Boundaries of Toleration

Alfred Stepan, Charles Taylor

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780231536332
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How can people of diverse religious, ethnic, and linguistic allegiances and identities live together without committing violence, inflicting suffering, or oppressing each other? In this volume, contributors explore the limits of toleration and suggest we think beyond them to mutual respect. Salman Rushdie reflects on the once tolerant Sufi-Hindu culture of Kashmir. Ira Katznelson follows with an intellectual history of toleration as a layered institution in the West. Charles Taylor advances a new approach to secularism in our multicultural world, and Akeel Bilgrami responds by offering context and caution to that approach. Nadia Urbinati explores why Cicero's humanist ideal of Concord was not used in response to religious discord. The volume concludes with a refutation of the claim that toleration was invented in the West. Rajeev Bhargava writes on Asoka's India, and Karen Barkey explores toleration within the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires. Sudipta Kaviraj examines accommodations and conflicts in India, and Alfred Stepan highlights contributions to toleration and multiple democratic secularisms in such Muslim-majority countries as Indonesia and Senegal.

1

CLASSICAL WESTERN APPROACHES TO TOLERATION

A FORM OF LIBERTY AND INDULGENCE

Toleration as a Layered Institution

IRA KATZNELSON

The Duke of Buckingham thus expressed himself in favour of a Toleration: My Lords; There is a thing called liberty, which … is, that the people of England are fondest of; it is that they will never part with…. This, my Lords, in my opinion can never be done without giving an Indulgence to all Protestant Dissenters. It is certainly a very uneasy kind of life to any man, that has either Christian charity, humanity, or good-nature, to see his fellow-subjects daily abused, divested of their liberties and birth-rights, and miserably thrown out of their possessions and freeholds, only because they cannot agree with others in some opinions and niceties of religion, which their consciences will not give them leave to consent to…. Methinks, in this notion of persecution a very gross mistake, both as to the point of Government, and the point of Religion…. It makes every man’s safety depend on the wrong place; not upon governors, or a man’s living well toward the civil government established by law, but upon his being transported with zeal for every opinion, that is held by those that have power in the Church that is in fashion…. My humble motion to your lordships is, that you would give leave to bring in a Bill of Indulgence to all Protestant Dissenters.

—HOUSE OF LORDS, OCTOBER 1675, COBBETT’S PARLIAMENTARY HISTORY OF ENGLAND, VOL. 4: COMPRISING THE PERIOD FROM THE RESTORATION OF CHARLES THE SECOND, IN 1660, TO THE REVOLUTION, IN 1688

TOLERATION IS PROFOUNDLY important. It addresses some of the most difficult and persistent features of human social relations. Combinations of hierarchy and loathing across group lines recur frequently in recorded history, notably, but not exclusively, when cultural pluralism takes religious form. The pervasive, protean, and passionate qualities of religious imaginations and identities combine belief with practical social organization. Hand in hand, religious and political contention can create markers of solidarity, incommensurability, and enmity that expose different faiths, especially minority faiths and their adherents, to zealotry and danger. Often led by specialists in violence, such processes under conditions of diversity that designate people and practices as unacceptable have been persistent in human history.

As Bernard Williams observed, toleration “is necessary when different groups—moral, political, or religious—realize that there is no alternative to living together, that is to say, no alternative except armed conflict, which will not resolve their disagreements and will impose continuous suffering.”¹ An alternative to oppression, suffering, and violence, toleration is most needed in circumstances that make respect, cooperation, and social peace difficult to obtain. “We need to tolerate other people and their ways of life,” Williams ruefully noted, “only in situations that make it very difficult to do so.”² Toleration thus is motivated and should be judged by its capacity to manage deeply felt commitments in inconvenient conditions.

Toleration is a virtue.³ It is not, however, a simple good. In the recent past, a significant number of philosophers and political theorists have probed and debated toleration’s meaning, complexity, and ambiguity. They have understood it to be a concept that is “grim and limited,” even if immensely valuable.⁴ Grim because it is premised on dislike and disapproval. Limited because its rules, combining law, intellectual justification, and social practices, are contingent on self-discipline by the powerful, and offer a form of liberty more qualified than a right.

Toleration is what George Fletcher calls an unstable virtue. Hovering between “an impulse to intervene and regulate the lives of others, and … an imperative—either logical or moral—to restrain that impulse,”⁵ it never is simply fixed or secure, for it is inherently controversial. Its very existence, its conditions for the accommodation of disliked beliefs and social practices, and its substantive range cannot but be deeply contested and often fiercely resisted, not always unreasonably. Toleration implies circumstances that make it possible and reasons that make it desirable.⁶ Both are uncertain.

