Zones of Tolerance

My friend, Prof. J Bud from UT, has some interesting things to say about tolerance and the modern culture wars. Consider this excerpt (from J. Budziszewski, The Revenge of Conscience (1999) at 53-54):

The bottom line is that Neutrality is no more coherent in the matter of religious tolerance than it is in tolerance of any other sort. What you can tolerate pivots on your ultimate concern. Because different ultimate concerns ordain different zones of tolerance, social consensus is possible only at the points where these zones overlap. Note well: The greater the resemblance of contending concerns, the greater the overlap of their zones of tolerance. The less the resemblance of contending concerns, the less the overlap of their zones of tolerance. Should contending concerns become sufficiently unlike, their zones of tolerance no longer intersect at all. Consensus vanishes.

This, I believe, is our current trajectory. The embattled term 'culture war' is not inflammatory; it is merely inexact. And we can expect the war to grow worse. The reason for this is that our various gods ordain not only different zones of tolerance, but different norms to regulate the dispute among themselves. True tolerance is not well tolerated. For although the God of some of the disputants ordains that they love and persuade their opponents, the idols of some of the others ordain no such thing.

By the way, J Bud's book is well worth reading while sitting on the beach at Cancun or Deltona over Spring Break.