The Third New Commandment:

Thou Shalt Not Be Intolerant

In one sense, this New Commandment is a kind of amalgamation of the Two Great Commandments; but in another, it's quite different. The positive side of this one is "Celebrate diversity," which you can't really tease out of the meaning of either of the two Great Commandments. The reason is that this Commandment has a different base, which is the real base on which the other nine nowadays stand: the Darwinian view of evolution as a chance modification of organisms and natural selection among the results--what used to be called "the survival of the fittest."

You know the basic outlines of the theory. The genes of a given organism get modified somehow--say, by being exposed to radiation. This results in mutant organisms being born from the parents. Generally, these mutants are defective in one way or another, and can't survive, so they die out, and their defective genes die out with them. But once in a great while, one of these mutants happens to have a "defect" which actually makes it better able to survive than its parents, and so it prospers, and reproduces more than its parents, and so the new genes get multiplied. Insofar as the new organism is in competition with its ancestors, it tends to take over, and they become the "defective" versions which gradually die out. There's nothing to prevent this new, improved organism from also being modified, and so the process goes on, creating, instead of a mutant version of the species, a whole different species, which can no longer produce fertile offspring with the organisms from which it arose.

I'll critique the theory in the interlude that follows this discussion. What I want to do here, however, is to draw out its implications for this New Commandment and the Two Great Commandments that preceded it--because, even though the history of their development is longer than this one, the emergence of this mutant theory, so to speak, has modified how they are understood in the present day.

First of all, the fact that all of this happens by chance means that you can't really talk about "progress" or an "advance" in evolution, as if there were a planned, definite direction for it that it "ought" to follow. What happens happens because it happens, that's all.

And what follows from this is that you can't really call one organism "better" than another, because all the organisms that exist are by definition the best (so far) at adapting themselves to the ecological niche (the place in the biological environment) they fit into, and any organism is subject to being replaced by some chance mutant that happens to fit in still better. Thus, we can talk about the results of evolution, but not its purpose.

But with hindsight, we can see that what in fact has happened is that organisms have proliferated. It seems that there are all kinds of ways to fit into a given ecological situation, and eventually, some mutant comes along to fill up a gap, very often not replacing the other organisms but fitting in along beside them. It does its job, which is different from the others' doing their jobs; but it is no better or worse than any other organism, because there's no hierarchy of jobs to do; there's just the environment, and the job, if you will, of any organism is simply to fit in. I hasten to note that this isn't really its task; if it fits in, it fits in and multiplies; if it doesn't, it dies out. But it's as if its "job" is to fit in, for this reason.

One other thing to notice, and we'll be able to draw conclusions. The new organs or characteristics that adapt the organism to its environment better than its parents are not really advances on the earlier organism; it's just that with this new organ, the organism happens to fit into the environment better. From the point of view of the earlier version, the new organ is a defect, because it doesn't allow the new version to interact in the old way with the environment; it's just chance that the environment happens to be such that this inability becomes a vehicle by which the organism can survive and reproduce more.

Relation to the First New Commandment.

First of all, let's see how this affects the understanding of the First Great Commandment: Thou shalt make no claim to absolute truth. Human beings differ from other mammals mainly in the fact that humans can reason and converse with each other, and the other animals can't. When other animals communicate with each other, the motions or sounds of one animal create an effect in the instinct of the other animal, causing behavior. But "conversational behavior" has never been observed except in humans--the kind where one of us says something and the other listens, and then the other says something and the first listens, and this goes back and forth, with each gaining information from the other and passing information back to the other. With humans, what the information is matters, irrespective of what you can do with it; with other animals, everything is oriented toward what they do with the input they get. There are ambiguities and complications here, of course, but in outline that's a main difference between humans and other animals, and it's due to the fact that we have reason or thought, which apparently the other animals don't have.

