"Tolerance is showing kindness towards people you disagree with."
NO. That is civility - and even that is only proper within the bounds of law and custom and civilization.
Tolerance is not a Christian virtue, and is mentioned several times in the Bible as an outright SIN - vid. Jeroboam. It is the attitude of the spiritually weak, and a failure to enforce boundaries.
Mercy may be a virtue. Kindness may be a virtue. Discernment that differentiates between the significant and insignificant, or foregoes addressing a lower virtue to maintain a higher when that is truly the case, may be a virtue.
Yes, and... even outside sin, tolerance of the dyscivic or those who flout one's customs is not a virtue. This is a definitional dispute, and I respectfully contend that your definition is wrong-headed.
I agree, in part. Now that "tolerance" has become a buzzword and is well on the way to losing its original meaning, it is good to return to the older terms used in the Bible: mercy and kindness and to Jesus' parables which clarify the meaning.
Enabling destructive behavior is not a virtue and is not merciful, whether that behavior is only destructive to the person engaging in it, or destructive to the culture and society as a whole.
Anyone who claims Christians should just passively accept (tolerate) sinful, destructive behavior (or, in some cases, actively support it) doesn't understand Christianity.
"(If you have ever paused to wonder where Ayn Rand got such a bizarre idea as “It is good to be selfish,” it was because she was trying to fight back against the Weaponized Altruism that had destroyed her childhood Russia, and she failed to draw the line between “Don’t let people push you to do things that are harmful to yourself” and “Altruism itself is evil.” )"
Thank you! I haven't studied in depth but just what I had picked up from osmosis and some references, it struck me that Ayn Rand was attempting to create a morality that communism could not infect and corrupt.
Which... yeah leads to different issues, but you can at least understand that goal.
Of note about the Good Samaritan, too, is that he wasn't poor. Margaret Thatcher said, “No-one would remember the Good Samaritan if he'd only had good intentions; he had money as well.” Also his efforts were specific and effective.
Listening to many who have directly worked with the poor and the sick, the government is very bad at the effective part. Money and even equipment via these programs sent to Haiti often does not find its way to the suffering, for instance. Those who work with the homeless directly will outright tell you that the issues these people have are not low-income housing or any other big, expensive fixes often demanded in op-eds.
I think, perhaps, the best way to get actual help to people is to a) leave it to local governments b) tax people less because then they'll donate to actual, non-government charities and have time/stress levels conducive to helping out, and c) get out of the way of churches and other real charitable organizations. NGOs need a good look, too, too many being scams of one sort or another, but that's another issue needing addressed- a government or private rating body, maybe, a BBB for charities.
The reluctance to do these actual potentially effective things tells you what this "empathy" actually is. It isn't concern, it's self-aggrandizement. There's a saying I've heard in the Bay Area: "sometimes you need a beggar." It's about feeling like you're making a difference by giving the corner homeless addict some cash, not actually helping him get his life together (which is really hard and can't be forced in the end).
Often enough, it's corruption, too. It has been mandated that the rebuild of the recently burned Pacific Palisades, one of the most expensive areas to live in the US, must include low-income housing. The Palisades is not expensive for some arbitrary reason- it's expensive because the area is beautiful, the weather is great, it's near but not in this massive metropolis with many well-paying jobs and interesting things to do. Many people want to live there. So the CA government forces someone to sell their expensive land for less to meet this mandate for low-income housing...maybe to a developer buddy/husband/wife, say, those are everywhere in the CA government. There is no way low-income housing in the Palisades stays low-income for long. This sort of thing happens all the time in the name of empathy.
I think there's room for it with local governments dealing with local problems, but in many ways that's not the same thing, because a local government- which can end up as its own form of tyranny, no doubt- does at least live next to the people who are struggling to some degree. But I'm open to debate there.
I don't think Rand's view of altruism was bizarre. When Rand referred to "altruism" she meant the idea defined by Auguste Comte, and incorporated into his "religion of humanity." This was not mere good will, or kindness, or willingness to help other people; Rand shows her characters displaying all of these toward people who deserve them—see for example Dagny Taggart's final conversation with her sister-in-law Cherryl. Comte's definition of altruism was total dedicated to the welfare of others and total indifference to one's own needs and desires. Years ago I copy edited a biography of Comte that discussed his statement that Jesus was not a sound moral teacher, because he said "Love your neighbor as yourself," and a GOOD person would not (in Comte's view) feel any love for themself, let along making it the standard by which love is measured. Since then people have been watering down Comte's idea to make it more palatable (starting with Comte's pen pal John Stuart Mill)—but Rand thought this was like watering down poison, and I think she had a point.
