|
PureBytes Links
Trading Reference Links
|
Lessons for an intolerant humanity
TOM PLATE, Tribune Media Service
Monday, December 31, 2001
©2001 San Francisco Chronicle
URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?
file=/chronicle/archive/2001/12/31/ED58558.DTL
Los Angeles -- IF 2001 will be known in history for anything, it'll
probably be as the "Year of Hate."
Just consider how widespread hatred is today: of men for women,
Muslims for Hindus, Jews for Muslims, Christians for Muslims, Islamic
terrorists for fat- cat Westerners, mainland Chinese for standoffish
Taiwanese, unforgetting Koreans for unrepentant Japanese, surly
Indians for prickly Pakistanis, Palestinians for Israelis, and so on
and on.
Lay out all the hatreds of the world and you have the ugliest list on
Earth.
The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center provides the Year of Hate
with an all-too-perfect icon. What kind of people do such things to
each other? We are an intolerant humanity.
And the only way to fight intolerance is with intolerance of
intolerance. As one of the world's leading liberal intellectuals, the
late Oxford don Isaiah Berlin, once put it: "Few things have done
more harm than the belief on the part of individuals or groups (or
tribes or states or nations or churches) that he or she or they are
in sole possession of the truth; especially about how to live, what
to be and do -- that those who differ with them are not merely
mistaken, but wicked or mad; and need restraining or suppressing."
Sir Isaiah offered an enduring legacy of a road map to intellectual
and political humility. "It is a terrible and dangerous arrogance,"
he wrote in notes to a friend, just published in the New York Review
of Books, "to believe that you alone are right; have a magical eye
which sees the truth; and that others cannot be right if they
disagree."
When arrogance propels a self-appointed collection of the self-
righteous, armed and committed, into action, the effect can be
terrifying. As Berlin tells his friend: "That makes one certain that
there is one goal and one only for one's nation or church or the
whole of humanity, and that it is worth any amount of suffering
(particularly on the part of other people) if only the goal is
attained."
Usually, the chosen enemy is advertised as lacking humanity in a way
that shrinks them to a convenient, contemptible cartoon. The delivery
vehicle for hate is ignorance, willful or not. "All stereotypes,"
Berlin insisted, "are substitutes for real knowledge -- which is
never of anything so simple or permanent as a particular generalized
image of foreigners -- and are stimuli to national self-satisfaction
and disdain of other nations. It is a prop to nationalism."
The world is witnessing the rise of aggressive nationalism in many
places, even in the United States. Observed Berlin: "Nationalism --
which everyone in the 19th century thought was ebbing -- is the
strongest and most dangerous force at large today, the product of a
wound inflicted by one nation on the pride or territory of another."
The world's New Year's Resolution for 2002 ought to be to start
replacing blind hatred with eye-opening understanding and respect.
Again, Berlin, the great teacher, guides us wisely: "Knowledge opens
the windows of the mind (and soul) and makes people wiser, nicer and
more civilized; absence of it breeds irrational prejudice, hatreds,
ghastly extermination of heretics and of those who are different; if
the two great wars plus Hitler's genocide haven't taught us that, we
are incurable."
May whatever God you worship or respect bless the world by helping
spread the gospel of tolerance.
Tom Plate is a communications professor at UCLA.
©2001 San Francisco Chronicle Page A - 15
------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
Tiny Wireless Camera under $80!
Order Now! FREE VCR Commander!
Click Here - Only 1 Day Left!
http://us.click.yahoo.com/WoOlbB/7.PDAA/ySSFAA/zMEolB/TM
---------------------------------------------------------------------~->
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
realtraders-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
|