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Tolerance and Consensus
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19793 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1991 |
5,370 Words |
| Author
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William A. Donohue
William A. Donohue is the author of The Politics of the
American Civil Liberties Union and the New Freedom. He teaches
sociology at La Roche College in Pittsburgh. |
One of the most popular themes of American democracy is tolerance. Tolerance, we are told, is the key to freedom and democracy, the very measure of a civilized society. Though this is not a new idea, it has surfaced in a major way in the postwar period and is, without question, one of the central rallying points for the cultural elite in the 1990s. The college campuses are knee-deep in sensitivity-training workshops, colloquia, and symposia dedicated to the proposition that tolerance for diversity is wholesome, enlightening, and positively ennobling. More than that, tolerance is the fulcrum upon which harmonious relations can be built among different and competing racial and ethnic groups. It can even lead to more global understanding, thereby enhancing the prospects for peace in the nuclear age. Above all, tolerance is the mark of the educated man and woman.
Most students of tolerance are accepting of the notion that the more tolerance there is in society, the better. Certainly this has been the case since the first major survey of the American people was taken on this subject in the 1950s. In the summer of 1954, a survey of more than six thousand Americans was undertaken by Samuel A. Stouffer and associates in an attempt to analyze public opinion on the subject of communism and communists; to a lesser extent, public attitudes on socialists and atheists were measured. It was not until nearly twenty years later that the next major survey on tolerance was taken. In 1973, Clyde Z. Nunn, Harry J. Crockett, Jr., and J. Allen Williams, Jr., surveyed more than four thousand persons, employing the same sampling design and battery of questions used by Stouffer.
Surveys taken in 1976-77 and 1978-79 form the basis of the work by Herbert McClosky and Alida Brill. Their analysis of the degree of tolerance that inheres in American society is far and away the most extensive, as it taps everything from religious tolerance to attitudes toward sexual nonconformity. But perhaps the most interesting work in this area was done in 1982 by John L. Sullivan, James Piereson, and George E. Marcus. It is a novel work in that it is the only critical examination we have of the tolerance surveys themselves. By drawing on the 1978 finding of NORC (National Opinion Research Center), Sullivan and associates were able to reexamine much of the conventional wisdom in this area. Their findings proved to be provocative.
With the exception of the Sullivan study, all the surveys indicate that there has been a marked increase in tolerance among the American people since the first study by Stouffer in 1954. Sullivan suggests that while attitudes toward
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