Dissent and Coerced Consensus

I wanted to write a little bit today about dissent.  For roughly the past 40 years, we have lived in an era where dissent has not been well tolerated.  Not tolerated, ironically, by those who claim to have a monopoly on tolerance.  

Over that time period it has become increasingly difficult to be publically (or even in some ways privately) supportive of the right to life, a traditional definition of marriage, the traditional nuclear family, gun ownership, and most of all religion.  Publically professing your belief in God in the wrong circles can be hazardous to your relationships or career.  Who can forget Ted Turner on Ash Wednesday famously shouting through the halls of CNN, “What are you all a bunch of Jesus freaks?” as he was greeted by employees with ashes on their foreheads.

The reality is, as you look at the positions you cannot comfortably take a public stance on, it is very clear the left wing movement in this country struggles with dissent.  They spent decades trying to get Rush Limbaugh taken off the air even though he was for many years a lonely conservative voice in a largely liberal media.  More recently they have tried to bully Chick-Fil-A, a privately held family company, into changing its stance on gay marriage.  The company did not hold a position, companies are legal entities, but the family apparently was not to share publically its opinions lest people not find it to be a purveyor of tasty chicken sandwiches.  

Throughout history, there are numerous groups that have been unwilling to tolerate dissent.  The KKK did not hold public debates on race related topics, they chose to put on sheets and burn crosses, one could argue they did not tolerate dissent well.

Nazis, and really all flavors of fascist regimes did not tolerate dissent.  The American South went to war only after they realized they couldn’t win the argument.  The Church of Scientology, or the Mormon Church do not handle dissent well.  Your options are to be all in or to leave, no in between.  If you continue to question (I deliberately say merely question) you will be asked to leave.  

The unwillingness to tolerate dissenting opinions is very squarely a human failing.  In the Bible, we have numerous examples of Jesus confronting his critics even up until his crucifixion.  This is the Lord God himself and even as people walked away as he preached things like the discourse on the bread of life, he did not condemn them to hell.  He did not chase after them and warn them of dire consequences should they not come around.  He did not strike them down where they stood as surely one must assume he could have.  

So what is this human weakness born of?  Looking back throughout history, time and time again, our great leaders were great debaters.  The founding fathers, Churchill, Thatcher, Reagan.  To take it out of a political context, also consider the intellectual heft of the many Saints, Cardinals, and Popes in the Catholic Church.  The Venerable Bishop Fulton Sheen certainly would not shirk from a good debate.  One could rightly conclude that all of these figures sought the debate because they believed in what they were saying and they could win the debate.

So as we look at the modern American left, is the answer that they do not really believe what they are saying or that they do not think they can win the debate?  Does it really matter?  If history is to be any guide than as a populace we should be incredibly suspicious of any group that will not tolerate dissent.  I hold many Catholic teachings and conservative positions in my head that some would find controversial.  I welcome that conversation, I welcome that challenge.  I feel like I could win the debate and if not, then I need to re-examine my position.

But that is the reasonable position of a logical person.  Maybe the conclusion one has to reach is that the left is not motivated by logic, but by emotion and sometimes so much by emotion that it is to the exclusion of logic.  In that case, the question then would be, do we really wish to make public policy based on the emotions of any particular group?  Has this nation survived 237 years based on a document that was created on emotion?  

When we look back through history at the groups opposed to dissent, can we rightly conclude that they were nations, parties, movements founded upon emotion?  In the case of fascist regimes it seems clear.  Those emotional movements were all, inevitably, reduced to the whims of man.  The brutality of the Nazism was not so well coordinated as what people think.  It was more about, from top to bottom, a group of people who reacted, not with extreme precision, but with extreme randomness born of their emotional hatred of the Jews.  

The SS officers were not robots following orders, quite the contrary, they were behaving as animals, reacting individually to Jews based on their own instincts.  That is why even within that horrific time period, you can find examples of Nazi officers who occasionally helped to save Jews.  

To be our best in the long-run, we have to return to being a society that accepts dissent that is willing to have the argument.  We have to be guided by logic combined with emotion.  Neither one by itself is the answer.  But emotion combined with logic becomes…love, it becomes God, the ultimate solution to any problem.