What do we take tolerance to mean when it is practiced in a liberal society?
In political philosophy, that question is usually overshadowed by two seemingly more fundamental questions: What degree of tolerance should we enjoy, and what justification entitles us to tolerance in the first place? Those questions have traditionally been settled by arguments that take one of the two following forms. The first is epistemic: insofar as there is a diverse set of rational possibilities as to what our fundamental values should be, we cannot be justified in limiting people to some arbitrary subset of those possibilities. The second is moral: the capacity to govern oneself, to come to one’s own mind and make one’s own path in life, commands respect. Therefore, we ought to value this capacity, indulging it insofar as we can without sacrificing the same capacity in others.
Though these two arguments reinforce each other and are often articulated together, they make separable and distinct claims. The epistemic argument treats tolerance as a necessary consequence of human ignorance. The moral argument reaches tolerance after establishing that the capacities and identity of the individual are sacrosanct. Once each argument is articulated independently, it becomes much easier to recognize how often each of them is invoked in daily life.
I imagine that for most people, these arguments will appear familiar, almost obvious. Even if the average citizen isn’t ready to write full-throated defenses of epistemic humility and the moral status of the individual, the basic arguments for tolerance have become so deeply embedded in our culture that they often appear in everyday life as truisms, as spontaneous intuitions.
But these arguments were once radical. It’s worth remembering that rule by divine right was once among the seemingly obvious intuitions that informed politics. The epistemic and moral arguments for tolerance can be traced back to a particular lineage of texts that were written against this foreign backdrop. This lineage borrows from the earlier work of Thomas Hobbes and Sebastian Castellio, reaches its popular zenith with John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and John Stuart Mill, and was later revivified by John Rawls. It is this surprisingly diverse set of philosophies that we call liberalism.
The liberal tradition’s success in advancing the epistemic and moral arguments for tolerance is hard to appreciate precisely because these arguments are so rarely challenged. To evince that point, it might be helpful to imagine a conversation between an Episcopalian and a Sunni Muslim. What form would we expect their conversation to take? They might be curious about each other’s beliefs and practices. They might find some common ground maintaining a religious practice in an increasingly secular age. They might even find that the faces of their respective Gods bear a familial resemblance. But it would surely be inappropriate for either person to ask why the other worships a false God. In the first place, we would not accept that either of them was in a position to know, rather than believe, that theirs was the true God. More starkly, if they were at work or some other formal setting, it might be considered inappropriate (or, for that matter, illegal) for one to even ask about the other’s religious beliefs, especially if one had any sort of power over the other. What would you think if a judge asked a defendant about their faith during sentencing?
Though we seldom spell it out so formally, we as citizens in a liberal society conceptualize conversations about values as strictly voluntary activities enjoyed by private citizens. We have no trouble acknowledging that people with different values can play enriching roles in our lives and that we can find surprising similarities between ourselves and others. But when push comes to shove, we retain the right to insist that some essential discontinuity exists between our worldviews, and that to forcefully bridge this discontinuity would transgress both the epistemic and moral arguments for tolerance, which liberal societies take for granted.
What we mean by tolerance, in practice, amounts to adopting the resulting attitude: our worldviews are discontinuous and should be protected in being so. By privileging the individual’s right to insist in any given case that there exists such a discontinuity, liberalism forces us to behave as though there may always be one. This follows, apparently quite intuitively, from the epistemic and moral arguments for tolerance; if our ignorance and morality keep us from resolving certain fundamental questions about our values, tolerance consists in the right to insist that our values (our religion, identity, tastes, etc.) are nobody’s business but our own.
The problems with this attitude may not at first be obvious. It helps to see them realized on the individual scale, as they are in Walker Percy’s 1961 novel The Moviegoer. At the climax of the story, seemly Aunt Emily confronts her great nephew, Binx Bolling, a searching young man who appears to his great aunt to be pushing the limit between aimlessness and degeneracy. She tells him, “I gave you all I had … the only good things the South ever had and the only things that really matter in this life.” Though she is clearly hurt, she doesn’t allow herself to be openly angry with Binx, not only because such animate emotion is contrary to her mores, but more profoundly because those mores, which Binx has forsaken and whose betrayal has inspired her anger, seem to mean nothing to Binx.
