-Caveat Lector-
Liberal Tolerance
by Jim Kalb
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Contemporary liberalism honors diversity and tolerance above all, but
what it calls by those names is different from what has been so called
in the past. Its diversity denigrates and excludes ordinary people,
and its tolerance requires speech codes, quotas, and compulsory
training in correct opinions and attitudes. Nor do current liberal
totems and tabus have a clear connection with letting people live as
they wish. Prohibitions, both grand and petty, multiply. To outsiders
the rules often seem simply arbitrary: prayer is forbidden while
instruction in the use of condoms is required; smoking and furs are
outrages, abortion and sodomy fundamental rights.
Many of these oddities can be explained by reference to the specific
understanding of tolerance held by contemporary liberals. "Tolerance"
is traditionally understood procedurally, to mean letting people do
what they want. Contemporary liberals understand it substantively, to
require equal respect as a fact of social life. These understandings
are radically inconsistent. As a political matter, procedural
tolerance calls for laissez-faire, while substantive tolerance
requires pervasive administrative control of social life. A regime
that adopts substantive tolerance as its goal must be intolerant
procedurally because it must control the attitudes people have toward
each other, and any serious attempt to do so will require means that
are unforgiving and despotic.
The issue may be clarified by contrasting a libertarian state, one
that holds to the traditional view, with one that favors the newer
view. A libertarian state is in one sense the most tolerant possible,
but in another does not care about the matter. You can do whatever you
want as long as you do not violate certain clearly defined rights. As
a result, a libertarian state is indifferent between tolerant and
intolerant ways of life as long as the intolerance does not take the
form of physical attack or violation of property rights. It may in
fact be quite hospitable to intolerance. For example, such a state is
structurally unforgiving of certain weaknesses, because it has no
public welfare system, and that structural feature is likely to be
reflected in unforgiving social attitudes.
In contrast, the multicultural welfare state that contemporary
liberals favor is intended to promote social tolerance in the sense of
equal respect. To do so, it must be intolerant of many ways of life
that do not directly injure or interfere with others. For example,
laws against discrimination are intolerant of the ways of life called
"racist," "sexist," "homophobic," and so on. They force people to
associate with others against their will, denying them the right to
choose those with whom they will live and work. Since sexual
distinctions and religious and ethnic loyalties permeate and organize
the life of all societies, the multicultural welfare state is in fact
intolerant of all actual ways of life, and committed in the name of
tolerance to transform them radically through the use of force. The
new tolerance thus means that no one except a few ideologues can live
as he wants.
Ideally, substantive tolerance would require treatment of all ways of
life as equal in value. That is not possible, since there are
intolerant ways of life, some aggressively so. It follows that only
those ways of life can be treated as equal that are acceptably
tolerant of other ways. When two ways of life exclude each other, for
example voluntary ethnic separatism and universal inclusivity, the
contemporary liberal state must suppress one in favor of the other.
Since contemporary liberalism rejects the libertarian standard of
requiring only respect for property and avoidance of physical
aggression, the ways of life that are acceptably tolerant are not
those that leave others alone in the most direct and obvious sense. On
that view the ethnic separatists would prevail, which they assuredly
do not. Instead, a more substantive criterion is applied.
The liberal criterion seems to be that a way of life is tolerant only
if it accepts the view that one man is as good as another, and
whatever a man likes is good for him. Such a definition of "tolerant"
seems necessary to explain the way liberals use the word. On such a
view all ways of life are equally valuable because all persons and
therefore all preferences are equal; to say that one way of life is
better than another is simply to say that those who like to live that
way are better than others, and is in itself an intolerant act since
what people say forms the social environment in which all live. As a
criterion for the acceptability of ways of life, this definition is
demanding to the point of what would ordinarily be called intolerance;
it turns out that to be tolerant is to hold a very specific and rather
unusual moral theory, one that considers persons objectively valuable
but all else valuable only subjectively. All those who hold moral
theories that recognize objective substantive goods, for example all
adherents of traditional religions, are by definition "intolerant."
But if liberalism tolerates only a particular and highly contestable
moral theory that few people hold, how does it differ from theocratic
systems it has historically viewed as intolerant? It seems no more
tolerant to insist that we be drilled in the doctrine and casuistry of
inclusiveness than that of the Church. The procedural intolerance of a
political regime depends less on its basis in religion or otherwise
than on the clarity of its ends, its dedication to achieving them, and
the strength and variety of the things it must overcome to do so.
Liberals are often very clear as to what they want, highly dedicated
to their ideals, and vividly conscious of the strength of the
impulses, habits and institutions that stand in the way of achieving
them. Why expect them to display tolerance as tolerance is
traditionally conceived? A council of civil rights lawyers may have no
more forbearance than a council of theologians. It is likely to have
less, since its members place more emphasis on the ability of those
who happen to hold power to make of the world what they will.
More and more, the new tolerance is destroying the old. The modern
liberal state is no longer limited except in the sense that it is not
authorized to deviate from liberalism, and to be limited in that sense
is simply to be subject to control by an ideological elite. Respect
for the views of the people is no longer a serious principle. Such an
outcome is paradoxical: liberalism began with worries about mixing
ultimate moral questions with politics, and a desire to limit
government and make it responsible to the people. It has ended in a
system that cares nothing about such things.
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