The Intolerance of Tolerance

In 1987 Professor Allan Bloom of the University of Chicago published a book entitled The Closing of the American Mind in which he argues that the so called “openness” that our culture demands is really a great closing, and it’s a closing of the mind. To be “tolerant” is really to be intolerant.

Francis Beckwith, in a lecture I heard him deliver on “The Deconstruction of Liberal Values,” sarcastically remarked that professor Bloom’s book is one of the only philosophy books that have actually sold! He said further that his wife asked him “Why don’t you write something like that?”!

In an often quoted line from the book, Bloom writes “There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.”

In Al Mohler’s latest blog,here, he quotes from the London Times article on Britain’s new proposed school policy,here,

Schools would no longer be required to teach children the difference between right and wrong under plans to revise the core aims of the National Curriculum.

Instead, under a new wording that reflects a world of relative rather than absolute values, teachers would be asked to encourage pupils to develop "secure values and beliefs".

I actually enjoyed reading this beautiful rhetoric! Teachers are “asked” (no, required) to “encourage” (no, demand) that pupils be “secure” (no, absolutely sure) in their values and beliefs (so long as they value and believe in relativism). Come on! How much more intolerant can you get?