In our intellectually and morally lazy times, virtues such honesty, chastity, piety, frugality, modesty, industry, fidelity, and the like are passé. The only thing remaining as a purported virtue is "tolerance," which is the refusal to question or criticize what anyone else is doing so long as it causes no immediate or visible harm. Since tolerance is the only virtue, intolerance is the only vice, and anyone guilty of it is banned from receiving tolerance from others.
This vapid code of ethics -- which amounts to little more than "do what though wilt" -- suffers from at least two serious problems.
First is paradox. The "tolerant" cohort admits there indeed is something it will not tolerate, and it causes no immediate or visible harm: a mindset. A man who is perfectly peaceful nevertheless cannot be tolerated if his thinking isn't right. That's quite an exception, one that swallows the rule, and it puts us back at square one, i.e., arguing over what should or should not be tolerated even if it causes no immediate or visible harm.
Second is the myopic concept of harm. There are plenty of ways to tear society down other than murder and mayhem; those ways can often be slow and imperceptible yet deadly and insidious, like a leak of radon gas or an advance of creeping mold. A healthy society does not tolerate activity that allows for such things to gain entry, regardless of whether their effects are immediate or distant. But that sort of thinking counters the mantra of tolerance -- perhaps the most noxious invasion of them all.
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