Peter Balint on Toleration

Moving ‘Beyond Toleration’?

(Or: Is Toleration Despotic?)

The importance of moving ‘beyond toleration’ has become a catchcry of many contemporary writers and activists. Tariq Ramadan, for example, writes: ‘toleration is intellectual charity on the part of the powerful…and we must get beyond it. When standing on equal footing, one does not expect to be merely tolerated or grudgingly accepted: that others endure and ‘suffer’ one’s presence is inadequate for oneself and detrimental to them.’

This line of argument is not even particularly new. Over two centuries earlier Thomas Paine wrote that ‘toleration is not the opposite of intoleration, but is the counterfeit of it. Both are despotisms.’

This call to move ‘beyond toleration’ – what I will call the Despotism Challenge – is based on an understanding of toleration as forbearance. That is, it necessarily entails an objection to some aspect of a person or group, the power to hinder that person or group, and intentionally not doing so.  

This challenge to toleration is certainly appealing: wouldn’t it be good to live in a world where nobody objects to other people, nor has the power to negatively interfere in their affairs? 

But the Despotism Challenge faces a number of problems. First, it assumes toleration must always involve objection. But this is not true. To see why, let us look at our use of the adjective ‘tolerant’. Sometimes we may applaud someone for a particularly tolerant act – perhaps a parent not stopping their child going out ‘dressed like that’. In this case, there is clear objection and the power to do something about it. The toleration here is a form of forbearance.

But at other times, we use the adjective more generally. For example, the way we might describe a person, an institution (perhaps a university), or even a society as being very tolerant. In this second case, we do not normally mean there is a lot of objection not being acted upon, but that there is usually little or no objection at all – even if there remains the power to hinder. It is this general sense of toleration (in which objection is not a necessary feature) which best applies to liberal states and liberal societies.  Here toleration is not necessarily a type of forbearance, it will primarily involve indifference. To be clear, this is not to say objection is never present, just that it is not a necessary feature of a general understanding of toleration.  

The second problem with the Despotism Challenge is that forbearance tolerance (where objection is necessary) may on many occasions actually be normatively preferable to the alternatives. One of the implied (and sometimes explicitly stated) implications of the Despotism Challenge is that respect or recognition of difference is a much better alternative.

While perhaps this may be possible from the state or state-like institutions (although I argue against this elsewhere), how can we even make sense of this as a demand on individuals in a liberal society? If we accept the basic liberal ideal of letting people live as they wish as long as they don’t harm others, then such an ideal is deeply troubling. Surely what matters is that people respect each other’s rights regardless of their views about each other’s differences; in other words, they minimally engage in forbearance tolerance.

If the resect for difference alternative was achievable, then such a society would no longer be very diverse (the range of respectable differences is quite likely much narrower than that of tolerable differences), and it would be a society that did not take people’s beliefs very seriously. Of course, if diversity and freedom of belief do not matter and homogeneity is being aimed for, then perhaps this is a better alternative; but it is an alternative that does away with one of the most basic liberal ideals.

What about the state then? Tolerant states will mainly be indifferent to the ways of life of their citizenry, and when individuals or groups clearly want to harm others they should certainly be intolerant. But there are also many cases where the state should engage in forbearance tolerance. Groups that do not believe in the equal worth of individuals – whether they be racist, sexist or otherwise – clearly violate the liberal state’s values of justice. But the importance of freedom of conscience and of association would seem to give liberal states good reasons not to interfere, at least initially, with the activities of such groups. Once again, it is the practice of toleration that allows such freedom and diversity – even, or especially, of things many will find objectionable.

Contrary to the Despotism Challenge, toleration – in either form – is not despotic, nor need it be ‘moved beyond’. It is a vital minimum in the relations between citizens; and from a state-citizen perspective, it allows those who do not hold liberal values and practices the freedom to live their lives as they fit. If one thinks that these liberal freedoms matter, then it is not toleration that looks potentially despotic, but perhaps certain forms of respect.  

Dr Peter Balint is a Senior Lecturer in Politics at UNSW Canberra. His most recent work is Respecting Toleration: Traditional Liberalism and Contemporary Diversity (Oxford, 2017). In 2011 he was a Visiting Fellow at the Morrell Centre for Toleration.    

For too long we have been "passively tolerant"...

This is the first in what will be a new series of Blogs from the Morrell Centre for Toleration (it is written in a personal capacity).

