So what do we do when a significant fraction of our population have decided among themselves that respect and tolerance should be conditional, and only extended to people who conform to their preferred skin colour, or ethnic background, or religious beliefs, or gender norms?

We are now realising—or perhaps remembering—that respect and tolerance are learned behaviours.

This almost instinctive reaction to even simple differences explains at least some of the behaviour we see everywhere today. It started online before spreading IRL along with the rise of right wing ethno-nationalism.

Personally, I find it surprisingly difficult not to have negative feelings about people who like things I don’t, even when it is something inconsequential, like music. For example, I would happily see anyone who plays “All I Want For Christmas Is You” banished to the ninth circle of hell.

-- From No. 2 of “Four Quartets” by T.S. Eliot

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing….

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting

And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing –

And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing façade are all being rolled away –
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence

Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury.
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,

Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,