I am actually a fan of the New Yorker columnist Adam Gopni, who writes entertainingly about a number of difficult topics. But I can hardly let this pass, from his appreciation last fall of the philosopher John Stuart Mill. The sentences quoted below are taken verbatim from the second paragraph of the article, the emphasis added by yours truly.
"[John Stuart Mill] was right about nearly everything, even when contemplating what was wrong: open-minded and magnanimous to a fault, he saw through Thomas Carlyle’s reactionary politics to his genius, and his essay on Coleridge, a leading conservative of the previous generation, is a model appreciation of a writer whose views are all wrong but whose writing is still wonderful. Mill was an enemy of religious bigotry and superstition, and a friend of toleration and free thought, without overdoing either. (No one has ever been more eloquent about the ethical virtues of Jesus of Nazareth.)"
Someone might inform Mr. Gopnik that the tolerance that means something extends to the subtext as well. It's just barely possible that the rights and/or wrongs of Coleridge's conservative thought and Carlyle's reactionary politics might be too complex to be dismissed airily in an adjective.
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