We Are Borg, Mentats, Empaths ...
And now we return to the idea of tolerance, which is the central precept of all free association, and a product of frontier societies. Before somebody says, "Oh, you mean like Salem, Massachusetts, with the witch trials?", let me just point out that such extreme expressions of intolerance were moderated and eventually extinguished by the ability of members to abandon their communities. That is, in fact, the motivation for tolerance: to keep members present. It is the price of fidelity. But, in an enclosed society, this balance of tolerance and fidelity does not exist.
In an essay presented to the Outlook Club of Berkeley, California in 1989, J. Peter Vajk (see "Vajk's Dilemma" for other thoughts by Vajk) suggests that, in the absence of a frontier, the idea of tolerance may contain the seeds of its own destruction. "Memetics: The Nascent Science of Ideas and their Transmission" is worth a close look in its own right. It is an elaboration of an concept advanced by writer-zoologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, namely that the brain is physically altered by the presence of ideas, or "memes", coined by analogy to the term "gene".
Vajk writes, "The meme of tolerance evolved in America under conditions of partial isolation ... Thus the tolerance meme was not exposed to competitive pressures in the global ideosphere until the middle of this century."
To adopt a biological analogy from Dawkins and Vajk, anti-tolerance memes act like retroviruses, which coopt the genes of the host to replicate themselves. Anti-tolerance regimes seize control of the machinery for transmitting and replicating memes: radio, television, the press, the Internet, in the name of safety or political correctness or "ethnic diversity" (whatever that is), or simply to avoid controversy. In the current American mutation of the tolerance meme, anti-tolerance constructs and Western Democracy are held to be morally equivalent. Because it must embrace its enemies, the tolerance meme may be self-extinguishing. For that reason and because the world has traditionally looked to the United States for guidance in these matters, frontier-building should be the organizing principle of American life, subordinate to absolutely nothing.
If it remains without a frontier, the world will become, perhaps is already approaching, a place where holding a divergent point of view is punishable, where you can't run and you can't hide, where there is no premium paid for tolerance, no need to keep the folks
Latest Articles