Charles Todorich is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and a resident of South Portland.  He can be reached at [email protected].

“Believe in tolerance,” said the bumper sticker.

To my mind, “Stand up for apathy” would have been equally nonsensical. By infusing “tolerance” with moral content, modern-day Americans are shooting themselves in the foot. And we’ve been firing away for decades.

Few single words better capture the spirit of the modern age than “tolerance,” the pinnacle virtue in the worldview of tens of millions of Americans, particularly liberal, college-educated baby boomers (and their progressive progeny) who came of age during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s when “racial tolerance” was the buzzword. 

Cutting their teeth politically on a clear-cut moral issue like civil rights made the tolerance argument easily transferable to almost every cause thereafter, with the result that tolerance has come to be seen as virtue in and of itself, relieving individuals of the need — indeed, the duty — to make reasoned moral judgments. 

This gives the verb “tolerate” moral content without knowing its direct object, as if we labeled shooting as “good” without knowing whether it was a person or a pigeon that was shot. Ask any random group of baby boomers what they value most in people, and in themselves — especially in themselves — and I guarantee you that being tolerant will either win or place. Being moral? It might not even show.  

The question is: What is being tolerated? In the civil rights context, we “tolerated” slavery for 250 years and Jim Crow for another 100, until reasoned moral judgment produced the “intolerance” that enabled America to “live out the full meaning of its creed.” 

Thus, tolerance is schizophrenic; a necessary lubricant in the peaceful life of civilized society, but a danger when it dulls our moral sensibilities and removes shame and guilt as regulators of human behavior. And without shame, as is said in the Book of Jeremiah, we know not how to blush.

Non-judgmental tolerance is the hot air that inflates the liberal balloon and has birthed an “anything goes” approach to life that has made “whatever” the one-word statement of philosophy for ten of millions of Americans, with catastrophic results. 

Who’d have believed — even just 10 years ago — that people assigned male at birth would be allowed to compete in women’s sports, including locker room access; that homeless encampments, needles, syringes and human excrement would be allowed to evict civilization from the streets of major American cities; that we would allow our southern border to be invaded by illegals exceeding in number the size of the Nazi army that invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941; that school educators would defend library books depicting oral sex; that a nominee for Supreme Court justice would be unable to answer the question, “What is a woman?”.

Such intellectual chaos led Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders to say in her 2023 Republican response to then-President Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address: “The dividing line in America is no longer right and left, it’s between normal and crazy.” 

Such are the results of non-judgmental tolerance run amok. This is what happens to a society with minds so open that its “brains fall out.”

There is social utility in a tolerance that precludes a punch in the nose as a first reaction to disagreement. But non-judgmental tolerance is not a moral foundation for enlightened civilization, which instead must find its support in transcendent sentiments like patriotism and religion. 

When these impulses atrophy — especially the religious — all bets are off. 

As G.K. Chesterton put it, the danger that comes from people not believing in God is not that they believe in nothing, it’s that they’ll believe in anything. This leads to what Pope Benedict XVI called the “dictatorship of relativism” in which truth, belief and purpose evaporate into the fog of soulless nihilism, the ideology of the abyss. 

All of which makes prescient a quote that has been attributed to Aristotle, “Tolerance is the last virtue of a dying society.”

There is also an external component. I vividly recall a TV news report post-9/11 featuring a young fellow who took umbrage at the enhanced airport screening of young men from Arab and Muslim countries. Asked how he would feel if eliminating such measures increased the dangers in flying, he replied, “At least I wouldn’t be a profiler.” 

Catastrophe is born of such idiocy. Every day, ships from all over the world arrive in Portland Harbor, many from unfriendly environs. Pakistan is a nuclear power. Iran was on the cusp. Between them is Afghanistan, a terrorist haven. 

The idea of a terrorist-acquired nuclear device being smuggled onto a ship that enters Portland Harbor and makes Commercial Street ground zero is not a zero-possibility event, in my opinion, especially if the nuclear aspirations of Iran go unchecked. 

History offers few examples of supine tolerance prevailing over ruthless fanaticism. If the day should come when America falls, either from external catastrophe or internal decay, the first step in that process will have begun not with a bang, but with a tolerant whimper.