Gateway to Ideas; 10; Let's Redefine Tolerance

the idea is gateway to ideas a new series of conversations in which ideas are discussed in relation to reading today's program let's redefine tolerance is moderated by and free mental noted author and critic a subject today is let's redefine tolerance and our guests on this is an ebola until recently professor of religion at barnard and then on the board daniel patrick moynihan was an assistant secretary of labor in washington and the kosovo's nascent days of beyond the melting pot which was widely circulated in magazine form and not shredded before being published as a book it received that data's field wolff award in race relations and has just appeared in paperback sydney buy an animal daniel patrick monahan are going to discuss let's

redefine tarps and i'm going to begin by asking says amoeba if prices and rather nasty thing of a sort of modeling kind of stuff and snares on over once was feeling good you think the tone of it don't insult to the quantity of manners concept around i think i'd be a school on straightaway say are you talking about the word are you talking about the attitude because it might save it all for the attitude perhaps the ticket if we make it deeper and more positive but perhaps revival kind of the word tomorrow oh yeah did this discussion we was redefined holmes tom's pepsi says as he does of el said about that it doesn't it's not enough for the situation today now i have to say it's like i didn't do that no quiet about them our dream business but shall we say those nasty do we dress sings the town people used to sneak out a live a decent food aisle fruits and vegetables that we use they're seated

don't like something vague and rather negative i would like to push off studying off the attitude in two directions both in terms of the individuals that includes what makes a person free of prejudice that's put it in that way all what helps a person to grow up learning to shed some of his prodigious is because i think probably the human individual grows up with water afterwards to fight talk about ian and they are he's got to extend his feelings about his family and the people don't look like him audience who may nor off his own kind of bristle and ask more questions about it in social situations social political situation the time ages one and comes in i think you're really isn't the word that

it's really basically a question of love i'm not a cement expert of getting my deep down into the psychological makeup that's rather what trouble be on the melting pot as advertisement will are now well our book is about is a another factor in that directly related on which is that the there has emerged in the united states as it has emerged in the world a situation in which no one ethnic or religious or cultural group is dominant arc at a certain it's not a sustainable situation but a continuing one in which and there are in fact many different groups competing coexisting when an event is inhabiting i'm acting and at the same time in the same social situation that

the point about tolerance seemed to me as we have tended to use it in america and i think as we have received it from from england as in the acceleration is it presumes a certain specific social situation that of a dominant culture with a dominant ethnic or our religious nationalist in control of most of the main institutions economic religious political institutions and into that situation is introduced a minority group a group either either arrives on the scene of firms polish jews arriving in america or it or did it it was always there it's for instance being with catholics and or order lawrence got so the welsh or what you will know these groups assert their rights to have to exist in made it into an act in some ways

differently from the majority they say well you know this is a protestant kingdom that were catholics or this is a a protestant nation or a christian nation where jews now you have to let us be and let us have the our institutions to the degree that they are for the central dilemmas on and the initial reaction in through history to majority groups faced with the revelation of the book the people who asked such fires in jail walk a mile or trauma on an overly is this turned out to be a difficult thing that it causes trouble and it's unpleasant and it's on ethical and all over a period on the proposition that rose well that view this is not that's no way to treat people you mostly muscle and tolerate their differences on well and this disappointing current has a superior inferior relationship there is implicit emotional disappear or grow there is in any event explicit the fact of the pure power i think we all moved into an

age certainly in the united states and an end and the work quickly where this fact of superior power no longer commutes are and the unveiling perhaps because of that ever happened in a very different things are the proposition of a superior what's your worth is no longer very easily defensible either in any event it damn it it becomes difficult for a person looking at the whole situation to have much confidence in and the fact that in the sessions of service to carry it which upsets simultaneously made by a dozen different route toward frankenstein universe that rather wasn't i made i would have an interest in catholic to do in this book that disney value and something to say about the odd experience with the quest for identity among young people of various but as an individual and a social relevance the concept of identity that's why james baldwin