Curiously, discussions and considerations of such matters have played little if any role in scholarly literatures in history and the social sciences that detail and seek to understand contentious and often violent engagements across the lines of religion and ethnicity, nation, and race. Toleration has yet to function analytically as a theoretically inscribed variable, in part because the philosophical literature designates toleration as self-abnegation by powerful actors but stops short of fashioning the concept in sufficiently differentiated fashion to make it a tool for systematic historical and empirical research. As a result, the separation between philosophical inquiry and such investigations has remained quite stark. My goal, by contrast, is to encourage the integration of toleration “into the current primary social science concerns and analytical methods,” which is how J. P. Nettl identified his objective in considering the modern state as a multilayered conceptual variable.⁷

What Sudipta Kaviraj has written about religion as “many different things,” and thus with “an indeterminacy of reference,” holds for toleration as well. Like religion, toleration refers to a range of institutional fields, spanning “an ethical order, a social order, philosophical systems, political institutions.”⁸ The sources, qualities, and strategies of human diversity and prospects for toleration all vary. How, I ask, might we specify toleration’s various dimensions and identify elements of its formation and topology in both settled and unsettled times? Without such analytical instruments it is not possible to advance a program of inquiry and research that can construct both richer descriptions and better causal explanations about particular historical situations and thus help identify forms of toleration we might wish to have.

I

It is easy to confuse toleration with what it is not. Toleration does not connote being unconcerned. Toleration exists despite caring. That is, toleration designates a willful decision to permit disliked groups, beliefs, or practices to persist despite the ability to do otherwise. Toleration is least required when different groups who dislike each other’s values and ways of life are nonetheless indifferent. Toleration is least secure when it is based not on principles but on “a Hobbesian equilibrium, under which the acceptance of one group by the other is the best that either of them can get” given the temporary balance of forces.⁹ Toleration is most likely to succeed when it is underpinned by persuasive argument and sustained by values both internal and external to it, when it is supported by practical arrangements that make its performance more likely, and when public authorities are willing to act when fanaticism threatens to override group inhibitions and self-policing.

As a site of applied ethics combining normative and practical elements, toleration hovers in an uncertain zone between, though often overlapping with, respect and recognition, on the one side, and persecution and oppression, on the other. A condition of toleration is the existence of persons and ways of thinking and behaving that elicit more than mild dislike or discomfort, but antipathy often closer to outrage and revulsion.¹⁰ Without such aversion, toleration so overlaps respect and recognition that it loses its distinctiveness. Dislike is often an antecedent to action. To be tolerant is to accept and refrain from action despite the absence of indifference. “Intermediate between wholehearted acceptance and unrestrained opposition,”¹¹ the concept designates a family of conceptions that support such self-discipline. Unlike cultural and moral relativism characterized by the absence of judgment, and unlike multicultural respect based on a normative approval of human diversity, toleration “presupposes … negative judgment or condemnation. To tolerate something or someone,” as Steven Lukes rightly notes, “is to abstain from acting against what one finds unacceptable.”¹² Toleration is not passive endurance, for it entails more than just not doing, but a reflective not doing, a self-conscious acceptance despite dislike and disapproval. Other considerations intervene to motivate either a temporary or permanent suspension of action, notwithstanding an often potent disposition to act.

As a willful act of omission, a deliberate silence or restraint, a suspension of commitment, and a willingness to share geographic and political space with others who deviate from true belief, correct values, and proper behavior, toleration is less a matter of social justice than of forbearance in the face of diversity.¹³ Toleration implies targets of disapproval, asymmetric relationships, and the absence of self-regulating regard. That is, it presumes circumstances in which members of at least one group view negatively the ideas and deeds of at least one other. Notwithstanding, those who could act to restrict others do not. They might condemn, but do not intervene despite their ability to do so; “we do not speak of the weak tolerating the strong.”¹⁴ Toleration thus restrains action consistent with disapproval. Such self-control requires either cost-benefit calculations that toleration is a necessary means to some more valued end or more principled justifications, based on religious convictions, secular skepticism, or other values that can trump the desire to impose religious and ethical uniformity on persons one wishes were not present or who one hopes would lead their lives differently.¹⁵ Not requiring respect or appreciation of difference, the central “problem of toleration,” as Susan Mendus identifies it, is “explaining how it can be right to permit what is wrong.”¹⁶

Toleration implies the capacity to not tolerate.¹⁷ It is a rejection of available intolerance. Toleration curbs behavior by those capable of repression, but does not insist that the beliefs motivating the restrained wish to act against others be given up. Toleration, in short, is based on an insistence that those who have the ability to curb others should voluntarily refrain, even when they are convinced that such actions would be just and means of repression are at hand. This is more than sufferance, for toleration compels decisions not to deploy such available instruments.

Toleration has thus been defined by Andrew Cohen as “an agent’s intentional and principled refraining from interfering with an opposed other (or their behavior, etc.) in situations of diversity, where the agent believes she has the power to interfere.”¹⁸ Actors with power, Preston King elaborates, decide “to endure, suffer, or put up with a person, activity, idea, or organization” despite their moral or practical aversion. Given the intensity of dislike, toleration is “an act of extraordinary self-restraint,”¹⁹ especially by public authorities who command sovereign powers and law. Understood this way, toleration is not a matter of private judgment but a contested feature of public policy whose indulgences extend liberty.