George H. Smith offered a detailed account of this watering down in one chapter of his book Atheism, Ayn Rand, and Other Heresies. But Rand herself was explicit in saying that she meant Comte's doctrine. Looking at Comte's teachings, rather than accepting popular current usage, seems to be in order.
Comte's own words (which I hadn't read before so thanks for posting) make it clear that he either intended his "altruism" to be a weapon against the truly moral individual or didn't care if it was so used.
With all due respect, I'd realized this years ago, and saw through the dishonesty and hypocrisy, and it wasn't that I was unable to articulate it so much as I knew that if I tried, I'd simply be misinterpreted and a clip or soundbite would be used to make it seem like I was a callous monster and deserving of all the retaliation the left could unleash.
Kipling put it best: man's timid heart is bursting with the things he must not say.
For a long time, I thought that Ayn Rand had forgotten about Altruism as still being a good counterpoint to objectivism and the right to be selfish. I did not consider the fact that she may have only seen forced/weaponized altruism, and just did a poor job of explaining the difference. Something we all have failed at consistently.
This is also why taxation cannot be charitable for it is always theft. It can't be charitable for charity requires altruism and the free gift of time, wealth or resources. You also can't take money from a person and give it to another and be considered altruistic if it isn't your money. It was never your money to give, and therefore it is not your altruism. You're just laundering stolen wealth based on your own criteria.
But yes, thank you for the expression "Weaponized Altruism" and "Weaponized Empathy". What's funny is that there is an old term for "Weaponized Empathy", it's called "Pity". I keep remembering that word in The Lord of the Rings, when Gandalf tells Frodo "Pity stayed Bilbo's hand when he had the chance to slay Gollum." At least in that case, the pity came full circle and Gollum became the means to save all middle earth by taking back the precious and falls into Mt. Doom, destroying himself and the ring in his own greed.
TL:DR I like the clarification on Rand and Altruism. I like the fact that we're giving those who seek to weaponize our altruism and pity and closing the chapter on this period of stolen social valor by those who wish to pretend to be virtuous, altruistic and magnanimous with other people's property, time and money.
I think you are right about Ayn Rand. If you read Atlas Shrugged, you see real altruism show up occasionally in the hearts of her characters. It's only the fake kind they abhor.
I wonder about pity, though. I think pity is a mistake, when it is a mistake, that you make in your own heart. While Weaponized Empathy is something other people try to do to you.
There is a passage in AS where one of the minor heroes, Midas Mulligan, is asked if there is anything more evil than the man without pity. Why yes, he answers, it's the man who uses another's pity as a weapon against them.
I think many people were saying the exact same thing, but it took VP to say it in order to shift the debate. When someone throws weaponised altruism at you, parry it the same way: "I really don't care, my kindness to strangers stops where my family begins." The next step is to make people realise, my family can extend to my nation, to whom I am ethnically related.
A warning to all: the Vance Glance may cause spontaneous pregnancy. I was cloistered on a mountain top for five years and one look into that dude's eyes put me into the third trimester.
I recall years ago I was beta reading for the then-friend who was writing a story where animals had been experimented on and had become sentient. My then-friend was showing proto-woke tendencies before that word have even been invented and I'd come to notice all of her work left a bad taste in my mouth. There was an ugly undercurrent to all of it.
And the most frustrating thing was that I couldn't make her understand that, yes, I thought humanity owed an obligation to the animals we'd created in our experiments, but that obligation didn't extend to rendering ourselves extinct so they could thrive.
No matter how clearly I articulated my position, it always came back to: "So you're saying humanity should enslave or destroy the sentient animals? That's what you believe? You're morality is messed up!"
That's why it was so very, very satisfying to see Vance talk to that reporter like she was a pouting fourteen-year-old girl who wanted to get her ears pierced and be a journalist when she grows up. Maybe if her real father had done that, she'd have become a better person.