are in using hart the concept i think has stuck both presented a very good case and miners had great to po them in a particular perhaps among the young who are finding their own identity i'd like to back a little bit has done it that when you think of the history of this country and off the half as common is and roger williams now lund and you see how this has to be worked out almost a fresh in every situation it doesn't have him for that that even with a historical example of william penn it was an expensive suburbs of philadelphia that was to go water could speak about the ethnic groups of push to surround air and i got that from someone who worked out and we were in philadelphia at that was more pretty judicious inexpensive side bets about ethnic groups all of which had expensive meeting houses and wonderful quaker condition then you might have

caught in the free for all of and in big industrial complex even in the middle of the day of i don't know enough about it and i would like to ask you is an expert on his mind and whether the free market of competing interests isn't of sometimes very good solid data that tadic they've got the cars are in the marketplace of ideas and four season precious politically you have to not only accept that welcome the contributions of different groups but the company won't have your bad instigate you've got for a member of that this group will want this and if you perhaps go to meet them you find among us i read in an issue what exactly the air this is a program about books and a mandate raises a bit with books have had some very considerable influence and in fact you can and it is true that much of books and we have the initial our idea which we're sort of emerging from i

think there in this mission was that we would be in the term melting pot very popular that somehow or other people coming into this mission from all driver sergeant are there on out would somehow or other melt down into a sort of uniform now how we mistakenly think this is a notion that have emerged in the late nineteenth century when the eastern and southern european migrations that actually gets its making its introduction people lived on the american continent the eighteenth century were as much a conscious of their differences one from the other as as were the people in new york are baking nineties that those differences tend to be about crimes which we don't think of especially significant a day but at that moment a bit quaker and philadelphia and to be a presbyterian in a new york an accommodation us to new haven looked like a very vast

wealth indeed in holland a good many such but enormously distinctly liberal and live together well the idea that somehow or other it would melted down i am to some uniform product emerged on the first book to talk about this was done to cry of course letters of an american farmer aren't as very interesting that he proposed it would happen are because and gradually religion would fade away and that an old methods require an awkward religious people and one that seeks to be quaker or pasture mr nicholson i was used to having difficulty with the emerson spoke to the un and then came in the early twentieth century mystic israel saying well who wrote of his play are the melting pot in which he he described the the mixtures of all thought of christian and drew in russian drummond the vote in staten island

as it happened on an ma was a business it was seized at all teddy roosevelt but it was most wonderful thing in the world to solve the problems in a curious fact is that that sang well as of course english his parents were polish jews who immigrated to england and only a very few years after zang will propose this new world in which in which that's a problem that was going to solve interesting that promise all of his play with a problem how the russian jews get along with christian with americans of all of that the daughter the arctic that whose father had been advised general mood killed the father of a young jewish intellectual they matter so that's how some of the very few years after saying well wrote his book he became a scientist and then julian the proposition all men could ever meltdown inside same period say all of that those yummy the june or gentiles he said on the contrary it's well out within our blood and

we're not going to want to say that this idea that was so important to the melting pot so important for their own people with the idea that assured him andy and martin would look like him it was obvious though people didn't have money and were getting much done in this country and he was well this little late reassuring proposition but what has changed in in the competition you describe what has happened over the past thirty years is something rather profound and that is in the forest experience of the depression and then the war the american intel intellectual community change definitely the book's began to be written in the nineteen thirties nineteen forties nineteen fifties suddenly seized the books which would any sense could be really had a dominant old american protestant tradition but like the men who emerged to be as they even you know writers of

our time in quite disproportionate numbers turned out debate jews catholics make sense and about that organ and they were not only thing out of the way their identity but it was a it was an identity is central to their work you can read this saul bellow's herzog norman mailer or james baldwin clearly without saying that this identity is fundamental to them that's what makes them go around and look at themselves look at the world through that they drew that identity and and having a circus you haven't called full situation there is no longer a dominant grow an inferior one there are a number of water music competing perhaps the chemicals and then you know would you say are in on the wearer groups that iron you know and we were now who are writing now

