If you question the existence of truth, then a quick detour to the FIRST PRINCIPLES is in order. If truth doesn’t exist, then intellectual honesty is without meaning. In fact there would be no use trying to find meaning in anything. But we tend to believe in intellectual honesty, and that presupposes that truth exists, providing another intuitive validator of the First Principles. But the question for today is whether or not tolerance follows from the existence of truth.
This is simple logic. If there is truth, (“truth” = true), then when we pursue truth, we of necessity discriminate between truth and falseness, keeping that which is true and rejecting that which is false. So tolerance of falseness is not a property that follows from truth.
Tolerance is a subjective, imperative, not a logical position. Tolerance is “right”, not “good”. Truth is “good”, and can also be “right”.
Goodness and Rightness are not the same thing, at least philosophically speaking. Goodness is a quality of material appropriateness, such as a “good fit”. It is a value judgment of material qualities. Rightness is a quality of ethical or moral appropriateness, such as a “right life decision”. It is a value judgment of ethical or moral qualities.
So when we talk of tolerance being right, we mean that it is ethically appropriate. It is an ethical precept. And as we can see from the logic above, tolerance is not always called for, or appropriate from a logical perspective.
Now if honesty is also a quality restricted to the realm of ethical or moral appropriateness, then tolerance and honesty exist in the same realm at the same time, on the same issue. Now if tolerance does not necessarily follow from truth, how does honesty fare?
First, “tolerance” as a concept includes tolerance of falseness. This cannot place tolerance within the sphere of truth and in fact it bears no relationship to the truth value of the entity being tolerated.
But “honesty” as a concept is necessarily and by definition included within the sphere of truth, and truth alone without falseness.
So we see that "intellectual honesty” follows from truth, as opposed to tolerance which does not follow from truth.
The open-ended tolerance of today’s society cannot support or be expected to produce truth without an equal amount of falseness. We see that tolerance is favored over intellectual honesty in all facets of popular culture, from the media to politics to courts of law. So the balance has shifted from truth, to an amalgam of truth and falseness, with increasing focus on the attractions of falseness.
This is a direct result of the failure to choose intellectual honesty as the ethic, rather than tolerance. In fact tolerance has gone to the extreme of declaring that failure to tolerate, or intolerance, cannot be tolerated. This is an irrational statement and is false on its face; tolerance should tolerate intolerance, or it wouldn’t be tolerant, now would it. And if tolerance is intolerant (of intolerance), then it is intolerant of itself…a paradox, falsifying itself.
But observation of actual tolerance activists shows that neither truth nor tolerance is at play; the benefit to activism is that tolerance-as a weapon-can prevent any restraint to any deviant agenda.
So tolerance becomes a force for wrong, not for right. It has moved as far from intellectual honesty as it can be moved.