Tuesday, February 1, 2022

Rise of Intolerance from Lack of Pluralism?

James Madison understood that freedom is well-served by pluralism, particularly pluralism in religion since it is the realm of life that addresses the most basic, sacred, and fundamental of our beliefs. Until recently, there was a Judeo-Christian “background orthodoxy” that framed the value structure of society in broad terms shared by major American religions, but there was religious pluralism nonetheless which led people of whatever faith to value free speech, tolerance, and openness for the sake of self-preservation if nothing else (when everybody is a religious minority, the Nash equilibrium in game theory is to cooperate on tolerance of minorities. That is now changing with the rise of a new religious majority. As traditional religion declines, woke religion rises to fill the void and, unlike its predecessor, the woke religion is monistic and unitary rather than pluralistic and diverse. There aren’t multiple sects of Wokism with competing dogmas as there were multiple sects of Judeo-Christian religion in previous eras. Tolerance and free speech were well-served by the pluralism that prevailed throughout most of American history, but they are poorly served by the monism of our current religious era.