Presumably, we all want to be tolerated. After all, who can imagine what might happen to us if we were not? Nasty things to be sure. Conversely, it seems likely that most of us would like to be thought of as tolerant. This toleration, which is due to each of us and extracted from all, is not merely social, but institutional: it is against the rule not to tolerate others. Intolerance, being against the standards of any decent community, will not be tolerated. It is intolerable.
To call someone “intolerant” is to brand them as a small person, one incapable of the moral magnanimity necessary in a pluralistic society. It is to condemn them as a representative of a bygone period of social history. In short, it is to dismiss their way of thinking as irrelevant, and probably beneath refutation. Here at Wesleyan, though, there are few words that have come to have a more plastic meaning than “tolerance,” which is to say that there are few words which mean less. The epithet of “intolerant” is slung around carelessly enough that it has begun to lose the sting which it should rightly possess.
There are also those people who say that being tolerated is not enough, that they must also be “accepted.” To them, acts of tolerance are apparently first and foremost acts of condescension, disingenuous through and through. To tolerate is to not accept—it is to marginalize! (And what, after all, is worse than being consigned to the margins, those places where little notes are scribbled!)
To be perfectly honest, I have very little conception of what this argument is supposed to mean. What exactly would an act of tolerance or acceptance look like? Should we hope for relative strangers to approach us, gently pat us on the shoulder, and say, “Hey, I just wanted you to know that I accept you.” Perhaps various social groups around campus, representing various constituents, should hang banners saying, “We tolerate you, whoever you are.” Or perhaps we are all due some toleration care package, to arrive biannually, complete with fruit, chocolate, and a little card that says, “Roses are red, violets are blue, if you tolerate well, then we’ll tolerate you.”
I do understand perfectly the desire to avoid harassment of all sorts. This desire is more than understandable, it is capable of being universalized: people don’t want to spend their time and energy dealing with acts that carelessly and thoughtlessly deride them, and they shouldn’t have to do so. I would not like to be construed as defending any such harassment, which are rightly labeled intolerant and intolerable, and which are indefensible in my eyes. Hate-crimes of all brands deserve to be scrutinized and repudiated, and those who commit them are rightly denounced as bigots. The happy truth is that just about everyone at Wesleyan would agree to these things, too.
But therein is the truth about what tolerance really means: it is a negative, liberal (with a little “l”) quality. The tolerant are not required to transform their approbation into acts of kindness or loving their neighbor, even if these things are generally desirable. The accepting are required to treat those accepted as they would treat others—not worse, but not better, either. Tolerance does not mean liking somebody, or showering them with signs of approval, or adopting their causes as your own. Therefore, to be tolerant does not imply liking everybody, or being indiscriminately nice, or fighting for the causes of everyone who has them.
It may be that when people say that they want to be tolerated, or accepted, they really mean that they want people to become their advocates. In the end, they want tolerance to be a positive action rather than a negative abstention from intolerance. This desire is by no means unreasonable, but it cannot ever have the same force as the prohibition of specifically intolerant acts. In a world where our time is scarce, all people must choose their own battles to fight. Asking others to take up your causes, in this light, deserves no odium whatsoever, and is indeed perfectly natural, but the polite denial of such a request has nothing of intolerance about it. Moreover, to blame individuals for the persistence of institutional discrimination that they did nothing to create (and possibly would actively denounce or correct if given the power to do so) simply because they do not choose to spend their time as advocates against this discrimination is not only wrong-minded but logically incoherent. The idea that “we are all responsible for societal discrimination” is simply absurd.
Being tolerant does not mean suspending judgment, of ideas or of individuals. To me, being tolerant means that I should judge individuals on the basis of their own personalities and ultimate values, irrespective of where they come from or how their beliefs might be summarily characterized. This means that it is perfectly acceptable for some people not to like each other, and, in some cases, even to hate each other. Indeed, my own perception that there are some people who really do not like me is one of the facts of my life that makes me certain I am doing something right. There are things I stand for, and if those things offend certain people, they have every reason to dislike me for them. If they disagree with my means but see my ends as ultimately worthwhile, then we may get along fine, debating as to the manner of how best to accomplish our goals. Given this picture of tolerance, I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that most students at Wesleyan, including myself, are paragons of tolerance.
In the end, tolerance is a tricky, paradoxical business, because we cannot afford to tolerate the actively intolerant. Arthur Koestler wrote, “He who does not love himself, does not love well, and who does not hate himself, does not hate well, and hatred of evil is as necessary as love if the world is not to come to a standstill. Tolerance is an acquired virtue, indifference is a native vice.” Tolerance cannot mean a soupy acceptance of everything for which everyone stands, because this is, at bottom, indifference. If we restrict the meaning of tolerance to the unequivocal rejection of bigotry, it can regain its power as a truly meaningful idea.
Leave a Reply