Most Popular White Papers
Content provided in partnership with
The virtues of toleration
National Review, Oct 5, 1992 by John Gray
A school of conservative thought, taking its cue from Edmund Burke and Michael Polanyi, finds positive value in prejudice, conceiving it as a repository for tacit or practical knowledge we would not otherwise have at our disposal. This view makes an important point in noting that much of our knowledge is possessed and used by us without ever being articulated. It is not entirely convincing as a defense of prejudice, if only because our fund of tacit beliefs contains tacit error as well as tacit knowledge. It was part of the fund of tacit belief of many Russians and Germans, in the last century and in our own, that Jews poison wells and perform ritual sacrifices; and this falsehood made anti-Semitic policies more popular in those countries. As this example shows, tacit error can have serious and sometimes harmful consequences.
It does not follow, however, that the project of banishing prejudice from the world is a sensible one. Prejudice does serve a cognitive function that is ineliminable in expressing beliefs that have been acquired unconsciously and that are held unreflectively. The idea that we can do without such beliefs, whatever their dangers, is merely another rationalist illusion. The life of the mind can never be that of pure reason, since it always depends on much that has not been subject to critical scrutiny by our reason. The project of abolishing prejudice is hubristic. It is hubristic because, as the history of our own age teaches us, even totalitarian regimes cannot control belief. The most they can do is affect behavior by intimidation, thereby promoting conformism and dissimulation. This is indeed the predictable outcome of movements for political correctness in American universities--that they initiate a dissociation of private thought from public life and so undermine the freedom of their institutions.
The totalitarian pedigree of political correctness emerges clearly in another way--in its attempt to impose a single world view on civil society. The totalitarian regimes were Weltanschauung states in which only a single world view--a radical form of secular humanism-could legitimately be propagated. It would be an irony of world-historical proportions if, just as totalitarian regimes are collapsing throughout the world, totalitarian order were re-established in the microcosm of the American university. Yet such is the logic of political correctness, with its hubristic project of replacing the variety of prejudice with the hegemony of a single ideology-if, in this case, an ephemeral and parochial liberalism which lacks even the historical sense displayed by Marxism-Leninism.
A humbler and more sensible approach--one suggested by the old-fashioned ideal of toleration, with its insight into the imperfectibility of the human mind--would be one that accepts the inevitability of prejudice and acknowledges that it has uses and benefits, while at the same time being prepared to curb its expression when this has demonstrably harmful effects. In general, however, we should guard against the harmful effects of prejudice not by engaging in the futile attempt to eradicate it, but by trying to ensure that everyone has the same civil and personal liberties. A policy of toleration, in other words, will be one that tolerates even the many false beliefs we have about each other-providing these do not result in the deprivation of important liberties and opportunities. When prejudice does have such an effect, our aim should usually be to protect the liberties and opportunities it threatens, rather than to eradicate the prejudice.
