I've found taking a new look at A Critique of Pure Tolerance (1965) helpful in thinking about the larger conceptual background of tolerance: a human right; as an essential element of democracy; as a necessary element of scientific research and development of knowledge; and, as a vital part of political and social progress.
The issue of tolerance, in both its formal (legal, human-rights) aspect and in its role of facilitating the search for truth and progress, comes up in many ways these days. I started writing these posts before the Republicans' recent "the New York Times is a traitor" campaign. In some ways it may seem counterintuitive for me as someone who sees the goal of that campaign as being to stifle the press altogether to be posting right now about 40-year-old essays that hold the concept of tolerance up to scrutiny.
But we can't let the Republicans drive what we talk about. They do it far too often already.
Here are a few links that raise different aspects of the issue of tolerance in its formal and qualitative aspects.
David Neiwert in Here comes the flood , Orcinus blog 06/13/06, writes about the punditocracy beginning to freak out over the implications of blogosphere democratizing of information dissemination and political comment and analysis. Using Times columnist Maureen Dowd as an example, he also gives a good commentary on the way that genuine alternatives for policies, not even to speak of different ways of life, get muffled in the corporate media environment:
What sparked the rise of Web-based political communication like the blogosphere was the behavior of people like Dowd. When she was named to one of the Times' cherished columnist slots, she replaced the estimable Anna Quindlen, a dependably thoughtful voice of liberalism. Dowd, in contrast, has operated more in the mode of a gossip columnist with snippy, personality-driven journalism that often becomes simply trite; while the Times' conservative columnists in the late '90s were singleminded in their pursuit of Clinton's impeachment, Dowd chose more often than not to chime in on their side, and likewise was a happy participant in the "Al Gore is a weakminded liar" theme that played out in 2000.Also, in An open letter to my fellow journalists Orcinus blog 06/26/06, Neiwert describes how destructive and partisan the current journalistic practice of "balance" can be. He quotes a favorite saying, "The enemy isn't conservatism. The enemy isn't liberalism. The enemy is b******t."
With that kind of voice representing "liberals" in the New York Times - and folks like Joe Klein and Pat Caddell showing up on cable TV to represent the "liberal" side - it's not the least surprising that genuine liberals felt the need to begin speaking up. Otherwise, their voices were not going to be heard. The blogosphere and Webzines became an effective way for that to happen.
He then elaborates a bit:
At some point, journalists are going to have to come to terms with the reality that the b******t, in the past 10 years and more, has not been an even-steven thing, where liberals are just as prone to it as conservatives - though most "fair and balanced" journalists like to pretend that this is so.In other words, the failure of the mainstream media to articulate alternatives and even to present relevant factual material in many cases has created a niche that blog technology allowed thousands of people to step in to begin filling it. I wonder if the people that perfected the software that allows regular updates of text without the author re-writing the code for the Web page realized that they were going to shake the old-line media to the extent that has occurred. Although, as Marcuse would surely remind us if he were around today, the "negative", critical function of blogs can also be absorbed and co-opted by the Establishment.
No, the reality is that in that time, the levels of unmitigated b******t flowing from the many founts of, er, wisdom on the right has been ceaseless, programmatic, and deliberately aimed at overwhelming the press. That's not to say that the left doesn't peddle b******t still, nor that every jot and tittle emanating from the right is a falsehoood. But the proportionate level of b******t from the right is so overwhelming as to render any quibbles almost negligible.
The press is drowning in it, as [the book] Lapdogs [by Eric Boehlert] demonstrates on every page. And the blogosphere, believe it or not, has the potential to be a lifeline.
If reporters can overcome their initial defensiveness, they will discover that bloggers' critiques can actually be helpful and insightful. Perhaps more to the point, they'll discover that there is a wealth of real information available on blogs that often was tucked away into obscure corners, particularly expertise from the likes of Juan Cole and P.Z. Myers.
Jane Hamsher (FDL Book Salon - Lapdogs, Pt. 2 06/25/06) talks about the difference between rightwing and liberal blog approaches to the press:
As [Eric] Boehlert notes, there is great irony in the fact that journalists have been so easily lulled into compliance with right-wing narratives. We on the left may be critical but we’re trying to urge the press into higher standards; the right essentially wants to destroy them.This is a very good example of how what Sloane Coffin called "old-fashioned journalism", journalism that does more than just type up whatever nonsense some industry lobby puts out in order to show the "other side" of an issue and achieve a phony kind of "balance", has become in itself a kind of dissent from the current order of things.
