Tolerance

Tolerance is in some quarters a virtue in disrepute. Its demand to abide, endure, permit, and even suffer the existence of what we find wrong and intolerable is fraught with contradictions. Tolerance involves accepting, abiding, or accommodating views that one rejects. In fact, its linguistic cognates in many languages include the verb to suffer (i.e., to suffer the existence of what one finds objectionable and wrong). It calls us to live in cognitive dissonance. We are obliged to bear what in fact we find unbearable: For, if we did not find [Page 1292]this, that, or the other word or deed objectionable, there would be no call to tolerate them. The whole issue of tolerance only arises when some act or speech is deemed objectionable.

Tolerance is, first and foremost, a method to live with what one finds objectionable, hence, by implication, with what is different from oneself and one's way of managing life. Tolerance as a virtue implies difference as an empirical fact. While not every difference is an objectionable difference, it is safe to assume that almost all of what we find objectionable we also define in opposition to what we are. It is in the face of what is both different and objectionable that tolerance is demanded.

To many, this demand, with the value judgment it entails (relegating certain acts to the realm of the wrong and unconscionable), is too insipid a virtue, falling far short of calls for the truly pluralistic or multicultural perspective that has become synonymous with what is right and fair and proper in the contemporary world. To these people, tolerance is not robust enough to support a shared life in a global world.

To others, however, tolerance is too broad a goal; it fails to delineate its own boundaries and cannot produce a definition of what would be intolerable. Fraught with internal contradiction, it would seem as well an unrestricted call to abide by all forms of objectionable behavior with no inherent limits on what is tolerable. After all, almost all would agree that there are actions that are beyond any moral compass and should not be tolerated. Many of the horrors of the 20th century, encompassing genocide and other crimes against humanity, would fall under this rubric. If certain sets of acts are clearly beyond what can be tolerated, we are left with the need to define the boundary of what can and cannot be tolerated. The real political and ethical debates, this group would argue, are over the definition of just this boundary, leaving the issue of tolerance as of only marginal significance.

Moreover, and to no small extent, tolerance as a virtue has in many countries been replaced with the idea of rights (individual rights, citizen rights, human rights) as the primary way of negotiating difference in the contemporary world. Rather than relying on a particular virtue—and an ill-defined and contradictory one at that—modern polities tend to organize collective life around a set of legally defined rights. Predicated most often on the secularization of the public realm, the freedom and moral autonomy of the individual conscience, and the separation of the private from the public realm, modern liberal democratic societies have in some sense made tolerance an irrelevant attribute of social life.

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