, parodies, and pastiches from sacred texts. But to take offence or, worse still, to try to prevent the secular desecration of what one holds sacred is itself intolerable. In his essay, aptly named, ‘Is Nothing Sacred?’ a defiant Salman Rushdie declares rather bluntly: “Nothing is sacred in and of itself.” A Rushdie style liberal reserves the right to cobble his own realities, even if it means defacing relics from another’s (often Islam’s) holiest preserves.
For those who hold nothing sacred, rummaging about the bazaar of belief systems conforms to the very essence of civility. In the liberal’s mind, vestigial recourse to a sacred realm is a superstition from which believers must be disabused. Therein lays the chief battleground of the current ‘war of civilizations’. If we in the West come to understand anything about ourselves, then surely it must be that tolerance is a force hell-bent on a mission of sacrilege.
The devout Muslim’s resistance to liberal incursions is borne from the fear of profane defacing the scared. And a certain fear is justifiable, even before modernity’s dubious wares are accounted for: rampant drug abuse, fractured families, endless pornography. Perhaps it bears noting that Auschwitz followed the Enlightenment and not vice-versa. In large part, the West has succeeded simply in substituting old problems with new ones. And the response from Muslims seems to be “We saw you profane your sacredness with your so-called Enlightenment and advancement. Now you wish to rifle our sacred content. Thanks but no thanks. We won’t allow it.”
While Islam has become the cause celebre of liberals looking for the Muslim Martin Luther, the offense against Islam was hardly a whole cloth creation. Whereas the secular humanist wants merely to rummage about sacred texts, the fundamentalist often wants to kill the secular humanist. So there is an incommensurateness of response. But where does it come from? Medieval backwardness? Craziness of conviction? Careful thinkers need to recognize the overwhelming tendency towards condescension on the part of the West.
To reverse that course, we must be tolerant of those who perceive ranging tolerance as an affront. We must not trample deeply-held beliefs, even if this means bridling our own imaginative forays. If our exercises in the spirit of tolerance strike large swathes of humanity as intolerable, shouldn’t that spur a certain respectful reticence? Perhaps it is the height of tolerance to curb ones public utterances in deference to the sensibilities of a neighbour? If not, the doctrine of tolerance may ultimately prove to be intolerable. http://www.thewesternmuslim.com/index.php/Life/articles/intolerable_tolerance/