like these a very strong jewish and catholic i think ethics started with a last ride in there and said well senate candidate utter gone along with nasa to work with gen khan i think some of the younger writers and anyway do you think that these books really make a difference for instance was twenty and vendors to visit because i believe used in university of california los angeles both in the thousands of copies and i was wondering if these this new awareness of not tolerance but commitment to and prejudice which is still happening today in these big midwestern university is interested comes partly from reading from from being aware of these books are to talk now just as in the air on the books the part of the contraband than the people you read i think everybody is a way out our i forgot the title of that new book about the wasps written by a

loss of as damaging us philadelphia after the death of a of a suitably again but those of us would have in a place like new york particularly and perhaps in hand because so called intellectual we're never quite sure where it is our way out the wasps are not minority that the bright young men and made moves her in months classes and getting the wonderful fellowships and for the most interesting metric sort of people i'm not the same racial stalkers you immunity financial racial stockings done somehow hadn't poor whites it's a long teeth yellow wrong g boasts and i can put that racial slights incident in an advertising world changed they're completely different if you look francis in an english getting article and download can be any other go half a shot in each of the young man and young maiden and last episode people who still

subscribes to vienna that you sell men's clothes better if they got a bony face structure but on the whole writing winning particular maybe your face as a moderate much more not in a melting pot face to face it is not kagame is the navy's equivalent of a lot of senators often stall which is a perfect whilst face i think it poses reading thing i think that you know when we were young says me but i'd interview will be able to get one of my key things i read was bought as a nonpartisan those who will light candles and midday agree with those who have been outside of your sound and things like that and then he'd gotten into tremendous amount and dirt and decided to people like kogi more and under into other people were quite fit and determined to tune in to deal with bronze of a day our watch we stay restricted if they did i think by their limited to a

little better point of view by what we read and i wonder if that's what's happening today in the college's it as a good deal of love reading yourself into us a mandate and the better for my vision about the psychological development of the person because today we live in a world not only where there are these problems whether other writers but we live in a post for a guinness whether suppressed marxist i think if we go back to saudi state to work even our generation of oxford that we observed the proper i think sequence of development which is to react a young man and young woman does react we hope i mean this is getting rated shall we say of the tendency toward cultural incest and when we think of thought south are deep south the shamans scandal of places there's a kind of cultural insist going on and it comes out in a facial stock that's why i'm not altogether

being completed it and back in our talk about the bad teeth and they are cheekbones and a narrow chest so violently in breaking racial of inbred white southerners ah nature doesn't like the sort of thing in reading it and a good idea and culturally speaking it is a good idea and you and i as people born in england can be bothered problem affected we've been a nation of moguls are language which is adidas and if barnett's new book if you like about an english language is a beautiful among the language so because they all sorts of things and in england some of the most lively uses american english because the american gift for expensive slang which comes from the west or the negro anywhere else is enriching english english the danger think also with these admirable thing land activist money to make this point people are getting more aware of their individual agencies like the french

canadians for instance or the in the ninth and the joy of having ads is it an expensive other proposes at the same time as a kind of withdrawal into a new kind of ethnic solidarity you'll win i you know this is one police to say tonight to see this business about the development of person that china li young man and innocent person to ever state reacting otherwise we get these perpetual adolescents who've never got part of that system should say a protracted legal situation hop dance by the co concept of identity is so useful for our young people you've got to get away from panama city a while dancing he's been practicing magic an intellectual that's again a new situation they don't have to cut back his doctors are as alike as an apprentice did you want to find yourself in this business of finding yourself whether it's like

supporting the deserts of arabia out or in the parents of the twenties or whatever it is you get a way of course to college and then again dixon's phrase all the laudatory of carnage unevenly to say this i think it gives young men are charts and that's the gaelic a previous job in health is the kind of laudatory of a finding himself or herself who they are and where they are to see whether they get that marriage of detachment a measure of self knowledge to be looked back upon mile on their colorful background say yes and no and it was all right i'm going home now going to tie adam beda being as i fear of capital no knowledge and the colony i got off a tiny hat head of rocks and pentagon but gosh you know that otis could occasionally and you get that sort of thought from six of dialectic a sort of are well something to it and i think its business are found the

