Does Tolerance have its Limits?
I began by asking us to think about ‘what’s in a name’, that is, to recognize both the power and the limitations of words to express our very flexible and changing ideas. There is often a problem not only in ‘saying what we mean’ but in ’meaning what we say’. So if we are to find a ‘level playing field’ for our attempt to understand one another we need to discover what we mean by the words we choose to use. The word tolerance has held a variety of meanings over the years and today a variety of meanings seems still to be present among us human beings, so that we may simply misunderstand one another whilst using the same word.
Understandings of the word ‘tolerance’
As we have to begin somewhere and because I am aware that I am approaching this whole subject from a fairly privileged white Westerner’s standpoint I began with what is often misnamed the Edict of Milan (313 CE) by which the first Christian Emperor of Rome, Constantine, along with his Pagan co-emperor removed the legal restraints imposed during the years of persecution on Christians and other religious groups. This document has been seen as an act of toleration. In effect, without it assenting to any of the ‘tolerated’ religions as the State religion, the Roman Imperial government allowed their adherents to practice their religion and to seek converts. As with all other similar legal grants of a right to exist there was the caveat that these religions should not ‘frighten the horses’ or the State tolerance would be put at risk.[‘ not to frighten the horses’ is reputedly a response of the English actress Mrs Patrick Campbell (whose career spanned from the nineteenth into the twentieth century) to a female actor who complained of the over-fondness of an older male actor for the leading man; ‘Does it really matter what these affectionate people do, so long as they don’t do it on the streets and frighten the horses.’
Presentation 2: When and when not to be tolerant.
The title of my contribution does not imply that I have presumed that there must be boundaries to tolerance or even that tolerance is a good thing! It is possible to say that you should always be tolerant and you should never set any limits, perhaps, because at least for Christians, ‘turning the other cheek’ (vid Matt 5 vv 38-40) implies such a reaction or conversely that you should never be tolerant because it indicates a lack of convictions and principle. Of course, I do have a provisional position which doubtless you will easily spot as I give this contribution into the discussion. But it is not my intention to make up anyone’s mind or in any way to inhibit full and open conversation.
I intend to look at a number of contemporary issues where tolerance has been advocated and to try to discover reasons why some people will feel a need to advocate limits to tolerance. In a sense I am testing out if or why there is a need for tolerance and whether Karl Popper’s assertion is correct. You may recall that he wrote ‘Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.’
‘I appeal for a cessation of hostilities….because war is bad in essence….I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless to saving you or humanity. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions (editor: presumably including India). Let them take possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these but neither your souls, nor you minds. If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself, man, woman and child to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them….I am telling His Excellency the Viceroy that my services are at the disposal of His Majesty’s Government, should they consider them of any practical use in advancing the object of my appeal.’ (Gandhi (1940) ‘The Story of My Experiments with Truth.’
Before we too readily see this as an idiosyncratic pacifist’s unrealistic view of what we may wish to call ‘unlimited tolerance’ we have first to remember, perhaps, that Hindus, Buddhists and Jainists share a common belief in ahimsa ‘the respect for all living things and avoidance of violence towards others.’ It may be that any intolerance we show towards Gandhi’s conviction may demonstrate something of the cultural division between West and East. It would be easy to prove that this theology has not prevented violence on the Indian sub-continent but it was inspirational for Gandhi in his struggle for a non-violent campaign for Indian independence.
The rise of militant Islam.
What I should say when asked about what Christians believe? I think I should say that Christians believe wildly different things about many beliefs and practices, and yet all will say that what they believe, and the morality of their consequent actions, have Christian roots. Of course many Christians will claim that they are the only ‘true Christians’ and suggest, with varying degrees of severity, that all others must be seen and non-believers.