"(If you have ever paused to wonder where Ayn Rand got such a bizarre idea as “It is good to be selfish,” it was because she was trying to fight back against the Weaponized Altruism that had destroyed her childhood Russia, and she failed to draw the line between “Don’t let people push you to do things that are harmful to yourself” and “Altruism itself is evil.” )"
"and tends to encourage people to stop trusting and believing in Christ."
While turning those who are finally convinced of supernatural evil, who ask us: "So... surely, if this points to the truth of super-nature, a Good exists as well?" away.
It paints the Good Shephard as the man who hands his whole flock over to be rent by wolves, to rescue, not even the one wayward lamb, but the injured wolf cub.
Thank you for figuring out how to explain the thing. Very much appreciated.
I actually had a line about "instead of rescuing the one, pushing the 99 off the cliff," but I took it out because I thought I'd put in a different essay I've been thinking of writing.
A useful revelation several days ago. Tolerance is not a Christian virtue.
Mercy is, and it is not mercy to enable people in their evil.
Obvious enough once thought of.
I agree in part. And I really like your insight about Mercy.
I do think the tolerance is a Christian virtue....if you mean actual tolerance.
Tolerance is showing kindness towards people you disagree with.
Tolerance is not showing kindness towards people you think someone else would disagrees with.
That's not tolerance. That's indulging vice.
"Tolerance is showing kindness towards people you disagree with."
NO. That is civility - and even that is only proper within the bounds of law and custom and civilization.
Tolerance is not a Christian virtue, and is mentioned several times in the Bible as an outright SIN - vid. Jeroboam. It is the attitude of the spiritually weak, and a failure to enforce boundaries.
Mercy may be a virtue. Kindness may be a virtue. Discernment that differentiates between the significant and insignificant, or foregoes addressing a lower virtue to maintain a higher when that is truly the case, may be a virtue.
Tolerance is a sin.
Sir, may I quote what you say above in another article?
I'm appreciative of, though not surprised by, the courtesy behind your request.
If I say it in a public domain, it's public. Consider this blanket permission for any future replies as well.
Thanks!
:-)
I am working on a post about Tolerance and wanted to include your very thoughtful take.
Reading your husband all these years gave me good training.
This is a definitional dispute. Tolerance of sin is definitely a sin.
Yes, and... even outside sin, tolerance of the dyscivic or those who flout one's customs is not a virtue. This is a definitional dispute, and I respectfully contend that your definition is wrong-headed.
I agree, in part. Now that "tolerance" has become a buzzword and is well on the way to losing its original meaning, it is good to return to the older terms used in the Bible: mercy and kindness and to Jesus' parables which clarify the meaning.
Agreed.
You stole my thunder.
Enabling destructive behavior is not a virtue and is not merciful, whether that behavior is only destructive to the person engaging in it, or destructive to the culture and society as a whole.
Anyone who claims Christians should just passively accept (tolerate) sinful, destructive behavior (or, in some cases, actively support it) doesn't understand Christianity.
Exactly!
"(If you have ever paused to wonder where Ayn Rand got such a bizarre idea as “It is good to be selfish,” it was because she was trying to fight back against the Weaponized Altruism that had destroyed her childhood Russia, and she failed to draw the line between “Don’t let people push you to do things that are harmful to yourself” and “Altruism itself is evil.” )"
Thank you! I haven't studied in depth but just what I had picked up from osmosis and some references, it struck me that Ayn Rand was attempting to create a morality that communism could not infect and corrupt.
Which... yeah leads to different issues, but you can at least understand that goal.
There was one simple scene in We the Living that got the whole thing over so clearly. So, yes.
I think you're right. It just didn't occur to he that it would use a different argument the next time.
Of note about the Good Samaritan, too, is that he wasn't poor. Margaret Thatcher said, “No-one would remember the Good Samaritan if he'd only had good intentions; he had money as well.” Also his efforts were specific and effective.
Listening to many who have directly worked with the poor and the sick, the government is very bad at the effective part. Money and even equipment via these programs sent to Haiti often does not find its way to the suffering, for instance. Those who work with the homeless directly will outright tell you that the issues these people have are not low-income housing or any other big, expensive fixes often demanded in op-eds.
