The virtues of toleration

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.

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.

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.

These departures from the old-fashioned ideal of toleration are all too likely to breed more old-fashioned intolerance. The case for toleration appeals in part to the fact that our society contains a diversity of strong and incompatible moral views. Consider the case of homosexuality. There are those, such as some traditional Christian, Jewish, and Moslem believers, who hold that homosexuality is immoral per se; others who regard it merely as a preference, that by itself raises no moral issue of any kind; and yet others who regard it as a form of cultural identity, with its own lifestyle and literature. These are deep differences among us, since they reflect not only divergent judgments on moral questions but also different views as to what is the subject matter and character of morality itself. An attempt to give legal force to any one of these views, in circumstances of deep pluralism of the sort we have now, is likely to fragment us further, and to evoke more intolerance among us. A policy of toleration, in which homosexuals have the same personal and civil liberties as heterosexuals and in which neither category bears burdens the other does not, seems the policy most likely to issue in a peaceful modus vivendi.

What a policy of toleration would not mandate is the wholesale reconstruction of institutional arrangements such that homosexuals acquired collective rights or were in every context treated precisely as heterosexuals. As matters stand, there is a single form of marriage entrenched in law in the U.S. and Britain. Complete neutrality between heterosexuality and homosexuality would entail the legal recognition of homosexual marriage, just as complete neutrality between Christian and Moslem marriage would entail legal recognition of polygamous marriage. If we go this route, we are not far from the radical libertarian reductio ad absurdum--the abolition of marriage itself and its replacement by whatever contracts people choose to enter into.

Apartheid in Reverse

IT IS in the area of multiculturalism that a policy of toleration is most needed, and ideas of radical equality and positive discrimination most unfortunate. We have already noted one disadvantage of policies of affirmative action--that they are applied on the basis of group membership and so entail the collectivization of (at least some) rights. Policies which result in the creation of group rights are inevitably infected with arbitrariness and consequent inequity, since the groups selected for privileging are arbitrary, as is the determination of who belongs to which group. The nemesis of such policies--not far off in the United States--is a sort of reverse apartheid, in which people's opportunities are decided by the morally arbitrary fact of ethnic origin rather than by their deserts or needs.

There is a deeper objection to policies of multiculturalism that issue in the creation of group rights. This is that a stable liberal civil society cannot be radically multicultural but depends for its successful renewal across the generations on an undergirding common culture. This culture need not encompass a shared religion and it certainly need not presuppose ethnic homogeneity, but it does demand widespread acceptance of certain norms and conventions of behavior, and, in our times, it typically expresses a shared sense of nationality. Where multiculturalism and toleration diverge is in the recognition within the ideal of toleration that stable liberty requires more than subscription to legal or constitutional rules--it requires commonality in moral outlook, across a decent range of issues, as well. We can live together in deep disagreement about abortion, for example, but not if we also disagree about the propriety of using force on our opponents.

The example of the United States--which at least in recent years has accepted the belief that a common culture is not a necessary precondition of a liberal civil society-shows that the view that civil peace can be secured solely by adherence to abstract rules is merely an illusion. Insofar as policy has been animated by it, the result has been further social division, including what amounts to low-intensity civil war among the races. As things stand, the likelihood is of a slow slide into ungovernability, as the remaining patrimony of a common cultural inheritance is frittered away by the fragmenting forces of multiculturalism.

An upshot of the foregoing reflections is that a society that is multiracial is likely to enjoy civil peace only if it is not at the same time radically multicultural. By contrast, the multiculturalists' demand that minority cultures--however these are defined--be afforded rights and privileges denied the mainstream culture in effect delegitimates the very idea of a common culture. Accordingly, the largely healthy pressures on minority cultures to integrate themselves into the mainstream culture are represented as inevitably the expression of prejudice, racial or otherwise, and so condemnable.

We reach a crux now in the idea and practice of toleration-its bearing on the idea and fact of prejudice. The idea of prejudice is, perhaps, not as simple as it looks, but the essence of prejudice as a practice seems to be the discriminatory treatment of people on grounds of their belonging to a group of some sort, where this is not relevant to the matter at issue. Now, there can be no doubt that prejudice of this sort can be a great evil--witness the long history of Christian anti-Semitism and the differential treatment accorded to members of diverse racial groups under the apartheid system in South Africa--and that it is an evil against which there can and ought to be legal remedies. It is worth noting again, however, that policies of positive discrimination or affirmative action involving quotas are also condemned by any ideal that condemns prejudice. A consistent rejection of policies based on prejudice would be one that was blind to race, gender, and sexual orientation, rather than one that merely reversed earlier or pre-existing prejudicial policies.