I have prefaced what I have to say on the issue of Muslim radicalism with this brief description of Christianity (as it is, rather than how some people would like it to be) because such is, I think, necessary background to any question which opens by asking ‘What do Muslims believe…’
In fact Muslims belief varies both in individuals and groups. In Christianity, as with Islam, there are some central common beliefs held by all believers (for Christians perhaps fewer than we might at first suppose, I recall many years ago discussing with a ‘modernist’ Christian about belief in God and I suggested that we Christians could all agree that we worshiped the God whom Jesus called ‘Father’ which seemed to me to be unexceptional. He replied ‘Oh, I could not say that.’) Unfortunately in the West we have a picture of all Muslims as having a very unquestioning approach to faith including in that the nature of the Koran, along with the place of Mohamed in their forming of the teaching of Islam. Muslims are regularly portrayed on our television screens and PC’s in the UK as aggressive, single minded immigrants from Middle Eastern countries who frequently belong to groups of radicalized extremists believing that Allah demands that his authority, his law, is imposed on those who will not believe. These groups, whilst being vocal and behind many acts of violence, are relatively few in number and do not represent the majority of say British Muslims. Many of these minority group members are radicalized one-time Christians who adopt conservative Muslim dress and talk of ‘their people’ suffering under Western military action; a relationship not of blood but of conviction. It is worth recalling perhaps the 80% of the Worlds Muslims do not live in Arab states or come from Arab stock.
Many people will support Karl Popper’s view ‘if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.’ This for such people makes ‘tolerance’ a non-proposition in the case Islamic terrorists for example (though it may not excuse such people or us from looking for the social and psychological origins of terrorism. The terrorist may have some justifiable cause for anger, if not for indiscriminate murder). However, the terrorist Muslim makes up a the relatively small and militant groups involved in a particular form of guerrilla warfare. The behavior is not totally dissimilar from that used by paramilitary groups of Catholic and Protestant allegiances in Northern Ireland over recent decades, but the Irish lacked the suicide element in their bombing campaigns.
The history of Islam is about as confused and confusing as the history of Christendom. There are Muslim believers who wish to promote the tolerant peace-loving nature of their faith, and there are many who take this stance along with a significant number of Christians (I am not simply speaking of pacifists but of those who, even if constrained to fight believe that warfare is regrettable and peace the fundamental basis for a truly humane society.) In effect for such people ‘peace’ is the default position and tolerance the way to achieve it. One Islamic scholar, now living in Toronto, in closing a lecture on ‘Religious Tolerance in Islam’ said ; ‘Time does not allow me to go into this discussion more than this, but let me say one thing about the issue of tolerance towards minorities and freedom of practicing; if we are to compare the attitude of Muslim rulers towards the minorities living under their rule during the nineteenth century-with the attitude of the Europeans and Americans towards their minorities, I dare to say that the record of the Muslims would be much better.’ ( Sayyid Muhammad Rizvi [1957- present] (2017) ‘Religious Tolerance in Islam’ in ‘The Right Path’ magazine pub Ahul Bayt Assembly of Canada.) I suspect the assessment may stand up to critical examination.
Those who make up the majority culture in the UK are asked (or perhaps are even required by Human Rights legislation) to exercise a tolerant approach to people of other than Christian religions and other than Western cultural background. There has to be a reciprocal understanding from and between the people from other cultural origins for a proper ensuring of the non partial human rights principles to be put into practice. The aim is both pragmatic and idealistic at the same time. Social harmony is generally desired by national governments in the West, and by individuals, who see it as essential to provide the equanimity required for happily fulfilled lives and for creative activity. Of course ‘Utopianism’ struggles alongside a popular ‘Dystopianism’ and I suspect reality will at best sit somewhere in the middle!
The question remains why people of different faiths cannot live harmoniously together if they sense that ‘humanity’ itself transcends differences. Another and perhaps more pressing issue, is based on the question why cannot different culture groups with varied ideologies live together harmoniously. More pressing, because whilst the rise of militant Islam put religion back onto our increasingly secular Western agenda, secularism is probably, in Europe at least, the social philosophy of choice. Thus into the mix comes the aspiration among many Westernized Muslims and people of minority groups that secular political philosophy will be a way to institutionalized tolerance which will serve for their protection and flourishing. But secularists, as with the religious, have various understanding of the secular state, and some feel it can only be achieved through a suppression of religion by increasingly limiting its role on the social stage.