But there is a difference from the approach of the Republican right, which can sound superficially like what I just said, and criticisms like those Hamsher is making. Wolff, Moore and Marcuse in A Critique of Pure Tolerance all say in various ways that tolerance has a purpose: to separate the accurate from the inaccurate, the scientific from the superstitious, the socially constructive from the destructive. For that to happen, there has to be a genuinely free debate. A kind of debate that is seriously limited in today's American society - limited by extreme government secrecy, by illegal surveillance, by a well-funded rightwing noise machine that intimidates the press, by religious zealots with big bucks at their disposal who want to sabotage any notion of truth and value not stemming from their interpretation of the Christian faith, and more.
Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby provided some interesting comments on class issues and the press in his Howler post of 06/26/06. He quotes David Ehrenstein on why the "press corps" was so hostile to Bill Clinton and Al Gore:
Clinton was all about their class-hatred, Eric. Don’t you remember what “Dean” Broder and Sally “Kneepads” Quinn wrote about him “trashing the place”?Now, I'm not sure if Ehrenstein meant to imply that he was saying that he sees poor Britney that way. Let's be generous and assume that he was making a more sensible statement, saying that just as the mainstream media can't possibly understand the cutting-edge social criticism and progressive postmodernism that is Little Boo's defining characteristic in her public persona, they were also incapable of seeing why the public elected both Bill Clinton and Al Gore President. Actually, there is a distinct similarity between Clinton and Britney (although I'm pretty sure Boo is a flaming socialist, not a cautious Democrat like Clinton).
He was Britney Spears to them - pure Trailer Trash. The fact that he was smarter, braver and more tenacious than they were only made it worse for them.
The Howler comments on this:
Reading minds is hard to do - but we’d guess that this comment is on the mark. On the other hand, there’s a surface problem with this analysis. By the time of Campaign 2000, the corps hated Gore even more than Clinton - and far from being “trailer trash,” Gore came from the DC/St. Albans class. Yes, he also grew up on the Tennessee farm. But in the most literal sense, Gore was not a class outsider, available for simplistic “class-hatred.”In other words, class considerations matter. And they often exert their force in subtle as well as overt ways.
That said, we’d guess that the press corps’ problem with Dems is, in large part, a matter of class. Human beings have always been tribal, and our modern, tribal national politics is largely a tribalism of class. We haven’t discussed this matter before, and we won’t be skilled in our descriptions. But it’s fairly clear that tribal connections have long defined our two major parties, and have done so more and more since the time of the GOP “Southern Strategy.”
Increasingly, the GOP is the tribe of the upper-class, older American order - and the Democrats are the tribe of everyone else. Everyone who doesn’t fit in the old order has found their way to the Dem coalition. The Dems are the party of The Other - of the “lower-class;” of racial minorities; of gays; of uppity women. The Republicans are the party of the traditional upper-class ideal - and of all those who will swear allegiance to that orders’ values. This does not mean that Dems are always right - or that Reps are always wrong [although obviously they normally are - Bruce] - about issues involving class and race. It does mean that the parties represent two different tribes - and that many people align themselves based on tribal impulses. [my emphasis in bold]
It's striking how the Howler's description of the mainstream press tends to see the Democrats as the Other - however removed that may be from the very corporate-friendly real existing Democratic Party - sounds remarkably like the Outsiders that Herbert Marcuse identified as being the groups vested in trying to create a genuinely free debate: "The Dems are the party of The Other - of the “lower-class;” of racial minorities; of gays; of uppity women."
That doesn't mean the Democratic Party is necessarily more representative of the real needs and concerns of all those groups than it was in 1965. It just means that the Establishment press is that much further removed from focusing on many of the real problems of American society.
Next, I have an excerpt from Cyber-Mobilization: The New Levée en Masse by Audrey Kurth Cronin Parameters (US Army War College) Summer 2006.
