The Intolerance of the Tolerant

The Catholic Thing

By Anthony Esolen
I have consistently found that the most intolerant people I meet are those who have the word "tolerance" on their lips all the time. We should not take this as hypocrisy. It is not what the Pharisees do, who blow a trumpet before them when they are giving alms. That is to turn charity into a stage-play, so that they can earn the praise of men, and if that is what they want, that is what they will get. "Fit retribution," says Milton, "empty as their deeds."
It is rather, I think, a condition most peculiar to our age, and it has to do with an urgent desire not to feel the prickling of the sins we approve. Those who regularly and honestly engage in examining their consciences will not like what they find there. That is because we are all sinners, and we all fall short of the glory of God.
The saint is more assured of God's mercy than the ordinary sinner is, but he is also more careful not to offend, and more abashed when he does offend. He does not need a slogan from politicized arms of the Church to instruct him in tolerance. His own sins instruct him well enough.
I am speaking here of persons to be tolerated, not sins. We want physicians who love their patients and hate their cancers.
We must get it into our heads that sin is real just as diseases of the body are real. I walked about for nearly a month with a blood clot in my leg, not wanting to believe it was really there. But the clot was under no obligation to respect my wishes.
We Catholics believe that God has given the human soul a moral constitution: we thrive by what is objectively good, and we wither by what is objectively bad. Our moral diseases are under no obligation to respect our opinions about them.
Of course, when a man sins with full and clear awareness that what he is doing is wrong, he adds defiance or recklessness to the underlying sin. And in this sense, we may say that some measure of ignorance mitigates one's guilt when the whole of the act and all its circumstances are judged. But the sin itself remains, and it works its harm.
Imagine, then, someone who bears within him a grave moral disease, a sin that has become so habitual that he cannot imagine living without it, yet a sin that deforms his dealings with other people, especially those who he knows disapprove of the sin, even if they do not know he suffers from it.
He begins to preach "tolerance" to numb the sore. He is not necessarily conscious of his motive. It is a subcutaneous panic. If he were a businessman nearing the brink of insolvency, the same kind of motive might keep him from driving past his bank, or looking at his checkbook, and he might snap at anyone discussing the ethics of frugality and prudence in money matters.
But that does not suffice. The sore never really grows numb. The disease continues its work. Something in the soul cries out that things are wrong.
It stings the man into action; so he imputes evil motives to those who remind him of the sin, and he goes on a spirited attack against sins he does not commit, and even against moral dispositions that are good or neutral, so long as they can be confused with those sins. "Tolerance" is on his lips, with the snarl of a wounded animal.
And since man is a social creature, social to the core, the condition can become general. The society loudest in preaching "tolerance" is one whose characteristic sins have become intolerable. They are angry sores, red and raw.
Everybody can see them. But everybody must be persuaded that they are not what they are, or that they are natural and inevitable. The melanoma must be called a beauty mark.
In the early progress of this inner conflict, the tolerance of a society's characteristic sin and the rage against its opposite is a function of vanity and social fashions, as Uncle Screwtape suggests: "We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make e...