Politics
If recent experience is anything to go by the most intolerant area of UK national life, as I suspect it may be in all other countries, is the field of politics. In fact public politics seem to me to be based on the image of a rather crude board game (perhaps if I had been born fifty years later I would say a computer game) which is based on violently opposed players determined to wipe one another off the board, but inventing the rules of play as they go along. Political behavior often has little to do with truth, and not always the welfare of the nation, but rather in achieving success at the polling booths. Of course there are many principled politicians who are highly motivated in their social and inter-national work. But the overall public face of political life is that of confrontation and a total lack of sympathy for anything the opposing party, or parties, has to contribute. It has seemed to me that recently in the UK after some tragic public events politicians have taken the opportunity to score points long before the evidence of culpability has been collected in order for them properly to make such a judgement. I am still of the mind that being entrusted by the public with governing the nation politicians should have some view of sustaining integrity, honesty, genuine conviction along with the well being of the nation and its responsibilities in the wider world.
Of course much of this gamesmanship comes from the assumption that ‘you’’ are right and ‘they’ are wrong. Perhaps one of the greatest problems to dog the question of tolerance and its limits is the matter of people being sure they are right. It seems to me unlikely that we can ever be sure that we are absolutely right about anything. One of the most influential contributions to my own thinking was given in a lecture offered to a group of senior clergy by the very distinguished Anglo-Austrian cosmologist Professor Sir Herman Bondi (1919-2005). Having made clear that he was a non-believing Jew and adding that he did not call himself an atheist as he was not opposed to others having religious belief (a touch of tolerance perhaps?) he then went onto say words to this effect; ‘It is not given for humanity to know absolutely but we have to act.’
This has seemed to me, over the years, to be a very profound expression of the human dilemma. We cannot know absolutely for a variety of good reasons including the limitations of the human brain and its lack of knowledge, which every great expert in this field of study is the first to admit. But we have nevertheless to make decisions. Such decision making, therefore, depends upon us taking ‘provisional’ decisions at every turn. To cope with this dilemma we have reacted in various ways. One way is to hold that absolute knowledge ‘absolute truth’ can be given from the only source of absolute knowledge, namely the Divine. This ‘absolute truth’ has been thought to come from Scriptures, investing the written word with delivering an inflexible set of instruction, prohibitions and directives. Of course this particular way of looking at ancient written documents presumes we can readily understand them though living in a quite different and even alien culture from the one in which they were written. The way around this quandary is to say ‘that it means what it means to me’, but I find that a bit of a circular and unconvincing argument.
Another way of dealing with the dilemma is to say that you ’feel’ that your belief is absolutely true and that an inner spiritual or emotional response has its own ‘truth’ authenticity. Both of these approaches are readily to be found in religious groups. They are also to be found in political groups where often ‘God’ (famously in Britain a political advisor interrupted a Prime Minister about to talk of his religious faith by saying ‘we don’t do God’ (Alastair Campbell to Tony Blair, May 4th 2003) is replaced by a written document which is given a Scripture-like status, for example the Communist Manifesto, the American Constitution, the Magna Carta, or perhaps the ‘prophetic’ words of influential leaders of thought or politics; Ghandi’s copious works; the economic writings of John Maynard Keynes; the publications of Sigmund Freud; John Calvin’s Institutes of Religion and so on. The emotional need for some kind of ‘absolute’ authority has, in my opinion considerable reduced the opportunities for building a tolerant society, if that is what we want. This desire for an absolute is not absent from a secular society which has taken to a moral status, so that to be socially aware and to have human welfare at heart implies for some that you must be a ‘secularist’.
Political tolerance is based on the principle that we can never know absolutely, and we will always have to act from the assumption that after due consideration what we decide will be for the welfare of the whole nation, the nations role in the wider world’ and the global humanity’s future. What after this decision making has to be accepted is that we necessarily frequently make mistaken assessments and should go back to the drawing board. My view is that few politicians publicly believe that this way works and so confronted by what I consider a mistaken judgement resort to ‘beating the pulpit’ and ‘shouting louder’ especially when they feel most vulnerable.
But it may be that public politics, as we know them, have no place for tolerance but encourage prejudice and hard line ideology in the hope of their adherents gaining power. Perhaps the word ‘power’ is itself reflective of a contemporary common political attitude. In the fairly recent past in the UK politicians after an election came ‘into office’, which meant ‘an employment to which duties are attached’, but it is a term not much used today, which fact may not surprise you.
Societal intolerance; the Jews.
Salarino, a Venetian gentleman and friend of Antonio, is speaking with the Jewish money lender Shylock who has made it a condition of his loan to Antonio that if he does not pay it back according to their agreement Shylock will claim a pound of Antonio’s flesh. Shylock is a fairly loathsome character who epitomizes the accepted archetype of the Jew in Medieval European Christendom.
