Make a pass with your mind over the following list of words, and then do so again, this time assigning each word to one of the categories on the side.

                        Republican                   Democrat                                   

Racist

Sexist

Open-minded

Conspirator

Anti-Semite

Tolerant

Evil

Good

Equality

Greed

Fairness

Generosity

If you're like most people, making the connection of "Tolerant" and "Good" with Republicans will not seem natural. But you will find it agreeable to place the words "Racist" and "Evil" on the Republican side.

This test, called an Implicit Association Test, tells us something about the perceptual images we carry in our brain. It shows that as a political culture, we have a bias in favor of some actors and against other, opposing actors. It also shows that the issue of Tolerance has lost its dignity as a free-standing issue, one with a reality in and of itself; the topic has instead acquired meaning only in relation to political categories.

Both as a community and as individuals, we have choices to make when it comes to addressing the issues and challenges which confront us. The choices are social and political, but they are also intellectual.

The first intellectual choice is whether to deny our rational mind. We can divide our world conceptually into the camps of Good and Evil, and place one set of policy recommendations and political actors on the side of the Good and alternative preferences and actors on the side of the Evil. We can heed sermons about "Social Justice," and denounce those who offer dissenting views as "intolerant." We can deny reality when it does not conform to our pre-conceived ideas of what should be, and substitute for it ideology and that which is correct and acceptable to one social and political elite. We can change the meaning of words to have them support that which we and our political allies want to affirm, and contradict that which we and they want to dispute. We can give favor to social and political actors who, for their own power purposes, stoke our paranoia about conspiracies and religious people and racists and sexists. In short, we can deny our mind as an analytical thing, one which can help us understand realities of our society and our lives, and which helps us to become learned about dealing with them.

The second choice is whether to embrace our free-thinking mind. Challenging the ideological version, this rational mind tells us that the world is an ambiguous place filled with imperfect people, and that no one set of political or social actors has a monopoly on representing, or being able to discern, the Good. This mind cheers no particular creed or slogan, and instead values those who "break the mold" by offering dissenting ideas. This mind embraces reality, and changes its ideas when old ideas demonstrate that they are dysfunctional, and this mind seizes the nobility of doing this even when its new ideas are unpopular with opinion-makers and power wielders. The free thinking mind can adhere to the meaning of words, recognizing the precarious situation we enter when we manipulate words into meaning whatever one set of social and political actors want them to mean. The free thinking mind rejects, as scholar Richard Hofstadter put it, "The Paranoid Style," of politicians who seek to inculcate a self-serving and politically convenient fear about opponents as conspiratorialists, religionists, racists and sexists. In short, we can celebrate our mind as an analytical thing, and use it to help us understand the realities of our lives and our society, and in a way which fosters the continuing pluralism in American democracy.