For those who haven’t read The Moviegoer, it may be helpful to imagine that she’s told him he has used his deceased father’s—and her deceased nephew’s—favorite tie as a kitchen towel, and he does not seem to grasp that such an object ought to be precious to him. There exists so little common meaning between their languages that her pain and anger become ineffable. Likewise, the response that Binx would like to give “cannot be expressed in the usual way.” Despite their mutual affection, Binx and Aunt Emily are reduced in each other’s eyes to objects of “idle curiosity.” It is at this point that she asks him, “What has been going on in your mind during all the years when we listened to music together, read the Crito, and spoke together—or was it only I who spoke—good Lord, I can’t remember—of goodness and truth and beauty and nobility?” And Binx realizes, “There is nothing for me to say.”
Aunt Emily and Binx’s grief and loneliness is a powerful articulation of the problem with treating tolerance as the acceptance of the discontinuity between individuals. I also take it to be the feeling that animates those who criticize the theories of liberalism that lead us to the concept of tolerance in the first place. Serious critics of liberalism generally share some idea that the formal abstractions of liberalism, which theorists use to bridge the discontinuities that liberalism’s epistemic and moral arguments impose, impoverish our moral discourse and leave us isolated and without a coherent, common language, much like Binx and Aunt Emily.
It seems to me that such criticisms are more aimed at the way we practice liberalism than they are at liberalism itself. Take, for instance, Charles Taylor’s notion of atomism, the idea that who a person is—their capacities, identity, and goals—can be understood without some essential reference to their communities. I agree with Taylor that the atomistic individual is a patently false ideal and that we must revise any theory that relies on it. But, as Taylor knew, the best proponents of liberalism don’t assume or even accept the truth of atomism. Before casting aside the central commitments of liberalism, it’s worth considering that though Taylor criticized prominent forms of liberalism, he certainly wasn’t arguing for an illiberal society. The intuitive notions that inform the practice of liberalism and popular versions of liberal theories are sometimes candidates for criticisms that philosophically tighter accounts of liberalism are not.
I will point out two particularly important examples where canonical accounts disavow positions for which liberalism is commonly criticized. First, consider the notion that liberalism is ultimately concerned only with private goods and rights and neglects the common good. Mill’s famous “harm principle” is often misconstrued to advance the claim that the only goods entitled to moral consideration are those enjoyed and harmed at the level of the individual. But that reading fails to account for Mill’s concession later in On Liberty that “there are many acts which, being directly injurious only to the agents themselves, ought not to be legally interdicted, but which, if done publicly, are a violation of good manners, and coming thus within the category of offences against others, may rightfully be prohibited.” That he accepts the legitimacy of defending good manners in public indicates a genuine concern for shared ethical attitudes and goals. Admittedly, that concern makes it harder to use the harm principle as a delineating condition for the justified restriction of liberty, but it strengthens Mill’s overall position. From this reading, we gather that prioritizing individual liberty must not overshadow the harm entailed by isolating the individual from shared practices, like manners. Tolerance, then, cannot mean that we forsake questions of the common good.
Next, consider the related notion that liberalism reduces our state, society, and community to instruments, ignoring the deeper, constitutive role that communities play in our lives. To challenge this idea, look to chapters eight and nine of Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. In these chapters, Rawls develops the idea of “a sense of justice,” the ability to understand, apply, and act from shared principles of justice. Rawls argues that citizens in a liberal society must be viewed as having a sense of justice in addition to the widely recognized ability to have, revise, and pursue some conception of the good. Identifying the sense of justice as a distinct moral power that must be included in the way we define personhood from the political perspective is among Rawls’s most significant and underappreciated contributions to the liberal tradition. We do not merely employ some idea of justice to regulate our use of society as an instrument in pursuit of our own, isolated ends. More fundamentally, “the collective activity of justice is the preeminent form of human flourishing.” In this way, the communities in which we actualize a shared conception of justice are irreducible components of our flourishing, or ethical fulfillment. Tolerance cannot be meant to suppose or occasion the individual’s isolation.
