speech about tolerance

1 Minute Speech on Tolerance In English

A very good morning to one and all present here. Today, I will be giving a short speech on the topic of “Tolerance”.

Google defines the term ‘tolerance’ to be “the ability or willingness to tolerate the existence of opinions or behaviour that one dislikes or disagrees with” and “the capacity to endure continued subjection to something such as a drug or environmental conditions without adverse reaction.”

Simply put, tolerance is the act of forbearing. Life is not all rosy like we envision it to be. Sometimes it will be unfair. Sometimes it will seem unbearable. At times like those, only the ability to tolerate will get us through and the hope that one day life will become better. To tolerate in life is thus a virtue we must all develop in our life.

Helen Keller has once said, “The highest result of education is tolerance.” Develop tolerance!

Thank you. 

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By Sarah Peterson

Originally published in July 2003, Current Implications added by Heidi Burgess in December, 2019

Current Implications

When Sarah wrote this essay in 2003, social media existed, but it hadn't yet become popular or widespread.  Facebook and Twitter hadn't started yet (Facebook started in 2004, Twitter in 2006.)  More .... 

What is Tolerance?

Tolerance is the appreciation of diversity and the ability to live and let others live. It is the ability to exercise a fair and objective attitude towards those whose opinions, practices, religion, nationality, and so on differ from one's own.[1] As William Ury notes, "tolerance is not just agreeing with one another or remaining indifferent in the face of injustice, but rather showing respect for the essential humanity in every person."[2]

Intolerance is the failure to appreciate and respect the practices, opinions and beliefs of another group. For instance, there is a high degree of intolerance between Israeli Jews and Palestinians who are at odds over issues of identity , security , self-determination , statehood, the right of return for refugees, the status of Jerusalem and many other issues. The result is continuing intergroup conflict and violence .

Why Does Tolerance Matter?

At a post-9/11 conference on multiculturalism in the United States, participants asked, "How can we be tolerant of those who are intolerant of us?"[3] For many, tolerating intolerance is neither acceptable nor possible.

Though tolerance may seem an impossible exercise in certain situations -- as illustrated by Hobbes in the inset box on the right -- being tolerant, nonetheless, remains key to easing hostile tensions between groups and to helping communities move past intractable conflict. That is because tolerance is integral to different groups relating to one another in a respectful and understanding way. In cases where communities have been deeply entrenched in violent conflict, being tolerant helps the affected groups endure the pain of the past and resolve their differences. In Rwanda, the Hutus and the Tutsis have tolerated a reconciliation process , which has helped them to work through their anger and resentment towards one another.

The Origins of Intolerance

In situations where conditions are economically depressed and politically charged, groups and individuals may find it hard to tolerate those that are different from them or have caused them harm. In such cases, discrimination, dehumanization, repression, and violence may occur. This can be seen in the context of Kosovo, where Kosovar Alabanians, grappling with poverty and unemployment, needed a scapegoat, and supported an aggressive Serbian attack against neighboring Bosnian Muslim and Croatian neighbors.

The Consequences of Intolerance

Intolerance will drive groups apart, creating a sense of permanent separation between them. For example, though the laws of apartheid in South Africa were abolished nine years ago, there still exists a noticeable level of personal separation between black and white South Africans, as evidenced in studies on the levels of perceived social distance between the two groups.[4] This continued racial division perpetuates the problems of intergroup resentment and hostility.

How is Intolerance Perpetuated?

Between Individuals: In the absence of their own experiences, individuals base their impressions and opinions of one another on assumptions. These assumptions can be influenced by the positive or negative beliefs of those who are either closest or most influential in their lives, including parents or other family members, colleagues, educators, and/or role models. 

In the Media: Individual attitudes are influenced by the images of other groups in the media, and the press. For instance, many Serbian communities believed that the western media portrayed a negative image of the Serbian people during the NATO bombing in Kosovo and Serbia.[5] This de-humanization may have contributed to the West's willingness to bomb Serbia. However, there are studies that suggest media images may not influence individuals in all cases. For example, a study conducted on stereotypes discovered people of specific towns in southeastern Australia did not agree with the negative stereotypes of Muslims presented in the media.[6]

In Education: There exists school curriculum and educational literature that provide biased and/or negative historical accounts of world cultures. Education or schooling based on myths can demonize and dehumanize other cultures rather than promote cultural understanding and a tolerance for diversity and differences.

What Can Be Done to Deal with Intolerance?

To encourage tolerance, parties to a conflict and third parties must remind themselves and others that tolerating tolerance is preferable to tolerating intolerance. Following are some useful strategies that may be used as tools to promote tolerance.

Intergroup Contact: There is evidence that casual intergroup contact does not necessarily reduce intergroup tensions, and may in fact exacerbate existing animosities. However, through intimate intergroup contact, groups will base their opinions of one another on personal experiences, which can reduce prejudices . Intimate intergroup contact should be sustained over a week or longer in order for it to be effective.[7]

In Dialogue: To enhance communication between both sides, dialogue mechanisms such as dialogue groups or problem solving workshops  provide opportunities for both sides to express their needs and interests. In such cases, actors engaged in the workshops or similar forums feel their concerns have been heard and recognized. Restorative justice programs such as victim-offender mediation provide this kind of opportunity as well. For instance, through victim-offender mediation, victims can ask for an apology from the offender and the offender can make restitution and ask for forgiveness.[8]

What Individuals Can Do

Individuals should continually focus on being tolerant of others in their daily lives. This involves consciously challenging the stereotypes and assumptions that they typically encounter in making decisions about others and/or working with others either in a social or a professional environment.

What the Media Can Do

The media should use positive images to promote understanding and cultural sensitivity. The more groups and individuals are exposed to positive media messages about other cultures, the less they are likely to find faults with one another -- particularly those communities who have little access to the outside world and are susceptible to what the media tells them. See the section on stereotypes  to learn more about how the media perpetuate negative images of different groups.

What the Educational System Can Do

Educators are instrumental in promoting tolerance and peaceful coexistence . For instance, schools that create a tolerant environment help young people respect and understand different cultures. In Israel, an Arab and Israeli community called Neve Shalom or Wahat Al-Salam ("Oasis of Peace") created a school designed to support inter-cultural understanding by providing children between the first and sixth grades the opportunity to learn and grow together in a tolerant environment.[9]

What Other Third Parties Can Do

Conflict transformation NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and other actors in the field of peacebuilding can offer mechanisms such as trainings to help parties to a conflict communicate better with one another. For instance, several organizations have launched a series of projects in Macedonia that aim to reduce tensions between the country's Albanian, Romani and Macedonian populations, including activities that promote democracy, ethnic tolerance, and respect for human rights.[10]

International organizations need to find ways to enshrine the principles of tolerance in policy. For instance, the United Nations has already created The Declaration of Moral Principles on Tolerance, adopted and signed in Paris by UNESCO's 185 member states on Nov. 16, 1995, which qualifies tolerance as a moral, political, and legal requirement for individuals, groups, and states.[11]

Governments also should aim to institutionalize policies of tolerance. For example, in South Africa, the Education Ministry has advocated the integration of a public school tolerance curriculum into the classroom; the curriculum promotes a holistic approach to learning . The United States government has recognized one week a year as international education week, encouraging schools, organizations, institutions, and individuals to engage in projects and exchanges to heighten global awareness of cultural differences.

The Diaspora community can also play an important role in promoting and sustaining tolerance. They can provide resources to ease tensions and affect institutional policies in a positive way. For example, Jewish, Irish, and Islamic communities have contributed to the peacebuilding effort within their places of origin from their places of residence in the United States. [12]

When Sarah wrote this essay in 2003, social media existed, but it hadn't yet become popular or widespread.  Facebook and Twitter hadn't started yet (Facebook started in 2004, Twitter in 2006.) 

In addition, while the conflict between the right and the left and the different races certainly existed in the United States, it was not nearly as escalated or polarized as it is now in 2019.  For those reasons (and others), the original version of this essay didn't discuss political or racial tolerance or intolerance in the United States.  Rather than re-writing the original essay, all of which is still valid, I have chosen to update it with these "Current Implications." 

In 2019, the intolerance between the Left and the Right in the United States has gotten extreme. Neither side is willing to accept the legitimacy of the values, beliefs, or actions of the other side, and they are not willing to tolerate those values, beliefs or actions whatsoever. That means, in essence, that they will not tolerate the people who hold those views, and are doing everything they can to disempower, delegitimize, and in some cases, dehumanize the other side.

Further, while intolerance is not new, efforts to spread and strengthen it have been greatly enhanced with the current day traditional media and social media environments: the proliferation of cable channels that allow narrowcasting to particular audiences, and Facebook and Twitter (among many others) that serve people only information that corresponds to (or even strengthens) their already biased views. The availability of such information channels both helps spread intolerance; it also makes the effects of that intolerance more harmful.

Intolerance and its correlaries (disempowerment, delegitimization, and dehumanization) are perhaps clearest on the right, as the right currently holds the U.S. presidency and controls the statehouses in many states.  This gives them more power to assert their views and disempower, delegitimize and dehumanize the other.  (Consider the growing restrictions on minority voting rights, the delegitimization of transgendered people and supporters, and the dehumanizing treatment of would-be immigrants at the southern border.) 

But the left is doing the same thing when it can.  By accusing the right of being "haters," the left delegitimizes the right's values and beliefs, many of which are not borne of animus, but rather a combination of bad information being spewed by fake news in social and regular media, and natural neurobiological tendencies which cause half of the population to be biologically more fearful, more reluctant to change, and more accepting of (and needing) a strong leader. 

Put together, such attitudes feed upon one another, causing an apparently never-ending escalation and polarization spiral of intolerance.  Efforts to build understanding and tolerance, just as described in the original article, are still much needed today both in the United States and across the world. 

The good news is that many such efforts exist.  The Bridge Alliance , for instance, is an organization of almost 100 member organizations which are working to bridge the right-left divide in the U.S.  While the Bridge Alliance doesn't use the term "tolerance" or "coexistence" in its framing " Four Principles ," they do call for U.S. leaders and the population to "work together" to meet our challenges.  "Working together" requires not only "tolerance for " and "coexistence with" the other side; it also requires respect for other people's views. That is something that many of the member organizations are trying to establish with red-blue dialogues, public fora, and other bridge-building activities.  We need much, much more of that now in 2019 if we are to be able to strengthen tolerance against the current intolerance onslaught.