There is a deeper question for the ideal of toleration posed by the reality of prejudice. As it is commonly understood, prejudice connotes not only discriminatory practices but also, and more generally, conduct and perception based on stereotype or emotion rather than a dispassionate grasp of the facts. Radical liberals have seen in prejudice of this fundamental sort an evil that must be attacked by legislation--by laws against sexist or racist stereotypes in advertising or children's books, for example. For these liberals, prejudice is an evil that issues, in part at least, from a distortion of the cognitive faculties, which is to be remedied by a destruction of the offending stereotypes. What does the supporter of the old ideal of toleration say of prejudice of this sort? He will not deny that it is often an evil. No one, I take it, who has been pigeon-holed or marginalized on the basis of offensive group stereotypes can pretend to have enjoyed the experience. There nevertheless remains a question about the radical liberal project of abolishing prejudice.

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.

My Judgment, Your Prejudice

THE ARGUMENT so far, then, is that we will do better if we seek to rub along together, tolerating one another's prejudices, rather than attempting the impossible task of ironing them out from social life. A policy of toleration with regard to all but the most harmful prejudices makes sense for another reason: there is not much agreement among us as to what counts as a prejudice.

For some, the idea that heterosexuality is the norm from which homosexuality departs is quite unproblematic; for others it embodies unacceptable prejudice. This deep difference of view among us exemplifies a pluralism in our society that is perhaps deeper than ever before in our history. Our society harbors conceptions of the good life and views of the world that, though they may overlap, are sometimes so different as to be incommensurable: we lack common standards whereby they could be assessed.

As has already been observed, among us there is disagreement not only about answers to moral questions, but also about the subject matter of morality itself. For some, sexual conduct is at the very heart of morality; for others, it is a matter of taste or preference and acquires a moral dimension only when important human interests--such as those of children--are affected. For those who hold the latter view, the appropriate approach to homosexuality, say, is not toleration but a more radical tolerance--that of indifference. They believe they have no more reason to concern themselves about the sexual habits of others than about their tastes in ethnic cuisine. It is this radical tolerance of indifference that homosexual activists should be aiming at, rather than the divisive project of group or cultural rights, if they remain dissatisfied with old-fashioned toleration.

It seems plain that our own society contains such incommensurable conceptions and that the tolerance of indifference is for that reason relevant to us. Nevertheless, several important caveats are worth making. First, the claim that there may be, and are present among us, conceptions of the good that are rationally incommensurable is not one that supports any of the fashionable varieties of relativism and subjectivism, since it allows, and indeed presupposes, that some conceptions of the good are defective, and some forms of life simply bad. One may assert that the goods expressed in the lives of Mother Teresa and Oscar Wilde are incommensurable, and yet confidently assert that the life of a crack addict is a poor one. Secondly, the radical tolerance of indifference is virtually the opposite of old-fashioned toleration in that its objects are not judged to be evils and may indeed be incommensurable goods. Very different as they undoubtedly are, these two forms of toleration seem no less necessary and appropriate in a pluralistic society such as contemporary Britain or America. But thirdly, and most importantly, recognition of the value of the radical tolerance of indifference does not mean that we can do without a common stock of norms and conventions or the older virtue of toleration. A common culture-even if one defined thinly in terms of the practices and virtues that make up a liberal civil society--is essential if we are not to drift into chaos; and even such an attenuated common culture will be renewed across the generations only if it is animated by a shared sense of history and nationality. For these reasons, the tolerance of indifference can never be the dominant form of tolerance in a free society; it must always be a variation on the very different, and inescapably judgmental, tolerance I have called old-fashioned toleration.

We return to the thought with which we began. Toleration is a virtue appropriate to people who acknowledge their imperfectibility. Such people will not demand that their preferences be accorded special rights or privileges, or expect that their style of life will receive universal respect. They will be satisfied if they are left alone. Rather than pursuing a delusive utopia in which all ways of life are given equal (and possibly unmerited) respect, they are content if we can manage to rub along together. In this they are recognizing a profound truth, suppressed in the Panglossian liberalisms that dominate political thought today--that freedom presupposes peace. As George Santayana expressed it: "In order to be truly and happily free you must be safe. Liberty requires peace. War would impose the most terrible slavery, and you would never be free if you were always compelled to fight for your freedom. This circumstance is ominous: by it the whole sky of liberty is clouded over. We are drawn away from irresponsible play to a painful study of facts and to the endless labor of coping with probable enemies."

We are most likely to enjoy an enduring liberty if we moderate our demands on each other and learn to put up with our differences. We will then compromise when we cannot agree, and reach a settlement--always provisional, never final--rather than stand on our (in any case imaginary) rights. Oddly enough, we will find that it is by tolerating our differences that we come to discover how much we have in common. It is in the give and take of politics, rather than the adjudications of the courts, that toleration is practiced and the common life renewed. We will achieve a form of common life that is tolerable and stable, most reliably, if we abandon the inordinacy of radical neutrality and cultural rights and return to the pursuit of a modus vivendi, shifting and fragile as it may be, in the practice of toleration.

Mr. Gray is a fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. and Stanahan Distinguished Research Fellow at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center, Bowling Green, Ohio. This article is adapted from an essay in the forthcoming The Loss of Virtue, to be published this fall by National Review Books.

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