The Morrell Centre for Toleration exists to “increase the philosophical and historical understanding an appreciation of toleration as an idea and practice”. In future Blog posts, I hope to alert readers to new literature and debates and to discuss issues related to this purpose. What prompts this Blog is the use of the concept of “toleration” by the Prime Minister followed by comments by the Home Secretary. I won’t be discussing the content of what they propose – though I have views about that, which may well follow in a separate piece – but rather their use of the term “toleration” and what they might mean.

David Cameron’s speech is not available in full, but he is reported as saying

For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone. It’s often meant we have stood neutral between different values. And that’s helped foster a narrative of extremism and grievance. This government will conclusively turn the page on this failed approach. As the party of one nation, we will govern as one nation… That means actively promoting certain values. Freedom of speech. Freedom of worship. Democracy. The rule of law. Equal rights regardless of race, gender or sexuality.

The first question is, what is a passively tolerant society? Presumably, it is not to be understood by reference to its opposite: an actively tolerant one. David Cameron seems to want less toleration, not more.

The first gloss offered – that we should do more than say as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone – does not help. The law, social norms, and other forms of regulation set out what citizens can expect the state and other citizens to tolerate (this is not an uncontroversial view of toleration).

I can wear a loud shirt in a built up area and expect others – not matter how much they disapprove – to tolerate my doing so. I can reprimand my child or my dog in public in some ways of which others might disapprove, but insofar as I keep within the law, I can expect to be tolerated. And that’s the point: if David Cameron wants to introduce new legislation, which he clearly does, what he will do is make more things subject to legal regulation.

Let us suppose that legislation is brought forward to allow so-called “banning orders” on organisations that seek to “radicalise” people. Stay within the law – be an organisation that is recognised as seeking to inform, but not to radicalise – and you’ll be “left alone”. Of course, in practice the law is likely to be vague and things will not be easy, but Mr Cameron cannot be suggesting that legal sanctions could simply fall on people who are accepted as “obeying the law” (of course, legal sanctions fall on many people who are in fact obeying the law, but are not believed to be or who it is convenient for the state to treat as if they are not, but that is another matter).

What, then, of the second gloss? This seems to be a version of the quip that a liberal is someone who does not take his/her own side in an argument. We have been neutral between values; we have not promoted our (right) values – freedom of speech and of worship, democracy, the rule of law, equal rights, and so on – and that this is what it is to be “passively tolerant”. What is more, such passive tolerance has left a space for “extremism and grievance”.

The connection to grievance is hard to see, but is there any merit in the claim that tolerance leads to neutrality when it comes to values; a neutrality that in turn leaves a vacuum in the public sphere that can be filled by extremism?

To tolerate something is roughly to forebear from interfering in some practice that one judges objectionable when one has the power to interfere. Nothing in that suggests that promoting freedom and democracy is inconsistent with being tolerant unless promoting those things interferes in practices that lie within the limits of toleration.

Is there any reason to believe that the promotion of those values threatens practices or ways of life that ought to be tolerated? Insisting on “equal rights regardless of race, gender or sexuality” might do if it was enforced as it reads, but this Government is not about to insist that the Catholic Church appoint women priests or, for that matter, that the Garrick Club allow women members.

Perhaps the feeling is that we have been reluctant to promote those values even when the threatened practice ought not to be tolerated. That we have “turned a blind eye” to practices such a female genital mutilation or domestic violence in certain communities. And, that this permissiveness has left space for others.

If so, this is a failure, but it is not a failure of tolerance. Some things ought not to be tolerated – many more things ought to be – and it is a matter of justice and democratic politics to decide where the boundaries lie. In a liberal democratic society, we ought to tolerate people whose beliefs we find deeply objectionable, but we ought not to tolerate it when they act in ways that are contrary to just and legitimate laws. Think what you like, but obey the law and the state should leave you alone.

Interestingly, sent into the media studios to explain David Cameron’s speech, the Home Secretary Theresa May explained that “this government will challenge those who seek to spread hatred and intolerance” and that we needed to be more positive about the values that unite us: “things like democracy,… a belief in tolerance for other people, equality, an acceptance of other people’s faiths and religions.”

For Theresa May, then – and I suspect for David Cameron – it is passivity (not being positive enough about liberal values) that is the failing. Tolerance is a virtue to be celebrated. One should take comfort in that, but at a time when across the world people are being killed for their beliefs, condemning “tolerance” – even if in an unintelligible phrase like “passive tolerance” – is dangerous.

That leaves the question of whether there is space for both tolerance and the Government’s understanding that being “positive” requires introducing new laws to control its citizens. That is something for another Blog once the proposed legislation is clearer.