One other thing we'd like to mention that was touched upon in the original article, but not explored much, is what can and should be done when the views or actions taken by the other side are so abhorent that they cannot and should not be tolerated? A subset of that question is one Sarah did pose above '"How can we be tolerant of those who are intolerant of us?"[3] For many, tolerating intolerance is neither acceptable nor possible." Sarah answers that by arguing that tolerance is beneficial--by implication, even in those situations. 

What she doesn't explicitly consider, however, is the context of the intolerance.  If one is considering the beliefs or behavior of another that doesn't affect anyone else--a personal decision to live in a particular way (such as following a particular religion for example), we would agree that tolerance is almost always beneficial, as it is more likely to lead to interpersonal trust and further understanding. 

However, if one is considering beliefs or actions of another that does affect other people--particularly actions that affect large numbers of people, then that is a different situation.  We do not tolerate policies that allow the widespread dissemination of fake news and allow foreign governments to manipulate our minds such that they can manipulate our elections.  That, in our minds is intolerable.  So too are actions that destroy the rule of law in this country; actions that threaten our democratic system.

But that doesn't mean that we should respond to intolerance in kind.  Rather, we would argue, one should respond to intolerance with respectful dissent--explaining why the intolerance is unfairly stereotyping an entire group of people; explaining why such stereotyping is both untrue and harmful; why a particular action is unacceptable because it threatens the integrity of our democratic system, explaining alternative ways of getting one's needs met. 

This can be done without attacking the people who are guilty of intolerance with direct personal attacks--calling them "haters," or shaming them for having voted a particular way.  That just hardens the other sides' intolerance. 

Still, reason-based arguments probably won't be accepted right away.  Much neuroscience research explains that emotions trump facts and that people won't change their minds when presented with alternative facts--they will just reject those facts.  But if people are presented with facts in the form of respectful discussion instead of personal attacks, that is both a factual and an emotional approach that can help de-escalate tensions and eventually allow for the development of tolerance.  Personal attacks on the intolerant will not do that.  So when Sarah asked whether one should tolerate intolerance, I would say "no, one should not." But that doesn't mean that you have to treat the intolerant person disrespectfully or "intolerantly."  Rather, model good, respectful behavior.  Model the behavior you would like them to adopt.  And use that to try to fight the intolerance, rather than simply "tolerating it." 

-- Heidi and Guy Burgess. December, 2019.

Back to Essay Top

---------------------------------------------------------

[1] The American Heritage Dictionary (New York: Dell Publishing, 1994).

[2] William Ury, Getting To Peace (New York: The Penguin Group, 1999), 127.

[3] As identified by Serge Schmemann, a New York Times columnist noted in his piece of Dec. 29, 2002, in The New York Times entitled "The Burden of Tolerance in a World of Division" that tolerance is a burden rather than a blessing in today's society.

[4] Jannie Malan, "From Exclusive Aversion to Inclusive Coexistence," Short Paper, African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD), Conference on Coexistence Community Consultations, Durban, South Africa, January 2003, 6.

[5] As noted by Susan Sachs, a New York Times columnist in her piece of Dec. 16, 2001, in The New York Times entitled "In One Muslim Land, an Effort to Enforce Lessons of Tolerance."

[6] Amber Hague, "Attitudes of high school students and teachers towards Muslims and Islam in a southeaster Australian community," Intercultural Education 2 (2001): 185-196.

[7] Yehuda Amir, "Contact Hypothesis in Ethnic Relations," in Weiner, Eugene, eds. The Handbook of Interethnic Coexistence (New York: The Continuing Publishing Company, 2000), 162-181.

[8] The Ukrainian Centre for Common Ground has launched a successful restorative justice project. Information available on-line at www.sfcg.org .

[9] Neve Shalom homepage [on-line]; available at www.nswas.com ; Internet.

[10] Lessons in Tolerance after Conflict.  http://www.beyondintractability.org/library/external-resource?biblio=9997

[11] "A Global Quest for Tolerance" [article on-line] (UNESCO, 1995, accessed 11 February 2003); available at http://www.unesco.org/new/en/social-and-human-sciences/themes/fight-against-discrimination/promoting-tolerance/ ; Internet.

[12] Louis Kriesberg, "Coexistence and the Reconciliation of Communal Conflicts." In Weiner, Eugene, eds. The Handbook of Interethnic Coexistence (New York: The Continuing Publishing Company, 2000), 182-198.

Use the following to cite this article: Peterson, Sarah. "Tolerance." Beyond Intractability . Eds. Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess. Conflict Information Consortium, University of Colorado, Boulder. Posted: July 2003 < http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/tolerance >.

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103 Tolerance Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

Looking for tolerance essay topics? Writing about tolerance is easy with us! Find here top writing prompts and examples, together with topics on tolerance and respect.

🏆 Best Tolerance Essay Examples

📌 interesting tolerance essay topics, 👍 hot topics about tolerance, ❓ tolerance essay questions.

The concept of tolerance is crucial nowadays. Tolerance makes it possible for people of various races, nationalities, ages, and cultural backgrounds to peacefully coexist. In your tolerance essay, you might want to talk about why it is so important in society. Another option is to compare the levels of tolerance in various countries in the world. One more idea is to focus on the ways to promote tolerance and respect in schools, offices, and in everyday life.

