What Even Is The Point of Tolerance?

Hello everyone, this is The Jungle blog.

Over the years, I’ve asked myself many variations of the same question. If I don’t believe that people with different religious beliefs than myself are going to hell, and I’m also not anti-pleasure, and don’t believe in victimless crimes, then what is even the point of the concept of tolerance?

I had seen concepts like ‘tolerance’ and ‘unity’ get weaponized by groups who were unwilling to practice what they preached. So at one point when I was a teenager I came to the conclusion that the concept of ‘tolerance’ was merely training wheels for the human race to prevent members of different religious groups from trying to kill each other; and we were coming close to the day when we would no longer need it. But years passed, and without me realizing it, I started moving away from this position. Since all these thoughts were merely obsessions irritating the back of my brain, I couldn’t always remember why my thoughts had changed. I just occasionally remembered that they had. I’ve been reflecting on this, and wanted to share my thoughts.

But before that, I want to go over why people feel a sense of disgust about tolerance. You have a lot of extreme moderates who always tell people to slow down when trying to take back their rights. This is even if said group is suffering – a lot. They say things like, ‘I agree with your cause, but not your methods.’ But in the field of action, where things are urgent and you have limited options, you can’t afford to be so picky. Some people are afraid of conflict – for two reasons – Christianity, and Middle Class Politeness Culture. They say – ‘oh, that’s so bad…’ or ‘I’m so sorry, I don’t want to be rude.’ This isn’t a personal attack by the way. I’m infected with similar tendencies. Things have gotten so bad, even ‘compromise’ has become a dirty word. A book I read which was written many decades ago said this was because of people’s fear of moral impurity; and that the word compromise originally referred to a woman’s virginity. I agree that this assessment was true when the book was written, but that it’s no longer the case. The reason compromise is a dirty word is because its meaning is so open to interpretation. Who’s compromise are we talking about? Mine or yours? It’s often weaponized. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad concept. Compromise is what democracy is all about. The concept of democracy is meant to help achieve universal civic participation. It’s not just voting; it’s education, protests, speaking, writing, and money. But when groups of free people are building a society together, there is conflict. Without conflict there is no freedom. If we’re all adding building blocks to our society, then there is no – one perfect analogy for what those blocks represent.

But then there is the reversal. Remember that there are some enemies for which there is no compromise. For many people who start as outsiders, their first instinct once they are accepted is to become insiders, to people please, and move to the center of the political spectrum- but then they lose all ability to take effective action. The other political individuals swallow them up. You only need to stay in control of the power that makes you different. There are times when it’s better to defer than fight. You need to pick your battles carefully. Another issue is that the world is much more complicated now. People who are your enemies, or who function to work against you, don’t always announce themselves as such. Groups forget what they believe in, and don’t know who they’re fighting. Because people always pass responsibility to someone else – groups trying to achieve change waste their energy.

But onto the main topic at hand. What is the point of tolerance? For example, I don’t ‘tolerate’ people having ‘extra marital’ sex. It’s their decision, and they’re not hurting anybody. I embrace it.

However, let’s think about the things a modern person might actually consider to be evil. I think the majority of what tolerance should be about is understanding that humans are not perfect moral beings, and that people have all sorts of forbidden impulses. This ideology needs to be flexible – and can take multiple forms. For example, we might be able to sympathize with a thief, a drug dealer, or even a killer; and, don’t say, ‘oh, I could never be like that.’ Every man and woman has aggressive impulses, much of which goes repressed. They may accidentally leak into our behavior in different ways. Every person justifies their aggression differently- everyone channels that energy for different purposes. But we are all frustrated social animals, and we have to utilize emotional maintenance, the same way every person makes decisions about their diet, exercise, and sleep. It’s easy to fall off the wagon. All it takes is one bad week to ruin your life. Repressing this energy will only exhaust you, and it will simply come out at bad times.

Here’s a less extreme example of the version of tolerance I described. Let’s say you have people in your life that you can’t cut off. This could be close friends or family members. They may have ideas, behaviors, or beliefs you consider legitimately harmful. But you come to realize you can’t change these people, and the only thing you can do is to understand them.

