Tolerance among the Virtues

John R. Bowlin

• Editorial: Princeton University Press
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781400883677
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Philosophy of Religion

In a pluralistic society such as ours, tolerance is a virtue—but it doesn't always seem so. Some suspect that it entangles us in unacceptable moral compromises and inequalities of power, while others dismiss it as mere political correctness or doubt that it can safeguard the moral and political relationships we value. Tolerance among the Virtues provides a vigorous defense of tolerance against its many critics and shows why the virtue of tolerance involves exercising judgment across a variety of different circumstances and relationships—not simply applying a prescribed set of rules.Drawing inspiration from St. Paul, Aquinas, and Wittgenstein, John Bowlin offers a nuanced inquiry into tolerance as a virtue. He explains why the advocates and debunkers of toleration have reached an impasse, and he suggests a new way forward by distinguishing the virtue of tolerance from its false look-alikes, and from its sibling, forbearance. Some acts of toleration are right and good, while others amount to indifference, complicity, or condescension. Some persons are able to draw these distinctions well and to act in accord with their better judgment. When we praise them as tolerant, we are commending them as virtuous. Bowlin explores what that commendation means. Tolerance among the Virtues offers invaluable insights into how to live amid differences we cannot endorse—beliefs we consider false, actions we think are unjust, institutional arrangements we consider cruel or corrupt, and persons who embody what we oppose.

CHAPTER 1

TOLERANCE AND RESENTMENT

Begin with the ordinary facts of pluralism, present in some measure in every time and place, but perhaps more apparent in our own, where differences of various kinds—moral, religious, ethnic, and other—press hard upon us and where disagreement about the relative merit of various goods, commitments, and activities confound our life together. Some of these differences and disagreements threaten the basic union of wills that every society assumes. These require rough magics—coercion, constraint, expulsion, or withdrawal. Others are less threatening to that union, and to these the tolerant respond well, most often with patient endurance, an act designed to maintain the society shared with those they endure and autonomy with respect to the differences in dispute.¹

It is because of these facts and threats, and because this desire for social union remains in spite of them, that tolerance has, from time to time, been counted among the virtues, one of the parts or aspects of justice that nearly every society cultivates in some way and praises in some measure.² Of course, as virtue and act, tolerance is not the only solution to the problems of association posed by the diversity of goods and loves. Nor should it be. At the same time, not every difference or dispute can be regulated by law, suppressed with coercion, or avoided by exit. And so in most times and places peaceful coexistence is secured, at least in part, by cultivating the habits, attitudes, and practices of the tolerant. In this, at least, ancients and moderns agree. Cicero notes that the just and pious will shun coercion and endure dissent in religious affairs, for the gods love purity of mind above all,³ while J. B. Schneewind insists that John Rawls’s theory of justice, in both its metaphysical and its political variants, is best regarded as a “modern liberal democratic view of toleration.”⁴ No matter how they are situated in time or place, the tolerant act justly and the just act tolerantly. They give what justice demands to those from whom they are divided by disagreement and dissent, and, in their paradigmatic act, what they give is a willingness to bear the burdens of these disagreements and endure the company of these dissenters for the sake of the common life they share.

This much is plain. Problems of association, of peaceful coexistence among individuals and groups, are constant and unavoidable, and the appeal to toleration is common. So is the defense of certain instances of the act as right and good, as truly tolerant. Still, those problems and that appeal do acquire an urgency from time to time, and we appear to live in one of those times. Two reasons stand out. The first regards “the immediacy of difference, the everyday encounter with otherness, [that] has never been so widely experienced,” not only in societies like ours—liberal, mobile, ethnically diverse, technologically advanced, stubbornly religious—but also in societies quite different from our own.⁵ Almost everywhere globalization has made difference that was once distant now proximate. At the same time, the liberal variety of tolerance offered in response to these circumstances comes packaged with certain deficits, difficulties, and threats that challenge its friends and provoke its foes. It’s no wonder, then, that ours is a heyday of discourse and dispute about tolerance.⁶

It has happened before. There have been other such heydays, other periods when peaceful coexistence was difficult to muster and when appeal to acts of toleration and to the perfection of this act was both considered and challenged: in the earliest Christian churches, in the late Roman Empire, in early modern Europe, and no doubt in other times and places. In each instance, debate abounds, and not simply about the variety of tolerance that might address this or that particular problem of association, but also about the essential goodness of its basic act and its status as a virtue. For every Lactantius defending the act and praising its consequences, there is usually a Porphyry decrying its vice.⁷ For every Locke there is an Assheton to confront and a Proast to debate.⁸ Our time and place reproduce the pattern. Liberal tolerance is proposed as one solution to the problems of association we confront, and straightaway critics emerge, highbrow and low, left and right, all denouncing the false promise and counterfeit character of the virtue and the dangerous and domineering spirit of its act.

