Too Much Tolerance Kills Conversation

Just a thought. It's very dull to have a conversation with somebody who's too tolerant. There has to be some resistance to make conversation interesting. If everything comes down to "live and let live" and "each to his own"...well...there isn't really much to say, except for exchanging information.

The opposite is also bad, of course. But I'm not sure it's equally bad. I think I'd rather have lunch with a fanatic than with a soggy liberal.

The joy of conversation is to enter into a topic. I've noticed that conversation in our consumerist, pluralist society tends to simply flit from subject to subject-- since there's nothing much to say about any of them. Once you've compared notes, where do you go?

The intiial idea of a liberal society was that the search for truth (and meaning, I suppose) was so important that everybody had to make that journey for themselves. And I agree with this. I think it comports with human dignity. (Which is not to say that we can't have a Christian character to our institutions; I think we should. Nobody is oppressed by having to listen to a prayer being said, or by having a Christmas crib in a public building. But the long history of religious and political persecution shows that forcing people to believe or not believe anything is always a bad idea.)

I also think the search and the journey has a value, even a sublimity, of its own.

But that's not to say we can't try to persuade each other. In fact, I want people to try to persuade each otther. Society should be a hubbub of religious, political, and cultural debate. That was the whole point of an open society. (Everybody should read On Liberty by John Stuart Mill.)  It doesn't mean you should be a pain in the face about pushing your beliefs on people.

The stage magiciaIn and atheist Penn Teller put it well, in this much-quoted rhetorical question: "How much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytize? How much do you have to hate somebody to believe everlasting life is possible and not tell them that?"

And even if you don't believe in everlasting life, or the matter at hand isn't religion, why wouldn't you want to argue for your vision of a good society?

The times in history that I'm drawn to are the ones where ideas and debates were thick in the air-- such as the Gaelic Revival and the Irish Revolution in Ireland, or the late nineteenth century in Russia, or the nineteen-thirties in Britain.

But even if you're talking about something non-ideological, such as cinema or architecture, "whatever floats your boat" doesn't float the boat of human interaction very far.

Of course, we have the worst of both worlds today-- where a supposed pluralism is unspokenly dominated by an utterly intolerant secular-globalist progressivism.

(An afterthought: I've always been baffled when the term "bore" is applied to somebody who has an obsessive interest in a subject and won't shut up about it. That might be irritating, to be sure. But give me that kind of "bore" any day ahead of the the more usual sort of bore-- somebody who has no consuming interests or passions, and who really has no conversation beyond general knowledge and received opinion.)