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Q.
In his book The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics
Christopher Lasch writes:
Niebuhr endorsed G.K.Chesterton's observation that
tolerance is the attitude of those who do not believe in anything.
Could you reconstruct the original quote?
- Anonymous
A.
Lasch was using the word "tolerance" for what Chesterton generally
termed "impartiality." Chesterton deplored impartiality, which he
equated with indifference, but he generally applauded tolerence, which
he contrasted with bigotry -- unless the tolerance in question was
really a mere mask for indifference. Chesterton expressed these thoughts
in a very large number of places and in a many ways. The closest to
Lasch's quotation is probably:
Impartiality means at best indifference to everything
. . . [Illustrated London News, July 5, 1919]
Or (from the Web page of The American Chesterton Society):
Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference,
which is an elegant name for ignorance. ["Puritan and Anglican,"
The Speaker, December 15, 1900. Reprinted in The
Chesterton Review, vol.9, no. 4]
More from the Illustrated London News:
Modern toleration is really a tyranny. It is a
tyranny because it is a silence. [October 10, 1908]
Our real error in such a case is that we do not know
or care about the creed itself, from which a people's customs,
good or bad, will necessarily flow. We talk much about 'respecting'
this or that person's religion; but the way to respect a religion
is to treat it as a religion: to ask what are its tenets and what
are their consequences. But modern tolerance is deafer than intolerance.
The old religious authorities, at least, defined a heresy before
they condemned it, and read a book before they burned it. But
we are always saying to a Mormon or a Moslem - 'Never mind about
your religion, come to my arms.' To which he naturally replies
-- 'But I do mind about my religion, and I advise you to mind
your eye.' ["Mormonism," The Uses of Diversity;
Illustrated London News, May 13, 1911]
The new bigot says, 'I will not argue with you, because
I know you agree with me.' (April 28, 1906)
From Heretics:
In real life, people who are most bigoted are the
people who have no convictions at all.
Bigotry may be roughly defined as the anger of men who have
no opinions.
Chesterton goes on to expand that idea as follows:
It is the resistance offered to definite ideas
by that vague bulk of people whose ideas are indefinite to excess.
Bigotry may be called the appalling frenzy of the indifferent. This
frenzy of the indifferent is in truth a terrible thing; it has made
all monstrous and widely pervading persecutions. In this degree
it was not the people who cared who ever persecuted; the people
who cared were not sufficiently numerous. It was the people who
did not care who filled the world with fire and oppression. It was
the hands of the indifferent that lit the faggots; it was the hands
of the indifferent that turned the rack. There have come some persecutions
out of the pain of a passionate certainty; but these produced, not
bigotry, but fanaticism -- a very different and a somewhat admirable
thing. Bigotry in the main has always been the pervading omnipotence
of those who do not care crushing out those who care in darkness
and blood. [Heretics, chapter XX, "Concluding
Remarks on the Importance of Orthodoxy"]
And:
And what applies to the family applies to the nation.
A nation with a root religion will be tolerant. A nation with no
religion will be bigoted. ["The Sectarian Society," A
Miscellany of Men]
Finally:
There is something that is higher than impartiality
. . . the living impartiality of the imagination rather than the
dead impartiality of the reason. ("The Case for Macaulay,"
A Handful of Authors)
- The "Quotemeister"
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