The Empty Core of Multiculturalism.

This is from an excellent article about tolerance as the summum bonum (#1 top deal) of society whereas it's really the most visible sign of societal breakdown, viz., its failure to know and respect its core values:

The proposed law against incitement to religious hatred is another bad example of intolerant tolerance. In order to 'champion our values of freedom and tolerance', it seems, we can no longer tolerate people having the freedom to ridicule or offend Islam or other religions. Yet surely that is one of the hard-won liberties of our genuinely tolerant, secular society.

The meaning of tolerance has mutated in recent years. First, it became a central plank of the official doctrine of multiculturalism. As examined elsewhere on spiked, the celebration of multiculturalism and 'diversity' has served as a substitute for any more coherent worldview within the British elite (see The price of multiculturalism, by Michael Fitzpatrick). That is why, when they try (and generally fail) to define what British values might mean today, politicians will invariably emphasise the importance of tolerance. In this context, it always ends up sounding as if they are saying, 'Our central value is that we tolerate the values of others'.

More recently, however, and especially since the bombings of 7 July, it has become clear that this emphasis on tolerance is more than a vacuous retreat into non-judgementalism. It is also a threat. In order to maintain the fragile status quo in our fragmented society, the authorities are telling us not to rock the boat. Their idea of tolerance thus involves suppressing opinions or ideas that might cause offence or controversy. This is the doctrine of what we might call illiberal liberalism, summed up by the trite phrase 'I can tolerate anything except intolerance'. Or as New Labour's Welsh secretary Peter Hain put it after the bombings, 'We will not tolerate people abusing Muslims' (with 'abuse' now being so widely defined as to mean anything you don't like). The message to all of us is 'Be tolerant - or else!'

The authorities are trying to use the doctrine of intolerant tolerance to keep the lid on things and hide the empty hole at the heart of the debate about British values.

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What we need instead is more genuine tolerance. . . . Let everybody freely express their views - and let us all have the freedom ruthlessly to question, criticise and interrogate everything that is said, about everything from religion to race, from suicide bombings to British values. Now more than ever we need freedom of speech for a frank and 'broad-minded' debate about the sort of society we live in and where it is heading (see Defend free speech - now more than ever, by Mick Hume). Instead, the doctrine of intolerant tolerance aims to stop anybody pointing out the embarrassing fact that the emperor of multicultural Britain has no clothes.

"The age of intolerant tolerance. The meaning of tolerance has mutated in recent years." By Mick Hume, Spiked, 8/19/05.