A COMMON LOGIC OF COMPLAINT

Some argue that tolerance offers an inconsistent, and thus unstable, response to the problems that pluralism poses. It comes overburdened with paradoxes. It demands what we cannot deliver. The tolerant dislike, and at times despise, what they are obliged to endure, a feat that few can manage. Most of us resolve this conflict between duty and desire by putting aside our objection to the differences in dispute. This in turn enables us to forgo the disapproval that makes pluralism a problem and tolerance a possible solution. Indifference is the fallout, which in turn confirms the suspicions of those who worry that tolerance requires impossible moral compromise and comes packaged with a contemptible metaphysical minimalism. For these critics, even a morally robust tolerance, one that shuns indifference and holds fast to disapproval, carries the taint of moral danger, decadence, and betrayal. For of course, why should we tolerate beliefs that we consider false, actions we consider vicious, social practices we consider dangerous or scandalous, institutional arrangements we consider cruel or corrupt? Why should we cut deals with the wicked and keep company with the confused when we could just as well coerce their conduct or forsake their company?

Consider, for example, Bruce Bawer’s remarks in his somewhat awkwardly titled essay, “Tolerance or Death!”, from the December 2005 issue of Reason.com.⁹ Bawer argues that the variety of tolerance that distinguishes liberal democracies is ill suited to our times. It’s the virtue that enables the mullahs to preach hate and the terrorists to kill the innocent. In a similar vein, Mark Steyn writes that liberal democracies are incapable of acting with force and confidence when their way of life is challenged by moral decay from within and by unjust violence from without. Schooled in patient endurance, in easygoing open-mindedness, the inhabitants of liberal democracies tend to respond to these challenges by mustering ever more tolerance. Craven and foolish, they can’t resist concluding that intolerance of other people’s intolerance, other people’s wickedness, is, well, simply intolerable.¹⁰ Pope Benedict XVI offered remarks of the same kind, although considerably less heated. While still Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, he argued that “the fundamental problem of our time [is] the question of truth and toleration.” The problem, as Ratzinger sees it, is that the modern “commandment of tolerance and respect for others” comes packaged with “the notion that all religions are ultimately equivalent,” which in turn denies the exclusive character of the truth that Christians confess about Christ and humanity, sin and salvation. He asks, “If tolerance is one of the foundations of the modern age, then is not the claim to have recognized the essential truth an obsolete piece of presumption that has to be rejected if the spiral of violence that runs through the history of religions is to be broken?” The Christian, he insists, must “resist this ideology of equality,” this false account of truth and freedom, this “all-inclusive tolerance.”¹¹

Others offer criticisms from the perspective of the tolerated. By their lights, the problem with tolerance is not that it is unstable, that it dissolves into relativistic indifference. Rather, the problem is that it begins with judgment and ends in condescension. For these critics, tolerance is a morally inadequate response to the problems posed by the plurality of lives and commitments precisely because it assumes unjustifiable inequalities of moral authority and political power. Some disapprove and endure, others are judged and tolerated. According to these critics, societies like ours must move beyond judgment and tolerance to recognition and acceptance.¹²

Even the friends of tolerance provide weak praise. As act and attitude, tolerance is useful, they say, perhaps even indispensable, for coping with disagreements and differences both large and small, and yet praise rarely proceeds beyond instrumental accounting. Tolerance is good because it helps us get along in spite of our differences, which is to say, in effect, that if we could get along without it, we would. A tepid endorsement indeed.

Notice the common logic of these quite different criticisms. Tolerance is too difficult to muster, too condescending. Tolerance is complicit in the worst vices of liberal societies. Tolerance encourages a passive-aggressive politics, a gentle and self-deceived paternalism that in fact betrays our commitment to the equal dignity of all. Tolerance must be overcome; the conditions that demand its exercise must be escaped. Pick a complaint, any one will do. Each begins with a certain disregard for the world we inhabit, a world where the diversity of human goods and the relative indeterminacy of human loves generate conflict among lives and commitments that are entrenched and inescapable and where societies large and small secure right relations among members only as toleration’s act is offer in response to at least some of these differences and only as some variety of the virtue is cultivated and praised. In order to free us from the obligation to endure certain differences and remain in certain dysfunctional relationships, these critics reject this world. They deny its unavoidable reality; they disregard the goodness embedded in its difficulties. They yearn for a world where pluralism was less perplexing and where tolerance was unnecessary. Some long for a world to come, some starry future where difference will not threaten nor disagreement divide, and where equal standing and shared first principles will generate mutual respect, acceptance, and appreciation. In this future, there will be no problems of association that might require toleration as a solution. Others yearn for a fanciful past, where pluralism was not so pressing and where the challenges of peaceful coexistence were not met with a remedy so unheroic and unambitious, so overburdened with ambivalence and moral compromise, so content with disagreement’s sorrow. And note, these latter, wistful yearnings are encouraged by the standard history. On this account, as act and potential virtue, tolerance is a modern affair, a moral innovation that emerged in the wake of the wars of religion that followed the Protestant Reformation. It acquired merit only as religion became relatively private, the public square relatively secular, and associations of all kinds relatively voluntary.¹³ For those who accept this account, and most do, tolerance is so closely bound to the norms and ideals of liberal society and to a certain image of secular modernity that our attitude toward one portion of the package typically bears on the others. This tight packaging has enabled liberals to consider tolerance their own, a moral advance that distinguishes their time and place from all others. But it has also offered the foes of liberal society and secular modernity another reason for discontent with tolerance, and, no surprise, the resentment that so many feel for tolerance confirms their complaints with liberal modernity.

