[Chewbacca]

Originally posted by The Hierophant: quote: Originally posted by Chewbacca: Perhaps Dr. Kings underlying ideaology and practice differed so greatly from the underlying ideaology and practice of racial intolerance that using the same word to describe his vewipoint would not be exactly fitting or fair, no matter how technically accurate it is?

Boo yah! I think you nailed it Chewie! Don't stretch the meaning of the word 'intolerance' to encompass actions that it does not entail. I think Dr King was a pretty decent guy, had some great ideas and enough charisma and willpower to convince people to do (not necessarily think) as he said. But he wasn't about tolerance, no way. He was about equality, which is very different.

To be honest, universal tolerance isnt possible anyway. You can be tolerant of individual people's actions (which can link us back to the smoking ban issue). But you can't be (in)tolerant of abstract concepts such as 'hate' or 'prejudice', because 'tolerance' itself is essentially an abstract concept, and when you go abstract, you go subjective. Everyone has their own ideas as to what abstract concepts are, whether or not you can effectively communicate your ideas through language is another thing entirely. Hence all the hissing and scratching between Yorick and yourself [img]smile.gif[/img]

My stance is that it is folly to apply tolerance to abstract social ideas. Because I don't think that 'tolerance' is necessarily a 'good' (oooooh, another abstract concept) thing. Conflict is necessary in order to create your reality. To preach the benefits of tolerance, it is necessary to create sweeping, dogmatic principles of social order, conduct, and physical law. Yet, dogma is subjective. And this subjective knowledge must be justified by personal conviction, otherwise it is merely a collection of words, sounds and visual symbols. And this personal conviction creates individual verifiability (ie: it is right/true because I personally believe it to be so')which in turn conflicts with the concept of detatched, unpersonalised universal knowledge. So tolerance ultimately, is intolerable... in a universal framework ('universal' again being a subjective abstract term).

Bad logic, yes, but I don't care, I'm tolerance-intolerant. [/QUOTE]Interesting perspective. I doesn't totally work for me though. I do agree that growth comes from conflict- how we individually define that conflict as good or bad is subjective.

I am a firm believer that at some point our abstract concepts about reality manifest in some way or another. If we (collectively and/or individually) beleive that racial/religious/social tolerance is the ideal reality, we will manifest that reality. So on one hand while abtract concepts like tolerance, good, evil, ect. are just subjective abstract ideas, they also have the potential to become tangible and objectively discernable in our social order. Anyway, my .02 on the idea of abstract vs reality. Interestingly enough, on several message boards that allow for custom user titles, I have chosen "Realistic Abstract" for mine.

I do have to disagree that Dr. King wasn't about tolerance. His actions and words were not only chosen to win equality for Black Americans, but to also win over the White population that supported segregation, either directly by advocating it or indirectly by allowing it.

His words support this, a few examples:

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every tenement and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last."

My parents would always tell me that I should not hate the white man, but that it was my duty as a Christian to love him.

This last quote is the most telling of the depth of tolerance King stood for:

"It is my hope that as the Negro plunges deeper into the quest for freedom and justice he will plunge even deeper into the philosophy of non-violence. The Negro all over the South must come to the point that he can say to his white brother: 'We will match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. We will not hate you, but we will not obey your evil laws. We will soon wear you down by pure capacity to suffer.' -Martin Luther King Jr