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Tolerance—Two Social Studies


ISSUE:  Autumn 1926

Tolerance. By Hendrick Willem Van Loon. New York: Boni and Liveright. $3.00.

Israel. By Ludwig Lewisohn. New York: Boni and Liveright. $3.00.

I

A cynic might say, and not without some justification, that the last dozen years have seen more intolrance, hate, strife, mayhem, and murder among “the so-called human race” than any period of equal length since pithecanthropus dropped his tail. There was the first World War in the history of the planet—a war.ostensibly between Christian nations—which slaughtered outright some eight million men, during which the Sermon on the Mount practically became a seditious document. There was the punitive peace, which indeed has been better than no peace, but which has brought fresh symptoms of hatred in its wings. Already we hear talk of the Next War with its death-rays and city-destroying bombs, which is formally to put an end to civilization and leave the Eskimo, the Bushman, and the Hottentot to inherit the earth. Nor have the seeds of intolerance been sown afresh between nation and nation merely: group antagonisms of a hundred kinds have been provoked or reintensified. The guns that thundered in Flanders Fields shook the world and the shock set off innumerable local magazines of hatred. Humanity just emerging from the thralldom of religious bigotry—the grand intolerance of the ages—finds itself beset with a thousand petty intolerances. The slumbering embers of persecution—coals which we had thought extinguished in all civilized states—burst again into flame. The race, it becomes increasingly clear, has suffered a phylogenetic backfiring. In politics, religion, and industry we see men splitting into cliques, klans, blocks, factions, and Heaven only knows what exclusive organisms, and the prospect of human brotherhood seems to be indefinitely, if indeed not infinitely, deferred.

But if a close-up of the human scene in the year A. D. 1926 does not thrill us with especial exultation, what shall we say of humanity when viewed in perspective—when seen from the hilltops of history? Well, if Mr. Van Loon be a reliable guide, we need not despair; we may even thank God and take courage. Not that Mr. Van Loon is a professional optimist; far from it. His God, indeed, seems to be in Heaven, but he finds a number of things quite wrong with the world. Moreover, he has no panacea, no nostrum, no specific. He does not Coue himself into believing that in every way we are getting better and better. But a sober judgment’of the record of man’s struggle for intellectual liberty, as Van Loon relates it, shows beyond peradventure that man, even during the last few centuries, has made immense moral and spiritual progress. Despite his occasional back-firings, man does tend to become less and less hostile to minorities and to new ideas as knowledge and experience widen. Not even the ghastly blunder of the Great War can shake our conviction that this is true. Compared to the human scene of only a few hundred years ago, humanity seems even now, despite Moscow, Mussolini, and Mississippi, to be living in a veritable Golden Age of Tolerance. Dissenters from an infallible faith are no longer roasted alive, nor even hanged, drawn and quartered. Slavery, though sanctioned by Holy Writ, has been abolished. Witch-hunting, once approved by Catholic and Protestant alike, is now as dead as the dinosaurus. Darwin sleeps in honor in Westminster Abbey. Huxley was never called to account by an Inquisition. Scopes was not burned at the stake like Servetus, Catholics no longer run amuck on St. Bartholomew’s day. Baptists grant that one may be saved without being immersed in water. Methodists no longer hold with Wesley that Newton’s theory of gravitation “tends to infidelity.” Presbyterians no longer agree with Calvin that the great majority of men are born unconditionally damned. Unitarians can be elected to office. The practice of crucifixion has long been extinguished. The founder of a new religion dies with money in the bank, full of years and honors. Even war itself has lost some of its brutality—prisoners are no longer sold as slaves nor massacred without compunction. And never was there so much propaganda for peace since the cave-man brandished his first club.

There is, then, today, as compared with any previous age, an extraordinary degree of intellectual freedom. But at what a great price has this freedom been obtained! What myriads of dissenters from established mores have been put to death by orthodox authorities! What rivers of blood have been shed for conscience’ sake! What barriers of sloth and superstition, bigotry and prejudice, ignorance and fear, have had to be scaled in the War for the Liberation of Humanity! Surely it is the most momentous warfare of all the ages—this struggle of the unconquerable soul of man for the right to think and to speak his thoughts unfettered and unmolested.