This allows you to suffer fools gladly with a sense of detachment. There are a mix of all sorts of different people in your environment that you can study the way a scientist studies varieties of animals, plants, samples of soil, and trees. For something very irritating, there are subtle things you can do to outwardly change someone’s behavior, or at least get them to not do something in front of you. For example, let’s say you know someone who likes telling you very lazy, unoriginal, racist jokes. You can simply pretend to not get the joke and ask them to explain it to you.

Often, ideas that were once original and new, can harden into dogma. So can methods used to approach a moral issue. People crave order, but need chaos. Because people’s minds require flexibility, and cultures need change to stay alive – our approach to issues must change too. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. I bumped into a social media post talking about sexual assault, where the a in the word rape was slashed out. You could still see the ‘a’ – it was just slashed out. Obviously this is unusual, on TV, cuss words are censored, but not words that merely describe bad things. However, over time, I’ve seen this trend become a little more common. I saw a post talking about sending nudes, but the u in the word nudes was slashed out. I saw another post where the ‘i’ in the word nipple was slashed out. These two examples are worse because it contributes to a culture of making things like nudity or ‘nipples’ taboo. I saw a post with the word kill in it, where the ‘i’ was slashed out. I saw another post where a guy was saying Black Lives Matter was a terrorist organization – but he censored out the e in terrorist. He went on a long rant, and I found it pretty funny because these types of guys like to refer to people as ‘snowflakes.’ It’s a good example of how even two opposing groups within the same generation share the same strengths and weaknesses. All this is actually similar to how the previous generations came up with a list of ‘naughty’ words you can’t say on TV. It reminds me of a joke where there’s a guy on TV who says the word ass. Then he says hole. Neither word is bleeped out, but then he says asshole, and the word hole is bleeped, but the word ass isn’t.

I want to note that even if you slash or censor a letter in a word, you still know what the word is. Slashing out a letter is just a symbolic gesture to make it feel like you made a difference. This instinct from two places. There’s the obvious desire to show some concern about a sensitive issue. Then there is Middle Class Politeness Culture. Many liberals still come from such backgrounds, and have remnants of these instincts. During conflict and debate, many injustices are allowed to continue because of clever phrases and euphemisms that don’t actually mean anything. They slip right under our noses. If we’re talking about a bad leader, or a serious issue, why should we be afraid to talk about it openly – and name the issue directly?

Multiple factors compete for dominance. Over time, the desire to be thoughtful caves to Middle Class Politeness Culture. In addition, a person has to weigh the need to be diplomatic against the occasions where it’s necessary to be a little rude.

I just want to get it out of the way that I think driving when you’re high is a very stupid and dangerous thing to do. But there are many people that insist that driving while high isn’t dangerous, and that it isn’t the same as driving while drunk. Obviously the specifics aren’t the same, and the two experiences feel different; but it’s still dangerous nevertheless. But because people think it isn’t, and we are in a society where getting high is taboo, you have to pick your battles carefully. It depends on the setting and driver. For some people, it’s better to let the issue go – for others, you absolutely want to intervene. In The Great Gatsby, lots of people were drinking and driving. There’s the caveat that cars were a new invention. But that’s beside the point. It wasn’t until alcohol was legal and more socially accepted that we could focus our energies on making drunk driving a taboo rather than just forcing people not to drink. A similar process will have to happen with marijuana. Even now we still have hangups about alcohol from prohibition – grocery stores don’t sell liquor, many stores won’t sell alcohol on Sunday. This is even though many people don’t go to Church, and others aren’t Christians. Americans also don’t freely drink wine with their meals.

One might wonder how anyone could be stupid enough to be a drunk driver. Imagine the background of such a person. The inability to prioritize battles has made it to where the person must take an all or nothing approach. Rather than simply not drinking and driving – the person has to either drink ALL the alcohol, or none at all.

Perhaps you’re in a situation where you’re wondering if you should report something you’d usually consider bad, but seems understandable in a specific case. You might realize some things have to be judged on an individual basis.

