“A Rock of Defence for Human Nature”

Abstract

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) document entitled “Tolerance Today: A Philosophical Inquiry” presented at the Official Closing Ceremony of the XIX World Congress of Philosophy held in Moscow in August 1993, echoed Director-General Federico Mayor’s published lament that violence is now global and intense, and harmony threatened, mainly because people no longer perceive that “the ability to value each and every person is the ethical basis for peace, security and intercultural dialogue.” Finally, Mayor concluded in that document, “it is intolerable that tolerance itself remains the most important item on the agenda of building democracy and a culture of peace in today’s world.” Mayor’s speech and the document released to the World Congress of Philosophy closing session cite only the all-too-lamentable effects of global violence and neglects the causes. But to simply state that the opposite of tolerance, “intolerance” is the cause, is much too general and can hardly be termed “Philosophical Inquiry” (as the sessions were entitled). Rather than “intolerance,” which is too passive a word for the cause of something as devastating as violence, the more accurate term would be pornography, a “pornography of relationships” underlying attitudes which have today become (as Mayor said) “global and intense” (UNESCO).