Charles Moore

The vice of tolerance

In my feckless youth, I spent a great deal of time messing about with automobiles. One thing you learn about building engines is tolerance - a small amount is necessary, but too little or too much causes big-time trouble.

Similarly, in the sciences, in mathematics, in high-tech manufacturing, in navigation, and dozens of other fields, narrow or zero tolerance is a necessary virtue. However, in the culturally crucial area of moral systems, open-ended tolerance has come to be regarded as an unassailable virtue, with social consequences analogically similar to what would happen in an engine if someone arbitrarily decided that narrow tolerances were just too restrictive. That sort of "liberalism" would quickly end with a loud bang.

At the close of the 20th century, we are witnessing a sort of socio-cultural engine failure. Post-Enlightenment liberalism has established cultural dominance, and civilization, which like an engine is a complex system of interdependent components that rely on narrow tolerances to work in harmony, is coming apart at the seams.

A majority of people today have swallowed, hook, line, and sinker, the liberal lie that indiscriminate tolerance, broad-mindedness, and a spirit of moral compromise are not just desirable values, but indeed that anyone who does not uncritically embrace them is bigoted, fanatical, mean, and probably hateful. Advocating the true notion of tolerance has come to be popularly perceived as vice. This is unhealthy for society.

Consenting adults

We start out with the reasonable-sounding premise that what consenting adults do with each other in bed, under whatever circumstances, is none of society's business. Thirty years on, you end up with a 50 per cent divorce rate, pandemic sexually transmitted diseases, and the constellation of social distempers that inevitably result from large numbers of children being raised in broken and-or fatherless homes.

That wreckage accomplished, the tolerance advocates move inexorably into new avenues of broad-mindedness. If ordered sexual morality can't be demanded of adults, why should it be imposed on adolescents and children? Unable to come up with a coherent answer, liberal baby-boomer parents hustle their pubescent daughters off to the ob-gyn clinic for a pill prescription or diaphragm-fitting, and approve condom machines in school washrooms, and if that doesn't work, there's always the abortion clinic.

Why should common-law couples be denied spousal employment benefits traditionally enjoyed only by married people? That would be intolerant and narrow-minded. So now that the shack-ups qualify for benefits, why shouldn't same-sex couples be included too?

Objective moral order

Ultimately, moral principles govern whether a society thrives or fails. There is an absolute, objective order to the moral sphere, just as there is in engineering and science. Attempts to defy that order are ultimately futile and destructive. There is always tension between our biological instincts and desires, and our spiritual nature as human beings. Biological creatures without this spiritual element are blissfully free of this stress. Animals eat until they are full, copulate to procreate, and generally know when enough is enough. Obesity from gluttony or sexual satyrism are extremely rare in the animal kingdom.

Christianity - upon which Western culture was founded, built, and sustained - identifies the human problem as Original Sin. Unlike animals, we humans are made in the spiritual image and likeness of God, and uniquely possess a soul. Our God-given nature also includes free will - the potential to choose right or wrong on the basis of morals and ethics, rather than merely depending on instinct and behavioral conditioning.

This wonderful/horrible capacity puts the spirit at war with the flesh. Our fleshly nature is not to be despised, as the Gnostic heretics proposed, but to be brought into conformity with the created moral order through co-operation of human will with God's grace.

Thus, the sexual department of life is to be affirmed, but only within the narrow tolerance created by God - monogamous marriage between a man and a woman, who mystically become one flesh through the physical act. Sexual behaviour outside this divinely defined tolerance constitutes a subversion or perversion, the pernicious consequences of which are broadly manifest in our late 20th-century culture.