I think, perhaps, the best way to get actual help to people is to a) leave it to local governments b) tax people less because then they'll donate to actual, non-government charities and have time/stress levels conducive to helping out, and c) get out of the way of churches and other real charitable organizations. NGOs need a good look, too, too many being scams of one sort or another, but that's another issue needing addressed- a government or private rating body, maybe, a BBB for charities.
The reluctance to do these actual potentially effective things tells you what this "empathy" actually is. It isn't concern, it's self-aggrandizement. There's a saying I've heard in the Bay Area: "sometimes you need a beggar." It's about feeling like you're making a difference by giving the corner homeless addict some cash, not actually helping him get his life together (which is really hard and can't be forced in the end).
Often enough, it's corruption, too. It has been mandated that the rebuild of the recently burned Pacific Palisades, one of the most expensive areas to live in the US, must include low-income housing. The Palisades is not expensive for some arbitrary reason- it's expensive because the area is beautiful, the weather is great, it's near but not in this massive metropolis with many well-paying jobs and interesting things to do. Many people want to live there. So the CA government forces someone to sell their expensive land for less to meet this mandate for low-income housing...maybe to a developer buddy/husband/wife, say, those are everywhere in the CA government. There is no way low-income housing in the Palisades stays low-income for long. This sort of thing happens all the time in the name of empathy.
Absolutely agree.
Charity is something that's good for us to do. But it does us no good if the government's doing it for us.
It's almost as if the universe knows this, and only when real charity is being done is good accomplished.
I think there's room for it with local governments dealing with local problems, but in many ways that's not the same thing, because a local government- which can end up as its own form of tyranny, no doubt- does at least live next to the people who are struggling to some degree. But I'm open to debate there.
I do think there might be something governments, particularly local ones, should do...a kind of base safety net.
But above that, it doesn't seem often to reach the actual problem.
I don't think Rand's view of altruism was bizarre. When Rand referred to "altruism" she meant the idea defined by Auguste Comte, and incorporated into his "religion of humanity." This was not mere good will, or kindness, or willingness to help other people; Rand shows her characters displaying all of these toward people who deserve them—see for example Dagny Taggart's final conversation with her sister-in-law Cherryl. Comte's definition of altruism was total dedicated to the welfare of others and total indifference to one's own needs and desires. Years ago I copy edited a biography of Comte that discussed his statement that Jesus was not a sound moral teacher, because he said "Love your neighbor as yourself," and a GOOD person would not (in Comte's view) feel any love for themself, let along making it the standard by which love is measured. Since then people have been watering down Comte's idea to make it more palatable (starting with Comte's pen pal John Stuart Mill)—but Rand thought this was like watering down poison, and I think she had a point.
George H. Smith offered a detailed account of this watering down in one chapter of his book Atheism, Ayn Rand, and Other Heresies. But Rand herself was explicit in saying that she meant Comte's doctrine. Looking at Comte's teachings, rather than accepting popular current usage, seems to be in order.
Yes. Exactly.
It is only buzarre if you don't know what she is fighting.
Comte's own words (which I hadn't read before so thanks for posting) make it clear that he either intended his "altruism" to be a weapon against the truly moral individual or didn't care if it was so used.
At first, you were puzzled?
With all due respect, I'd realized this years ago, and saw through the dishonesty and hypocrisy, and it wasn't that I was unable to articulate it so much as I knew that if I tried, I'd simply be misinterpreted and a clip or soundbite would be used to make it seem like I was a callous monster and deserving of all the retaliation the left could unleash.
Kipling put it best: man's timid heart is bursting with the things he must not say.
I grew up as a liberal...it took me a sadly long time to recover from the Weaponized Empathy attack.
Nice Kipling quote.
For a long time, I thought that Ayn Rand had forgotten about Altruism as still being a good counterpoint to objectivism and the right to be selfish. I did not consider the fact that she may have only seen forced/weaponized altruism, and just did a poor job of explaining the difference. Something we all have failed at consistently.
This is also why taxation cannot be charitable for it is always theft. It can't be charitable for charity requires altruism and the free gift of time, wealth or resources. You also can't take money from a person and give it to another and be considered altruistic if it isn't your money. It was never your money to give, and therefore it is not your altruism. You're just laundering stolen wealth based on your own criteria.
