The Blog

2020-

2020-12-05 g
MODERN FASCISM II

The Decline of Cultural Understanding

... This raises the question of how far we tolerate the intolerant, that is to say those whose desire, sometimes elevated into a goal, is to destroy the very tolerance that they enjoy, and who would use their freedom to destroy our freedom. The rule of law demands that we should act against only those who have committed a crime, and not against those whom we suspect of being liable to commit a crime. As the great English judge of the 18th century, Lord Mansfield, said, “As long as an act remains in bare intention alone, it is not punishable by our law.”

We have faced the dilemma before, with communist and fascist movements. Now we have Islamic movements and, as yet in embryo, fascist anti-fascism. If we overreact, we destroy our own freedom; if we under-react, we allow others to destroy our freedom for us.

This suggests to me (not a very original thought) that a free society can exist only where there is some cultural, and not merely a legalistic, understanding of a constitutional order: an acceptance of limits of outrage, for example, if you happen to be fortunate enough to live in a tolerably tolerant society, even when that society is not perfectly just or fair (as no society yet known to man is).

This cultural understanding is easily lost, and indeed seems to be in the process of decline in Western countries, most dangerously among the very class—the intelligentsia—in whom one might have expected or hoped it to be strongest. Our universities are becoming bastions of unfreedom, if my few young academic friends are to be believed, and we are raising up a generation of secular ayatollahs. (read more)

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