Christmas decorations at Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, New York City (Vivvi Smaak/Shutterstock.com).How to Defend Tolerance
Police try to block counter-protesters of the 'Free Speech' Rally on August 19, 2017, in Boston. (Shay Horse/NurPhoto via Getty Images)Herbert Marcuse’s Revenge
Herbert Marcuse, a man who managed somehow to reconcile revolutionary romanticism and opposition to all that exists with the cushy lifestyle of the high-profile academic, once enthused the spoiled brats of the whole Western world with his turgid prose, Teutonic pedantry, vacuous utopian abstractions, and destructive paradoxes. All that endures of his work, I suspect, is a familiar two-word phrase: repressive tolerance.
Reason, Revelation, and Laïcité Positive
The Truth of the Christian Religion, Hugo GrotiusIn the public debates over religion, politics, and morality, isn’t there some rational standard that we all can agree on? Surely there must be a set of common foundations and core first principles from which we can reason together. This is by no means a new question, of course. For viciousness of rhetoric and physical treatment of other human beings, few ages rival the early modern period. In the midst of that age’s battles, Hugo Grotius, the Dutch humanist whose writings have greatly contributed to international law, sought to determine and argue for the core principles of Christianity on which all parties could agree.
The topic was not an abstract one for Grotius. He wrote from the castle in which he was imprisoned by Dutch Calvinists, who opposed his allegiance to a party that sought toleration for dissenters from strict Calvinism.
