Philosophical Foundations of Contemporary Intolerance: Why We No Longer Take Martin Luther King, Jr. Seriously

ABSTRACT A growing body of research suggests that political polarization in the United States is at a forty-year high, and that it is rooted less in disagreements over policy than in hostile attitudes toward political opponents. Such attitudes explain the manifest increase of intolerant behavior in American culture and politics in recent years. But what explains the attitudes themselves? One significant contributor may have been the rise of scientism in the early twentieth century, which undermined the metaphysical, epistemic, and institutional foundations of the type of morality required to transcend our instinctual tribalism.