ABSTRACT
The chapter examines a number of key modern views on tolerance, based on arguments from the previous chapters.
The thought of Hannah Arendt concerning the nature of political life has certain key similarities to that of J.S. Mill, particularly with regard to the need for free and open public debate of different views, and in this sense Arendt has a significant notion of political tolerance, albeit not expressed in the customary language of liberal thought. I discuss the influence of ancient Greek thought and that of Kant on Arendt’s approach to tolerance.
The work of the Kant scholar Onora O’Neill provides a detailed account of tolerance based upon Kant’s notion of the public use of reason.
For John Rawls, tolerance plays a central part in his notion of justice as fairness. While tolerance of other people’s views is thus basic to the practice of justice, there are nonetheless times when tolerance of intolerance is not possible. This may happen when there are matters of security and where there is a threat to basic liberties, for example where a group of some kind such as an intolerant sect aims to impose their beliefs and practices on others. Here the first principle of justice comes into play as it describes how basic liberties need to be compatible between people. There thus follows from this that there needs to be some public setting where reasonable public debate about matters of what can or cannot be tolerated takes place.
Rawls in his later work moved from his assumptions of a well-ordered society to trying to tackle the modern democratic society where diverse and often incompatible religious, philosophical, and moral worldviews live alongside one another in various comfortable and uncomfortable ways. Instead of a uniformity of assumptions and beliefs he proposes that such a modern society should work with ‘overlapping consensus’.
Rawls provides a clear and fundamentally liberal view about what he considers would be suitable for such a society. This would entail mutual respect for others, which would enable people with different doctrines to cooperate with one another and abide by terms of cooperation in the first place. The just principles he puts forward need to satisfy the criterion of reciprocity. I use the Respect principle as another essential element of subject tolerance.
Jürgen Habermas tackles the public use of reason within the context of a theory of human communication, which in its earlier form at least was deeply influenced by psychoanalytic clinical practice. He argues that active tolerance, with human subjects able to communicate in an open public arena, not passive indifference, protects a pluralistic society from being torn apart as a political community by conflicts over comprehensive world views. Tolerance enables subjects to have open, free, and non-coercive communication.
Rainer Forst divides tolerance into the Permission or Respect conception of tolerance. The Permission conception is about those in power allowing others, usually a minority, to live in accordance with their own convictions. This would be to accept a minority’s minimal demands for freedom of belief and practice, but may be better than nothing, at least for a while. It is a kind of ‘vertical’ tolerance, from top down. With Respect Tolerance, the tolerating parties respect one another as autonomous persons, as equally entitled members of a community under the rule of law. Clearly this is similar to Subject Tolerance and is more like a ‘horizontal’ form of tolerance, involving more equal relationships.
Subject tolerance requires some form of equal and respectful relationship between different parties holding different views. But for there to be such tolerance, there already needs to be an assumption of what Ingrid Crepell calls a ‘will to relationship’. Tolerance depends upon an initial will to interaction in the face of differences, which of course is far from being the case in many situations of conflict. This approach does require a shift in political attitude, and a considerable amount of good will, motivation, and imagination from those engaged in politics, as well as a realistic approach to tackling intolerant states of mind and attitudes.
Martha Nussbaum has written extensively on contemporary politics and its links to past thinkers and movements, laying particular emphasis on the place of political accommodation. She tackles the issue of accommodation and struggles to achieve it, both from an historical perspective but also using modern interpretations within the legal context, to illustrate how intolerance needs to be faced by offering a clear vision of how it needs to be overcome.
I end the chapter by looking at how some theorists, such as Chandran Kukathas, argue for tolerating minority groups by leaving them free from state interference, that a wide view of tolerance is the main way to manage these issues. He argues there are no group rights, only individual rights. By granting cultural groups special protections and rights, the state oversteps its role, which is to secure civil peace, and risks undermining individual rights of association, thus ending up creating an increased risk of intolerance towards minorities. States should not pursue cultural integration or engineering, but rather a ‘politics of indifference’, or ‘benign neglect’ toward minority groups.
This contrasts with others who argue that mere tolerance of group differences falls short of treating members of minority groups as equals; what is required is recognition and positive accommodation of minority group practices through what Will Kymlicka has called ‘group-differentiated rights’.
But I argue that unless thought on tolerance takes full account of the nature of intolerance as an element of human nature that cannot merely be argued away by public reason, there is a great danger of allowing the dark forces of intolerance to swamp those who offer reasonable arguments. As I argue, one of the most powerful reasons for people holding intolerant views, regardless of any amount of rational discussion, is a primal fear about loss of identity, which I have described as a fear of a loss of a psychic home. This primal fear can make individuals and groups have profound and irrational fears about being displaced by strangers and it can tear communities apart, as well as lead to discrimination against those who appear to be different. Managing intolerant attitudes and promoting tolerance is not then just a matter of providing reasonable arguments in the face of ignorance and prejudice, though that is important, but of confronting the human elements that make up intolerant thinking, such as anxieties around a loss of a psychic home, that is, addressing the emotional context driving intolerance.
