This year, the biannual Pierre Bayle Lecture was given by the British historian Jonathan Israel. Professor Israel's subject was Pierre Bayle himself, after whom the lecture series is named. Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) was a Dutch philosopher, whose early writings include a plea for broad political toleration of divergent opinions on religion.
Israel argues that the famous Dutch toleration is a product of the thoughts of people like Bayle and Spinoza, people who are almost forgotten because of the government-driven attack on the humanities in the high schools and universities and the Thatcherite obsession so pervasive in western Europe today with favouring so-called ‘practical’ vocational studies, especially business, law and technological subjects while cutting back everything that contributes to cultural, civic and historical understanding.
I must admit, it is tough reading material. But it gives you something to think about, in view of the rising intolerance of Dutch society, and what to do against it.
Everyone must be allowed to believe whatever they want, asserts Bayle, that is part of toleration. But on its own such a stance amounts merely to official indifference and, as such, is assuredly not toleration. Indeed, experience shows that complacently allowing expounders of theological doctrines to amass as much power as they can over their following can all too easily and quickly degenerate into endemic sectarian conflict and persecution. The essence of a true toleration is not what has passed for toleration in Dutch society in recent years but rather a co-ordinated policy on the part of the guardians of the state, education and opinion-forming to neutralize theological hatreds and bias, that is prejudice, discrimination and suppression of unpopular views wherever and whenever such bias rears its head in the form of incitement, hatred and violence. Indeed, neither democracy, nor toleration nor individual freedom can long survive unless government, teachers, media reporters and police in whatever country do join together in a co-ordinated fashion promptly, consistently and without hesitation to block theological power, and calls from the pulpit, wherever and whenever these seek to mobilize sections of the populace against unpopular minorities, dissenters, homosexuals, women, and independent critical thinkers.
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