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The Folly of Tolerance
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11068 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1993 |
4,666 Words |
| Author
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Glenn Tinder
Glenn Tinder is professor of political science at the
University of Massachusetts, Boston. His most recent book is
titled The Political Meaning of Christianity. |
The most serious questions about tolerance concern its justification. Why be tolerant? How can a tolerant person help being divided or indifferent? How can a tolerant society be anything but a scene of confusion and unrestrained error?
To ask why we should be tolerant is not to ask the only serious question about tolerance. For example, one can ask about the social conditions of tolerance. Does tolerance depend on pluralism for its vitality, or perhaps on a strong basic consensus to mitigate its risks? Or one can ask about the attitudinal conditions of tolerance. Is fervent religious faith fatal to tolerance? Is skepticism favorable to tolerance? The question of limits is particularly important. To put the question bluntly: What must civilized people treat as intolerable?
Such questions cannot be dealt with, however, unless we know the fundamental reasons underlying tolerance. Thus it would be futile to try to specify the proper limits on tolerance without understanding whether and why tolerance is imperative to begin with. But justifying tolerance is not important just because of its bearings on other questions; it is important in itself for all persons and societies. If tolerance is a good thing, it cannot have vitality and strength unless the reasons supporting it are widely understood. It will be abandoned as soon as it proves inconvenient or difficult. On the other hand, if tolerance is not a good thing--if, for example, it contributes decisively to social disintegration and personal anomie--this is something we had better realize, however unpleasantly it may collide with present-day preconceptions.
However, on asking why be tolerant? many will be surprised to find that it is far from easy to provide a good answer. The great Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset speaks of liberalism as acrobatic; this is because, as Ortega puts it, it involves the strange act of admitting the enemy into your own camp. The word "acrobatic" applies particularly to tolerance, which signifies freedom, even protection, for opinions you despise and consider dangerous. Tolerance often seems obvious and effortless because the opinions we ordinarily tolerate do not matter very much to us in principle and have proven innocuous in practice. It is easy, in America, for the average Republican to tolerate the average Democrat, and vice versa. But is tolerance very important if it means nothing more than leaving room for slight and harmless disagreements?
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