In any case, the ability to do this (which, of course, I am now engaged in with you) has clearly made the human animal extremely capable of fitting into all kinds of diverse ecologies, and in fact, capable of fitting the environment to himself in a way that the other animals give only the barest rudiments of doing. So the human species is exceedingly adaptable; and in being so, it has become the dominant species all over the planet. In fact, one of the interesting facets of humans is that they don't seem adapted by nature to any one ecology; they can adapt themselves to anything, even bizarre places like outer space.

But not even this, from an evolutionary standpoint, means that reason is some "superior power" that human beings were "gifted" with by a supernatural being who had their development in mind, and who commanded them to "have dominion over the birds of the air, the fish of the sea," and all the rest of it. It's just a quirk that happened in the brain of some primate, and that quirk just happened to make the offspring incredibly efficient at fitting in anywhere, and so in reproducing their own kind.

Therefore, reason has no real relation to "the facts" or "truth." It's just a reproduction-enhancer. Reason did not, on this theory, evolve to give humans access to the reality of what was around them; there was no purpose for it at all. It just happened. And it just happens to make them more efficient at reproduction than other organisms; but not even that is its purpose; it has no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. Things just happen.

So mankind has nothing to brag about because we have reason and animals don't. We're efficient in adapting to our various environments, true; but the other organisms are supremely efficient in adapting to the conditions they find themselves in as well. We think that because we have reason we're special and unique, but there's nothing really special about us; each organism is special and unique in its own way, because of the organs that it happens to have developed which happen to fit it into its own proper place in the environment.

In other words, evolution confirms what Immanuel Kant thought about reason and truth. Reason happens to be the kind of thing that tricks people into believing that it can get at the "real true reality," but this is a sham and a delusion. As Kant said in his Critique of Pure Reason, when reason tries to do this, it gets itself all mixed up in contradictions, and can "prove" that the same thing is both true and false. Well, surprise, surprise! All reason is is a chance quirk that allows us to reproduce and fit into diverse environments; to say that it has a handle on what's really going on "out there" is to give it a use that it wasn't fitted for in the first place.

Hence, the First Great Commandment. Reason can't get us to the absolute truth; it wasn't made for that; in fact, it wasn't made "for" anything; it just is, and it just happens that with it we fit into this world.

--But wait just a minute, now. Isn't the theory itself a reasoned account of what happened: the "real story" about how organisms got the way they are? But if it concludes that reason can't get at what the "real story" is, how can it claim to be the "real story"?

We seem to have just uncovered a new version of Derrida's deconstruction, which apparently applies to everything except itself. If the theory I just outlined is true, then it is worthless as a theory, because it concludes that no theory is worth anything, since every theory is just a misuse of a mechanism that adapts the organism to its environment, no more.

And also, remember what we said in the discussion on the First Great Commandment: we know that in fact we can get at absolute truth (at least in one case, that there is something). So even if reason evolved, you can't conclude that it's a mere adventitious means toward making reproduction more efficient; somehow or other, it does enable us to know what is going on "out there."

But let's leave this for the moment, and take the evolutionist where he is. His assumption is that evolution is just chance and has no purpose, and so any "progress" or "advance" we see is just something we impose on a set of random operations. From this assumption, as I said, it follows that all organisms are on an equal footing; they're all "just there," fitting nicely into the place they happen to be adapted for.

This also applies to the diversity of races and cultures among us humans, of course. No one race or culture is "superior" to another; we're each of us just ways in which we have adapted ourselves to the particular environment we happen to be in. For instance, black people, living near the equator, have a lot of melanin in their skin, which protects them from sun; and they have kinky hair, which forms an insulation against heat. White people's hair doesn't insulate them so well from heat (though it's better at cold), and they don't get the sunlight so directly, and so they've bleached so as to be more able to synthesize vitamin D from the meager sunlight that falls on them. Equatorial people live in jungles, where there are all kinds of things for food growing year-round, and where the only shelter they really need is shade; and so their culture has adapted itself to this. People in colder climates have had to develop warm clothing and housing, and places to store food for the winter, and so on. There's no way of saying that one of these lifestyles is better or superior to the other; it depends on the environment you happen to be in.

