Tolerance - the moment between breathing out one orthodoxy and breathing in another.

Mark Shea points to another shining example of "gay brownshirts" attempting to stifle dissent. It seems that homosexual activists have attempted to use their clout as a powerless minority to make Pay Pal freeze the accounts of various groups and people who dare - dare! - to publicly dissent from the view that homosexuality is one of the best things ever. After a counter-petition drive, PayPal has apparently decided to let these folks have the money, which was their's anyhow. Here is the blog of Julio Severo, one of the people who aroused the ire of the right sort of powerless minority.

This incident actually offers a proof of one insight from moral philosophy.

I just finished reading Servais Pinckaers' "Morality - the Catholic View."  In his book, Pinckaers distinguishes between two views of freedom, specifically "freedom for excellence" and "freedom of indifference."  The "freedom of indifference" is the view that we are used to as people living in modern times, namely that freedom is simply the ability to make a choice.  We are free because we can choose, and the highest value of freedom is simply the choice, not necessarily the thing chosen.

This world view relies implicitly on the sense that goods - the things we choose - have no objective "goodness" in themselves; things are good simply because we choose them.  Our choice gives the thing value, and, therefore, the real value that things have is that we choose them, which means that our choice - our act or ability to choose - is the only good there is.

The alternative view described by Pinckaers is the classical philosophical view of "freedom for excellence."  Under this view, freedom is the ability to perfect ourselves by choosing good things that make us more excellent as human beings.  In this view, things outside of us have an objective value, in fact, objective value is at the heart of "freedom for excellence" because the entire project of becoming more excellent - another word for which is "virtuous" - is premised on chasing after something outside of us, namely the excellence that we seek, and the corresponding eudaimonia - happiness/joy - that comes from being a perfected human being.

Modernity has long rejected this notion.  Our sense is that we really cannot judge another person's life insofar as they have chosen that life and "it works for them." Our distance from the "freedom for excellence" is seen in this passage from Book 13 of Augustine's "On the Trinity":

He says, Here we have, not philosophers but merely people who love an argument, saying that everyone is happy who lives as he likes—this is the same as what I have just called “in a way he enjoys.” Then he immediately went on to add, But this is false. To want what is not right is itself a very unhappy situation; in fact not to get what you want is not so unhappy a state of affairs as to want to get what you have no business to. Quite excellently said, and absolutely true. Who could be so mentally blind, so estranged from any light of decency and wrapped in the darkness of infamy as to call happy the man who lives a rotten worthless life, with no one to stop him, no one to punish him, no one even daring to rebuke him; who with lots of people praising him, since as divine scripture puts it, The sinner is praised in the desires of his soul, and the man who does iniquity will be called blessed (Ps 10:3), fulfills all his most criminal and licentious wishes; to call him happy because he lives as he likes, when in fact, though still unhappy, he would at least be less unhappy than this if he could get none of the things he is vicious enough to want? A man is made unhappy just by having a bad will alone, but much more so by the power to fulfill the desires of his bad will.


Saint Augustine of Hippo; John E. Rotelle; Edmund Hill (2011-01-23). The Trinity (The Works of Saint Augustine) (p. 349). New City Press. Kindle Edition.  

We wouldn't expect someone today to be this "judgmental" about someone else's lifestyle choices, because we live in the world of "freedom of indifference," where lifestyle choices are, in some sense good, because someone has chosen that lifestyle.

Or do we?

The interesting thing about the case above is that it seems that humans may be uncomfortable with living in a world of no value. We want our choices to be meaningful and to be seen as meaningful.  Because we invest our lifestyle or our choices with value - because we have chosen it - we may want others to see our choice as "valuable."  And, so, homosexuals - the very people who one would think would be truly indifferent to what other people thought so long as they are left alone by those people - are the most concerned with shutting down the expression of antipathy by people who are in no position to do them any concrete injury.

The human tendency to see that there is an objective value in the things that we choose can be seen in another perverse example - the tendency of abortion activists to laud abortion as a good in itself. Check out this video of Planned Parenthood boosters telling the public that they are proud of their abortion.  At the time I thought this was simply weird; one could defend abortion as a necessary evil, but to be proud of having an abortion implies that abortion is a good thing, a thing one could be proud of.

Obviously, though, the "freedom of indifference" has moved to "freedom for excellence," except that they think their excellence is achieved by the false good of having an abortion.  They have invested an act which is either evil or morally neutral with an objective "goodness."

That may simply be the way that we are wired as human beings.  We can't maintain the "double entry" bookkeeping required by "freedom of indifference," where things are both valuable for being good and yet having no intrinsic goodness at the same time.  It is like the cognitive dissonance whereby the child in the womb is both a loved member of a family, entitled to legal protection, and a unloved tumor with no legal protection, depending of the mother's attitude.  Something's got give or people will go crazy.

What gives is that people think that they are living in the freedom of indifference world, but their acts show that they are really living in the world of "freedom for excellence," and they either are or are not measuring up, and when they find that they are not achieving excellence, they have to still the quiet voice of accusation by shutting up anyone who reminds them of their failure.

Interestingly, this seems to have the tendency to "infect" things that our chosen with