We Don't Put Up With No Intolerance

This started a while back on Facebook. Someone posted picture of a sheet of notebook paper on which was scrawled, "Judging a person does not define who they are, it defines who you are."

My first thought was, the spirit is right, but its too simplistic.

My second thought was the grammar is wrong. The singular "person" is being referenced with a plural "they."

My third thought was, I have just outed myself as a Grammar Nazi.

I don't think you can go through life without judging others. You ought not get in the windowless van with the creepy stranger promising free candy. The same goes for decisions about where you'll invest your money or who you'll hire to remodel your house. You judge others when you accept a dinner date or consider a marriage proposal. This is simply exercising good judgment.

The black economist Walter Williams make a case for discrimination. He says he won't sleep with a woman if she's not Mrs. Williams. He's being a bit silly to make a not-silly point. Keeping one's wedding vows  is a legitimate basis for discriminating against potential sex partners. Since Dr. Williams is black it is obvious that he's making a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate bases for discrimination.

The basis of judgment may be legitimate or not. If I am selling you something, the only color I care about is the green of your money. If I'm lending you money, I'll extend my consideration to your credit history. It's illegitimate to consider your race, creed, sexual preference, or political affiliations. I think it's wrong to even record such criteria for the purposes of affirmative action.


The legitimacy of judgment is also contextual. If I'm renting a house or an apartment to you, your housekeeping becomes a consideration. I don't want to wash nicotine off my walls, so I feel  smoking habits are a legitimate basis of judging of potential tenants.

Suppose I'm considering a job candidate. It is wrong to consider sex, creed and sexual preference in employment decisions. How about when a female, Buddhist, lesbian applies for the job of Pastor of a Baptist church?

I've stated before one's conscience is not subject to political suasion. Freedom of religion is more than just disestablishmentarianism (prohibiting funding of an established church with tax dollars). It's giving people the space to be true to their conscience.

Religious intolerance cuts both ways. If someone's conscience demands something you don't like, you are the intolerant one when you damn that person on that basis. Which brings us back to where we started. This goes around and around.

And around. Sometimes being intolerant is OK. If your religion tells you to fly an airplane into a building or another murderous act, I won't tolerate your religion.

It's a judgment call.

Those Mills Closed Decades Ago

After grousing about Thunder In The East, which I hated, I thought it might serve as counterpoint to describe an old movie I liked: The Man In The White Suit illustrates a similar principle.

The original Obi Wan Kenobi was played by Alek Guinness, who was quite a handsome young buck back in the early 1950s. He starred in a humorous parody as a rather naive young chemical engineer working in for a major textile manufacturer as a laborer.

First off, because he's just a laborer, he can't get anyone in charge to pay attention to him and he has to do his research on the down-low. He has in mind to invent a new synthetic fabric that has a number of desirable attributes: it does not wear out, it rejects dirt, and it does whatever other Good Things you'd like to find in a miracle fabric.

His experiments pan out, he gets management support, and he has a tailor make a suit of the miracle fabric. Since the fabric rejects all dyes, it is a white suit. A very white, glowing suit.

Trouble starts when the union members at the mill discover that this nice young man has invented this fabric that will never wear out and they expect that after one production run of this miracle stuff, management will close down the plant. And think of the launderers who'll be idled if clothes never get dirty.

Since this movie was made in the 1950s when labor unions held great sway in Britain, this is a major consideration.

Trouble escalates when the other mill owners catch wise of this invention, and they realize they will not be able to stay in the textile business if this invention gets out. They conspire with Alek Guinness's boss to suppress the invention.

This leaves Alek Guinness with a wonderful boon to mankind that has both management and labor  in cahoots to suppress. He's kidnapped, held captive, and escapes. Only to be chased through the darkened streets of the mill town in his glowing white suit. Hilarity ensues.

Now comes the irony. All of those mills were shuttered a generation ago. They were all idled as the labor unions predicted, and the mill owners' capital investments in factories and machinery were rendered just as useless. In the story, Alek Guinness's invention does not pan out and everyone goes back to business as usual.

In reality, the entire story is a funny anachronism because free trade has done more to toss unionists out of jobs and shutter factories than anything imagined of Alek Guinness's invention.


Yet, has the world ended? Hardly.

Pretty much everyone on the planet enjoys a much better standard of living than they did in the 1950s. New technologies and free trade disrupts markets and they force everyone to adapt to new ways of doing business, but in the end the consumer gets better stuff cheaper.