It hardly needs saying that, in the West, it was the Reformation that projected toleration beyond considerations of heresy and the status of non-Christians, the two sets of questions that had concerned the Church and some rulers in medieval Europe. Toleration, to be sure, possesses an etiology older than ideas and developments in the early modern period. But it was Christian civil war that transformed toleration from a concern with peripheral people by religious authorities and political rulers to a set of questions located at the very center of European public and private life. When John Rawls explained why he had turned from the mode and content of reasoning, above and outside human particularity, that had characterized A Theory of Justice’s search for a comprehensive liberalism to focus, by contrast, in Political Liberalism on potentially irreconcilable human differences among persons who do not all share a single comprehensive doctrine, he highlighted the Reformation’s radically unresolved moment when “rival authoritative and salvationist” forms of Christianity, each “dogmatic and intolerant,” faced off while seeking to control and secure protection from secular authorities.²⁰

Almost no one in the sixteenth century considered toleration to be a good thing. At a moment when the political was so deeply embedded in the language of God and his creation, and the human condition was understood as an aspect of a larger cosmic structure, conflict tended to be total. Unlike various syncretic and open religious faiths, like Islam in India, the forms of western Christianity were unitary and closed. In France, tolerer was used by partisans of a tough line against heresy to denote subjection to an evil, a course of action they despised. During the broadside wars of the Reformation, polemicists often treated toleration as an unwelcome sanction for licentiousness and iniquity, an endorsement of great mistakes, a threat to the seriousness of theology and the depth of doctrine, and thus a recipe for disorder. As a negative slur, the term was “mainly used pejoratively,” Alexandra Walsham writes, “denounced … [as] a diabolical device, the hallmark of the Beast, ‘the last and most desperate design of Antichrist,’ ‘the whore of Babylon’s backdoor.’”²¹ Only a minority expressed a contrary conviction to the effect that “we should refrain from mutual slaughter in the name of our differences of opinion on the matter of the Holy Trinity, the sacrament of the Eucharist or predestination, since God, in the Last Judgement, will not ask us about our theological opinions, whether right or wrong, but about whether we tried to live by the commandments of the Gospels.”²²

Today, the location of key arguments has shifted, but aspects of the underlying structure remain present, especially in articulated doubts that toleration is too generous because it goes hand in hand with an abandonment of judgment and thus relinquishes the quest for truth. Stipulating that “I refrain from reacting aggressively to things I strongly dislike or disapprove,” Leszek Kolakowski advised that toleration risks insisting that “I refrain from expressing—or indeed holding—any opinion, and sometimes even to condone every conceivable type of behaviour or opinion in others,” for its teaches “that when we persist in our beliefs, even if we do so without aggression, we are ipso facto sinning against tolerance.” Toleration thus can produce a neglect for fundamental values. It can become not just a means to tolerate those held by others but can induce people to become indifferent to their own. Toleration, Kolakowski further cautioned, can turn “against itself” and thus can produce a circumstance that “destroys the conditions of its own existence.”²³ Taken too far, toleration may exact too high a price if its suspension of judgment and action comes at the expense of egalitarian values or human rights. This, famously, was the view of Brian Barry.²⁴ A century and a quarter earlier, Walter Bagehot similarly worried that when toleration becomes too democratic it risks negating liberal values. Further, there is a republican line of criticism that worries lest toleration “weaken the civic and moral virtues that are necessary for self-government.”²⁵ For those who hold this constellation of views, toleration threatens to become a dangerous snare that leads to the suspension of necessary disagreement, even to the absurdity of sanctioning the bad and the ugly.²⁶ If, as John Gray, notes, “the objects of toleration are what we judge to be evils,” or at least are “undesirable, false, or at least inferior,”²⁷ why should such objects not be reined in?

Today, such views vie with a strong countercurrent that also is sharply critical of toleration, but for rather different reasons. Much contemporary criticism has followed a line of argument pioneered in Thomas Paine’s denunciation of toleration in Rights of Man as condescending, filled with cultural contempt. Serving to reinforce the laddering of power, he wrote, toleration “is not the opposite of intolerance, but is the counterfeit of it. Both are despotisms. The one assumes to itself the right of withholding Liberty of Conscience and the other of granting it. The one is pope armed with fire and faggot, and the other is the pope selling or granting indulgences.”²⁸ Premised on judgments that denigrate the cultural other, toleration thus advances, rather than curtails, human domination by proceeding without appreciating competing values or regarding minority practices as legitimate. Subjecting such beliefs and behavior to undue scrutiny, toleration demands the provision of reasons that the dominant group does not stipulate for itself.

On this understanding, toleration’s combination of disdain and the power t...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Introduction
• Religion and the Imagination
• Part 1: Classical Western Approaches to Toleration
• Part 2: Before and Beyond Classical Approaches to Toleration
• List of Contributors
• Index