• Importance of Religious Tolerance Essay The Hindu pattern is again evidence of the fact that all religions are depictions of the experiences of the people involved and the conceptual systems that they deduced from them.
• Religious Tolerance in Ottoman Empire Religious tolerance in the Ottoman Empire could not be compared to religious tolerance in the Roman Empire because diversity was not allowed in the Roman Empire.
• Tolerance and Respect for Cultural Differences The author concludes the essay in the third section by revisiting the thesis statement and highlighting the various approaches used to develop attitudes that promote respect and tolerance.
• Tolerance with Other Beliefs and Values People should live according to some rules and should value the moral rules according to which other people live. I am inclined to think that moral rules and values are mostly presented by our religion […]
• Abrahamic, East Asian and South Asian Religions and Concept of Religious Tolerance It is indeed true that religious tolerance and the problem of religious diversity present a major danger to individuals, societies and the world at large.
• Netflix: Solving the Problem of Increasing People’s Stress Tolerance Currently, an obvious fact is the increase in the number of psychosomatic diseases, in the origin and course of which the leading role belongs to the influence of traumatic factors.
• A Visit to the Museum of Tolerance in LA The museum is a storehouse of the relics of racism to the xenophobia that has led man to commit heinous crimes in the name of faith and belief.
• The Goddess: The Cry for Female Tolerance Feminism echoes throughout the plot of the movie through the life of the main character and through the reactions of the people around her.
• Exploring Glucose Tolerance and Gestational Diabetes Mellitus In the case of a glucose tolerance test for the purpose of diagnosing GDM type, the interpretation of the test results is carried out according to the norms for the overall population.
• Undiscovered Killers: The Ineffectiveness of Zero-Tolerance Policies The ineffectiveness of zero-tolerance policies is the social aspect that enables and empowers serial killers to kill and remain unidentified for a long time.
• The Mongol Empire: Cruelty and Tolerance One of the apparent pieces of evidence of the barbarism and cruelty of the Mongol army can be the Mongol conquest of the Khwarazmian Empire.
• Possibility of Improving Gluten Tolerance Using Necator Americanus The next phase, which is the introduction of the hookworm larvae, improves the gluten tolerance levels. The disease that the introduction of hookworm is expected to treat is celiac disease.
• Measuring the Salt Tolerance of Plants The variety of crops grown and the need for agricultural measures for soil moisture and irrigation depend on the arable land belonging to a particular category.
• Fault Tolerance of an Information System In a soft fault tolerance focus is on data security incase an eventuality that hinder general functioning of the system is witnessed.
• Risk Tolerance and Business Ethics In this case, basic critical thinking is reflected in considering the former type of risks while it is not applied to evaluating the latter one.
• A Visit to the Museum of Tolerance The location is an ideal place for those interested in learning about the traditional culture and history of ancient people, giving a wide view of what happened in the past and the effect and the […]
• White Women, Black Men: History and Tolerance The reasons for such changes and fluctuations may have varied from social to political and economic; and in her book White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South Martha Hodes undertakes the task […]
• Zero-Tolerance Policies and Student Rights One of the main arguments for the idea that ZTPs violate students’ rights is connected to instances of discrimination. In particular, they may result in students from disadvantaged groups being more likely to partake in […]
• Museum of Tolerance and Cultural Diversity Issues The description of the exhibit devoted to the Holocaust at the Museum of Tolerance is provided hereafter. I have recently visited the exhibit devoted to the Holocaust at the Museum of Tolerance, and I am […]
• Chimamanda Adichie: The Issue of Equality and Tolerance After centuries of discrimination and alienation between the communities of different cultural and ethnic backgrounds, after hundreds of years of wars based on religion and nationality, modern society has slowly started coming to senses and […]
• Zero-Tolerance Policing Style The findings obtained from this study may be used in improving the efficiency of zero tolerance policing or in deciding whether to abolish the policing style.
• Ethical Issues: Risk Tolerance It might be possible to state that when it comes to issues related to risk tolerance, the ethical dimension of these issues is similar to other their dimensions in some ways, but different in others.
• European Framework National Statute for Tolerance Promotion Besides, the article with the Statute helps to clarify the main points intolerant relations between people, the development of national relations, and even the respect to migrants and other social minorities.
• Religious Pluralism and Tolerance Therefore, it is possible to state that all religions have the same goal though they may have different tools to achieve it but people should embrace the idea of religious pluralism, as it will enable […]
• Religious Tolerance and Theology Therefore, tolerance can be defined as the aspect of respecting people in their different nature and not demanding any same action from their beliefs From the Jewish perspective, extending their laws to encompass other religions […]
• Tolerance and Equal Attitude to People With this in mind, it is possible to say that it is a kind of segregation which is now officially promoted. That is why, it is clear for me that some actions are needed to […]
• Religious Tolerance in Different Systems of Beliefs The purpose of this paper is to explore the subject of religious tolerance and its usefulness in the academic approach to the religious phenomenon.
• Linguistics: Bilingualism, Multilingualism and Tolerance In my opinion, a person with some understanding of a local language is likely to find some of the social and cultural things in a foreign country awkward or abnormal.
• Show Boat: Encouraging Tolerance In the beginning of the musical play, the fight between the characters and the disagreements that seize by the end illustrates a sense of acceptance as well as tolerance amongst the different groups by all […]
• Major Religions: Contribution to Religious Tolerance In spite of the constant existence of religious fanaticism and prejudice experienced in most parts of the word, there has been a notable growth in religious tolerance.
• Tolerance and Truth in America During the founding of the United States of America, the Catholic faith seemed to be the predominant religion in the country.
• Freedom of Speech, Religion and Religious Tolerance As stipulated in Article 19 of the Universal Human Rights Declaration, the pastor has the right to share ideas and information of all kinds regardless of the periphery involved and in this case, he should […]
• Tolerance and Pluralism in a Civil Society This is because the society is built by all kinds of people because everyone has a role to play in the society.
• The Acceptance and Tolerance Towards Gay Rights
• Tolerance, Cooperation, and Equilibrium Restoration in Repeated Games
• Understanding Compassion and Tolerance in Harper Lee’s Novel To Kill Mockingbird
• Three Different Perspectives on Tolerance, Equality and Freedom
• The Impact of Acceptance, Tolerance, and Forgiveness in Frankenstein, a Novel by Mary Shelley
• The Zero Tolerance Policy: Justified or Unreasonable
• Use and Application of the Zero Tolerance Policy in American Schools
• Schools Should Eliminate the Use of Zero-Tolerance Policies
• The Role of Lactose Tolerance in Pre-Colonial Development
• The Rise of Religious Tolerance in Protestant England in the Mid to Late 17th Century
• The Demoralizing Treatment of Students as Criminals Due to the Zero Tolerance Policies in American Schools
• The True Meaning of Tolerance and Its Importance for the Modern Society
• The Tolerance Approach to Sensitivity Analysis in Linear Programming
• Socio-Bioethics of Migration. The Deconstruction of Tolerance and Reinvention of Terror
• Tutorial on Religious Tolerance and the Film The Passion of the Christ
• Postmodernism Multiculturalism Tolerance and Political Correctness
• Tolerance, Empathy and Respect and Diversity Programming
• The Correlation Between Drug Tolerance and the Environment
• The Importance of the Concept of Tolerance in the LGBTQ Society
• Tolerance and Diversity for a Health Care Provider
• Vygotsky’s Theory of Social Learning & Tolerance Introduction Prejudices
• The Benefits of Religious Tolerance in American Society
• Tolerance for Uncertainty and the Growth of Informationally Opaque Industries
• Teaching and Modeling Homosexual Tolerance in the Public School System
• Waiting Tolerance: Ramp Delay vs. Freeway Congestion
• Tolerance and Kindness in the Novel To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• Why Religious Tolerance Increased in the American Colonies
• The Relevance of Tolerance and Persecution ”The Crucible” by Arthur Miller
• White and Ety Uses Stereotypes to Promote Cross-Cultural Tolerance
• The Sign of the Cross, Tolerance and Indifference
• Sexuality and Public Policy Regarding Sexual Tolerance
• The Relationship Between Religious Tolerance and Ethnic Relation Practices Among MultiEthnic Youth in Malaysia
• Using Variable Reduction Techniques and Tolerance Intervals to Summarise a Fitness Testing Battery in Soccer
• The Impact of Tolerance as a Component of Organizational Culture on Individual Stress
• Stereotypes Used in White and Ety Promotes Cross-Cultural Tolerance
• The Effect of Visual Stimuli on Pain Threshold and Tolerance
• Social Problems Are Due to Society’s Tolerance of Immorality
• The Tolerance of Violence in America Review of Flaming Guns of the Purple Sage
• The Problem of Zero Tolerance Policies in the United States
• The Challenge of Tolerance Within a Multicultural Society
• Why Is Tolerance Important in Our Daily Life?
• What Is the Value of Tolerance?
• Why Is Tolerance Important for a Peaceful Society?
• How Can You Show Tolerance?
• What Is the Importance of Tolerance in Islam?
• How Can We Promote Tolerance in Our Society?
• Why Is It Important to Teach Tolerance?
• How Do You Show Tolerance in School?
• What Is an Idea of Religious Tolerance?
• How Can I Improve My Patience and Tolerance?
• What Does the Bible Say About Tolerance?
• How Do You Explain Tolerance to a Child?
• What Is the Benefit of Tolerance in Diversity?
• What Is Education Tolerance?
• How Does Tolerance Develop?
• What Is Cellular Tolerance?
• How Can Tolerance Help Prevent a Conflict?
• Why Tolerance Is Important in the Workplace?
• Is Tolerance Enough for Preventing Conflict in Society?
• How Does Tolerance Shift Your Attitude Towards Others?
• Why Is Tolerance Important in a Relationship?
• What Is the Most Serious Effect of Tolerance?
• What Does Developing a Tolerance Mean?
• Are Tolerance and Respect the Same Thing in the Workplace?
• What Is Tolerance Answer in One Sentence?
• What Is Tolerance and How It Affects Us?
• Does Tolerance Mean Acceptance?
• What Is Chronic Tolerance?
• What Does Love and Tolerance Mean?
• How Many Types of Tolerance Are There?
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Differences . . . “Allow All Men the Same Privilege”

Appreciation—Sign of Maturity

After Charlottesville, how we define tolerance becomes a key question

Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney

Professor, Department of Biology, University of Washington

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It’s been a little over a month since a group of white nationalists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia , some chanting Nazi slogans. Clashes with counter-protesters turned violent, leading to the tragic death of counter-demonstrator Heather Heyer.

Since then, the value of tolerance has been under the spotlight. Tolerance seems to be a good thing, but do we have to tolerate this ? Do we have to tolerate people and ideas that are intolerant? And if we don’t, are we abandoning the goal of tolerance?

The ladder of tolerance

In 1945 the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper, having escaped the Nazis just before the second world war, published a book, The Open Society and Its Enemies .

It included, in a footnote, what Popper called “the paradox of tolerance”. Complete tolerance is an impossible goal for Popper, because if we tolerate even the intolerant:

… then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.

Since Charlottesville, Popper has been rediscovered on social media . He captured an important question, writing in a different time but one with echoes of our own.

The most famous of all books written in political philosophy over the century, John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice , drew related conclusions. A society that values freedom should try to tolerate the intolerant, Rawls said. But if the intolerant start to endanger the free society itself, then we do not have to tolerate them.

For both philosophers, the message seems to be that tolerance is good, but perhaps in moderation.

We think the whole idea of tolerance needs to be thought about differently, in a way that distinguishes levels of tolerance.

First, there is tolerance versus intolerance of ordinary or “base-level” behaviours. We call this first-order tolerance. If a person is first-order tolerant or intolerant, this will show in how they behave. If they are intolerant, they might threaten or abuse others.

That creates a new choice about tolerance – do you tolerate those behaviours? If so, this would be second-order tolerance. There can also be third-order and fourth-order tolerance, but most of the time it is the first and second orders that matter.

There is a sort of ladder here, with tolerance (and intolerance) at higher and lower levels. But what is the difference between the “base-level” behaviours and the others? We’ll look at two examples.

First, think about behaviours that are private , such as who you have sex with. You might choose to have heterosexual sex, homosexual sex, sex involving a non-binary individual, or some other kind. (Assume all these behaviours are between consenting adults.)

Liberal democracies have become much more tolerant about sex and other private behaviours over recent decades. Gay male sex was illegal in New South Wales until 1984 , for example. Decriminalising gay sex is an example of first-order tolerance.

Many countries and states also now have anti-discrimination laws, aimed at preventing intolerance of homosexuality, among other things. That is second-order intolerance.

Our society is now intolerant of those who are intolerant of homosexuality; they can be legally penalised. Is that a failure of tolerance? Would complete tolerance involve being tolerant of their intolerance? Not really.

There is a sensible goal here – the goal of first-order tolerance – and that is not a compromise. Societies like ours have decided that tolerance of private sexual choices is valuable and important. To protect tolerance of those private behaviours, we have to be second-order intolerant. A combination of first-order tolerance and second-order intolerance makes sense in a case like this.

What tolerance requires to thrive

But that example seems far from the situation we face with neo-Nazis and the like. Their behaviours are not “private”. They are marching around in public, chanting. How is our framework applicable to a case like that?

We think the same principles can be applied. Above we used a “private” behaviour to introduce the distinction between first-order and second-order tolerance, but that was not essential.

What is essential to the behaviours that get the story rolling is that they are not attempts to interfere with others’ choices. That is what defines the “base” level. First-order tolerance in the case of speech is tolerance of what people say when they are not interfering with the choices of others.

There is a slogan associated with the 18th-century French philosopher Voltaire (though it seems to have been invented by the English author Beatrice Evelyn Hall, writing years later):

I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it.

This is another example of first-order tolerance and second-order intolerance. The Voltaire-figure allows people to say things he does not approve of (first-order tolerance), and will also interfere with those who try to prevent the person speaking (second-order intolerance).

The Voltaire slogan illustrates the way first-order tolerance and second-order intolerance can be applied to speech, and also illustrates how tricky the situation can be.

If someone tries to interfere with another person stating their opinions, this interference will often take the form of speech – threats, abuse, and so on.

So Voltaire, to protect free speech, will have to oppose some kinds of speech. How can he decide which speech to defend and which to oppose? He can defend speech which is not an attempt to prevent others making their own choices, even if the speech is controversial. He won’t defend speech which is first-order intolerant, or speech which does even greater harm, such as speech that incites violence.

When people who believe extreme political views want to express their opinions, we can tolerate their speech and argue back. We can be first-order tolerant.

Tolerance need not imply approval, and when we argue back to them we can express our disagreement under the same umbrella of protection afforded by a first-order tolerant society.

