ABSTRACT
Toleration has lately fallen on hard times. It is a virtue that has fallen from fashion, because it goes against much in the spirit of the age. 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 it 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. Such pseudo-faiths are perhaps inevitable in those who have abandoned traditional faiths but have not relinquished the need for consolation that traditional theodicy existed to satisfy. The result, however, is a world-view according to which only stupidity and ill will stand between us and universal happiness. Grounded as it is on 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 – which is the Enlightenment project, in all its myriad forms, liberal and otherwise – of instituting a political providence in human affairs whereby tragedy and mystery would be banished from them.