I’ll use it for fish bait. You can’t eat human flesh, but if it feeds nothing else, it’ll feed my revenge, He’s insulted me and cost me half a million ducats. He’s laughed at my losses, made fun of my earnings, humiliated my race, thwarted my deals, turned my friends against me, riled up my enemies-and why? Because I am a Jew. Doesn’t a Jew have eyes? Doesn’t a Jew have hands, bodily organs, a human shape, five senses, feelings, and passions? Doesn’t a Jew eat the same food, get hurt with the same weapons, get sick with the same diseases, get healed by the same medicine, and warm up in summer and cool off in winter just like a Christian? If you prick us with a pin, don’t we bleed? If you tickle us, don’t we laugh? If you poison us, don’t we die? And if you treat us badly, won’t we try to get revenge? If we are like you in everything else, we’ll resemble you in that respect. If a Jew offends a Christian, what’s the Christian’s kind and gentle reaction? Revenge. If a Christian offends a Jew, what punishment will he come up with if he follows the Christian example? Of course, the same thing- revenge! I’ll treat you as badly as you Christians taught me- and you’ll be lucky if I don’t out do my teachers.’
Shakespeare lived at the end of what fifteenth century Italian humanists chose to determine as the age between the classical age and the new age of revived classicism, and so eventually named the Middle Ages.
His play is set in Venice a trading port of Medieval Europe, as was the short story from an Italian collection of fifty written around the end of the 14th century ( Giovanni Fiorentino [first published 1558)] ‘Il Pecerone’) which appears to have been the basis of Shakespeare’s plot. Shakespeare could not have re-set the story in the England of his day for all practicing Jews had been expelled from England by Edward I in 1290 and they were not publicly to return, and then very un-dramatically, until the Republican Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell 367 years later. There is evidence of Conversi Jews (at least nominally converts to Christianity) being in England, and a few specially invited Jews, along with some who crept in and were often disclosed to the authorities. Before the 1290 expulsion, in 1218 in the reign of Henry III Jews in England, in line with the instructions of the Church’s Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 were required to wear a yellow badge on their garments. In this instance, to be made of yellow felt and representing not the Star of David, as required by the Nazi Regime over seven hundred years later, but of the two tablets of the Covenant.
A great anti-Jewish mythology arose in Christian Europe based, I believe, on two things; the first that the Jews were unpopular because at a time when Christians could not lend money on interest to fellow Christians the Jews could lend to non-Jews and did often at a healthy profit. This amount of profit was deeply resented thus making Jews not only essential for the new fiscal arrangements of Europe but, in consequence, apparently monopolistic profiteers. The second cause for the unpopularity of the Jews was in part created by the Jews being ghettoized and insular. For understandable reason the minority Jewish population having lost its homeland first to the Romans and then to both the European Christians and the Muslims, so suffering a stateless Diaspora until 1948, were very protective of their separate identity and resistant to assimilation. Unfortunately this led to accusations of ritual infanticide of Christian children with their blood being used for matzos to be used in the Passover ceremonies. There appears to have been absolutely no evidence to support this claim but it went to the extent of the popular ‘Canonisation’ of some murdered boys and the establishment of shrines. The remains of one such shrine of Little St Hugh can still be found in England’s Lincoln Cathedral.
In some way it may be that ‘tolerance’ is not an issue here but rather justice, but the humanist ‘tolerance’ principle placed into the mouth of Shylock which suggests that whilst we may deeply disagree with the beliefs and even the actions of some of our fellow human beings perhaps we should ‘tolerate’ these beliefs and practices at least until they lead to seriously anti-social behavior and only then should we legislate against such when we are sure that the evidence has not been falsified and created from the pit of prejudice.
My view is that such thinking could equally apply to other areas of intolerance in our society, not least in matters of race and religion. In the UK, despite the fact that Muslims are often quite open to have non-Muslims in the Mosque and sometimes even during times of prayer (but not for joint prayer) their home life is often understood more by imagination than reality. Whilst Westerners from European background may have problems in the place of women in traditional Islam it is nonsense to believe that even the most heavily veiled woman ( hajib, jilbab, niqab or burqa the last exposing only the eyes) necessarily lives in ‘slave like’ conditions in the home or that they wear supposedly prescribed unfashionable clothing beneath the public veiling.)
