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Tolerance and Progress
 Nothing
is quite so tiresome and toothless as the
Latest Thinking. We’ve been barraged with it for more than a
century, by such advanced apostles of Progress
as  George
Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and
Bertrand Russell, to name only a few of those who are still remembered at
all. Their ideas have been adopted with disastrous results, but their faith
goes droning on.
One of the founding fathers of
the Latest Thinking is the American sex researcher Albert Kinsey, hero of
a new movie. Kinsey’s famous 1948 study, Sexual Behavior in
the Human Male, has taught two generations that all sexual
practices are natural, therefore okay. He professed to be a pure,
value-neutral scientist, but it has since transpired that he was a pretty
kinky guy himself who had an interest in abolishing distinctions between
the normal and the abnormal. His study included sexual experiments on
little kids, which, though highly illegal, was for some reason overlooked
by the law. Maybe the magic word science immunized him.
In any case, the book’s
implicit moral was hardly value-neutral, as everyone now sees. It was a
thorough rejection of the very idea of virtue in the realm of carnal
relations. Kinsey was an enemy of chastity, virginity, and innocence itself.
The movie, judging by the reviews, plays down his own —
what’s the term? — sado-masochism, as well as the kiddy
sex. But then Hollywood has a long tradition of beautifying heroes, and the
real Kinsey requires a lot of beautifying.
Socialism, once a cornerstone of
the Latest Thinking, has been a bit tarnished by modern history, but the
sexual revolution — once known as “free love” —
is still going strong. Hey, if it feels good, do it. You can always get an
abortion or penicillin later.
Those who still hold out against
this revolution, which might also be called the Kinsey ethic, are now
accused of “intolerance.” You see this every day on the op-ed
pages, where red-state Christians who oppose abortion and same-sex
“marriage” are said to be acting contrary to Christ’s
teachings. Christ, after all, taught tolerance, which these people sorely
lack. So we are told.
Actually, Christ never preached
anything as mushy and undefined as tolerance, let alone Kinsey-style
tolerance. He taught mercy, patience, charity — which cover a lot of
ground, but are a long way from Kinseyland. He also condemned divorce,
adultery, and even looking at women with lust. Pretty intolerant,
according to the Latest Thinking. “Go, and sin no more.” These
are sweet but stern words of forgiveness, even encouragement, but far
from “Anything goes.”
![[Breaker quote: The
banality of the Latest Thinking]](2004breakers/041116.gif) Why is tolerance supposed to be an unqualified virtue? Dr.
Samuel Johnson, always ready to take a stand against the Latest Thinking
in his own day, had tough words about “unlimited toleration.”
As he put it to Boswell and other friends, “Old Baxter [the Reverend
Richard Baxter, 1615–1691], I remember, maintains that the
magistrate should ‘tolerate all things that are tolerable.’
This is no good definition of toleration upon any principle; but it shows
that he thought some things were not tolerable.”
Unless we want to say that
everything is tolerable, there must be some limits; and we should ask
ourselves whether we have already tolerated too much. The answer
depends on questions about human nature about which the Latest Thinking
is itself none too tolerant. Do we have immortal souls? If so, are we at
risk of damnation? And what sins increase the risk? Could sexual sins be
among them?
The Latest Thinking answers
such questions in the negative; or rather, it presumes negative answers.
The Christian takes them seriously. If we are essentially more than
animals, they have to be confronted.
Never mind the poor diseased and
deserted losers of the sexual revolution, let alone the dead unborn. What
about the winners? Does anyone really look up to such masturbation
moguls as Hugh Hefner and Larry Flynt? Have you ever heard anyone
express admiration for these men?
We’re now living in the
ruins of false Progressive hopes, in moral as in political matters. Yet such
is the sway of these banal ideas that hardly anyone dares suggest that we
reconsider the merits of such alleged advances as divorce and
contraception, whose effects are worse than any pessimist predicted.
Tolerance may yet be the death
of us. The Latest Thinking needs a lot of rethinking.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2004 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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