Other issues can be vague and amorphous. There’s some detail you can’t explain and if you act immediately, you could cause great harm. Two things seem contradictory, but after the issue is given much examination, you realize there are additional options. It’s only after putting off your ego which wants to immediately explain something, that you can discover anything new.

If you’re involved in activism, you will have to work with groups you consider harmful. This is for strategic reasons. If you are affected too directly, you may be unable to do this, and that’s fine. You might want to take a more backseat position rather than be on the front lines. For example, let’s say you grew up in The Church. Doesn’t matter if it’s Catholic, Protestant, or Latter Day Saints. Maybe you’re a woman who was inculcated with the belief that your only purpose in life was to make babies, or a gay person who was told that being gay is an abombination. Perhaps you were kicked out of the house as a teen for being an atheist. Maybe you didn’t suffer directly but were still a bystander. Worse yet, maybe you read the Bible and discovered that God endorses all this; and that humans have used religion to justify such things for thousands of years. As an adult, you won’t want to work with churches, but may encounter situations where as an activist, it’s strategically necessary. This is an example of what I mean. Something important is that being a victim, and victimizer is not mutually exclusive. Someone can be both. Variants of this idea are used by those defending The Church, and those arguing against it.

In a sense, you could say tolerance is something extremely subjective, personal, and individualized: therefore, the concept of tolerance cannot be black and white. Some behaviors are truly ugly and there are situations where you absolutely should not be tolerant. For example, witnessing someone bullying a person because of their race, or sex, or because they’re gay; or being abusive to someone for being transgender. Perhaps there is someone willing to turn their neighbors over because they care more about the law than morality. For example, turning over Jews hiding in someone’s basement during WW2. Another ugly behavior could be harassing someone for being part of a ‘non-Christian’ minority group, like Jews or Muslims.

Then there is the tolerance paradox – this is the issue of simultaneously being tolerant and still being against things that are really horrible. One attempt to reconcile this ‘paradox’ is by saying that tolerance should not be weaponized by those that promote intolerance. This is certainly true in many cases; but I disagree with it for two reasons. One – what about defending the rights of religions that have beliefs and doctrines that are intolerant? As an aside, you might live in an area where it’s really common to fly hate symbols, but the people who fly them are just ignorant, not hateful. It’s not *all* people who fly it that are hateful, but it’s still a hate symbol nevertheless. Secondly, things like racism, sexism, or homophobia are not necessarily ‘intolerant’ per se. They’re just really horrible.

With the tolerance paradox – I’m not going to do the thinking for you. It’s complicated and referred to as a ‘paradox’ for a reason. I’m merely going to provide a quote that I think will serve as a useful guide.

“It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life. For my own part, I should be inclined to think freedom less necessary in great things than in little ones, if it were possible to be secure of the one without possessing the other. Subjection in minor affairs breaks out every day, and is felt by the whole community indiscriminately. It does not drive men to resistance, but it crosses them at every turn, till they are led to surrender the exercise of their will. Thus their spirit is gradually broken and their character enervated; whereas that obedience, which is exacted on a few important but rare occasions, only exhibits servitude at certain intervals, and throws the burden of it upon a small number of men. It is vain to summon a people, which has been rendered so dependent on the central power, to choose from time to time the representatives of that power; this rare and brief exercise of their free choice, however important it may be, will not prevent them from gradually losing the faculties of thinking, feeling, and acting for themselves, and thus gradually falling below the level of humanity. I add that they will soon become incapable of exercising the great and only privilege which remains to them. The democratic nations which have introduced freedom into their political constitution, at the very time when they were augmenting the despotism of their administrative constitution, have been led into strange paradoxes. To manage those minor affairs in which good sense is all that is wanted—the people are held to be unequal to the task; but when the government of the country is at stake, the people are invested with immense powers; they are alternately made the playthings of their ruler, and his master—more than kings, and less than men.”

Anyways, I hope even if people didn’t agree with specific things I said, that someone still got something out of this. If you want to see more articles this one, consider checking out my other posts. Have a good day everybody.