Tolerating the Intolerant

Free-market fanatics, racist bullies, and techno-elites all see nature as a cruel competition

Does everyone get to be on Team Human? How do we practice social inclusion with those who don’t want to be included?

If we can summon enough of our own humanity to really listen, we’ll find that most of our counterparts are not truly violent or irredeemably mean-spirited. Understanding their fears and then working together toward our common goals is far more constructive than pretending that entire populations have no humanity at all. This means venturing as far back into their emotional logic as it takes to find something we can identify with — the valid feelings they hold, before they are transformed into their more destructive expressions.

The enemies of a tolerant, inclusive culture don’t see their position as inhumane or racist. They see the history of the world as a competition for dominance, and their own race and civilization as the rightful, if unrecognized, winner. What some of us understand as the aggressive, colonial expansion of white European nations, they see as the growth and spread of civilization itself. Might makes right. So, in their view, those of us who are attempting to promote the cultures, values, and languages of defeated peoples are retrieving failed approaches, teaching them to our kids, and weakening our society. These cultures don’t deserve to get taught, they feel, because they lost.

The Silicon Valley billionaire with an apocalypse bunker in New Zealand uses a similar logic to justify creating the very conditions that are leading to a world where such a plan B should be required. The smartest, wealthiest technologist gets to survive because he won. It’s a hyperbolic, digitally amplified, zero-sum version of the same exclusion.

So how do we engage with such a perspective? First, by acknowledging the vulnerability for which it is attempting to compensate. Free-market fanatics, racist bullies, and techno-elites all see nature as a cruel competition. A jungle. For all of nature’s cooperative networks, there are just as many species hunting and eating others. Letting down one’s guard means being vulnerable to attack.

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