Thus, racial differences and cultural differences are simply ways of adapting the people to their environment, and imply no superiority or inferiority either of the bodily characteristics they have, or of the behavior they exhibit. And since the culture's behavior rests on what that culture considers as "the facts" (that is, the way it uses reason to adapt itself to its surroundings), then one culture's grasp of "the facts" is going to be quite different from what another culture sees as "the facts." And from this you can conclude that there's no special "set of facts" that's privileged and allows those possessing it to say that some other culture (which sees things differently) is just plain wrong.

But of course, that is exactly what western culture holds: That there are things that are true, and are true for everyone, that can be known objectively; and anyone who disagrees with them is mistaken at best and malicious and subversive at worst. From an evolutionary point of view, this is simple nonsense, and the (perhaps natural) arrogance of a culture to assert itself as superior simply because it happens to be adapted to its own conditions in a very efficient way.

--But wait a minute again. What do you mean, "simple nonsense"? Aren't you saying that it's objectively true, for all cultures that what one culture thinks is "the truth" applies only to that culture and doesn't apply to all cultures? Where did you get this "universal truth" that "truth is culturally determined" except by making a prediction from the theory of chance evolution? But that means that the theory of chance evolution predicts something which by your own admission is patently false, because it generates a "truth" which is not culturally determined: that all truth is culturally determined.

But you can see why people who haven't spotted this inconsistency would hold (a) that no culture is superior to any other, and (b) that each culture's truth is true only for that culture, and there is no "objective" truth that applies to everyone irrespective of culture.

The evolutionary basis of the Second New Commandment.

So let's leave the inconsistency aside and go back to where the evolutionist is, and continue with what follows if you accept a chance-evolution view of things. What applies to truth, of course, applies a fortiori to conduct. A culture's behavior is precisely its way of adapting itself to the conditions it finds itself in.

And this is part of the basis of the Second Great Commandment, not to force one's moral standards on anyone else. "Moral standards" is taken on this view to mean "cultural adaptation to the environment," and obviously there is no privileged adaptation to the environment which "ought" to apply to all peoples in all environments.

--I'm sorry; I find I can't help reminding you here once again that this view of morality also predicts its own contradiction, the moral imperative not to export your culture's morals--which applies to all cultures. So once again, if the theory leads to this conclusion, it refutes itself.

But let's continue. Serious things happen biologically when an organism adapted for one environment is moved to a different one. Ordinarily, it will be maladapted and die out. But occasionally, it will be so well adapted to its new location that it will eat up everything in sight, and disrupt the ecology drastically. Thus, the kudzu plant, once introduced into the American South from the orient, doesn't have the predators that kept it in check, and it's climbing over the trees and bushes there, killing them all at an alarming rate.

And we see biological effects like this among humans too. Move black people into temperate climates, and they'll get sick unless they take artificial vitamin D supplements; move whites into the tropics and they need sunblock to survive.

Extrapolating from this, it follows that for one culture (which has, by trial and error, adapted itself to its environment) to impose its cultural norms on another culture is for it to try to make the other culture do maladaptive things, which is positively detrimental to the other culture. So it ought not to be done.

--Another reminder. Sure, among the Mayans, killing off the virgins stabilized the population so that there could be calendars and fancy buildings and all the rest; but the population itself didn't want this; only those in control did. So it doesn't follow that the "adaptive" route which leads to a stable population in the environment is what ought to be done. In our country, slavery adapted the South to its cotton-growing lifestyle; and therefore it was okay?

What I'm saying is that using evolutionary biology as the criterion for moral goodness or badness isn't automatically the right way to go. The survival of the fittest supposes that the unfit are worthless and expendable; and do we really want to say that? If so, why?