Sexual Preference.
I do not wish to give this subject too great an airing, not least because it has become somewhat of a media supported obsession in the West. However, I do believe it raises the particular problem that often inspires an appeal for tolerance namely un-accommodated facts. In the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries masturbation was said to lead to certain forms of madness and to certain serious physical illnesses. [I am sorry if anyone is offended by this part of my presentation but in the past it was embarrassment that inhibited sensible discussion and thus created a very psychologically damaging taboo which did untold harm to too many young people and also to their seniors.] As late as 1972 The American Medical Association pronounced masturbation ‘normal’, Sigmund Freud in the meantime having only fueled the myth. The evidence is that in itself this nearly universal activity causes no mental illness and no physical sickness. However, some churches and many other sectarian groups simply refuse to believe the evidence and proclaim it as both dangerous and necessarily sinful. Whilst in the past in the Roman Catholic Church it was considered a mortal sin and if not confessed would lead the sinner directly to hell, in the Roman Catholic Church today among some theologians and moralists of a more ‘liberal’ outlook there are other views present and sometimes dependent, in part, on a re-estimation of what constitutes mortal sin.
We human beings have a dislike, it seems to me, of being proved ‘wrong’ most especially when we have created a whole morality, however innocently at the time, upon certain false assumptions.
It would seem to me that ‘tolerance’ could be a necessary function of human behaviour whilst the real ‘facts of life’ are being understood and accommodated. It is hard for people to sense that they have been wrong in their attitude towards their children or society at large when they have to face a serious ‘collapse’ in the justification for what proves basically to be a life-long form of prejudice reinforced by whatever makes up the basis for their so called traditional values . Of course it is always possible to say that a ‘higher authority’ has decreed certain ‘facts of life’ to be sinful but more difficult to justify ‘sanctified’ persecution as a consequence. We should all recall that between the years 1400-1800 in Europe between 50,000 and 200,000 were condemned and executed for witch craft. In Salem, Massachusetts, between 1692 and 1693, of the two hundred people accused of Witchcraft 20 were executed. In 1697, partly out of fear that they had displeased God, the people of the town had a Day of Official Humiliation, which came somewhat late for the victims but doubtless was of help to their families, who also received compensation.
It would be I think equally mistaken of us to suppose that areas of what is sometimes euphemistically called ‘sexual preference’ have been resolved simply because human rights agreements have compelled governments to bring in legislation to protect people whose sexual preference has been previously held to be illegal. Social attitudes, especially in the over-35’s, see many people privately hostile to what is still thought by many to be a deliberate sexual deviancy. Again, biological and psychological evidence goes strongly towards the conclusion that sexual ‘variety’ is, and probably always has been, a normal part of human behavior. Whilst, as with all sexual behavior, some anti-social expressions may suggest there are limits to tolerance (for example however much incest has actually been a part of human practice and sometimes approved of [for example The Egyptian Pharaohs] it is unlikely to be accepted now even if the dangers involved in procreation are inhibited. Similarly, however much paedophilia is thought by some to be a permissible sexual activity of choice, for complex social reasons primarily concerned with the States protection of the young and vulnerable it is reasonable to assume it will still bring a prison sentence of some severity.)
To enable society to function it could be that tolerance has to be shown for those forms of emotional and sexual expression that are thought, by some, simply to be ‘wrong’, and for those who campaign for what they believe to be true whatever their views, simply to be heard. All short of promoting severe social disruption which is perhaps a limit to tolerance. But it may be that in the next generation the sexual habits of people who do not ‘frighten the horses’, will be seen simply as a functional part of human society.
An inconclusive conclusion.
All I have tried to do in this second contribution to this parish conference is to give some examples from our everyday experience which raise questions of tolerance, and if tolerance is to be allowed and even encouraged, then does it have limits. I know I have offered no final conclusions but nevertheless I doubt I have entirely avoided ‘showing my slip’, as my mother’s generation would have it, when accidentally showing an undergarment was a major social solecism. Of course I have my own views, even if I agree that they must be provisional, but I have tried not to inhibit any of your views from being left open to discussion and respect. Where I have failed in this attempt I ask you to accept my apologies. I see myself as essentially an educational facilitator and not an intellectual polemicist!