The virtues of toleration

The New Puritanism

IN PRACTICE things are rather different. The idea of the moral neutrality of the state with respect to different ways of life faces the problem of what is to count as a bona-fide way of life. Since there is nothing in the idea of neutrality that addresses this problem, its adherents fall back on the deliverances of the bien-pensant opinion of the day. If it has any clear meaning at all, the idea of neutrality among different ways of life tells us that the way of life of the smoker, the drinking man, or the man devoted to pleasure even at the expense of health should not by any government policy be disprivileged, disfavored, or otherwise discriminated against; and yet, such categories of people have been afforded no protection from the New Puritanism-the Puritanism that is inspired, not by ideas of right and wrong, but by a weakness for prudence that expresses itself in an obsession with health and longevity. The smoker of unfiltered Turkish cigarettes or the would-be absinthe drinker will get short shrift if he argues that these pleasures are elements in a way of life animated by a definite conception of the good that deserves equal protection along with those of the jogger and the vegan.

At the level of theory the problem of identifying genuine ways of life is insoluble, since it requires an evaluation of human lives that will inevitably be non-neutral among some ideals of the good. The life of the drinking man may be stigmatized as alcoholism, which is not a way of life but an illness; or the life of a housewife may be characterized as a form of oppression--not an embodiment of any coherent conception of the good. In practice, favored minorities will obtain legal privileges for themselves while unfashionable minorities will be subject to policies of paternalism and moralistic intervention in their chosen styles of life that earlier generations of liberals--including John Stuart Mill--would at once have rejected as intolerable invasions of personal liberty.

The practical legal and political result of these newer liberal ideas is found in policies of reverse or positive discrimination and in the creation of group or collective rights. For those who have constituted themselves members of a cultural minority group, to be the object of old-fashioned toleration is to feel subject to a form of disrespect, even of contempt or persecution, since they are thereby denied equal standing with mainstream society. More, what is needed to remedy this discrimination, in their view, is not merely parity of treatment, but a form of differential treatment in which their group is accorded privileges over the majority, or over other minority groups. So it is that in the United States--where these practices, predictably, are at their most extreme--there are quotas in universities in favor of some minority groups, and, if rumor is to be believed, there have been quotas against disfavored groups such as Asians. Some who may not hitherto have considered themselves members of a cultural minority--such as many homosexuals--are encouraged by such practices to constitute themselves as one, thereby transforming a sexual preference into a culture or a way of life that demands protection or privilege along with those of selected ethnic minorities. In all these cases, as with quotas created for women in American universities, it is group membership that now confers rights. Indeed, the rights of groups now often trump those of individuals when they come into conflict with one another.