But when people refuse to be tolerant, we can refuse to tolerate those behaviours. That refusal should not be violent or unreasoning, and should not target behaviours that would otherwise receive protection; the aim is not “tit-for-tat”, a reply to intolerance in its own coin. The aim is instead to protect, using reasonable means, the field of first-order tolerance.

This is not a compromise, or a failure to fully live up to the ideal of tolerance. It’s a policy based on a better understanding of what tolerance requires to thrive.

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The term “toleration”—from the Latin tolerare : to put up with, countenance or suffer—generally refers to the conditional acceptance of or non-interference with beliefs, actions or practices that one considers to be wrong but still “tolerable,” such that they should not be prohibited or constrained. There are many contexts in which we speak of a person or an institution as being tolerant: parents tolerate certain behavior of their children, a friend tolerates the weaknesses of another, a monarch tolerates dissent, a church tolerates homosexuality, a state tolerates a minority religion, a society tolerates deviant behavior. Thus for any analysis of the motives and reasons for toleration, the relevant contexts need to be taken into account.

1. The Concept of Toleration and its Paradoxes

2. four conceptions of toleration, 3. the history of toleration, 4. justifying toleration, 5. the politics of toleration, other internet resources, related entries.

It is necessary to differentiate between a general concept and more specific conceptions of toleration (see also Forst 2013). The former is marked by the following characteristics. First, it is essential for the concept of toleration that the tolerated beliefs or practices are considered to be objectionable and in an important sense wrong or bad. If this objection component (cf. King 1976, 44–54 on the components of toleration) is missing, we do not speak of “toleration” but of “indifference” or “affirmation.” Second, the objection component needs to be balanced by an acceptance component , which does not remove the negative judgment but gives certain positive reasons that trump the negative ones in the relevant context. In light of these reasons, it would be wrong not to tolerate what is wrong, to mention a well-known paradox of toleration (discussed below). The said practices or beliefs are wrong, but not intolerably wrong. Third, the limits of toleration need to be specified. They lie at the point where there are reasons for rejection that are stronger than the reasons for acceptance (which still leaves open the question of the appropriate means of a possible intervention); call this the rejection component . All three of those reasons can be of one and the same kind—religious, for example—yet they can also be of diverse kinds (moral, religious, pragmatic, to mention a few possibilities; cf. Newey 1999, 32–34 and Cohen 2014).

Furthermore, it needs to be stressed that there are two boundaries involved in this interpretation of the concept of toleration: the first one lies between (1) the normative realm of those practices and beliefs one agrees with and (2) the realm of the practices and beliefs that one finds wrong but can still tolerate; the second boundary lies between this latter realm and (3) the realm of the intolerable that is strictly rejected. There are thus three, not just two normative realms in a context of toleration.

Finally, one can only speak of toleration where it is practiced voluntarily and is not compelled, for otherwise it would be a case of simply “suffering” or “enduring” certain things that one rejects but against which one is powerless. It is, however, wrong to conclude from this that the tolerant need to be in a position to effectively prohibit or interfere with the tolerated practices, for a minority that does not have this power may very well be tolerant in holding the view that if it had such power, it would not use it to suppress other parties (cf. Williams 1996).

Based on these characteristics, we can identify three paradoxes of toleration that are much discussed in philosophical analyses of the concept, and each one refers to one of the components mentioned above. First, there is the paradox of the tolerant racist , which concerns the objection component. Sometimes people argue that someone who believes that there are “inferior races” the members of which do not deserve equal respect should be “more tolerant.” Thus the racist would be called tolerant if he curbed his desire to discriminate against the members of such groups, say, for strategic reasons. Thus if (and only if) we considered tolerance to be a moral virtue, the paradox arises that an immoral attitude (to think of other “races” in such way) would be turned into part of a virtue. What is more, the racist would be more “tolerant” the stronger his racist impulses are if only he did not act on them (cf. Horton 1996). Hence, seen from a moral perspective, the demand that the racist should be tolerant has a major flaw: it takes the racist objection against others as an ethical objection that only needs to be restrained by adding certain reasons for acceptance. It thus turns an unacceptable prejudice into an ethical judgment. From this it follows that the reasons for objection must be reasonable in a minimal sense; they cannot be generally shareable, of course, but they must also not rest on irrational prejudice and hatred. The racist, therefore, can neither exemplify the virtue of tolerance nor should he be asked to be tolerant; what is necessary is that he overcome his racist beliefs. This shows that there are cases in which tolerance is not the solution to intolerance.

Second, we encounter the paradox of moral tolerance , which arises in connection with the acceptance component (for various analyses of this paradox, see Ebbinghaus 1950, Raphael 1988, Mendus 1989, Horton 1994). If both the reasons for objection and the reasons for acceptance are called “moral,” the paradox arises that it seems to be morally right or even morally required to tolerate what is morally wrong. The solution of this paradox therefore requires a distinction between various kinds of “moral” reasons, some of which must be reasons of a higher order that ground and limit toleration.

Third, there is the paradox of drawing the limits , which concerns the rejection component. This paradox is inherent in the idea that toleration is a matter of reciprocity and that therefore those who are intolerant need not and cannot be tolerated, an idea we find in most of the classical texts on toleration. But even a brief look at those texts, and even more so at historical practice, shows that the slogan “no toleration of the intolerant” is not just vacuous but potentially dangerous, for the characterization of certain groups as intolerant is all too often itself a result of one-sidedness and intolerance. In a deconstructivist reading, this leads to a fatal conclusion for the concept of toleration (cf. Fish 1997): If toleration always implies a drawing of the limits against the intolerant and intolerable, and if every such drawing of a limit is itself a (more or less) intolerant, arbitrary act, toleration ends as soon it begins—as soon as it is defined by an arbitrary boundary between “us” and the “intolerant” and “intolerable.” This paradox can only be overcome if we distinguish between two notions of “intolerance” that the deconstructivist critique conflates: the intolerance of those who lie beyond the limits of toleration because they deny toleration as a norm in the first place, and the lack of tolerance of those who do not want to tolerate a denial of the norm. Tolerance can only be a virtue if this distinction can be made, and it presupposes that the limits of toleration can be drawn in a non-arbitrary, justifiable way.

The discussion so far implies that toleration is a normatively dependent concept . This means that by itself it cannot provide the substantive reasons for objection, acceptance, and rejection. It needs further, independent normative resources in order to have a certain substance, content, and limits—and in order to be regarded as something good at all. In itself, therefore, toleration is not a virtue or value; it can only be a value if backed by the right normative reasons.

The following discussion of four conceptions of toleration is not to be understood as the reconstruction of a linear historical succession. Rather, these are different, historically developed understandings of what toleration consists in that can all be present in society at the same time, so that conflicts about the meaning of toleration may also be understood as conflicts between these conceptions (cf. Forst 2013).

1. The first one I call the permission conception . According to it, toleration is a relation between an authority or a majority and a dissenting, “different” minority (or various minorities). Toleration then means that the authority gives qualified permission to the minority to live according to their beliefs on condition that the minority accepts the dominant position of the authority or majority. So long as their being different remains within certain limits, that is, in the “private” realm, and so long as the minority groups do not claim equal public and political status, they can be tolerated on pragmatic or principled grounds—on pragmatic grounds because this form of toleration is the least costly of all possible alternatives and does not disturb civil peace and order as the dominant party defines it (but rather contributes to it); and on principled grounds because one may think it is morally problematic to force people to give up certain deep-seated beliefs or practices.

The permission conception is a classic one that we find in many historical writings and in instances of a politics of toleration (such as the Edict of Nantes in 1598) and that—to a considerable extent—still informs our understanding of the term. According to this conception, toleration means that the authority or majority, which has the power to interfere with the practices of a minority, nevertheless “tolerates” it, while the minority accepts its inferior position. The situation or the “terms of toleration” are hierarchical: one party allows another party certain things on conditions specified by the first one. Toleration is thus understood as permissio negativa mali : not interfering with something that is actually wrong but not “intolerably” harmful. It is this conception that Goethe (1829, 507, transl. R.F.) had in mind when he said: “Tolerance should be a temporary attitude only: it must lead to recognition. To tolerate means to insult.”

2. The second conception, the coexistence conception , is similar to the first one in regarding toleration as the best means toward ending or avoiding conflict and toward pursuing one’s own goals. What is different, however, is the relationship between the subjects and the objects of toleration. For now the situation is not one of an authority or majority in relation to a minority, but one of groups that are roughly equal in power, and who see that for the sake of social peace and the pursuit of their own interests mutual toleration is the best of all possible alternatives (the Augsburg Peace Treaty of 1555 is a historical example). They prefer peaceful coexistence to conflict and agree to a reciprocal compromise, to a certain modus vivendi . The relation of tolerance is no longer vertical but horizontal: the subjects are at the same time the objects of toleration. This may not lead to a stable social situation in which trust can develop, for once the constellation of power changes, the more powerful group may no longer see any reasons for being tolerant (cf. Rawls 1987, 11, Fletcher 1996).

3. Different from this, the third conception of toleration—the respect conception —is one in which the tolerating parties respect one another in a more reciprocal sense (cf. Weale 1985, Scanlon 1996). Even though they differ fundamentally in their ethical beliefs about the good and true way of life and in their cultural practices, citizens recognize one another as moral-political equals in the sense that their common framework of social life should—as far as fundamental questions of rights and liberties and the distribution of resources are concerned—be guided by norms that all parties can equally accept and that do not favor one specific ethical or cultural community (cf. Forst 2002, ch. 2).

There are two models of the “respect conception,” that of “formal equality,” and that of “qualitative equality.” The former operates on a strict distinction between the political and the private realm, according to which ethical (i.e., cultural or religious) differences among citizens of a legal state should be confined to the private realm, so that they do not lead to conflicts in the political sphere. This version is clearly exhibited in the “secular republicanism” of the French authorities who held that headscarves with a religious meaning have no place in public schools in which children are educated to be autonomous citizens (cf. Galeotti 1993).

