Today on National Review Online, American Enterprise Institute education policy studies director Frederick Hess astutely observes the significance of a recent incident at a Maryland university in which a checkout person refused to ring up a young woman’s purchase because she was wearing a t-shirt declaring herself as pro-Israel.
Ironically, the incident resulted in a series of conciliatory gestures from the woman who was refused service, and the store made it a policy that employees could discreetly refuse to serve someone whom they found politically unacceptable, provided that they quietly found someone else to serve the person.
As Hess points out, this incident illustrates the contemptible contemporary process of turning tolerance on its head to ensure that certain favored groups get special treatment because they continuously complain about how downtrodden they are:
Exactly how “tolerance” devolved into coddling those who choose to take offense for the slightest of reasons is a question for another day (although decades of experience demonstrates that on-campus tolerance is more frequently understood as the right of “victims” to air grievances than of heterogeneous speakers to be heard). Another question is how and why we’ve allowed identity politics to constrict public spaces.
But the pressing problem with the way “tolerance” as touted by too many educators is that it rewards zealotry; while the zealots are understood to be beyond its soggy grasp, the rational and pragmatic are expected to do what is necessary to keep the peace.
The champions of “tolerance” have pitched it as a costless and all-embracing virtue, all the while dismissing or sidestepping concerns that it might dim critical faculties or undermine commitment to core American values. Indeed, the goings-on at the Maryland Food Collective suggest just how readily this doctrine can become tantamount to unilateral intellectual and moral disarmament.
Hess’s observation is important: today’s perversion of tolerance rewards zealotry. And as psychologists will tell you, when you reward something, you get more of it.
A return to the ideal of equal treatment is essential if this society is to forestall a decline into ever-greater barbarism.
Dear S. T.:
I agree with Frederick Hess and you. This seems to be political correctness in its tertiary metastasis stage. The widespread loss of a sense of humor in the Western nations about topics such as ethnicity, religion, and politics signals a terminal prognosis for our culture. (And I do not allude to so-called “comedians” like the ones on Comedy Central who present corrosive opinions under the guise of “humor.”)
As a former school teacher, I am familiar with cases of arrested development. My generation–the one that emerged during the sixties and seventies–has now taken control of society. Too many of us had grown accustomed to getting our own way, and now it’s coming back to bite us on the posterior. Bill Clinton and Hillary are prime examples of this (arrested) development: She seems to embrace what I recently heard characterized as “cultural Marxism,” which, unless I misunderstand, is a return to the total state disguised as warm and fuzzy “helping people.” The impatient, foot-stamping children have gained the upper hand on their parents and at long last can now force them to do their bidding. The secular regressives have attained ascendancy; only “the salt of the earth” remain to resist them.
Respectfully,
Mike Tooney