People like Edward O. Wilson in Consilience, of course, have an answer. They pick out the traits they like, claim that biology has selected for those traits, and then say that we should do these things to follow our nature as evolutionarily selected for. They find traits they don't like--for instance, the Nazis' attempt to purify the gene pool by getting rid of what they considered misfits (like cripples, the blind, homosexuals, and Jews), which is an explicit imitation of what natural selection does--and they either ignore this logical consequence of their theory, or say, "Well, you see, evolution didn't really select for that kind of behavior, so we ought not to do it."

Do I have to point out explicitly that that's circular reasoning?

The evolutionist would, of course, answer, "Not really, because that's what we are, and it's all that we are. To say that we have reason and therefore each individual has a special dignity that makes him inviolate is simple mystical nonsense. Reason is just an accident that happened to certain mammals; but natural selection of course applies to humans as much as it does to anything else." It's just that they have this special insight into what natural selection is really trying to do, based apparently on some mystical insight into genetics.

But tabling again whether this is correct or not, you can now see why a good Darwinist would have to hold the Second Great Commandment as well as the first. There are no universal moral standards, because all environments are different and special, and there is no single way in which humans can or ought to adapt themselves to their situations.

Therefore, all lifestyles are equal, and equally to be "celebrated." The maladaptive ones don't have to be consciously stamped out; they'll die by natural selection. But any one that has been around for a good long time is as good as any other.

The Third New Commandment.

Putting both of these lines of reasoning together, we come up with the Third New Commandment: Thou shalt not be intolerant. True, you will necessarily think of your own way of doing things as "better," and your truth as "truer," because it is better (and hence truer) for you in your circumstances; but the other's circumstances make his lifestyle better for him, and who are you to say that he should adopt your customs?

For someone who hasn't thought the matter through, the argument sounds quite convincing; it seems to explain the differences in cultural outlooks very neatly, as long as you don't push it too hard--and it even fits into the traditionalists' view that tolerance is a good thing. But this is a special kind of tolerance, as we'll see.

But in any case, the virtue of today is tolerance. (Haven't you noticed?) This virtue doesn't mean that you have to agree with someone who holds a different position from the one you have; simply that you have to accept that other position as "no better than" yours. So the neat thing about this sense of tolerance as a virtue is that it doesn't mean you have to give up what you cherish as true or as moral; it's just that you have no right to expect the other person to give up his view. Who are you to impose your ideas or standards on someone else?

--But once again there's a fly in the ointment. If tolerance is the virtue of all virtues, then it follows that bigotry or prejudice is the vice of all vices--and therefore intolerance and bigotry must not be tolerated. Those who proclaim themselves as tolerant and open to all points of view are violently intolerant toward the bigoted and closed-minded; they want to make sure that their view is suppressed, because--well, because it's intolerant, and tries to suppress opposing views. Exactly.

And you can't escape the logic of this. If there is no privileged point of view or privileged standard of conduct, then relativism in truth and morals is automatically privileged, and any other view or moral standard must not be tolerated. How could you tolerate bigotry if you held that bigotry was evil? Even if you say that bigotry is evil only for you, how can you say to someone else, "Sure, be a bigoted as you want and stamp out everything you disagree with; it's perfectly okay with me, because I'm tolerant of your position."? That might be a logically possible position, but it's not one that anyone can hold in practice.

Is it any wonder that contemporary society is all mixed up?

And did you notice all the people who quoted the Bible during the whole impeachment process? One particular passage in the Bible: "Judge not lest ye be judged." (New Moralists, as we'll see, can live quite comfortably with a certain--very selective--view of Christianity.) It was okay to deplore the conduct Bill Clinton engaged in in the abstract or for yourself, but who were you to hold him to your standards--and actually want him punished! You should be jailed yourself for wanting that! Remember how many of these "tolerant" people wanted bad things to happen to the "intolerant" Kenneth Starr? And said so, on national television, and no one batted an eye. But say that Clinton should be impeached and removed from office! How dare you!