The model of “qualitative equality,” on the other hand, recognizes that certain forms of formal equality favor those ethical-cultural life-forms whose beliefs and practices make it easier to accommodate a conventional public/private distinction. In other words, the “formal equality” model tends to be intolerant toward ethical-cultural forms of life that require a public presence that is different from traditional and hitherto dominant cultural forms. Thus, on the “qualitative equality” model, persons respect each other as political equals with a certain distinct ethical-cultural identity that needs to be respected and tolerated as something that is (a) especially important for a person and (b) can provide good reasons for certain exceptions from or general changes in existing legal and social structures. Social and political equality and integration are thus seen to be compatible with cultural difference—within certain (moral) limits of reciprocity.

4. In discussions of toleration, one finds alongside the conceptions mentioned thus far a fourth one which I call the esteem conception . This implies an even fuller, more demanding notion of mutual recognition between citizens than the respect conception does. Here, being tolerant does not just mean respecting members of other cultural life-forms or religions as moral and political equals, it also means having some kind of ethical esteem for their beliefs, that is, taking them to be ethically valuable conceptions that—even though different from one’s own—are in some way ethically attractive and held with good reasons. For this still to be a case of toleration, the kind of esteem characteristic of these relations is something like “reserved esteem,” that is, a kind of positive acceptance of a belief that for some reason you still find is not as attractive as the one you hold. As valuable as parts of the tolerated belief may be, it also has other parts that you find misguided, or wrong (cf. Raz 1988, Sandel 1989).

To answer the question which of these conceptions should be the guiding one for a given society, two aspects are most important. The first one requires an assessment of the conflicts that require and allow for toleration, given the history and character of the groups involved; and the second requires an adequate and convincing normative justification of toleration in a given social context. It is important to keep in mind that the (normatively dependent) concept of toleration itself does not provide such a justification; this has to come from other normative resources. And the list of such resources, speaking both historically and systematically, is long.

In the course of the religious-political conflicts throughout Europe that followed the Reformation, toleration became one of the central concepts of political-philosophical discourse, yet its history reaches much further back into antiquity (for the following, see esp. Forst 2013, part 1; cf. also Besier and Schreiner 1990, Nederman 2000, Zagorin 2003, Creppel 2003, Kaplan 2007 and Bejan 2017). In stoic writings, especially in Cicero, tolerantia is used as a term for a virtue of endurance, of suffering bad luck, pain and injustice of various kinds in a proper, steadfast manner. But already in early Christian discourse, the term is applied to the challenge of coping with religious difference and conflict. The works of Tertullian and Cyprianus are most important in that respect.

Within the Christian framework, a number of arguments for toleration have been developed, based on charity and love for those who err, for example, or on the idea of the two kingdoms and of limited human authority in matters of religious truth, i.e., in matters of the divine kingdom. The most important and far-reaching justification of toleration, however, is the principle credere non potest nisi volens , which holds that only faith based on inner conviction is pleasing to God, and that such faith has to develop from within, without external compulsion. Conscience therefore must not be and cannot be forced to adopt a certain faith, even if it were the true one. Yet, Augustine who defends these arguments in his earlier writings, later (when confronted with the danger of a schism between Roman Catholics and the so-called Donatists) came to the conclusion that the same reasons of love, of the two kingdoms and of the freedom of conscience could also make intolerance and the use of force into a Christian duty, if it were the only way to save the soul of another (esp. Augustine 408, letter # 93). He cites numerous examples of reconverted Catholics to substantiate his position that the proper use of force combined with the right teaching can shake men loose from the wrong faith and open up their eyes so as to accept the truth—still “from within.” Accordingly, individual conscience can and sometimes must be subjected to force. Christian arguments thus both form the core of many modern justifications of toleration and yet are janus-faced, always bound by the superior aim to serve the true faith. Similar to Augustine, Thomas Aquinas later developed a number of reasons for limited and conditional toleration, drawing especially strong limits against tolerating any form of heresy.

The question of peaceful coexistence of different faiths—Christian, Jewish and Muslim—was much discussed in the Middle Ages, especially in the 12 th century. Abailard and Raimundus Lullus wrote inter-religious dialogues searching for ways of defending the truth of Christian faith while also seeing some truth—religious or at least ethical—in other religions. In Judaism and Islam, this was mirrored by writers such as Maimonides or Ibn Rushd (Averroes), whose defense of philosophical truth-searching against religious dogma is arguably the most innovative of the period (see esp. Averroes 1180).

Nicolas of Cusa’s De Pace Fidei (1453) marks an important step towards a more comprehensive, Christian-humanist conception of toleration, though in the conversations among representatives of different faiths his core idea of “one religion in various rites” remains a Catholic one. Still, the search for common elements is a central, increasingly important topic in toleration discourses. This is much further developed in Erasmus of Rotterdam’s humanist idea of a possible religious unity based on a reduced core faith, trying to avoid religious strife about what Erasmus saw as non-essential questions of faith ( adiaphora ).

In contrast with this “irenic” humanist approach, Luther defended the protestant idea of the individual conscience bound only to the word of God, which marks the limits of the authority of the church as well as of the secular powers of the state (Luther 1523). The traditional arguments of free conscience and of the two kingdoms were radicalized in this period. The protestant humanist Sebastian Castellio (1554) attacks the intolerance of both Catholic and Calvinist practices and argues for the freedom of conscience and reason as prerequisites of true faith. In this period, decisive elements of early modern toleration discourse were formed: the distinction between church authority and individual religious conscience on the one hand and the separation of religious and secular authority on the other.

Jean Bodin’s work is important for the further development of modern ideas of toleration in two ways. In his Six Books of a Commonweal (1576), he develops a purely political justification of toleration, following the thought of the so-called Politiques , whose main concern was the stability of the state. For them, the preservation of political sovereignty took primacy over the preservation of religious unity, and toleration was recommended as a superior policy in a situation of religious plurality and strife. This, however, does not amount to the (late modern) idea of a fully secular state with general religious liberty. More radical still is Bodin’s religious-philosophical work on the Colloquium of the Seven (1593), a discourse among representatives of different faiths who disagree about fundamental religious and metaphysical issues. For the first time in the tradition of religious discourse, in Bodin’s work there is no dominant position, no obvious winners or losers. The agreement that the participants in the conversation find is based on respect for the others and on the insight that religious differences, even though they can be meaningfully discussed, cannot be resolved in a philosophical discourse by means of reason alone. Religious plurality is seen here as an enduring predicament of finite and historically situated human beings, not as a state to be overcome by the victory of the one and only true faith.

Marked by bitter religious conflicts, the 17 th century brought forth a number of toleration theories, among them three paradigmatic classics: Baruch de Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670), Pierre Bayle’s Commentaire Philosophique (1686) and John Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689). In his historical critique of biblical religions Spinoza locates their core in the virtues of justice and love and separates it from both contested religious dogmas and from the philosophical search for truth. The state has the task of realizing peace and justice, thus it has the right to regulate the external exercise of religion. The natural right to freedom of thought and judgment and to “inner” religion cannot, however, be entrusted to the state; here political authority finds the factual limits of its power.

Bayle’s Commentaire is the most comprehensive attempt to refute the arguments for the duty of intolerance that go back to Augustine (and especially his interpretation of the parable “compel them to come in,” where the master orders his servants to force those who were invited to the prepared supper but did not attend to come in; see Luke 14, 15ff.). In his elaborate argument against the use of force in matters of religion, Bayle does not primarily take recourse to the idea that religious conscience must not and cannot be forced, for he was aware of the powerful Augustinian arguments against both points (cf. Forst 2008 and Kilcullen 1988). Rather, Bayle argued that there is a “natural light” of practical reason revealing certain moral truths to every sincere person, regardless of his or her faith, even including atheists. And such principles of moral respect and of reciprocity cannot be trumped by religious truths, according to Bayle, for reasonable religious faith is aware that ultimately it is based on personal faith and trust, not on apprehensions of objective truth. This has often been seen as a skeptical argument, yet this is not what Bayle intended; what he suggested, rather, was that the truths of religion are of a different epistemological character than truths arrived at by the use of reason alone. Connecting moral and epistemological arguments in this way, Bayle was the first thinker to try to develop a universally valid argument for toleration, one that implied universal toleration of persons of different faiths as well as of those seen as lacking any faith.

In important respects, this is a more radical theory than the (much more popular and influential) one developed by Locke, who distinguishes between state and church in an early liberal perspective of natural individual rights. While it is the duty of the state to secure the “civil interests” of its citizens, the “care of the soul” cannot be its business, this being a matter between the individual and God to whom alone one is responsible in this regard. Hence there is a God-given, inalienable right to the free exercise of religion. Churches are no more than voluntary associations without any right to use force within a legitimate political order based on the consent of the governed. Locke draws the limits of toleration where a religion does not accept its proper place in civil society (such as Catholicism, in Locke’s eyes) as well as where atheists deny any higher moral authority and therefore destroy the basis of social order.

In the 18 th century, the conception of a secular state with an independent basis of authority and the distinction between the roles of citizen and believer in a certain faith were further developed, even though Locke’s thought that a stable political order did require some common religious basis persisted (with a few exceptions, such as the French materialists). In the course of the American and the French Revolutions a basic “natural” right to religious liberty was recognized, even though the interpretations of what kind of religious dissent could be tolerated differed.

Thinkers of the French Enlightenment argued for toleration on various grounds and, as in Bodin, there was a difference between a focus on political stability and a focus on religious coexistence. In his On the Spirit of the Laws (1748), Montesquieu argues for the toleration of different religions for the purpose of preserving political unity and peace, yet he warns that there is a limit to the acceptance of new religions or changes to the dominant one, given the connection between a constitution and the morality and habits of a people. In his Persian Letters (1721), however, he had developed a more comprehensive theory of religious pluralism. The difference between the two perspectives—political and inter-religious—is even more notable in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s writings. In his Social Contract (1762), he tries to overcome religious strife and intolerance by institutionalizing a “civic religion” that must be shared by all, while in his Emile (1762) he argues for the primacy of individual conscience as well as for the aim of a non-dogmatic “natural religion.”

The idea of a “religion of reason” as an alternative to established religions for the sake of overcoming the quarrels between them was typical for the Enlightenment, and is found in thinkers such as Voltaire, Diderot and Kant. In his parable of the rings (which goes back to medieval precursors) in the play Nathan the Wise (1779), G. E. Lessing offers a powerful image for the peaceful competition of established religions that both underlines their common ancestry as well as their differences due to multiple historical traditions of faith. Since there is no objective proof as to their truth for the time being, they are called upon to deliver such proof by acting morally and harmoniously until the end of time.

