This from Jacques Maritain’s Reflections on America (link):
One happens sometimes to meet people who think that a primary condition of tolerance and peaceful co-existence is not to believe in any truth or not to adhere firmly to any assertion as unshakeably true in itself. May I say that these people are, in fact, the most intolerant people, for if perchance they were to believe in something as unshakeably true, they would feel compelled by the same stroke to impose by force and coercion their own belief on their fellow men. The only remedy they have found for their abiding tendency to fanaticism is to cut themselves off from truth. As a result, they insist that whoever knows or claims to know truth or justice simply cannot be a good citizen “because he cannot and is not expected to admit the possibility of a view different from his own, the true view.”
Well, if it were true that whoever knows or claims to know truth or justice cannot admit the possibility of a view different from his own, and is bound to impose his true view on other people by violence, the rational animal would be the most dangerous of beasts. In reality, it is through rational means, that is, through persuasion, not coercion, that man is bound by his very nature to try to induce others to share in what he knows or claims to know as true and just. Be it a question of science, metaphysics, or religion, the man who says “What is truth?”, as Pilate did, is not a tolerant man, but a betrayer of the human race. There is, in other words, real and genuine tolerance only when a man is firmly and absolutely convinced of a truth, or of what he holds to be a truth, and when, at the same time, he recognizes the right of those who deny this truth to exist, and to contradict him, and to speak their own mind, not because they are free from truth but because they seek truth in their own way, and because he respects in them human nature and human dignity, and those very resources and living springs of the intellect and of conscience which make them potentially capable of attaining the truth he loves, if some day they happen to see it.
The views I have just criticized about the “what is truth?” supposedly required by mutual toleration are not specifically American — it was Kelsen who made a system of them. Moreover, when you hear, them expressed — not infrequently, I would say — in this country, they are much more an easy-going way of speaking than an expression of serious views to be put into practice. In actual fact what people think is rather that a kind of humility always keeps pace with the spirit of tolerance. And this is perfectly true.
I don’t believe, nevertheless, that it is without utility explicitly to realize that doubt and intellectual timidity are not a prerequisite for mutual toleration; and that it is truth, not ignorance, which makes us humble, and gives us the sense of what remains unknown in our very knowledge. In one sense there is wisdom in appealing to our ignorance, if we mean the ignorance of those who know, not the ignorance of those who are in the dark.
For more on the matter, there’s always the Pope.
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