Customer Reviews

Political Tolerance: Balancing Community and Diversity (Contemporary American Politics)

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This book undertakes to expose the hypocrisy of the tolerance movement in the United States, that is the indoctrination of children and citizens into believing in a hierarchy of acceptable values. That is, homosexuality is tolerable and should be met with compassion, while religious fundamentalism is to be condemned because Christians are too intolerant, etc. Unfortunately, like many books that deal with culture it does a good job of grasping the logic of political tolerance, but ignores the evolutionary basis for the tension between the left and the right. When reading it, I had to keep comparing the observations with the analysis of evolutionary human behavior as described by Kevin MacDonald.

MacDonald's three books take what is described in Political Tolerance, and provides an evolutionary basis for its occurrence. The books are A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy (1995), Separation and its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (1998), and The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (1998). To complete what Weissberg is observing one has to look at the tension between gentile and Jewish forces in the United States, and how they have played out. An analysis of values cannot be understood without understanding the underlying forces of social-identity theory (evolutionary resource and reproductive competition). Wiessberg's book lends credence to MacDonald's observations, they go hand in hand though from different perspectives.

This book undertakes to expose the hypocrisy of the tolerance movement in the United States, that is the indoctrination of children and citizens into believing in a hierarchy of acceptable values. That is, homosexuality is tolerable and should be met with compassion, while religious fundamentalism is to be condemned because Christians are too intolerant, etc. Unfortunately, like many books that deal with culture it does a good job of grasping the logic of political tolerance, but ignores the evolutionary basis for the tension between the left and the right. When reading it, I had to keep comparing the observations with the analysis of evolutionary human behavior as described by Kevin MacDonald.

MacDonald's three books take what is described in Political Tolerance, and provides an evolutionary basis for its occurrence. The books are A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy (1995), Separation and its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (1998), and The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (1998). To complete what Weissberg is observing one has to look at the tension between gentile and Jewish forces in the United States, and how they have played out. An analysis of values cannot be understood without understanding the underlying forces of social-identity theory (evolutionary resource and reproductive competition). Wiessberg's book lends credence to MacDonald's observations, they go hand in hand though from different perspectives.