Is Tolerance Still a Virtue?

I once had a professor in college who had received a chaired position, which effectively exempted him from committees and meant he only had to teach one graduate-level course and one seminar per semester – bliss, if you’re an academic. He kept a small candy jar by his desk. It was shaped like a penguin and loudly squawked when opened. Whenever the dean called to ask him to serve on a committee, he held the phone up to his candy jar and opened it before hanging up. And so during his final years as an academic this professor got to enjoy academic life free from deans and committees and with only minimal responsibility to students. A colleague of his once remarked to me that academic jobs would be amazing if it weren’t for deans, committees, and students.

In that case, the statement was made with tongue firmly in cheek. Yet the sentiment is something I think many will recognize elsewhere. Over the past ten years, particularly as frustration with America’s social decay and fracturing has set in, it has become more common to see both dominant political blocs in America adopt policies that suggest America would be better if a large group of American voters didn’t exist. The trouble with this, speaking pragmatically, is that there simply is no plausible reality in which either bloc of voters disappears. We are stuck with each other. All that remains is figuring out how to make it work.

This brings us to an idea that was deeply in fashion not that long ago but has now passed into obscurity: the idea of tolerance. Once widely hailed and regarded as necessary in the 1990s and 2000s, it has fallen on hard times in more recent years. Today it is not uncommon for people to regard tolerance as something harmful, a euphemism for “being indifferent to the presence of great evil.” The notion that progressives should tolerate socially conservative Christians who reject gay marriage would sound like an appalling injustice to many on the left. Likewise, the notion that right-wingers should tolerate people who do not share their politics or values sounds to many like an unforgivable embrace of weakness and a political loser’s mentality.

Carol Aust, Two Boats, acrylic on panel. Used by permission.

Yet when we push past the bluster, we find that we need tolerance after all. The kind of homogeneous America that many on the left and right equally desire is no more real or coherent than the university without deans or committees or students that my professor jokingly wished for. Regardless of how anyone feels about the matter, we are stuck with tolerance as a necessary practice that we all must take up to varying degrees.

To say we are “stuck with” tolerance is, of course, precisely how most people feel about it. Tolerance is regarded as a necessary evil, something we accept because there are no other options. But this results in a kind of pendulum that constantly swings between the two mentalities described so far: We accept tolerance as a necessary evil until we find ourselves confronting evils so great that we think tolerance must be discarded. Then we persist with our intolerance until we find ourselves crashing against the hard facts of America’s political life, at which point we reluctantly return to tolerance. Though quite common, this is no way to live a political life, effectively driven by resentment and unable to overcome the problem of our powerlessness to eradicate its source. Is there another way?

According to Princeton theologian John R. Bowlin, there is. Rather than treating tolerance as a necessary evil, we can recognize tolerance as a virtue. In this sense, tolerance is a habit or practice that actually helps us grow in our capacity to love our neighbor, to live well among others, and to better discern the good. Though this is a counterintuitive thought for many, particularly those who following Alasdair MacIntyre and Stanley Hauerwas are inclined to see a conflict between the cultivation of virtue and democratic life, it is actually not that hard to discern the ways in which tolerance functions like any other virtue.

Consider chastity, something long regarded as a virtue. The chaste person chooses to forgo some more immediate, lesser good or, at least, pleasure – sexual union with another person – in order to lay hold of some higher good – lifelong monogamy with a spouse or a particular form of lifelong devotion to God. The lesser good is set aside, rejected, because something greater is (rightly) valued more highly. Indeed, all of the virtues have this sort of quality, calling us to distinguish and judge between competing goods with wisdom as we pass through this life. Tolerance, then, is a virtue of much the same sort.

When we practice tolerance, we are essentially telling ourselves that some particular thing we find objectionable or distasteful should be patiently endured so that some higher, better good can be enjoyed. To take a simple example, most of the coffee shops I frequent as a full-time remote worker are owned and staffed by people who do not share my traditionalist Christian social democrat politics. But their business tolerates my presence because there are other goods we enjoy together. Their distaste or disapproval for my political views, or mine for theirs, is not the sum total of our relationship. That component is real, but not exhaustive.

When we practice tolerance, we are essentially telling ourselves that some particular thing we find objectionable or distasteful should be patiently endured so that some higher, better good can be enjoyed.