It is this warfare that Mr. Van Loon in his latest opus seeks to chronicle. “Tolerance” is the history of the idea of tolerance—an idea which seems to have originated in Greece —that minorities and new ideas are not necessarily wicked and against God. It is also and more especially the story of the struggle to achieve a condition of tolerance—to carry the idea from theory into practice. The book, therefore, deals with both men and movements, but most of the chapters, fittingly enough, are grouped around men. And what manner of men! Strange figures, indeed, jostle each other in Mr. Van Loon’s pages. Here are men of colossal courage, and men of cringing cowardice. Here are martyrs to the principle of intellectual liberty, and bigots dominated by a damnation complex. Here are churchmen in high places awed by authority, and bold and original thinkers whose thoughts have shaken the world. Here Socrates champions the freedom of speech and takes the hemlock calmly—victim to the fundamentalists of Athens. Here Innocent III sets up the Inquisition—to make the world safe for orthodoxy. Here Bruno is burned at the stake—to save the ancient Hebraic astronomy. Here Galileo is threatened with torture—compelled to “curse and detest” the theory of the earth’s motion. Here Erasmus sows the seeds of discontent—which ripen into the Reformation. Here Luther and Calvin stand up manfnily for the right of private judgment—so long as it agrees with theirs. Here Rabelais bursts into gusts of uncontrollable laughter —mocking the monstrosities and mountebankeries of the monastic system. Here Socinius formulates the modern doctrine of religious liberty that has made its way around the world. Here Frederick the Great demonstrates that a state without an official priesthood may yet survive and wax strong. Here Voltaire blasts bigotry with ridicule, laughing hypocrisy out of countenance. Here the Fathers of the American republic write freedom of speech and of worship into the fundamental law, a thing hitherto unknown in history. Here, in short, is the story of that glorious warfare, that struggle against altar and throne for the right to think and to speak, waged by the choice and master spirits of the ages.

But valuable as “Tolerance” may be as a history, it is not primarily a history for history’s sake. It is rather an attempt at social diagnosis. The various efforts of orthodoxy and authority to stifle free thought all down through the ages are not merely chronicled in Van Loon’s inimitable arm-chair manner: they are interpreted in the light of the new psychology. Freud showed that hatred is but a defense reaction of the individual: Van Loon appropriates the doctrine and applies it to the group. Intolerance, then, is oniy a manifestation of the herd’s protective instinct. Society, like the individual, is dominated by the all-powerful instinct to five. This is true of civilized man; it is, of course, more obviously true of savages. But the savage (like most of his civilized brothers!) is not given to deep thought, nor is he very proficient at inductive reasoning. He is apt to think that a hundred and one things are necessary for his temporal salvation which are not, in fact, essential at all. Fear and mental laziness combine to render him an arch conservative. Primitive man, indeed, is the most orthodox of men. His fear of innovation is a fear of the unknown; his intolerance is deeply rooted in the soil of ignorance.

This is graphically illustrated by Mr. Van Loon in his parabolic prologue. Primitive man, says he, was living happily in the Peaceful Valley of Ignorance. Back comes some explorer from wandering in strange lands, beseeching his fellow tribesmen to move their tents across the distant hills to greener fields and fresh pastures. But the orthodox authorities know that this will never do—it is contrary to the ancient oracles infallibly written in the sacred books. Away, then, with the blasphemer! Deal with him according to the formula for the disposition of heretics in Deuteronomy XIII, 6-10! . . . But ere long drought comes upon the land, and close behind stalks famine. Forced to move or starve, the tribe rebels against the orthodox authorities, treks its way across the dim trail which the martyred pioneer has blazed, and at length in the new-found land a monument is erected to the Great Explorer.

This fable of Van Loon’s is more than a mere fantasy. Indeed, as his subsequent chapters show, it is a true epitome of the intellectual history of the human race. From time immemorial humanity has been inclined to kill its prophets and to stone them that seek to propagate new ideas. The reasons for this are not far to seek. Civilization has, indeed, outgrown much of man’s fear of the unknown and greatly abated the intolerance of ignorance, but the two other grand species of intolerance—that due to laziness and that resulting from self-interest—are with us yet. The average citizen, from sheer mental laziness, is naturally hostile to new ideas. A new idea, inconsistent with some belief which he holds, means the necessity of rearranging his mind, and thought, as John Dewey observes, is the hardest work in the world. But the most powerful, perhaps, of all the forces of intolerance, has been the motive of self-interest. Silversmith and sectaries have always been ready to raise the cry, “Great is Diana of the Ephesians.” The civil authorities, naturally wishing to remain in power, are likewise hostile to innovation. The current mores, therefore, unless challenged by exceptional individuals, tend to crystallize into infallible dogmas and faiths once for all delivered. To question these dogmas is downright dangerous to life and limb.