This excerpt raises some disturbing questions. But I should also say, after having complained about the general lack of understanding in America about the revolutionary past of democracy, Cronin's article draws on that tradition to frame her article. For example, referring to the French Revolution, she writes:
The role of the poor French peasant in particular, supporting the revolution and fighting its wars, was central to the power of the popular army. The passionate participation of the working-class Frenchman, who previously would not have been granted the right of citizenship, was a vital evolution in the organization for war. The unprecedented range of communications effected a transformation of individuals in the lower strata of French society into the “People,” the holders of popular sovereignty. They also enabled the quite conscious building of a national identity: from a focus on warfare in the service of local nobility, those on French territory drew themselves into one focused and motivated fighting unit. The French people believed that they were fighting a war for freedom and against tyranny, for their revolution and against monarchical power, and the bombardment of information from above and within consolidated those beliefs. In this culmination of social, political, and military change, the French nation and the army were as one. [my emphasis]The disturbing part comes later in the article. She is discussing the implications of cyber-mobilization, which is being used not only by democratic movements but also by violent Salifist jihadist groups. She defines the problem this way:
In democratizing global communications, the West’s initial assumption was that the natural outcome would be the spread of democratic concepts. And to some extent, that did happen. The combination of cell phones and the Internet has facilitated a variety of democratic movements, including the Rose Revolution in Georgia, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the sweeping of Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo into power, anti-globalization protests by groups like Direct Action, and many other types of grass-roots campaigns. Another powerful motivator in the post-Cold War years was the conviction that democracies do not fight each other: with the spread of connectivity would come increasing access to the ideals of the liberal state, an undermining of authoritarian regimes, and a natural reduction in war. Sadly, however, democratic means did not guarantee democratic ends. Like the printing press, television, or radio, these new tools were just as capable of advocating repression and violence as democratic change. The new age of communications has proven to be a double-edged sword.And she discusses the solution:
Like the levée en masse, the evolving character of communications today is altering the patterns of popular mobilization, including both the means of participation and the ends for which wars are fought. Most important, it is enabling the recruiting, training, convincing, and motivating of individuals who are driven to engage not primarily in the high-tech cyber-attacks that many US policymakers are focused upon, but in old-fashioned violence in the physical world. Today’s mobilization may not be producing masses of soldiers, sweeping across the European continent, but it is effecting an underground uprising whose remarkable effects are being played out on the battlefield every day.
Just as the telephone, telegraph, and radio eventually engendered countervailing technologies in code-breaking, monitoring, intercepting, and wire-tapping, the United States is gradually recognizing the strategic potential of these means and just beginning to effectively react. Most of the United States’ efforts have been focused on counteracting their practical, logistical effects, including terrorist fund-raising on the web, preventing the use of the Internet for logistical coordination, intervening in communications, and tracking statements and websites. These activities are imperative, demanding intelligence collection, monitoring, disinformation, and disruption, but they are embryonic and limited in their scope. The intelligence community’s relatively narrow remit cannot cover the full implications of the physical and ideological mobilization that is currently taking place. The parallels drawn here with the levée en masse should give us pause."The state can reclaim the tools of popular mobilization". No one quarrels with the need to intervene in terrorist plots, online or off. But when we see the ways in which the most rabid Republicans identify Democrats, liberals, blacks and so forth as The Enemy even more than The Terrorists, its a reminder that keeping the public debate open and not under the thumbnail of corporate conformity of government disinformation operations is a real problem.
The good news, however, is that this connectivity can also provide the means to counter the use of these tools to mobilize for radical causes, if the United States will consciously engage in a wide-ranging counter-mobilization. Overall connectivity is far higher in countries that represent more open, democratic societies.
This should be a tool that greatly advantages the United States,one that Western military organizations are adept at using themselves. But currently the security implications of connectivity are too controversial to analyze seriously. Americans are too busy worrying about the economic benefits of the web and who is to control it, arguing about impositions on freedom of speech and who is to determine them, willing to neglect the impact of what appears on the web even as it translates into killing people in the real world. The Internet is vital to US security, not only because of its obvious centrality to the American economy, but also because of its less-obvious role in animating our friends and enemies. The state can reclaim the tools of popular mobilization, but only if it will more seriously address the need to understand, react to, and employ them. [my emphasis]
Finally, Duncan Black (Atrios), in Stand Up 06/27/06 gives a good, brief statement of how a false form of "tolerance" can actually lead to less freedom and more domination - and worse:
Torturing people, jailing journalists for treason, the president being allowed to disobey the law at whim... The mainstream media has made all of these things a part of the normal conversation. They've allowed "two sides" to all of these things to be debated on equal footing. Left wing bloggers on the internets complain about the media and they get ignored and accused of "blogofascism." Conservatives call for the New York Times to be blown up and their reporters and editors jailed and they get treated seriously on MSNBC's flagship political talk show. [my emphasis]The United States is not East Germany yet. It's not even like the segregated South yet, even though the neosegregationist Republican Party today is far closer to the spirit of Theodore Bilbo than of Theodore Roosevelt.
But can we say that we see "repressive tolerance" at work? I think we can.
Other posts in the series:
1. Are there problems with tolerance?
2. Robert Paul Wolff on going "Beyond Tolerance"
3. Barrington Moore, Jr., on science and tolerance
4. Tolerance, social analysis and radical democracy
5. Herbert Marcuse on repressive tolerance
6. The need for tolerance, its limits and its "repressive" form (current post)
Tags: tolerance, repressive tolerance
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