Indeed, here there is an especially important point to understand as it relates to our current social malaise. It has been widely recognized for over twenty years now that associational life in America is in decline – recreational sports, philanthropic societies, church attendance, participation in organized labor – all these traditional forms through which Americans connected with one another and wove the fabric of our common life are in decline. This sad reality, of course, is precisely why many now view our present condition as so urgent, and it is in that feeling of urgency and alarm that they find justification for more extreme political ideologies. So tolerance dies due to the anxiety provoked by social erosion. Yet what the critics of tolerance fail to recognize is that abandoning tolerance only accelerates the forces of social collapse. It cannot do otherwise. To reject tolerance is to accept the lie that our common life with our neighbors is really only about politics and not about the host of other good things we share.

When we practice tolerance, we forgo the more immediate good of seeing something we find distasteful or illicit condemned in the name of gaining some greater good. In other words, we patiently endure something within political society that we find objectionable because we recognize there are other forms of common life that might still be possible and we seek to lay hold of those. To endure such things with patience is inherently to recognize that the scope of our political lives reaches beyond that of formal politics and into domains and spaces in which formal politics are of little or no relevance. To practice tolerance, then, is to deny the state the right to regard itself as the sum total of our political lives. It is to insist that there are goods to be enjoyed beyond those of party politics and so, therefore, we patiently endure certain things in this domain to preserve other goods that stretch beyond the confines of our current gridlock. To give up on this task is to reduce the common life of human communities to no more than politics proper. There is an irony in all this, for one of the signature critiques of traditionalist conservatives in the past fifteen years has been that the left adopts a vision of politics that reduces all of common life down to formal political processes. This was the critique, for example, that many made in responding to the “Life of Julia” ad from the Obama presidential campaign in 2012. But any argument for the importance of communities outside of formal political institutions is inherently a call to practice tolerance of formal political disputes on grounds that common life is broader and more interesting than simply being an expression of partisan friendship or enmity. To argue for the good of family, neighborhood, churches, philanthropic organizations, and so on is to claim that partisan political differences are not ultimate and that they can in many cases be patiently endured.

To be sure, there are further considerations to bear in mind. Patient endurance, in contrast to direct approval or stringent condemnation, is also different from a passive acquiescence. It does not mean avoiding conflict at all turns, nor does it mean being closeted or timid about one’s beliefs or values. Quite the opposite, it means that we are forthright about our beliefs and concerns and convictions while also holding a space in which we can patiently endure among our neighbors who we know do not share those beliefs, concerns, or convictions.

And, of course, there genuinely are things that should not be tolerated; there are moral limits that even apply to democracies and are ultimately unaffected by the will or vote of the people. To endorse tolerance is not the same as endorsing relativism. Bowlin’s book is framed largely by his encounter with a traditional practice in some indigenous cultures that he initially found repugnant, sought to understand sympathetically, and yet ultimately concluded could not be tolerated. He arrived there only after a long and sustained reflection on the nature of tolerance, the nature of virtue, and how common life can be held together. Which is to say that patience not only helps us endure the things that can be endured; it also helps us better approach debates about the things that can’t be endured. Similar thought experiments could be applied to any number of relatively common practices in American life today, such as bloodhound racing or circuses or to religious practices that endanger community members, such as the handling of poisonous snakes as part of public worship. To argue that tolerance is a virtue and a necessary good is not to argue for an absolute moral relativism, but merely to reckon with the complicated nature of public life, the difficulty of living in love with one’s neighbors, and the positive role that patient endurance of disagreement can play in sustaining common life and helping people to grow in their capacity to love others.

Everyone agrees that some behaviors should be encouraged in society, others discouraged or even prohibited. The category we must recover is that of patient endurance. For when we practice patient endurance it does not just preserve the greater goods we desire to realize together. It also changes the way we approach those things that must be encouraged or prohibited, because it creates an atmosphere in which it is possible to reason together calmly and without anxiety about the highest goods of life and even to consider together what things we find intolerable. Patient endurance matters because we are not “stuck with” our neighbors, but rather have been given to them – and they to us. And if we are to live well with this gift, then we must learn to identify not only what is praiseworthy and what is shameful, but also what must be endured with hope.