But neither the intolerance of altars nor thrones can ever wholly subdue the spirit of man. Despotisms may rise and flourish for many a day, but not forever. Unorthodoxy will eventually out. The voice of the heretic will be heard in the land. The forces of reform will finally assert themselves. At length authority is forced to compromise with innovation, in order to avert catastrophe. Thus freedom broadens slowly down from dissident to dissident.

II

I said at the outset that the race had recently suffered a phylogenetic back-firing—that group antagonisms of a hundred kinds had been provoked or reintensified. This is particularly true with reference to the Jews. From Danzig to Detroit, from the Ukrainian plains to the Yosemite valley, the late war has left its backwash of anti-semitism. It is to the Jew and his problems, therefore, that Mr. Ludwig Lewisohn has lately turned his eloquent pen. The result stylistically is an authentic masterpiece: few prose works more beautifully written have appeared in our time. Nor is the merit of the work confined to verbal beauty: back of the artist stands revealed a thinker of exceptional insight and keen analytic power. So far as this generation is concerned, Lewisohn rises to the rank of one of Israel’s major prophets.

His book, entitled “Israel,” complements that of Van Loon. It is a keenly critical analysis of the historical relations between the Jew and the world, with especial reference to present-day conditions. Though in no sense a work of special pleading, it carries in its overtones a profoundly moving plea for tolerance. Primarily, it is a book for the Jews, seeking to interpret the Jew to himself and to point the way to the cultural integration of Israel. But it is also a book for the non-Jew, interpreting, as it does, the genius of the Jewish race. Surely no fair-minded Gentile can read this book without the feeling that in Israel there is a people too long scourged and misunderstood, a people whose cultural aspirations, whose passion for truth and beauty and righteousness should be set free. The road to such freedom, in Lewisohn’s opinion, lies primarily in the establishment of a Jewish homeland. He seeks the upbuilding in Palestine of a state without political aspirations, a cultural center where, freed from alien pressure, the Jews may release their generous energies in creative work, a home where they may absorb all the cultural contributions of the world without losing their individuality; in short, a modern community where the Jew may be a Jew.

But the most remarkable part of Lewisohn’s book, in my judgment, is its penultimate paragraph. Here, in language worthy of a modern Isaiah, he calls upon Israel to dedicate itself to peace. “For myself,” says he, “I have still another ideal. It is a hard one and even those who have followed me so far may shrink from this ultimate task and test. I do not think that Jews should fight any more. Not on any side. Not for any cause. Their records in the World War suffice to repel the charge of cowardice. Indeed they are supremely brave. For no Jew likes to fight. Yet the Jews forced themselves to fight and many on all sides of the conflict were conspicuous for gallantry. It was pathetic; it was wrong. Jews should not consent to the horror and degradation of military servitude. What people or, if one pleases in this matter, what faith has a better right to withdraw itself from the barbarism of war? Like the admirable Quakers we should declare that war is opposed to our instincts, to our conscience, to the tradition of our prophets and sages and saints for more centuries than have passed since the birth of any of the war-like modern nations. Not more of our conscientious objectors would be shot than were killed in Flanders and in Poland. No more devastating pogroms would follow than those which desolated the Ukrainian plains, no cruder tyranny than that which now holds sway from Vilna to the Black Sea. We cannot fare worse by refusing to fight. We can shed our blood and endure our martyrdom for peace. We can be true to ourselves and to Israel. We can be like the Quakers a light to them who are in darkness. . . . For myself I hold this ideal. . . . I do not expect it to be accepted today. . . . But its day will come. . . .”

To me, this utterance of Lewisohn is worthy of the noblest of the Hebrew prophets. Zionism, anti-Zionism, colonies, Palestine—all sink into the background beside this eloquent pronouncement for peace. I do not suppose that the Jews will raise many hosannahs to Lewisohn’s project. I do not imagine that the governments of the world would regard such a stand on the part of the Jews with equanimity. It might, indeed, be the occasion for new pogroms, new accusations, new persecutions. But even at that, in the long run, as Lewisohn says, Israel could hardly fare worse. Such a stand would, indeed, be a challenge to the so-called Christian nations. It would lift the idea of Peace on Earth and Good Will to Men from rhetoric to reality. It will not, of course, be accepted today. On some tomorrow, perhaps, its time may come.

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