Truth and Tolerance

Central to our heritage of substantial equality is the concept of absolute truth.  There must be absolute truth for there to be morality and functioning laws.  Our society is based on the idea that we are all equal under the law.  Laws legislate what is socially acceptable or moral for a group.  Recent events show that morality is slipping in today’s society.  Moral relativism, the concept that all ideas are equally right and should be given the same concern and value, does not allow for rule of law.  In a society without absolute truth cheating, stealing, murder, lying, and even rape cannot be discriminated against because there is no real right or wrong.  To a murderer his crime can be justified because of some interior decision once made that the taking of life was within his jurisdiction.  No true case can be made against such an argument without ceding that murder is wrong—always.  If murder be always wrong, then there must be an absolute truth that makes murder universally wrong.

This in turn relates to tolerance.  In a society where there is absolute truth the virtue of tolerance is something for which to strive.  It is a virtue that must be extolled.  Tolerance calls for friendly respect of another person’s views or behaviors.  In a world without absolute truth tolerance should be a byproduct and yet a lack of tolerance cannot be criminal for one’s view of tolerance is individual and therefore relative.  This leads to a focus made by the believers in absolute truth to be more tolerant and the relativists to cry for tolerance to be extended without returning the opinions or papers written.  Tolerance need not be acceptance, tolerance respects but need not condone.   

                This is similar to Philippe Beneton’s definitions of substantial equality and equality by default.  Substantial equality requires absolute truth whereas equality by default allows for relativism.  After all equality by default would make any ideas of the same overall value and requires not tolerance but acceptance.  How can something that is right be merely tolerated, it must be condoned.  Similarly if there is absolute truth then tolerance must extend to those of opposing or dissimilar views but not at the cost of acceptance. It is argued that as a society Western Culture is moving towards equality by default and tolerance is being used to impose viewpoints upon people who are fundamentally opposed to certain ideologies.  This raises the questions: 1) can we restore to preeminence the traditional value of substantial equality and thereby restore tolerance to its proper sphere?  2) How can the ideology of equality by default and its attendant value of tolerance be overcome?  Without a suitable answer to these questions our society must crumble as it cannot survive under equality by default and the dual edged sword of tolerant acceptance.