The reasons that provoke these criticisms are not immediately apparent. One is tempted to offer an easy explanation. Tolerance deserves our complaints; it ought to be resented. Why? Because it asks us to do or endure what we would rather not. Few of us want to tolerate what we find objectionable or to be tolerated by others. The tolerant do not want to restrain their outrage and the tolerated would prefer to be accepted. The first act with regret and the second receive what is given with little gratitude. Both would prefer to live in a world where tolerant attitudes and practices were unnecessary. Given this response, it’s no surprise that tolerance is resented and its place among the virtues doubted.

But this can’t be right. If it were, we would expect other virtues to be resented for roughly the same reasons, but for the most part they’re not. At times, we don’t want to be treated justly or to act among the just, and yet this aversion rarely yields global complaint against justice. Specific judgments about the just and the unjust are often resented, as is the authority those judgments sometimes have over other considerations, but rarely do these resentments touch justice in se.

Or, rather, discontent with this or that collection of authoritative judgments about the just and the unjust is rarely expressed in across-the-board complaint against justice, but not so with tolerance.¹⁴ Of course, one suspects that the critics exaggerate, that their complaints in fact regard specific judgments about the tolerable and the intolerable, not tolerance in se, and yet something about the virtue enables them to couch their complaints in comprehensive terms.

In the next section I will consider what this something might be that encourages this odd resentment of the virtue itself. For now I want to pursue another explanation, one that involves attention to how philosophers and theologians talk about tolerance. At first, this might seem odd. If complaint and resentment are relatively widespread, then why not cast a wide net and look at first order expressions of opinion: polling data, editorials, newsletters, reading lists, weblogs, and so on? Why not describe the actual lives and practices that embody these opinions, complaints, and resentments? Well, for starters, I assume that philosophers and theologians give ordered, condensed, and reflective expression of these same widely held opinions, and I assume that their reflections begin with lives and practices. They do not create what they say out of nothing. The concepts they employ and the arguments they advance are not artifacts of their own making. Rather, philosophers and theologians begin with the lives, commitments, and judgments of actual communities of discourse. They spell out the norms implicit in those lives and put those commitments and judgments in order—gathering them together, tracing their inferential relations, making imbedded commitments explicit, offering reasons in defense of some, and suggesting revisions of others. And it is this reflective and expressive character of their efforts that I am after. When it goes well, reflection brings concept, commitment, and judgment into focus. It helps us see what they amount to, what revisions of belief and practice they encourage, and what reasons are needed to maintain them. And even when it goes poorly, it encourages reflection on our own reasons for maintaining this belief or making that inference, our own understanding of how norm and commitment made explicit ought to affect judgment, conduct, and linguistic usage.¹⁵

This is how I intend to make use of the philosophers and theologians discussed in this chapter and beyond. More often than not, their efforts go well, but not entirely so. Concept, commitment, and judgment are brought into focus, but distortion remains, either in what is said about tolerance, or in the practical proposals made. My hunch is that at least some of the sources of resentment reside in these distortions and that a good number of these distortions follow from our failure to grasp what it might mean for tolerance to be a virtue annexed to justice.

But there’s more. Philosophical and theological efforts are not simply expressive, they also provide warrants. They give ordered, reflective expression of judgments and commitments implicit in certain lives and practices, and in turn, those expressions justify certain judgments and commitments, certain practices and lives. There is, as John Rawls put it, a kind of reflective equilibrium and a kind of trade in authority between abstract expression and the concrete realities that are the objects and sources of reflection.¹⁶ That said, there is also trouble hidden in this trade, trouble in the divide between the concrete and the abstract, the reflective and the practical. When philosophers and theologians make explicit the specific commitments embedded in act...

Índice

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Abbreviations and Translations
• Chapter 1: Tolerance and Resentment
• Chapter 2: A Natural Virtue
• Chapter 3: Among the Virtues
• Chapter 4: A Virtue's Vocabulary
• Chapter 5: Liberalism and Lists
• Chapter 6: Love's Endurance
• Epilogue: Nature, Grace, and Cockfights
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Index