Toleration

 Seems to me, only a society with only one ethnicity, one religion, one political ideology can survive without toleration. I do not know of any such government. We do not know if China will survive the next ten years. The near fascist government just elected in Italy will face a country with different ideologies. Multicultural countries without toleration will sooner or later resort to violence to destroy the Other. See the South African Union, the U.S.S.R., Nazi Germany, the English Civil War, the Confederate States of America, the Spanish Inquisition for the examples that come most readily to my mind. 

Psyche Ideas published Toleration is an impressive virtue that’s worth reviving which I found most interesting. It is always pleasing to the vanity to see your own ideas validated by someone else!

Suppose that I am polyamorous and that my mother disapproves. She tolerates my love life but thinks it’s wrong that I have not one partner but two. What her half-accepting, half-critical attitude reveals is a duality at the heart of toleration, an ambivalence that is beautifully captured by the British philosopher Bernard Williams (1929-2003). Toleration, for Williams, is a central ingredient in thinking through ‘what coexistence under conditions of fundamental disagreement requires’ (to use a helpful phrase from the philosopher Teresa Bejan).

To tolerate, as Williams stresses, is to be conflicted. Toleration involves putting up with something that you would rather not be the case. This doesn’t have to involve moral disapproval: perhaps you just can’t stand your colleague’s taste in music. But toleration is likely to be especially hard when what you experience is moral disapproval. After all, if you think that something is wrong, why not try to stop it happening?

***

 For Williams the virtue of toleration is an impressive and hard-to-sustain achievement. You might think that toleration is entirely passive, but as Williams shows, it is both active and passive. You have to actively sustain your moral beliefs at the same time as you actively resist acting on them. If you stop caring, you’d no longer be tolerant, merely indifferent.

*** 

Toleration as a virtue flirts with paradox by suggesting that there is something positively good in allowing something bad to go on. But, as we have seen, for Williams, this air of paradox is removed by the introduction of the value of liberal autonomy, which is to say valuing people’s ability to freely make their own decisions and to live accordingly. The ambivalence experienced by the tolerant involves a conflict between valuing freedom, and rejecting the moral content of what is done with that freedom. What results, at the heart of toleration, is mixed feelings. We could sum it up in a familiar phrase: you’re free to choose but I wish you hadn’t chosen that.

Like Bob Dylan, I am a liberal to a degree. However, I see no more reason I should tolerate fascism than I should tolerate a rabid dog running around a playground full of children. 

Williams’s version of toleration is pragmatic rather than principled. What is needed for a tolerant society, he felt, is not only – or even primarily – a single liberal virtue but rather ‘all the resources we can put together’. These include positive elements such as ‘the desire to co-operate and to get on peacefully with one’s fellow citizens and a capacity for seeing how things look to them.’ But most of all, for Williams, it involves a healthy sense of what life looks like when mutual toleration breaks down.

And fascism allows no toleration, there it is what life looks like when mutual toleration breaks down. 

sch 9/26/22