The Arguments for Tolerance

As the dust from the free speech wars settles, let's pause to ask ourselves a naive question: Exactly why should we be tolerant of opinions, convictions and ways of living that we consider (in order of increasing intolerability) strange, misguided, wrong, or evil? With a little reflection, we might be surprised to find that there are no easy answers. In fact, most of the reasons people give for tolerance are flawed. Here follows the most common arguments for tolerance, plus an uncommon one that I think beats all of them:

Because tolerance is practical. After the ethnic ugliness of the Los Angeles riots last spring, Rodney King made a moving call for tolerance by asking, "Can't we all get along?" His plea sums up the pragmatic argument for tolerance, which goes something like this: Diversity in America is becoming more and more of an intractable fact. In a just a few decades, after all, whites will be outnumbered by people of color. And if California is any indicator, people from starkly different backgrounds will sooner or later find themselves living next door to each other, sending their kids to the same schools, and even intermarrying. So we'd better learn to deal with diversity, this argument goes, or else continue to live with a lot of resentment, bitterness and perhaps violence.

There are two major drawbacks to this argument for toleration. First, it says nothing about what is valuable about diversity, if it's valuable at all. It's just a fact. So we merely have to learn to cope with reality. If we can learn to like pluralism or celebrate it, so much the better. If some people don't like it, tough luck. The second drawback is that the pragamatic argument for toleration is supremely intolerant in its own way. It says that nothing is more important than being able to agree, get along, and cope. Principle, religious conviction, and conscience should all be discarded if they lead to futile and irresolvable dilemmas. In the abortion stalemate, for example, pragmatism tells pro-lifers to throw out their religious objections to abortion because these arguments are never going to convince any atheist pro-choice feminist to change his mind. And if religious convictions, categorical principles, and tortured consciences happen to go the way of dinosaurs, good riddance: Then it would be easier to get along.

Because everything's relative. (Or, philosophical skepticism in more academic circles.) This is the most common argument driving both multiculturalism and political correctness. It says: If you're intolerant of different beliefs and lifestyles, you're not only being arrogant (e.g. ethnocentric, phallocentric, etc.) in thinking that your values are the only right ones--you're also philosophically wrong to think that any conviction or lifestyle can be proven rationally to be correct, true, best or even better. No one is right, wrong, or closer or farther from the truth. Ergo, we should all be tolerant.

The problem with relativism is that it has a tendency to instill too much tolerance. A short and sweet example: By my senior year in high school, some of the world history teachers were already drilling into us the multicultural mantra, "Not better or worse, just different." Let's just say it came back to haunt them when we discussed the practice of widow-burning in India. The moral of this story? Any coherent argument for tolerance must allow room for critical disagreement. Tolerance should be clearly distinguished from indifference.

Because truth will prevail. Here's a more promising argument: We should be tolerant because if we suppress controversial or repugnant opinions or experiments in living, we could very well be depriving ourselves of ideas that are truer or better than those opinions and habits we hold now. We should by no means go so far as relativists and skeptics in asserting that there is no truth to be discovered. But we should admit that as individuals, we certainly have no monopoly on the truth and could be wrong in our opinions. We should therefore be open-minded in the interest of finding out the truth.

Besides the problem that many people these days don't believe in truth any more than they believe in God, this argument suffers from an internal contradiction. If everyone thought that their views might be wrong, then how can anyone be sure that she knows the truth? How can you wholeheartedly promote your views while thinking that your opponents might actually be right after all? The solution is that you have to be either schizophrenic or half-hearted about your convictions. And judging from the spineless, gelatinous character of most liberals at Harvard (especially when radical feminists and multiculturalists starting getting illiberal on them), it must be psychologically easier to be half-hearted than schizophrenic.

Because controversy is good. This one is surely the least common and most controversial reason advanced here. It also happens to be my pick for the best defense of toleration. On this view, toleration is not good in itself, nor is it good because it helps us to learn to accept each other for who we are. On the contrary, toleration is valuable because only by maintaining a large degree of toleration can a community--like Harvard--sustain a healthy level of controversy. Controversy is good because it--like war, competitive sports, and mental games like chess--demands and elicits the best of each of us as individuals.

This individualistic argument for toleration avoids all the traps of more common justifications. Unlike the pragmatic argument, the individualistic argument for toleration sees diversity not as a dead fact but as an opportunity for engagement and individual excellence. In contrast to relativists, individualists unabashedly promote the view that an vigorous, independent, non-conformist, and critical life is better than a lazy, dependent, conformist, and settled one. And in response to those who complain of Eurocentrism, phallocentrism and marginalization in general, the individualistic view sees the position of the underdog--within reasonable limits--as the better (i.e. more challenging) place to be.

Finally, this view of toleration argues that truth is secondary to the process by which we arrive at it. Truth would have no value if an alien descended to Earth one day and gave us the answers to all our problems and settled all our controversies on the spot. That would defeat the purpose of living, which is to struggle against each other as individuals to find our own answers, debunk our own myths and reach our own compromises. And even if in the end we discovered that truth was only an imaginary trophy, the game will still have been worth playing. Why? Because, win or lose, what matters is how you played the game.