Intolerant tolerance. . .

It is surely well known and hardly a surprise that the terms diversity, inclusion, and non-discrimination have become the buzz words not only of post-modern culture but of the businesses seeking to survive in this post-modern culture.  All around us are CEOs and BoDs who insist that they are committed to diversity, that this is a core value, and that they will not tolerate a workplace in which there is rejection of or disagreement with these terms.  They insist upon a non-discrimination atmosphere except that they openly and calmly discriminate against anyone and everyone who disagrees with the mantra of modernity.

So we all know by now how software engineer James Damore authored a memo challenging Google's intolerance for ideologies conflicting with their core values (and left leaning biases).  In typical form, the CEO of Google insisted that the workplace cannot tolerate hostility and there is nothing more hostile, in their point of view, than disagreement with or challenge to its commitment to a non-neutral culture of diversity in which some points of view are more equal than others and these are so sacred that disagreement or even discussion cannot be allowed.


This authoritarian liberalism is not merely at work in Europe but exists also throughout America -- in both cultural and political environments as well as the predictable place it occupies in university settings. Such as “diversity,” “inclusion,” and “non-discrimination” effectively bulldoze all dissent from the politically correct position and even discussion of that position is too much of a threat to be allowed.  As the educational institutions have created a "safe environment" that rewrites history and refuses to give voice to anyone who might disagree, so we are finding industry has mirrored the rather strange idea that the workplace is a sterile and protected environment in which no disagreement is tolerated.

Of course, no one is suggesting that physical or sexual or violent threat ever be allowed but in this case it is not this extreme threat that requires a protective cone over academia and the workplace but anything that someone does not want to hear (excepting always the promotion of the sacred and core values that are now without question or challenge).

Europe has become a stale and empty place.  Only one voice is heard.  There is no opposition party in the European Parliament and what binds the peoples of the Common Market appears to be no deeper than the common coin in their pockets and the dream of a prosperous world without war or violence.  We might be willing to agree with the prosperity and peace of this world except that in Europe it comes at a cost of freedom -- most especially the freedom to disagree.  In such an environment Europe's Christian history is not a heritage to be lauded but a shame to be confessed.  Strangely, there is little realization that it is precisely the rejection of Europe's Christian past that has created the opportunity for Islam to flourish and to threaten the very values Europe holds to be most sacred.  Strange for a world in which allegiance to a common papacy, the sound of a common liturgical language, and the sharing of a common set of faith and values was once THE unity of a Europe otherwise divided by national sentiment and geographic border.

Ah, but such curiosity toward Europe and its situation today is not theoretical.  We in the US are usually only a generation or two behind.  Soon the infection of discontent that refuses challenge and now occupies academia will break out of its safe pockets and American will just as openly reject its own religious history as bigoted, racist, misogynist, and phobic.  Orthodox Christianity will be rejected as hate speech and the new religion of America will not be our past civil religions with its thin veneer of Christianity but the very diversity, intolerant tolerance, inclusivity, and non-judgemental ideals that for now will be caught up in the courts.

Unless we insist that this will not happen. . .