John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859) marks the transition to a modern conception of toleration, one that is no longer occupied with the question of religious harmony and does not restrict the issue of toleration to religious differences. In Mill’s eyes, in modern society toleration is also required to cope with other forms of irreconcilable cultural, social and political plurality. Mill offers three main arguments for toleration. According to his “harm principle,” the exercise of political or social power is only legitimate if necessary to prevent serious harm done to one person by another, not to enforce some idea of the good in a paternalistic manner. Toleration towards opinions is justified by the utilitarian consideration that not just true, but also false opinions lead to productive social learning processes. Finally, toleration towards unusual “experiments of living” is justified in a romantic way (following Wilhelm von Humboldt), stressing the values of individuality and originality.

The story of toleration would have to be continued after Mill up to the present, yet this short overview might suffice to draw attention to the long and complex history of the concept and to the many forms it took as well as the different justifications offered for it. Seen historically, toleration has been many things: An exercise of love for the other who errs, a strategy of preserving power by offering some form of freedom to minorities, a term for the peaceful coexistence of different faiths who share a common core, another word for the respect for individual liberty, a postulate of practical reason, or the ethical promise of a productive pluralistic society.

Many of the systematic arguments for toleration—be they religious, pragmatic, moral or epistemological—can be used as a justification for more than one of the conceptions of toleration mentioned above (section 2). The classic argument for freedom of conscience, for example, has been used to justify arrangements according to the “permission conception” as well as the “respect conception.” Generally speaking, relations of toleration are hierarchically ordered according to the first conception, quite unstable according to the conception of “coexistence,” while the “esteem conception” is the most demanding in terms of the kind of mutual appreciation between the tolerating parties. In each case, the limits of toleration seem either arbitrary or too narrow, as in the esteem conception, which only allows toleration of those beliefs and practices that can be ethically valued.

Accordingly, in current philosophical discussions of toleration in multicultural, modern societies, the “respect conception” is often seen as the most appropriate and promising. Yet in these discussions, toleration as “respect” can be justified in different ways. An ethical-liberal, neo-Lockean justification argues that respect is owed to individuals as personally and ethically autonomous beings with the capacity to choose, possibly revise and realize an individual conception of the good. This capacity is to be respected and furthered because it is seen as a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for attaining the good life (cf. Kymlicka 1995). Hence the argument presupposes a specific thesis about the good life—i.e., that only an autonomously chosen way of life can be a good life—which can, however, reasonably be questioned. One may doubt whether such a way of life will necessarily be subjectively more fulfilling or objectively more valuable than one adopted in a more traditional way, without the presence of a range of options to choose from. Apart from that, the ethical-liberal theory could lead to a perfectionist justification of policies designed to further individual autonomy that could have a paternalistic character and lack toleration for non-liberal ways of life. In other words, there is the danger of an insufficient distinction between the components of objection and rejection mentioned above (section 1).

Thus, an alternative, neo-Baylean justification of the respect conception seeks to avoid a particular conception of the good life, relying instead on the discursive principle of justification which says that every norm that is to be binding for a plurality of persons, especially norms that are the basis of legal coercion, must be justifiable with reasons that are reciprocally acceptable to all affected as free and equal persons. Such persons have a basic “right to justification” (Forst 2012a) which gives them the power to reject one-sided ethical or religious justifications for general norms. For a complete argument for toleration, however, this normative component has to be accompanied by an epistemological component which says that ethical or religious reasons, if reciprocally contested, cannot be sufficient to justify the exercise of force, since their validation depends on a particular faith that can reasonably be rejected by others who do not share it; its validity reaches into a realm “beyond reason,” as Bayle said (see also similar arguments by Rawls 1993, ch. 2, and Larmore 1996, ch. 7). Thus toleration consists of the insight that reasons of ethical objection , even if deeply held, cannot be valid as general reasons of rejection so long as they are reciprocally rejectable as belonging to a conception of the good or true way of life that is not and need not be shareable. While such a distinction between ethical reasons for objection and stronger, morally justifiable reasons for rejection tries to overcome the “paradox of moral tolerance” (see section 1 above), the “paradox of drawing the limits” would be solved by seeing as tolerable all such views or practices that do not violate the principle of justification itself (see Forst 2013).

With such a reflexive turn in the debate about toleration, a number of questions arise as to the alleged superior validity of the principle of justification and the plausibility of a neo-Baylean epistemology distinguishing between faith and knowledge. Can there be an impartial justification that is not in the same way a “party” to the contest of ethical truths and world-views? Might there be the possibility, using a phrase John Rawls (1993) coined in the context of his theory of justice, of a “tolerant” theory of toleration that is at the same time substantive enough to ground and limit toleration?

Any concrete use of the concept of toleration is always situated in particular contexts of normative and political conflict, especially in societies that are transforming towards increased religious, ethical and cultural pluralism – even more so when societies are marked by an increased awareness of such pluralism, with some cultural groups raising new claims for recognition and others looking at their co-citizens with suspicion, despite having lived together for some time in the past. These social conflicts always involve group-based claims for recognition, both in the legal and in the social sphere (see generally Patten 2014, Galeotti 2002). Contemporary debate has focused on questions of respecting particular religious practices and beliefs, ranging from certain manners of dress, including the burka, to certain demands to be free from blasphemy and religious insults (Laborde 2008, Newey 2013, Nussbaum 2012, Leiter 2014, Taylor and Stepan 2014, Modood 2013, Forst 2013, ch. 12). The general questions raised here include: What is special about religious as opposed to other cultural identities (Laborde and Bardon 2017)? When is equal respect called for and what exactly does it imply with respect to, for example, norms of gender equality (see Okin et al. 1999, Song 2007)? What role do past injustices play in weighing claims for recognition, and how much room can there be for autonomous forms of life in a deeply pluralistic society (Tully 1995, Williams 2000)?

Other connected and intensely debated issues of toleration include free speech and “hate speech,” (Butler 1997, Waldron 2012, Gerstenfeld 2013) as well as the ways in which new forms of digital communication change the nature of social and political discourse (Barnett 2007).

Finally, in light of Goethe’s remark that to tolerate also means to insult, those working from the perspective of a critical theory of toleration discuss how power can be exercised not only by denying toleration but also by disciplining when granting toleration (Brown 2006, Brown and Forst 2014). As much as a politics of toleration aims to express mutual respect, it also involves disagreement, mutual criticism, and rejection. We still face the challenge of examining the grounds and forms of a politics of toleration as an emancipatory form of politics.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

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Augustine of Hippo | Bayle, Pierre | Bodin, Jean | Cusanus, Nicolaus [Nicolas of Cusa] | justice: international distributive | liberalism | Locke, John | Locke, John: political philosophy | Rawls, John | Spinoza, Baruch

Copyright © 2017 by Rainer Forst < forst @ em . uni-frankfurt . de >

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Promoting Peace, Tolerance, and Respect

September 26, 2018

Good evening to all of you. Thank you so much for the honor awarded to me tonight. I would especially like to thank Rabbi Schneier and the Appeal of Conscience Foundation that he has created.

I am humbled and I am very, very honored to be recognized by you. As I was listening to your very complimentary remarks about me, I was really wondering who you were talking about! So thank you.

To you, Secretary Mnuchin thank you very much for your keynote address and thank you for reminding me of the extraordinary relationship that we have developed in the course of the last year and a half.

To Johann Rupert — my congratulations on your honor this evening and thank you for sharing the evening with me! We go back a long way, both of us, and I can only say how grateful I am for your kindness and generosity.

As a reformed lawyer-- as probably many of you are in this room -- I have a disclaimer to make: I am actually an accident of faith and love. What do I mean by that?

My father was born to a Jewish mother and a non-religious father. As a student at École Normale Supérieure in Paris, my father converted to Catholicism. He was actually converted by a Chinese priest who was a refugee and the vicar of the school! This is not invented, I promise you it is true. And he was so “well converted” by this Chinese refugee priest that he wanted to become a priest himself. And then he met my mother! And this whole vocation of becoming a priest fell through the cracks.

So that explains why I am here, an accident of faith and love!

Now earlier this week I was reflecting on the meaning of this award and I realized that tonight, in many ways, is the easy part. We gather at a wonderful venue, we give our speeches and we catch-up with old friends. But the hard part, as you know, is what happens when each of us leaves this room. When we go back to our life — in the private sector, in the public sector, in civil society — and we begin anew the task of promoting peace and tolerance. Sometimes the work can be frustrating. Sometimes it feels like not enough is happening. Sometimes it seems that there is simply so much to do. Sometimes, it feels that time is running out.

That is where the Appeal of Conscience must inspire us. I think of the work you have done in Cuba, in Hungary, in India, and even right here in the United States. You take on conflicts, divisions, and enmity that is hundreds of years old and you ask people to establish a dialogue to listen to each other. In so doing, you help plant the seeds of peace.

It reminds me of the work that we do at the IMF. Our mission is different, we seek to promote economic security and prosperity for our 189-member nations. But our goals are interconnected. Because without peace there can be no economic development, and as we all know, economic security is a critical building block on the pathway to peace.

If there is no economic prosperity, there is no hope. Those who have economic freedom can more easily pursue their aspirations — and can build a society free of ethnic, religious, and civil strife.

How can we go about this hard work? I, for one, can relate to my own history. It is natural to go home close our door, and to withdraw into ourselves to protect our “turf” when challenged. That's easier, that is what I would call first nature.. What is harder is if you have that “appeal of conscience” that forces us to look beyond ourselves-- to praise diversity and embrace our brothers and sisters. It is not easy.

So when something is not easy I always think to myself: what was really hard? And I think of my days as a synchronized swimmer. That might come as a surprise to you. Synchronized swimming has always been regarded as something a bit “different” from just swimming or diving. I was on the French national team -- so I stepped up and I served my country as an athlete, as well as a Minister of government.

In 1973, when I came to this country in the Washington, D.C. area and went to Holton-Arms school, I was fortunate to be able to work out at the Jewish Community Center in Rockville Maryland — it was the only swimming club which had synchronized swimming. And there I was able to continue that unbelievable routine that you do when you are a synchronized swimmer.

