Human Respect in a Barbaric Age
Donna Steichen on the Sin of Tolerance
What killed our capacity for resistance? Most mainstream American Christians seem too apathetic today to denounce outrage, degradation, or even sacrilege. Little outcry was heard against the predawn capture of six-year-old Elián González by an armed SWAT team on Holy Saturday, the countless presidential scandals, or the desecration of Montreal’s cathedral on International Women’s Day.
Consider the public silence about the ominous April 25th arrest, outside the Supreme Court building, of 22 pro-life demonstrators whose approved posters were outlawed overnight by an ordinance composed especially for the occasion. Note the absence of raised voices when actor Michael Caine was awarded an Oscar for playing a complaisant abortionist as a hero in the blatant propaganda film, Cider House Rules.
Doesn’t anyone care? Faced with such passivity, one marvels that there was once an American Revolution.
What has made us so inordinately tolerant?
The Explanations
One explanation might be that our sources of news—television, radio, or print—tend also to be our primary sources of entertainment. We may have come to view both news and entertainment from the same emotional distance, as if they were all stories invented for our diversion. Unless we deny the reality of what we see, how can we continue to watch channels like CNN, where the same alternating glimpses of wars and murders and human triviality are repeated throughout the day?
Another credible explanation is our sense of helplessness. We can do nothing to prevent the horrors reported, since they have already occurred, a fact that does not escape those who plan such acts. Why get outraged when you can’t do anything about it?
Are contemporary citizens too submissive to defend their liberties? Seeing that the course of events is out of our hands, we can most easily tolerate our political impotence by putting it out of our minds and focusing on matters that touch our lives more immediately. Leaders of activist social movements know that most people so detest confrontation that they can only be stung into public action—briefly—by intense organizing efforts that appeal to their private interests.
There are those, too, who think our society is so good that it can tolerate a little evil. A virtuous civilization is strong enough to endure the transitory assaults of the new barbarians without lasting harm, they say. After all, Western civilization has survived for thousands of years; it will not be undone by abortion, or a corrupt political regime. But they don’t know how rare a feat it is to build a free and noble civilization, or how costly it is, or how fragile.
All these encourage our indifference, but I think it is chiefly human respect that has made cowards of us all.
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