Tolerance
Description
Frank Furedi:
"Tolerance is an important ideal that is indispensable for the working of a genuinely free and democratic society. Yet it is ideal that we take for granted and do not take very seriously. Numerous articles and books on this subject treat it as a boring rather insignificant idea that doesn’t go far enough to secure a just society. Others depict tolerance as a disinclination to judge or to have strong views about the behaviour of others. Increasingly we are in danger of forgetting what tolerance as an intimate companion of liberty and freedom means. The aim of this essay is to remind ourselves that tolerance constitutes one of the most precious contributions of the Enlightenment imagination to modern life. Without tolerance we cannot be free, we cannot live with one another in relative peace, we cannot follow and act on our conscience, we cannot exercise our moral autonomy nor pursue our own road towards seeking the truth.
It is important to recall that tolerance is in historical terms a very recent ideal. Until the 17th century the toleration of different religions, opinions and beliefs was interpreted as a form of moral cowardice if not a symptom of heresy. Indeed, medieval witch-hunters and inquisitors were no less concerned with stigmatising those who questioned their intolerant practices than they were with hunting down witches and heretics. The 15th century witch-hunters manual, Malleus Maleficarum claimed that those who denied the existence of witches were as guilty of heresy as the active practitioners of witchcraft. In the following century scepticism was frequently treated as a particularly dangerous form of anti-Christian heresy. As the French historian, Paul Hazard noted in his pioneering study, The European Mind, until the 17th century, tolerance ‘had not been a virtue at all, but, on the contrary, a sign of weakness, not to say cowardice’. He added that ‘duty and charity’ forbade people to be tolerant.
It was in the 17th century that attitudes towards tolerating competing ideas and religions began to change. In part the rise of secularism and rationality encouraged a more sceptical orientation towards religious dogmatism and intolerance. This was also a period when Europe was overwhelmed by bitter religious conflicts which frequently resulted in bloody civil wars. In such circumstances, calls for tolerance were influenced by the pragmatic calculation that without a measure of religious toleration endemic violence and bloodshed could not be avoided. This was the moment when a significant minority of Europeans recognised that tolerance was a pre-requisite for their society’s survival. The American philosopher Michael Walzer emphasised the significance of this insight when he stated that toleration ‘sustains life itself’. Time and again we need to remind ourselves that, as he put it; ‘toleration makes difference possible; difference makes toleration necessary’.
The aim of 17th century advocates of tolerance such as John Locke was to protect religious belief from state coercion. His advocacy of toleration represented a call for restraining political authorities from interfering with the workings of individual conscience. Over the centuries this affirmation of religious tolerance has expanded to allow the free expression of opinions, beliefs and behaviour associated with the exercise of the individual conscience. Tolerance is intimately connected to the affirmation of the most basic dimension of freedom – the freedom of belief and of conscience. The ideal of tolerance demands that we accept the right of people to live according to beliefs and opinions that are different, sometimes antithetical to ours. Tolerance does not invite us to accept or celebrate other people’s sentiments. It demands that we live with them and desist from interfering or forcing others to fall in line with our own views.
Tolerance pertains to the domain of the political/philosophical through its avowal of the principle of non-interference towards the way that people develop and hold beliefs and opinions. Tolerance affirms the freedom of conscience and individual autonomy. As long as an act does not violate a person’s moral autonomy and harm others, tolerance also calls for the absence of constraint on behaviour linked to the exercise of individual autonomy. From this perspective tolerance can be measured in relation to the extent to which people’s belief and behaviour is not subject to institutional and political interference and restraint. Secondly, tolerance is also a social/cultural accomplishment. A tolerant society is one where tolerance as a cultural orientation discourages and restrains social intolerance. This was a concern eloquently pursued by the philosopher J.S. Mill who warned about what he characterised as the ‘tyranny of public’ opinion and its tendency to stigmatise and silence minority and dissident beliefs. Upholding the disposition to be tolerant is always a challenge and as experience shows legal safe guards can always come unstuck when confronted by a tidal wave of intolerance."