But actually, the whole thing is a crock. If you look ahead at the other New Commandments, you will find how intolerant all these "tolerant" New Moralists are toward what violates their moral code. Do you ever hear of people preaching "tolerance" toward those who want to see the Pope's sexual moral standards once again the norm for our culture, or toward those who think it's perfectly all right to have large families, or those who pollute the environment or destroy a species whose sole habitat happens to be on their private property, or who smoke or do any of the other things the New Morality finds evil? Of course not.

"Tolerance" in the New Morality, whether the New Moralists realize it or not, means that (a) they and everyone else are expected to be tolerant of "differing lifestyles" (including ones like Clinton's), and (b) those who disagree with them must be tolerant of their position, but (c) they are exempt from tolerating what they consider evil--because, as I said earlier, they don't define it as "evil," but as "maladaptive," or "ignorant," or in general, "not with it." And, insofar as the practice or view is maladaptive, of course, then natural selection will destroy it--it's just that the New Moralists, like the old Marxists, want to help out and hurry along the inevitable.

And of course, since it looks as if there's a scientific base for what the New Moralists hold, then they don't consider what they're doing bigoted; they're not being intolerant, they're just being sensible. Sure.

The hatred of "eurocentrism."

This interpretation of "tolerance" as "every culture is equal to every other" explains the war against western culture, or what is now called "eurocentrism." It is regarded as a kind of oppressive force which is trying to mold people's minds all over the world into lock-step agreement with this particular notion of "the truth," when the real truth is that there are many versions of the truth, one for each culture. Eurocentrism to the New Morality is intolerance writ large.

But the ironic thing, of course, is that western culture is in one sense exactly what these people are advocating without realizing it. Granted, the scientific aspect of it comes from the ancient Greeks (who were, of course, Europeans)--and in fact from Aristotle, who invented the science of logic, the organic theory of living bodies, classification of living things by genus and species, the notions of matter and energy, the empirical method of collecting data and drawing conclusions from what was observed, and so on.

But even here, the Greeks had no problem borrowing outside concepts. For instance, the time and the calendar use a number system whose base, instead of 10, is 12, which is from Babylon; nor did they shrink from incorporating into their mathematics the discoveries in geometry that came from the Egyptians--and there wasn't any attempt to deny that it came from them either. They weren't interested in claiming, "We thought of it first"; they just cared whether it was true or not. And Plato's view, and certainly Plotinus's a couple centuries later, is heavily influenced by Hindu thought about what the "pure" life consisted in, and what happened after death. So what is "eurocentric" about even this most European aspect of western culture?

Later on, of course, when the Arabs invented zero, the Arabic number system was taken into "eurocentric" culture, because it was a much more efficient way to write numbers than using letters (like the Greeks) or those Xs and Vs of the Romans. And, when Aristotle's explanation of how the planets appeared to move against the background of the stars was shown to be inferior to the Ptolmaic view, the latter simply supplanted the Aristotelian one, even though it was, like the number system, Arabic in origin.

But the major influence that makes western culture what it is came from Jerusalem, not Greece. The Greeks, after all, were polytheists; even Aristotle was; and the universe was regarded as either eternally in a steady state, such that before each chicken there was an egg, and before each egg there was a chicken, or in a cyclic condition such that the present state of the universe had happened over and over again at the proper point in the eternal recurrence of things (a view Babylonian in origin, not European). The notion that there was a single God who "started everything off" at the beginning, before which there was no universe, and who had a plan and was directing things toward an end, and who had a definite set of things that had to be done, came from the Jews, hardly what you would call European.

It was Christianity, really, which transformed the world of Greece and Rome into what is now western culture; but it actually did so some four hundred years after Jesus died, by means of the greatest thinker of that first millennium, who, incidentally, happened to come from Africa (and no "eurocentrist" ever tried to deny this): St. Augustine. He showed how Christianity was compatible with what was known from Greek thought; and his ontogeny, if you will, recapitulated in a way the cultural phylogeny of the time, starting as a pagan who was following something very like our New Morality, and going through all the theories that justified it and finding them wanting, and finally realizing that only Christianity could make sense out of life. He was also the first evolutionist, saying that the universe was developing rather than staying the same, with "seeds of reason" imparted long ago germinating at their proper time. He got this evolutionary view of things, interestingly enough, from his interpretation of the Bible.

