Toleration and tolerance

This chapter examines how the space for toleration in contemporary societies depends upon our conception of the plurality that characterises them. Toleration, traditionally understood, entails objecting to but not preventing whatever it is that we tolerate. Toleration amongst those who hold different and conflicting religious beliefs has always been the paradigm case, but the traditional idea of toleration comports equally well with conflicts of moral, political, and intellectual belief. The plurality that characterises contemporary societies is, however, often conceived in other terms. Contemporary populations are said to be marked more conspicuously by difference than disagreement and the most salient differences are differences of identity, such as gender, sexuality, nationality, and ethnicity. Even religious differences are frequently accounted more significant as differences of identity than belief. Thus a switch from belief to identity radically shrinks the space within which toleration is appropriate. That conclusion requires a major qualification arising from the different meanings given to ‘being tolerant’ nowadays. Whereas traditionally toleration has connoted not impeding the objectionable, the tolerant individual and the tolerant community are now often understood as tolerant insofar as they abstain from disapproval or dislike. Others may disapprove or dislike differences; the tolerant person simply accepts them. Unlike toleration, ‘tolerance’ so understood can occupy the same space as identity. In our untidy world, the claims of belief and identity, and the associated claims of toleration and tolerance, jostle together and compete for pre-eminence in shared spaces. The final part of the chapter examines how those claims differ and compete in two types of case: (1) the issue of how we should deal with challenges to religion, such as the Danish cartoons and (2) the issue of how we should respond to demands that a society should make special efforts to accommodate the religious differences present in its population.