Why You Are A Fundamentalist - Adam Phillips

"One thing that the modern liberal and the fundamentalist may be said to share is what psychoanalysts after Freud call a resistance: each believes that there is something the other refuses to see what is considered to be true, or at least better. Were the other side capable of the requisite acknowledgment, both of them believe, the world would be as it should be. We would be living the lives we are required to live–required, that is, by God, or the relevant set of secular beliefs and authorities… here we come up against the real difficulty of changing people. It is, of course, a version of the feeling that most couples have at one time or another, that there is, as we say, no point in talking… The talking cure turned up to show us what talking cannot cure.

…There are now a lot of upbeat democratic and rather more low-key psychoanalytic accounts of why conflict is to be valued–as stimulating, as generative, as productive, as truthful, as inclusive, and so on. And fundamentalisms of whatever persuasion at best pay lip-service to value of conflict and at worst want to abolish it. The fundamentalist of Western capitalism, just like the more ostensibly religious fundamentalists that we hear more about, really believe that the only good life is one in which the enemy, the dissenters, the unpersuaded, are no longer part of the conversation; a world without communists, a world without Jews, a world without unbelievers, is the world as it should be. Those of us who are not drawn to what is loosely, and not so loosely, called fundamentalism; those of us who don’t want to be fundamentalist in a war against the fundamentalisms, have a very serious problem. What is the point, after all, of having respect for people who do not respect our respect for them? I don’t know what an answer to that question would be; but we are endangered by our optimism"

 - Adam Philips, a physoanalyst, "On Balance" via MockingBird's article

New vs. Old Tolerance - D.A Carson

How does what you call the old tolerance differ from the new?

"The old tolerance presupposed another system of thought already in place—Christianity, communism, Naziism, Buddhism, secularism—whatever. The issue then became how much deviation from that system could be tolerated before coercive force is applied. To the extent that one allowed deviation, one was tolerant; correspondingly, where one judges that deviation has gone too far (e.g., almost everyone agrees, even today, that pedophilia goes beyond the pale), then coercive force—in short, intolerance—is a virtue. It was quite possible to disagree strongly with what a person was saying, but still tolerate the opinion that was perceived to be aberrant, on the ground that it was better for society to allow such opinions than to coerce silence from those articulating them.

But invariably, tolerance has its limits. The new tolerance (1) tends to insist that those who merely disagree with others, at least in several spheres, are intolerant, even if no coercive force is applied; (2) tends to make such tolerance the supreme good, independently of surrounding systems of thought; and (3) tends to be remarkably blind in regard to its own intolerant condemnation of everyone who disagrees with its own definition of tolerance. The result is that in many domains, in many discussions, the question is rarely "Is this true?" but "Is anyone offended?" Rigorous discussion of content soon shuts down; truth is demoted; various forms of class warfare are encouraged; in some domains it becomes wrong (supreme irony) to say that anyone is wrong."

- D.A Carson, in an interview with John Starke

The Intolerance of Tolerance

"Now, tolerance means that you must not say anybody is wrong. That’s the one wrong thing to say. But, now notice, under this view of tolerance, you are tolerant, not of individuals, you are tolerant of all positions. The tolerance is now directed toward all views that are articulated because you are not in a position to say that any view is wrong

The one thing that is not tolerated is the view that this view of tolerance is wrong.

And thus you have the intolerance of tolerance."

- D.A Carson

The rest after the break