And then in the Middle Ages (which by the way was full of intellectual ferment, and was anything but "dark"), when Aristotle's scientific studies had been lost because of the brilliant synthesis of Platonism with Christianity that Augustine made, the Arabs preserved these pagan writings and studied and developed them; and when they conquered Europe, Aristotle's wisdom dropped like a bomb into Christianity, apparently refuting scientifically the notion of one God, the immortal human soul, and much of the rest that Christianity thought of as factually true.

It was St. Thomas Aquinas who did for this new infusion of science what St. Augustine had done for Neoplatonism; he showed how Aristotle's empirically based theories were in fact compatible with Christianity; and so once again western thought modified itself through adoption of lore preserved by Arabs.

And, of course, with the discovery of China and the New World western culture modified itself with new learning, new art, new foodstuffs, new forms of recreation (among them smoking), and so on.

The point, of course, is that western culture is world culture. The western world wasn't interested in keeping its culture intact and imposing it on others; it was interested in anything it could find that was useful and true, and adopting it. There's almost no aspect of western culture that can't trace its origins to some place outside Europe.

Then why is it so hated? "Hey, hey, ho, ho, western culture's gotta go!" Because it supposes that there is something true irrespective of your culture, there is a right and wrong that don't depend on your culture, there are works of art that "work" no matter what your culture is, and others that are bad irrespective of your culture. And if you disagree with the western idea, then it wants you to state your case, and if it finds you correct, it adopts your view, your art, your moral stance; and if it finds that you contradict yourself or the known facts, it rejects your position, however passionately you believe in it.

Let me take as an example the alleged "sexist bias" of western culture. What about Mary Ann Cross, who wrote things like Adam Bede dealing with the woman's tragedy of getting pregnant by the noble and killing her child? Yeah, but she wrote under a man's name, George Eliot. Well then, what about Jane Austen? But look at the kind of things she wrote about: romances and subordinating yourself to the domineering male, for heaven's sake!

You can't win. The real problem is that if you read Adam Bede, whether you're a man or a woman, you identify with the girl even in her barbarism; when you read Pride and Prejudice, you look at the characters and you say, "There but for the grace of God go I." It's because you recognize yourself in these characters that they "grab" you, no matter how foreign their culture may be to yours; and that's why they're in the canon. You see the sameness in the difference, and the difference in the last analysis makes no difference.

This is what the multiculturalists can't stand. This is why western culture must go. Its claim is that there is a universal bond in humanity, and the cultural differences are superficial--interesting, but not of ultimate significance. What the followers of this Third New Commandment, however, think, is that this view is evil and must be "selected away from" (a.k.a destroyed). Different cultures, as evolution shows, are irreducibly different, and so "It's a black thing; you wouldn't understand," is the real truth, which must prevail. If you come back with "It's a human thing; I do understand," you're a fool at best and a liar and hegemonic pig at worst. You're taking the white male as the standard and expecting us to conform to it. But that's only your truth, Honkie.

And underneath this, I think generally at the subconscious level, is the knowledge that evolution implies speciation, and species are unique within themselves and don't interact. Hence, a given cultural group has its own identity, its own special truth, and its own special morals, which must be recognized by other groups, but definitely not assimilated.

But which is right? Are cultures irreducibly different, or does our common humanity shine through them? I have, by accident, been a laboratory for the study of this question. I married an Argentine (like me, a philosophy professor), who considers herself Argentine still, though she has lived in the States almost forty years now; and so I know what it is like to be on most intimate terms with someone from a vastly different culture (for instance, she was shocked the first time she saw me go downtown without a suit and tie). In the course of our life together, we have had living in our house and eating at our table for as long as a year at a stretch at different times, a Catalan from Barcelona, a girl from Madrid, one from Colombia, a student from Japan, a woman from Viet Nam, one from Indonesia, and a devout Muslim plucked right out of Kabul in Afghanistan, whose mother never left the house.

