Book Review: Be Intolerant

Title: Be Intolerant

Author: Ryan Dobson

Date: 2003

Publisher: Multnomah Publishers

ISBN: 1-59052-152-8

Length: 108 pages

Quote: “I want to bring you out of the darkness of political correctness into the light, peace, and freedom of the truth.”

Ryan Dobson is not, of course, encouraging bigotry here. He’s saying that when people try to make tolerance the core of their philosophy, they end up becoming nihilists. A line between “All the different things people sincerely believe have some truth, for those people, and deserve some respect” and “All the different things people believe are equally true” tends to fade. People turn into deranged Richard Dawkins sound-alikes furiously arguing that they aren’t really thinking and, furthermore, may not really exist.

If you’d rather approach Dobson’s points from a classical philosophical perspective, of course, check out C.S. Lewis’s Abolition of Man. If you’d rather be titillated by a hormonal stew of emotion, try Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons. If you’re young enough, even at heart, to identify with Dobson’s “generation... being destroyed by manic tolerance,” you may appreciate his short, no-frills plea for standards of merit.

Dobson’s subtitle is ...Because Some Things Are Just Plain Stupid. He identifies five aspects of politically correct stupidity as making up a philosophical “T.U.M.O.R.” excessive Tolerance, obsessive Untraditionalism, falling in love with the Marginalized, worshipping the Outdoors, and excusing Reprobate conduct.

Can we be classically liberal and still eliminate these qualities from our thinking? I say we not only can, but must.

Excessive religious Tolerance means trying to believe that all religions are equally true. Most religions teach that no human mind can grasp all the truth in the universe, and there are times when dialogue with adherents of a different religion can enlighten people about their own overlooked beliefs. Still, how much sense does it make to pretend that the beliefs that have made some people poor, sick, and miserable are equally as valuable as the beliefs that have made others strong, rich, healthy, powerful, and even generous? 

Untraditional ideas, often marketed as someone’s creative take on some obscure foreign tradition, can be a rich source of artistic inspiration. And the ideas have to be pretty bizarre to offend the parents of today’s students, after three generations of infatuation with vestiges of vanishing minority cultures. If you want to study the Yuchi language, or some new language constructed on its remains, that’s fine with me. But if you embrace the ideas that failed those who originally believed them, or claim to, are you even being merely stupid, or are you also being disrespectful of the people whose culture you admire? Using Buddhist calming-and-grounding techniques to cope with mood swings is wonderful; bogging down in the kind of Buddhist passivism that allowed China to be bullied by Japan and India to be tyrannized over by England is, at best, stupid.

Not wanting anyone to be Marginalized is a noble idea and a lovely character trait, but it can be exploited and made functionally stupid. Does being non-racist oblige anyone to pretend that the Obama girls have been more victimized than homeless Anglo-American children are? Does fairness toward people with disabilities mean eliminating all requirements that students learn to read, because reading is too difficult for people with brain damage? Those who think that any claim to have been marginalized should get them anything they want make it hard for the rest of us to practice good will.

I have to question how many of Dobson’s generation really worship the Outdoors, since the main problem I see with this age group is that they don’t spend nearly enough time outdoors. Despite some beautiful exceptions, today’s colleges are full of pale, pasty, puffy, flabby, haggard, obese or skinny, repulsive bloated dronelets who couldn’t raise one bean vine if you gave them a pound of beans. It’s hard to blame them, since they grew up in cities where people constantly told them it wasn’t “safe” for them to go to summer camp, ride bicycles, or even swing back and forth on a swing set, so they’ve spent their lives “safely” watching TV. They are unfit for college, for jobs, or for military service, and if any readers recognize themselves or their children here, please shut down the computer and start power-walking now. I want to urge Dobson’s generation to be Greener every day. Spend time in green space. Demand more green space. Designate green space: raise vegetables in your back yards.

However, as Dobson explains, “Moral relativism...places nature on a higher plane. We humans should bow in reverence to it...Christians worship God and manage the earth, while moral relativists worship the earth and disregard God.” I see evidence of this kind of fanatical Greenies in cyberspace, although I’ve not actually met one in the real world, so I’ll take his word that they exist. Right. When Greenies reach the point of seeing no difference between eliminating coyotes from populated areas and strip mining in populated areas, when they don’t merely commit themselves to “one child or none” but start urging people to abort more existing babies—if and when they do—then they’ve become stupid and need to be scolded by Dobson and his readers.

The final piece of stupidity is the demand that we show tolerance of any behavior “as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody else,” even though we can see that some of the behaviors in this category—like taking drugs, or seducing Charlotte Simmons just to dislodge her from her secure position at the head of the class—do in fact hurt other people. Taking drugs might be a victimless crime if you could guarantee that no children you might have one day, nobody who has to share the road with you, no people you might abuse while in an altered state, could possibly be harmed by it, but in order to do so you’d need to be in a padded cell. 

The Bible does not recommend that people become moral vigilantes, sniffing around for hints of secret sin in other people’s lives. It’s not that my neighbor’s conscious, wilful, habitual cheating on his taxes is likely to alienate him from God less than the sin of a mugger or a child molester; it’s that I have to have faith that God can defend God’s honor. I have to step in only if I’m convinced that God needs to mobilize my body to protect the person being mugged or molested. But if my neighbor asks me what I think of cheating, or aborting a healthy child because my neighbor unrealistically believes that a travel opportunity like this one is more unlikely to recur than the chance of giving birth to a healthy child, or some other unchristian choice, then the Bible does tell me to be intolerant enough to admit that those things are wrong.

What Dobson has to offer young readers is a position from which to take their rightful place in college discussions of these moral issues. Toward this end, he provides them snappy comebacks, a selection of the most pertinent Bible verses (if you quote the translation he uses, your dorm mates won’t recognize them as Bible verses, but that may be the effect you want), and succinct, well-reasoned arguments. If you’re a college freshman who doesn’t want to be argued out of your traditional views on sex, drugs, honesty, etc., don’t leave home without Be Intolerant.