I’m Offended, Therefore I’m Right
One always hesitates to say the obvious, but as George Orwell remarked, it is the obvious that intellectuals are most inclined to ignore. There is a good reason for this: there is hardly any point in being an intellectual if you see only what is obvious. An intellectual, almost by definition, is a person who sees, or claims to see, what others do not see, an alternative to which is to be blind to what others do see. It is true that appearances are sometimes deceptive, but more often than not they are very instructive.
A tolerant person is one who disapproves of someone or something but does not act as if his disapproval were all that counted in the determination of his conduct towards whomever or whatever he disapproves of. To live and let live is not to approve—much less, in modern parlance to “celebrate”—all ways of life as if there were nothing to choose between them, or to be glad that some people have adopted a morally reprehensible or disgusting way of conducting themselves. Tolerance, moreover, should not be infinite: for to find nothing intolerable is to accept everything, including the worst evils, and is the ultimate form of pusillanimity. It is the refusal ever to confront anything; toleration can be a vice as well as a virtue. Where to place the boundary between the tolerable and the intolerable is, of course, a matter of judgment, and judgment is always fallible, for there is no hard-and-fast rule to help us decide every case, many cases being marginal. What is tolerable in one circumstance is often intolerable in another.
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The supposed right of people to have their attitudes, beliefs, opinions “respected”, that is to say not questioned, reprehended, derided or mocked, merely because of their strength of conviction, will no doubt put most people in mind of Muslims who claim it and want to impose it on the whole world. In the wake of the Salman Rushdie affair, which in my view was a turning point in world history, a book was published in England with the title Be Careful with Muhammad! It implied that those who were disrespectful towards the Prophet had only themselves to blame if their disrespect was met with violence.
This, of course, is the logic of the protection racket and the gangster: we will leave you in (relative) peace, but on our conditions.However, such a manner of thinking and behaving is becoming more widespread: the real Islamification of our society. There are numbers of subjects on which many of us are reluctant to express our thoughts because of the reaction they are likely to evoke, even to the point of violence. Good-humoured disagreement, at least on these subjects (which, of course, change with fashion), becomes impossible. An asymmetric war is waged between monomaniac enragés on the one hand, and people for whom the subject in question is only one among many on the other. The latter are not prepared to make much personal sacrifice to establish what they see as the truth on the subject, and so the monomaniacs, who are usually a small minority of the population, win by default.
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A willingness to take offence has become a desire to take offence; and as we know, appetite grows with the feeding. No propitiation of the offended, therefore, is ever enough; on the contrary, it leads merely to the next demand and cause for offence if not met.
Taking offence acts as a kind of guarantee that one cares deeply about something in the absence of any other transcendent purpose in life. The new Cartesian cogito is, therefore, I’m offended, therefore I’m right—and righteous.Anthony Daniels
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Tolerance - What Is It Good For? (Read 3229 times)