You build muscle memory. You do the routine over and over and over again. You join hands with the other members on the team. You listen to every note of music. You know exactly how and where you need to do this or that move.

That this is work we have to do here. Because when you compete you do not have to think twice, you just do it and it does become a routine. It becomes your second nature.

I personally believe that peace, tolerance, and respect have to become second nature — and they are profoundly needed right now.

So we need to practice the routine over and over so that our first nature is overwhelmed by our second nature

I will close by telling you how pleased I am this evening. And I cannot tell which one of the three events that occurred for me today make me the happiest.

This award is certainly one.

But I also received earlier today the first sonogram pictures of my soon-to-be grandson.

And, what’s more, I was informed earlier today that the Vatican had tweeted one of my speeches — on the topic of the Sustainable Development Goals and the elimination of extreme poverty by 2030.

So I thank you again for this wonderful evening, on this wonderful day, and this wonderful honor.

IMF Communications Department

Media relations.

Phone:  +1 202 623-7100 Email: [email protected]

Law and Crime

"hate has no home here" and the paradox of tolerance, is intolerance of intolerance, well, intolerant is hating hate hateful.

Posted July 2, 2020 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan

I’ve seen the signs around in a few people’s yards. “ Hate Has No Home Here, ” they say, followed by translations of the phrase in Hebrew, Arabic, Spanish, Korean, and Urdu. I didn’t think much of them, other than that the sentiment was nice. But when a colleague of mine got hate mail from a neighbor for displaying one in her front yard, I had to look further into it. Hate mail for not hating? There had to be a logical fallacy to be found somewhere!

The phrase, it turns out, was the brainchild of … children … a third-grader and kindergartner at Peterson Elementary, which services the extremely diverse Chicago neighborhood of North Park, Illinois. The sign project was the result of the cooperation of a North Park neighborhood organization. The stated purpose of the sign is as a “public declaration that hate speech and hateful actions against others will not be tolerated by the person or organization displaying the sign.” What’s to hate, right?

Karen Pansler Lam thinks the signs are a hate crime , and her explanation of why is what my colleague received as an email forward. I won’t go into the details here (like I did here ), but in short her argument is that putting up a “Hate Has No Home Here” sign in front of your house, which implies that you do not hate “foreigners”—i.e., people of other cultures, who speak other languages, and belongs to other religions—is tantamount to saying that you do hate those who do not tolerate such people. She apparently sees signs that suggest “you should love and accept everyone” as a personal affront to her and her views. And apparently my colleague’s neighbor does too. To them, my colleague putting up a “Hate Has No Home Here” sign was tantamount to saying “In my home we don’t hate … unlike in that other home down the street, where they do hate. I hate them.”

Now, there is certainly is a strawman fallacy here. My colleague was only trying to express that her home does not tolerate hate speech or actions. She did not have her neighbors in mind. Saying otherwise misrepresents her view. But my colleague also, most certainly, hates hate. And this got me thinking about the paradox of tolerance.

The paradox of tolerance , first identified by Karl Popper, suggests that tolerance leads to intolerance—or, more specifically, that complete and pure tolerance of everything would lead to the elimination of tolerance for anything. How so?

If every view is tolerated, then viewpoints that are intolerant must be tolerated. But intolerant viewpoints, left unchecked, will wipe out everything besides themselves—leaving us with only intolerance in the end. So, to champion tolerance, one must be intolerant to a degree—one must not tolerate intolerant views. Indeed, Popper argued, such views must be made illegal (like how Germany effectively made Nazism illegal after WWII).

A similar paradox arises it seems, not about tolerance and intolerance, but about love and hatred. If you truly love everything, then you must also love hate. But if hate is loved, and thus left unchecked, it will wipe our everything but itself, and all we will be left with is hate. So, to champion love, one must hate to a degree—one must hate hatefulness. And that, in a way, is what the “Hate Has No Home Here” signs declare: “In this house, we hate hate.”

But is this truly a paradox? Perhaps we can just “hate the sin but not the sinner,” or “hate the hate without hating the hater.” Indeed, perhaps we can even love the hater, but hate their hate and not leave it unchecked. Maybe. But, on the other hand, is it really possible to separate people from their actions in this way—especially their actions towards others? As author Mayur Ramgir put it, “Your actions define your character, your words define your wisdom , but your treatment of others defines [the] real you.” Can I really love Hitler, but just hate his actions? Didn’t his actions reveal him to be a deplorable human being deserving of hatred? Indeed, one might even argue that a person is morally deficient if they don’t hate Hitler. So is one morally deficient if they do not hate people who take calls for love and tolerance as personal affronts? I’m not really sure. But if one vocally stands against an “anti-hate” message, one should not be surprised if one receives criticism from people who hate hatefulness.

Copyright David Kyle Johnson, 2020.

David Kyle Johnson, Ph.D. , is a professor of philosophy at King's College in Pennsylvania.

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The Tolerant Society

Lee Bollinger argues that free speech establishes tolerance. Through a free speech regime, a vast number of ideas circulate even those that some may consider as extreme, dangerous, hateful, or wrong. Bollinger reasons that if we run up against ideas and opinions that differ from our own, we will learn to accept their existence. We will learn to manage our impulse, almost instinct to forbid such views. We will learn to manage our impulse to excessive intolerance. Through freedom of expression, we are forced to encounter others, others' opinions, others' dignities, others' autonomy, and to tolerate their existence. In his view, a free speech regime is a great social experience in tolerance. The extraordinary zone of freedom of expression tests our ability to live in a society that is necessarily defined by conflict and controversy. It trains us in the art of tolerance and steels us from vicissitudes. The best way to think of freedom of speech and press then, is not just as an aid in the search for truth, but also as creating an unregulated public arena, a special zone of social interaction. Bollinger argues that through the free speech experiment, we commit ourselves to being people of fortitude.    

Lee Bollinger , the Tolerant Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986)

Herbert Marcuse

Repressive tolerance (full text).

Selassie's speech on Tolerance

Undated speech

Opening [ edit ]

It gives us great pleasure to appear before this distinguished assemblage and we bring you the fraternal salutations of the Ethiopian people.

The people of Ethiopia and Trinidad and Tobago are joined in a massive and continuous effort to create for themselves a new and better way of life. They face many of the same problems. The hopes and aspirations which they share derive from the same essential beliefs in the nature and destiny of man. It is thus inevitably true that there should exist between those two great peoples strong and lasting ties of friendship and understanding

Your role as the representatives of the people is a particularly critical one in the councils of the twentieth century. The manner in which a representative of the people should properly discharge his responsibilities has long been a matter for learned discussion among philosophers and political scientists.

The world of the developing nations is creating new problems for the scholars to ponder as new societies are emerging to deal with the intricate and explosive questions of national and institutional development.

Is a representative responsible only to a constituency or to the particular group or interest which has chosen or appointed him? Certainly this responsibility Must be an element in the thought and action of such a man, but there are higher values and greater interests and responsibilities than these.

Obstacles, Sectional, tribal and other divisive factors often pose major obstacles to national development. In their expanded sense, as narrowly national and ideological interests, they threaten unity and progress.

No one is today so foolish as to believe that any one nation constitutes a perfect monolith of faith and ideology. Nor could anyone wish that there should be such utter vanity of thought and aspiration.

The systems of Government which have sought to impose uniformity of belief have survived briefly and then expired, blinded and weakened by obsessive reliance upon their supposed infallibility. The only system of Government which can survive is one which is prepared to tolerate dissent and criticism and Which accepts these as useful and in any case, inevitable aspects of all social and political relations.

The tolerance of dissent and criticism within a Government proceeds from a single essential premise: that the Government exists to serve the people generally. Government servants, whether designated as representatives or not, have a trust to work for the general welfare.

The same trust exists among the member states of international organizations. The members of such organizations must adhere to some tacit or expressed conception of international welfare.

Common Goals [ edit ]

In the case of the Organization of African Unity, it is an African Unity, it is an African welfare; in the case of the United Nations Organization, it is world welfare.

In one way or another, the member nation must accept in thought, spirit and action the basic premise of their institutions that men of all races, beliefs and status share some essential common goals.

From this premise, no great and easy actions follow as corollaries. The representatives of peoples and nations can only come together with open and objective minds and willing hearts to engage in dialogue, without rigid dogmas and slogans and without violence.

Working in this way achieves no instant Utopia. It may, however, enable us to achieve together what it is possible to achieve and to move forward steadily, if not always in great haste, with some degree of harmony and mutual understanding.

Domestically, we can build strong and happy and resourceful societies. internationally, we can force the end of oppression of man by man and nation by nation. We can bring about the security and mutual trust which will open the way to the greater human achievements for which the needs of mankind now cry out.

Permit me to express my heartfelt gratitude for the reception accorded me by the people and Government of Trinidad and Tobago.

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The Editorial Board

A Way Back From Campus Chaos

By The Editorial Board

The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values . It is separate from the newsroom.

Protesting the world’s wrongs has been a rite of passage for generations of American youth, buoyed by our strong laws protecting free speech and free assembly. Yet the students and other demonstrators disrupting college campuses this spring are being taught the wrong lesson — for as admirable as it can be to stand up for your beliefs, there are no guarantees that doing so will be without consequence.

The highest calling of a university is to craft a culture of open inquiry, one where both free speech and academic freedom are held as ideals. Protest is part of that culture, and the issue on which so many of the current demonstrations are centered — U.S. involvement in the Israel-Hamas conflict — ought to be fiercely and regularly debated on college campuses.

The constitutional right to free speech is the protection against government interference restricting speech. Therefore, leaders at public universities, which are funded by government, have a heightened duty to respect those boundaries. Private institutions don’t have the same legal obligations, but that doesn’t relieve them of the responsibility to encourage open dialogue whenever and wherever possible on their campuses. It’s essential to the pursuit of learning.

In the real world, though, this can get messy, and nuance is required when free speech comes into tension with protecting academic freedom. The earliest universities to adopt the principle of academic freedom did so to thwart interference and influence from totalitarian states and religious zealotry. Today, the American Association of University Professors defines it as “the freedom of a teacher or researcher in higher education to investigate and discuss the issues in his or her academic field and to teach or publish findings without interference from political figures, boards of trustees, donors or other entities.”