identity of our groups when i first came to this country it needs to be disposed of thirty years before modern sinclair lewis wrote a book about the often flawed of this country it was so sick that overweight screen please and bad apple pie this sunday and across you know and settlement cook book came out with good ethnic cooking and i think ethnic cooking has been a very potent part of our development toward of war but vittore but what about differences this can invite on this i think it's becoming an action and i think this idea of identity is probably be key notion which can take you from the general proposition that current solid word evolved out of a homage are tearing into to actually do to some working principles about how to behave in a in a situation of the michael called full stomach and then i think

then the idea of ethnic and religious identity has turned out to be more important for on time and we had expected that we have we've now i'm still cooking and we still the foremost a fine world politics if you don't do think about it in terms of all of the nineteenth century but journalist doctrines about economic production when are you going to be a capitalist country of yourself as a country or communist country that right under our noses that a world the world has almost never sees all that question has moved away from it and it's a question whether africa gandhi black or white were either candidate is going to be english speaking french speaking whether this country will be a jewish or iran that country la lune or flemish i mean in these issues to turn or this country i will itself be a gay biracial community or

whatnot they we must there are we must remember that you know there is a certain amount of understanding of the southern white situation as necessary if you can do anything with it no one it turns out i think is that the ethnic identity religious identity has a value in the modern world that we hadn't suspected has got something i suppose like the value of the extended family gives you an identity that you can hold on society which doesn't give you many many others and so it's useful and so persistent than anything empowering gets more elaborate and people there's a grandfather effect coming in which is that people who feel like things or people in third generation accept and that's because there's no identity how do you get people working again i think what you have to faces the that what erik erikson concept of a higher identities look i'm not there are one and then more than one level of lily and for instance one of the the great

single most important fact of race relations in the country the reason we would have been able to break through the last four years really passed the civil rights act is that the christian churches and the jewish are all organizations entered the fray and made this a religious question as well as an ethnical so it became possible for people who had quite separate identities on ethnic group you join a higher level i don't want to get into that question will walk and white quite different one from the other jew from catholic from protestant on and an honorable agreeing on rocking are definitely not wishing washington still being quite willing on iraq say we're all children of god and they're doing this was given that what they're actually made this year about whether they are not martin luther king and that's that's become a welsh position it's not indian americans have won in sales also honored by the

by president johnson who funded the presidential medal of freedom is the highest level on a conferred by the president on state in peacetime to reinhold niebuhr a messiah who's done some magnificent work in his writings over the last forty years and this was very much because he helped to create this sense of higher identity is very much rooted joel christian in crisis into his writing very well i have to say canada to redefine taiwan's because recommended and about that is is you know what would you say was the indian one of the words was the alternative for what was the definition of health how dare a noontime to put into a few words i would say that what i how i would like to redefine need is to ask fall a positive re examination off what is involved in the person's attitude orders for being and in the social group

an awareness of the free market of the exchange of tight semi desert contributions is some of the data you know that is hard to find in a word the acceptance even has a sleepy sound as if your name on an active recognition an active record for think ultimately a game farms a religious and ethical it would be almost the wellcome of differences it was for them for their own sake thank you very much indeed we've been discussing let's redefine tolerance and the guest today once his neighbor a researcher professor of religion at barnard and the honorable daniel patrick moynihan assistant secretary of labor in washington and also beyond the melting pot thank you very much indeed just won an ambitious new book you've been listening to gateway to ideas a new series of conversations in which ideas are discussed in relation to read today's program let's redefine tolerance has presented assistant

secretary of labor daniel p moynihan co author of beyond the melting pot and muses reinhold niebuhr until recently professor of religion at barnard college columbia university the moderator was and free mental noted author and critic to extend the dimensions of today's program for you a list of the books mentioned in the discussion as well as others relevant to the subject has been prepared you may obtain a copy from your local library or by writing to gateway to ideas post office box six four one time square station new york piecing closest and a self addressed on the dope gateway to ideas has produced the national educational radio under a grant from the national home library foundation programs are prepared by the national book committee an american library association in cooperation with the national association of educational broadcasters technical production by riverside radio's wypr in new york city this is the national

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