I had just written down the above headline for an essay I wanted to write this morning, when I came across the July 7, 2026 article in Quadrant by LOGAN LAMONT titled Respectable Cowardice, before I put pen to paper (in old school terms). As I started reading it, I was struck by the very thoughts I had planned to put forward. And Lamont seems to have put it best, so under the cover of ‘great minds think alike’, I offer the following salient points from his article.
# Civilisations rarely admit they are afraid. They find more respectable words. Fear becomes prudence. Retreat becomes tolerance. Capitulation becomes compassion. Moral uncertainty becomes humility. The language sounds noble, even virtuous, but words can disguise reality as effectively as they reveal it. The modern West has become remarkably adept at renaming weakness so that it no longer appears as weakness at all.
This habit of linguistic self‑deception has become one of the defining characteristics of our age. We congratulate ourselves on our tolerance, even as we often display an unwillingness to defend our own values. We praise prudence when we are simply avoiding confrontation. We celebrate compassion while ignoring the consequences of decisions that steadily erode the cultural confidence upon which compassion itself depends. The vocabulary is reassuring. The results are not.
# The irony is that genuine tolerance requires confidence. A civilisation secure in its own identity can accommodate disagreement because it knows what it stands for. A civilisation uncertain of itself gradually begins to confuse tolerance with surrender. Every demand becomes difficult to resist because resistance itself is interpreted as intolerance. The vocabulary changes long before the institutions do.
# Properly understood, tolerance does not require the abandonment of standards. It requires living peacefully alongside those with whom we disagree while retaining confidence in our own convictions. That distinction has become blurred. Increasingly, tolerance is interpreted as an obligation to affirm every competing worldview, however incompatible it may be with the cultural foundations that made tolerance possible in the first place.
# History suggests that civilisations seldom lose confidence because they lack resources. They lose confidence because they cease believing that their own civilisation is worthy of preservation. Military strength, economic prosperity and technological achievement cannot compensate for moral uncertainty. A people uncertain about their own legitimacy will eventually hesitate to defend every institution built upon it.
# Compassion without wisdom becomes indulgence. Tolerance without limits becomes surrender. Prudence without courage becomes little more than fear wearing respectable clothes.
# Words matter because they shape the way societies understand themselves. When a civilisation consistently renames cowardice as prudence, surrender as tolerance and fear as compassion, it eventually loses the ability to recognise its own decline.
# Civilisations endure because they possess the confidence to defend the principles upon which they were built.
FOOTNOTE:
“We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.” Philosopher Karl Popper.