Too tolerant can be empty

The radical tolerance that lies at the heart of modern day ethics, the notion that ethics are exclusively formal and can define only processes and not the content of the ethical system, which content is particular to each actor and their desire and so cannot be prescribed by any fixed ethical system, that tolerance might well have the effect of vacating any notion of agency, action or autonomy in the conduct of human affairs. The clash between traditional political ideologies versus Western, modernist, political ideologies could well center on this radical anonymity implicit in the modernist conception, which lodges all the evaluative energy in the isolated individual and strips away the possibility of there being some profound system of values that go beyond the individual, indeed, that go beyond the mundane and the human. It could be modernity inadvertently strips away the possibility of autonomy and agency because radical hedonism cannot comprehend dignity or self-possession.