Student codes of conduct and other guidelines are meant to relieve some of the tension between free speech and academic freedom, as well as to ensure that schools are in compliance with government regulations and laws. Every campus has them. But rules matter only when guardrails are consistently upheld. It’s in that enforcement that the leadership of too many universities has fallen short.

The point of protest is to break such rules, of course, and to disrupt daily routines so profoundly as to grab the world’s attention and sympathies. Campuses should be able to tolerate some degree of disruption, which is inherent to any protest. That makes it even more important that school administrators respond when the permissible limits for speech are violated.

During the current demonstrations, a lack of accountability has helped produce a crisis.

It has left some Jewish students feeling systematically harassed. It has deprived many students of access to parts of campus life. On campuses where in-person classes or commencement exercises were canceled, students have watched their basic expectations for a university experience evaporate. And at times, the protesters themselves have been directly endangered; the disarray and violence of the past weeks have been escalated by the continued involvement of both the police and external agitators.

Amid the protests, there has been much discussion of both antisemitism and Islamophobia and when the line is crossed into hate speech. There are profound risks to imposing overly expansive definitions of inappropriate speech, and universities were rightly chided for doing so in the past. But it should be easy to agree that no student, faculty member, administrator or university staff member on a campus should be threatened or intimidated. School policies should reflect that, and they should be enforced when necessary.

In the longer term, a lack of clarity around acceptable forms of expression and a failure to hold those who break those norms to account, has opened up the pursuit of higher learning to the whims of those motivated by hypocrisy and cynicism.

For years, right-wing Republicans, at the federal and state level, have found opportunities to crusade against academic freedom, with charges of antisemitism on campus serving as the latest vehicle. Speaker Mike Johnson of the House of Representatives used this moment of chaos as cover to begin a legislative effort to crack down on elite universities, and lawmakers in the House recently passed a proposal that would impose egregious government restrictions on free speech. The Senate should reject those efforts unequivocally.

The absence of steady and principled leadership is what opened the campus gates to such cynicism in the first place. For several years, many university leaders have failed to act as their students and faculty have shown ever greater readiness to block an expanding range of views that they deem wrong or beyond the pale. Some scholars report that this has had a chilling effect on their work, making them less willing to participate in the academy or in the wider world of public discourse. The price of pushing boundaries, particularly with more conservative ideas, has become higher and higher.

Schools ought to be teaching their students that there is as much courage in listening as there is in speaking up. It has not gone unnoticed — on campuses but also by members of Congress and by the public writ large — that many of those who are now demanding the right to protest have previously sought to curtail the speech of those whom they declared hateful.

Establishing a culture of openness and free expression is crucial to the mission of educational institutions. That includes clear guardrails on conduct and enforcement of those guardrails, regardless of the speaker or the topic. Doing so would not only help restore order on college campuses today but would also strengthen the cultural bedrock of higher education for generations to come.

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WTVM Editorial 05/13/24: Butker’s Free Speech

C OLUMBUS, Ga. (WTVM) - The story of Kansas City Chiefs kicker, Harrison Butker, and his recent commencement address at a Catholic university is less about what he said and more about the importance of tolerance and the support of free speech.

The best commencement address always has a distinct point of view.

It’s meant to make young graduates think. Commencement speeches are almost always about the speaker’s personal experience or something that motivated them to succeed.

Butker’s speech focused on his personal views about family, religion, and conservative social values. In short, his address urged the graduates to commit to all three for a more fulfilling life.

But the reaction to Butker’s personal views were immediately polarizing. Some supported his conservative views by buying his number 7 Kansas City jersey in record numbers. Others opposed to Butker’s values called for the NFL to remove him from the field.

His personal remarks, otherwise known as “free speech,” ignited a major public controversy.

No one has to agree with him.

Perhaps you don’t. But everyone should be tolerant of his views.

The Oxford Dictionary defines tolerance as the willingness to allow the expression of opinions or beliefs that one does not necessarily agree with.

There are many different views about what Harrison Butker said in his now-famous commencement speech.

Love it or hate it, all of us ought to agree on his right to have those views - and for others to be able to express opposing views.

The first amendment guarantees everyone the right to speak out.

Being tolerant of that right to speak is what free speech is all about.

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The infected blood scandal exposes the toxic mendacity of our ruling class

Britain’s unspoken vice is elite secrecy, but we are waking up to how long we have been taken for fools

There is an unspoken phenomenon that quietly threatens the position of the British establishment. It might be described as “perma-gate”. That is to say, the endless string of elite scandals – both cold case and contemporary – that are shining a light on the corrupted machinations of the state. 

Taken in isolation these national outrages, from the infected blood disaster and the Post Office disgrace to the pandemic response , elicit an impotent shiver of revulsion from a deferential, if disillusioned, nation. Taken together, they are dynamite.

Across the pond, faith in democracy and the ruling class was exploded by Watergate, a single episode that exposed American statecraft’s amoral, expletive core. In Britain, the suspension of our disbelief in the system is more painstakingly, yet no less profoundly, unravelling, as we steadily gain a partial but in parts astonishingly detailed artists’ impression of the rancid paternalism that pollutes the state’s every tentacle, from the dingy IT offices of the postal service to the laboratories of backwater haemophilia centres.

With the release of the Infected Blood Inquiry’s report, we are left to process the revelation that the NHS is not so much a sacred institution as a corrupted priesthood. That in its paradoxically paternalist zeal for “clinical freedom” it allowed doctors to follow unsafe treatment policies and practices, with some exploiting this so far as to experiment on children. That by the early Eighties, when doctors had not only become aware of a killer AIDS virus but that it might be spread through blood, and research had established that a non-A/non-B hepatitis caused by treatment with a blood product carried with it a serious risk of long-term consequences – crucially establishing that those who played God may have been giving patients the kiss of death – the health service was unacceptably slow to change course. That as the horrific fallout became clear, our hallowed health service refused to acknowledge its errors, instead retreating into a basilica of lies, obfuscation and destruction of evidence. 

If there was something seedily mafia-esque about the subterfuge that characterised the Post Office scandal, the cover-up surrounding the biggest treatment disaster in NHS history has whiffs of impudent zealotry.

We must come to terms with the revelation that for years successive governments and the Civil Service disseminated fake news. With a bland militancy it maintained over several decades, it stuck to the mendacious narrative that the blood infections were a tragic and regrettable development, which occurred because of a lack of understanding of the risks.  The inquiry’s report details how false orthodoxies (albeit described in the arid language of officialdom as “lines to take”) entrenched themselves. “Dogma became a mantra. It was enshrined. It was never questioned.”

Politicians frame the blood scandal as a historic “injustice” with their platitudes about a “shameful” episode that is “hard to even comprehend”. In this attempt at psychological distancing, we the public are partially complicit. Delayed justice has become a grim ritual of a country which loves authority a little too much and can only confront the state’s perversions when it is part of a historic investigation. 

But ultimately something about these historic scandals resonates with us to the point where the past collapses into the present. Our hearts seize at grainy pictures of victims who not only didn’t live to see justice but suffered horrible and shameful deaths, enduring the cruelties of public stigma. Our minds inevitably wander to those faceless doctors and civil servants, instrumental and complicit in their unnecessary deaths, who are by now happily retired, living on gold-plated public pensions. 

True, it is welcome that criminal prosecutions may follow today’s report. But it is likely that too many will go unpunished. As the families of victims protested in the sweltering summer heat on Westminster’s College Green yesterday, I couldn’t help wonder what the report’s “someone in the Department of Health” who probably deliberately chose to mark incriminating files for destruction was doing at that moment. Perhaps tending their begonias in some corner of the suburbs, living a life of discreetly arrogant splendour.

What makes such inquiries more powerful is how they are exposing pathologies of the British state that are not historic but eternal. The past treatment of haemophiliacs speaks to an enduring culture of cover-up that officials have warned is still endemic in the NHS, with hospitals still hiding evidence of poor care.

The thing that this inquiry really hits home is that the British culture of elite secrecy is without parallel in the Western world. It is a national puzzle that one might call the British Question.

An archaic ruling class code based on Victorian club governance has barely changed since it was established in the 19th century. The elite’s culture of honourable secrecy and patronising impunity has proved bomb-proof, surviving not only democratisation, but recent attempts to build better mechanisms of account into the system. Via a darkly brilliant process of “systems thinking”, an ossified bureaucracy has “learnt” how to preserve itself from democratic scrutiny – burying errors under layers of obfuscation planted by generations of civil servants who stick to an “authorised account of events”.

Elected ministers in young democracies such as Japan were far more effective at holding civil servants to account and getting to the bottom of similar blood infection scandals. Indeed, a succession of public inquiries reveals to us that our more mature liberal state’s secrecy is so prolific, so compulsive, so endemic that it threatens to effectively render Britain a failed democratic state. 

Such a claim may seem implausibly strong, but the fact remains that the state is technically failing, as it lacks a plausible system of democratic accountability and ministerial responsibility, with the only recourse to truth being the pantomime of public inquiry. These are as much a gravy train for lawyers as they are the public’s only vehicle, beyond elections, to hold state power to account. Even with their enhanced coercive powers, as we have seen from the blood scandal to Horizon to Hillsborough to Grenfell to the Covid inquiry, they are systematically bogged down by subtly uncooperative officials, sometimes through the late disclosure or withholding of evidence, other times through bids to delay the inquiry or limit its scope. 

Britain’s crisis of institutions is becoming dangerous. It is impossible to ignore the fact that an archaic, entrenched, corrupted bureaucracy – the origin of which predates our democracy by a century – shows little compunction over lying to its people. 

The ruling class’s favouring of closed government over democracy, of loyalty over objective truth, of order over freedom, saving face over the preservation of public trust, have emerged so strongly as recurring themes that they surely cannot continue to be a niche preoccupation of Leave voters and lockdown-sceptics, but a burning outrage that unifies the nation.

• Infected Blood Scandal,
• Covid Inquiry,
• NHS (National Health Service),
• Post Office scandal
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