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The virtues of toleration
National Review, Oct 5, 1992 by John Gray
People want approval, not toleration and in the current political climate they demand it. But the project of legislating tastes and preferences may harm society more than it helps any individual.
TOLERATION is a virtue that has lately fallen on hard times. Old-fashioned toleration--the toleration defended by Milton and by the older liberals, such as Locke--sprang from an acceptance of the imperfectibility of human beings, and from a belief in the importance of freedom in the constitution of the good life. Since we cannot be perfect, and since virtue cannot be forced on people but is rather a habit of life they must themselves strive to acquire, we were enjoined to tolerate the shortcomings of others, even as we struggled with our own. On this older view, toleration is a precondition of any stable modus vivendi among incorrigibly imperfect beings.
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If toleration has become unfashionable in our time, the reason is in part to be found in the resistance of a post-Christian age to the thought that we are flawed creatures whose lives will always contain evils. This is a thought subversive of the shallow optimistic creeds of our age, humanist or Pelagian, for which human evils are problems to be solved rather than sorrows to be coped with or endured. The result is a world view according to which only stupidity and ill-will stand between us and universal happiness. Grounded as it is in accepting the imperfectibility of the human lot, toleration is bound to be uncongenial to the ruling illusions of the epoch, all of which cherish the project of instituting a political providence in human affairs whereby tragedy and mystery would be banished.
Toleration is unfashionable for another, more topical reason. It is unavoidably and inherently judgmental. When we tolerate a practice, a belief, or a character trait, we let something be that we judge to be undesirable, false, or at least inferior; our toleration expresses the conviction that, despite its badness, the object of toleration should be left alone. This is in truth the very idea of toleration, as it is practiced in things great and small. So it is that our tolerance of our friends' vices makes them no less vices in our eyes: rather, our tolerance presupposes that they are vices. As the Oxford analytical philosophers of yesteryear might have put it, it is the logic of toleration that it can be practiced only in respect of evils. So, on a grander scale, we tolerate ersatz religions, such as Scientology, not because we think they may after all contain a grain of truth, but because the great good of freedom of belief necessarily encompasses the freedom to believe absurdities. Toleration is not, then, an expression of doubt about our ability to tell the good from the bad; it is evidence of our confidence that we have that ability.
Such judgments are alien to the dominant conventional wisdom according to which standards of belief and conduct are entirely subjective or relative in character, and one view of things is as good as any other. A tolerant man does not doubt that he knows something about the good and the true; his tolerance expresses that knowledge. Indeed, when a society is tolerant, its tolerance expresses the conception of the good life that it has in common. Insofar as a society comes to lack any such common conception--as is at least partly the case in the U.S. and Britain today--it ceases to be capable of toleration as it was traditionally understood.
Toleration as a political ideal is offensive to the new liberalism--the liberalism of Rawls, Dworkin, Ackerman, and such like--because it is decidedly non-neutral in respect of the good. For the new liberals, justice the shibboleth of revisionist liberalism--demands that government, in its institutions and policies, practice neutrality, not toleration, in regard to rival conceptions of the good life. Although in the end this idea of neutrality may not prove to be fully coherent, its rough sense seems to be that it is wrong for government to discriminate in favor of, or against, any form of life animated by a definite conception of the good.
According to the new liberals, such discrimination violates an ideal of equality demanding equal respect by government for divergent conceptions of the good and the ways of life that embody them. This is radical stuff, since--unlike the old-fashioned ideal of toleration--it does not simply rule out the coercive imposition of a conception of the good and its associated way of life by legal prohibition of its rivals. It also rules out as wrong or unjust government's encouraging or supporting some ways of life--by education, subsidy, welfare provision, taxation, or legal entrenchment--at the expense of others deemed by it, or by the moral common sense of society, to be undesirable or inferior. It rules out, in other words, precisely a policy of toleration--a policy of not attaching a legal prohibition to, or otherwise persecuting, forms of life or conduct that are judged bad and that government tries by a variety of means to discourage. What the neutrality of radical equality mandates is nothing less than the legal disestablishment of morality. As a result, morality becomes in theory a private habit of behavior rather than a common way of life.