I point to On Liberty and A Theory of Justice both because the texts are sometimes criticized for advancing the very notions I believe they reject and because they each contain dramatically different versions of both the epistemic and moral arguments for tolerance. In looking at them together, we sidestep challenges that can be made to either one and move towards the essential commitments of liberalism in general. From that vantage point, we see that the inevitable diversity of beliefs (which is protected by the epistemic argument for tolerance) and the importance of individual liberty (which is protected by the moral argument for tolerance) do not force us to accept a view of individuals as isolated from or disinterested in their communities or fellow citizens. Tolerance cannot amount to the promise not to interfere with each other’s lives, because the lives and values of the people we live with are among our primary ethical concerns. To say the least, we need not settle for Aunt Emily’s idle curiosity.
If not the acceptance of some essential discontinuity between us, what should tolerance mean in practice? A closer examination of the canonical liberal texts yields an understanding of tolerance as something far more communal: it occurs as we find ethical fulfillment in engaging our fellow citizens in question of the common good and supporting them as they take advantage of all the liberties to which justice entitles them. We do not reach this understanding by rejecting the epistemic or moral arguments for tolerance, which I believe are sound and which are too deeply embedded to be easily replaced. Instead, we supplement them with a third argument which, like the others, represents a rare common thread among otherwise disparate theories of liberalism. This argument is ethical by nature and can be outlined as follows: we actualize our values not by practicing them privately or imposing them unilaterally on others, but by incorporating others into our lives and bringing our values to bear in the shared project of self-governance.
It will be easiest to describe the effect this argument would have if it were commonly accepted by making an analogy to working with animals, particularly horses. To speak from my own experience: when I learned how to sort cows on horseback, it involved riding into a herd of about fifty cows, being told which cow to take, and leading her out of the herd and away from her friends. The difficulty of the task, I thought, lay in communicating to my horse each of the many small movements I needed him to make. The difference between turning a cow around and nudging her forward can be very small. With all my focus, paying close attention and giving clear directions, I achieved… not much. Finally, the ranch manager yelled something to the extent of, “Stop treating that horse like he’s a mule! He knows a hell of a lot more than you do!” Sorting cows, it turns out, requires careful attention, precision, and focus. It also requires trust.
That much may seem obvious, but learning to trust changes your fundamental attitude towards others and yourself. Whenever I worked with a younger, less cooperative horse, I was keenly aware that the horse was bigger, stronger, faster than I was. In moments like those, the firmness of my will seemed like my only advantage. I would spend hours weaving Bandit through the same six posts or walking Flaco through tight circles, training them, I thought, so that they would be ready to do the work we needed them to do. It is only looking back that I appreciate the extent to which I, too, was being trained. Flaco may have needed to learn some restraint—he would run up to calves and bite them if you let him—but I too needed to learn patience, moderation. By giving ourselves over to each other and to our shared work, both Flaco and I developed in ways we would not have anticipated and could not have managed by ourselves.
Like horsemanship, liberalism fails when we consider our own goals and character to be fixed. In trying to achieve our goals, we will encounter others whose worldview will, at times, appear discontinuous with our own. But tolerance does not consist in respecting these discontinuities. Rather, it consists in trying to transcend them, to incorporate each other into more expansive a worldview than would be possible if any of us lived in isolation.
I understand this analogy has its limits. You might reasonably ask, isn’t the rider still determining the task that unites the rider and horse? I certainly don’t mean to say that some people are riders and others are horses, much less cows. It is hard to describe the alternative I would like to propose when we are so used to insisting on the discontinuity between ourselves and others. But it behooves us to resist this impulse.
The liberal project is faltering not because its essential commitments are mistaken, but because a subset of them have been separated from the understanding that human beings flourish only when engaged in a shared pursuit of the common good through self-governance. The epistemic and moral arguments for tolerance must be reunited with this ethical argument. That reunification will not be easily achieved, I know. But we might begin reshaping the way we practice tolerance by riding a horse and reading the whole text of the books we invoke.
I would like to extend particular thanks to Jeff Miller, Dean of Faculty and Students at Deep Springs College, both for his feedback on an earlier version of this piece and for sponsoring an independent study that began some two years ago and seems to have not yet concluded.
Image: Winslow Homer, Mount Washington, oil on canvas, 1869 (The Art Institute, Chicago, Illinois).