To say there were no cultural differences is silly. We found to our surprise that the Vietnamese thought she should never say "No" to an elder, which caused problems when, for instance, we were teaching her how to use our washing machine ("Do you understand, Trinh?" "Yas." "Are you sure?" "Yas."--and you can imagine what happened, since she didn't have a clue), or when we asked the Afghan how many people she had invited to a party at our house and she couldn't tell us, because Muslims can't say, "I'll be there" or they'll be tempting Allah.

But in the last analysis, what we all found is that these things didn't matter, because at the core we were the same--which is why, as I said, Muslim literature resonates with us, and why we stand in awe at Japanese paintings and African art, and all the rest of it.

My best friend at Thomas More College is a Hindu professor of physics, Sudhir Sen. His Hinduism is of interest to me, as is his black skin and light palms, his slight build, his health problems, and his knowledge of physics. But they are of interest because they are characteristics of him, and he is the one I care about. When religion comes up naturally, neither of us is reticent to say what he believes, and although I think he is profoundly mistaken (as he thinks I am), I don't see it as my place to convince him that I'm right; but I tell him what I believe as he asks me questions--since I presume that my religion is of interest to him just as what he believes is of interest to me in my knowing him better.

Group paranoia and moral equivalence.

That is the kind of thing that I would call "tolerance." But this sort of tolerance is actually anathema to the New Moralists, because it does not imply that all truths or all moral codes or cultural customs are on the same footing. To say that a black person's blackness simply makes no difference to me, or that a Jew's Jewishness is irrelevant to my relationship with him (except in the sense that Sudhir's Hinduism or blackness is of, as it were, academic interest as I mentioned above) is shocking to a New Moralist.

It is important to understand this. For the New Moralist, I must relate to the black person--excuse me, the "African American," because that is the euphemism of the moment--as if I were a member of the hegemonic, oppressor group and he were a victim of our horrible behavior which must be atoned for by every white person. The fact that neither I nor my ancestors had anything to do with his enslavement (since my ancestors were Canadian), and that whites from the North in fact fought and died to free the slaves--many of whom were bought in Africa from their black Muslim masters--is irrelevant. I belong to the oppressor group, which therefore must atone.

The reason for this is that, in order to establish themselves as a distinct "social species," as it were, blacks must define themselves as distinct from whites in a significant way. But since they can't (and don't want to) define themselves as different in ability or role, which might imply inferiority, they define themselves in terms of slavery. Thus, the truth for the New Moralist black person has to be heavily colored by the slavery-experience as now imagined (since no one living has actually experienced it), which is to say that everything has to be looked at through the lens of being oppressed. Even when there is no evidence for it, "hidden racism" is trotted out at every blow from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. And what is behind this is that otherwise, black people don't have a cultural identity as black; all they've got is black skin, irrelevant customs and an accent that is all too ephemeral. Thus, they have to claim that no white person can hope to understand "the black experience"; you have to be black to do so.

But the problem with this is that it is a kind of social paranoia, because when you once accept it, then anything, even the most benign of all statements or actions, simply reinforces it as a scheming lie to take you off guard. And the least sign of anything pejorative directed at you is immediately transmogrified into an inadvertent admission of "the real truth," which is implacable hatred for your race.

Let me just remark that this is far, far too high a price to pay for establishing cultural identity. But it's being done now all over the place.

For instance, the Jews who subscribe to the New Morality no longer define themselves by their special relation to God, but by the Holocaust. This is why they became outraged at the canonization of Edith Stein, a Jewish Christian, or at a cross outside Auschwitz which commemorates all the Christian Poles (and there were many) who were also gassed at the site. To say that these Gentiles experienced what the Jews experienced is the equivalent of blasphemy, because it deprives the Jews of the only specialness they have left. They are victims in a unique way which can only be understood by a Jew.