But yes, thank you for the expression "Weaponized Altruism" and "Weaponized Empathy". What's funny is that there is an old term for "Weaponized Empathy", it's called "Pity". I keep remembering that word in The Lord of the Rings, when Gandalf tells Frodo "Pity stayed Bilbo's hand when he had the chance to slay Gollum." At least in that case, the pity came full circle and Gollum became the means to save all middle earth by taking back the precious and falls into Mt. Doom, destroying himself and the ring in his own greed.
TL:DR I like the clarification on Rand and Altruism. I like the fact that we're giving those who seek to weaponize our altruism and pity and closing the chapter on this period of stolen social valor by those who wish to pretend to be virtuous, altruistic and magnanimous with other people's property, time and money.
I think you are right about Ayn Rand. If you read Atlas Shrugged, you see real altruism show up occasionally in the hearts of her characters. It's only the fake kind they abhor.
I wonder about pity, though. I think pity is a mistake, when it is a mistake, that you make in your own heart. While Weaponized Empathy is something other people try to do to you.
Otherwise, agreed!
There is a passage in AS where one of the minor heroes, Midas Mulligan, is asked if there is anything more evil than the man without pity. Why yes, he answers, it's the man who uses another's pity as a weapon against them.
Yep
I think many people were saying the exact same thing, but it took VP to say it in order to shift the debate. When someone throws weaponised altruism at you, parry it the same way: "I really don't care, my kindness to strangers stops where my family begins." The next step is to make people realise, my family can extend to my nation, to whom I am ethnically related.
For a Christian version of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, read my trilogy, beginning with https://thenoahoption/
My computer says your site can't be reached...but my browser is acting up, so it might be me.
At Luttwak noted, Christianity said 'turn the other cheek' and flush toilets didn't return to Europe for 1,000 years.
Wow.
Yeah.
A warning to all: the Vance Glance may cause spontaneous pregnancy. I was cloistered on a mountain top for five years and one look into that dude's eyes put me into the third trimester.
Lol
Laughing so hard
I just about died when I read 'the Vance Glance.' Did you make that clever title up on your own???
Alas, while I coined Weaponized Empathy, I do not know who came up with the Vance Glance...but I laughed out loud when I first saw it.
I recall years ago I was beta reading for the then-friend who was writing a story where animals had been experimented on and had become sentient. My then-friend was showing proto-woke tendencies before that word have even been invented and I'd come to notice all of her work left a bad taste in my mouth. There was an ugly undercurrent to all of it.
And the most frustrating thing was that I couldn't make her understand that, yes, I thought humanity owed an obligation to the animals we'd created in our experiments, but that obligation didn't extend to rendering ourselves extinct so they could thrive.
No matter how clearly I articulated my position, it always came back to: "So you're saying humanity should enslave or destroy the sentient animals? That's what you believe? You're morality is messed up!"
Our friendship ended shortly after 2016.
That's why it was so very, very satisfying to see Vance talk to that reporter like she was a pouting fourteen-year-old girl who wanted to get her ears pierced and be a journalist when she grows up. Maybe if her real father had done that, she'd have become a better person.
Yep. ;-)
He just didn't fall for it.
"(If you have ever paused to wonder where Ayn Rand got such a bizarre idea as “It is good to be selfish,” it was because she was trying to fight back against the Weaponized Altruism that had destroyed her childhood Russia, and she failed to draw the line between “Don’t let people push you to do things that are harmful to yourself” and “Altruism itself is evil.” )"
Good point, well put.
"and tends to encourage people to stop trusting and believing in Christ."
While turning those who are finally convinced of supernatural evil, who ask us: "So... surely, if this points to the truth of super-nature, a Good exists as well?" away.
It paints the Good Shephard as the man who hands his whole flock over to be rent by wolves, to rescue, not even the one wayward lamb, but the injured wolf cub.
Thank you for figuring out how to explain the thing. Very much appreciated.
I actually had a line about "instead of rescuing the one, pushing the 99 off the cliff," but I took it out because I thought I'd put in a different essay I've been thinking of writing.
Glad it helped!
Yes to every word. Gosh, what a great essay.
Thanks!