Women, of course, have leaped on the bandwagon, in an effort to establish their equality as a group to men. They find all kinds of sinister evidence of oppression in the use of the generic personal pronoun, which happens to be the same as the masculine one, as well as the generic term "man" when used in the German sense of "Mensch" as opposed to the male sense of "Mann."

When women say that in the "canon of dead white males" women's "issues" are not raised, they become indignant if a person mentions Euripides' Medea or Dickens's Dombey and Son, because these were written by men, who couldn't possibly understand what a woman goes through.

--And the fascinating result of this is a uniculturalism of "oppression studies." Writers of other cultures must be read, but only if they express the struggle against western, white, male, homophobic, fill-in-the-blank oppression. You don't read the Baghavad Gita or Martín Fierro or Anna Karenina or the Analects, still less the Republic or Cicero's orations, or the Golden Ass, and for God's sake stay away from the Bible! Only writers from other cultures who express a basically Marxist view of a class- (read: group-) struggling world are let into this "multicultural" stuff that's taught; because all the rest have the taint of universality about them.

And it is this irreducibility of truth and morals and its confinement to only one culture that accounts for the moral equivalence among the most grossly non-equivalent things. For instance, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee Henry Hyde's long-ago private affair, which he acknowledged and repented, was trotted out as a reason why he should not "judge" Bill Clinton, who seduced (didn't he?) a subordinate, committed perjury about it, suborned perjury, obstructed justice, and all the rest. (To those of you New Moralists who say "Allegedly! Allegedly!" I answer, "We're not in a lawcourt, and so we don't have to abandon common sense. You heard the report and the testimony.")

Similarly, the fact that Mark Fuhrman once said "nigger" (I'm sorry; I will not yield to the New Morality and substitute "the N-word" when I'm quoting. I don't use it, but I don't subscribe to the New Morality either.) meant that O.J. Simpson had to be acquitted of his butchery, because his accuser was "just as guilty." You can understand this only on the grounds that in "black truth" the use of the N-word (by a white) is a slip revealing the fact that white people are really plotting to exterminate the whole black race--which is worse than somebody cutting up somebody else in a jealous rage.

I remember so vividly the 1998 elections, in which the black people responded to Democrat commercials, of which this (I kid you not) is an example, "(Sound of something blowing up) Get out and vote, or another black church explodes! (Sound of fire) Get out and vote, or another cross is burned in someone's front yard! Get out and vote, or the Republicans will take away your childrens' lunches and your health care!" As a Republican and a conservative because I care about the poor and blacks I am outraged beyond limit by this lie; but the real tragedy is how well it worked, because of black group-paranoia.

The same thing happened during the cold war, when we constantly heard that the Soviet Union was as afraid of our imperialism as we were of their expansionism, and after all, we had McCarthy--which, of course, balanced off the Gulag and Stalin's starvation of a million Georgians. But that was because "Soviet truth" is irreducibly different from "capitalist truth," and neither can even approach understanding the other.

--But that, of course, means that the objective, real truth is that truth is culturally conditioned; and if you disagree with that, then you're a Right Wing Extremist, who must be stamped out. That's the New Morality's idea of tolerance.

But real tolerance--the only one that isn't intolerance in sheep's clothing--is not an acceptance of what is manifestly false (as if it were "true for the other guy") just because someone else happens (in his ignorance) to think that it's true, or a winking at what is manifestly evil as if it were okay just because someone else has a warped conscience. Tolerance might leave the person in his ignorance if he's adamant, but it will try to enlighten him if he is capable of being informed. Tolerance wants to be corrected if it doesn't really understand, and it recognizes that it might not understand (except in cases like "There is something"). But it doesn't make its own humility a fetish.

Put it this way: An open mind is like an open house; it's fine unless you have something valuable inside. Then you have to lock the door. --Only don't throw away the key.