Geoff Kemp: Tolerance having a hard time

COMMENT


The meaning and application of "tolerance", that most hallowed of terms in modern liberal democracy, has been argued over for centuries. In a week that has seen the tabling of the Civil Union Bill, there appears no sign of the argument abating.

Amanda McGrail of the Maxim Institute said homosexuality could be tolerated as long as gays kept to themselves.

Michael Stevens responded that the religious views of anti-gay groups could be tolerated as long as these did not impinge on public decision-making.

The two feel themselves to be at loggerheads over the meaning of tolerance, but in fact are engaged in a similar project, that of seeking to simultaneously allow but marginalise views and lifestyles they do not value.

This is less a criticism than a dose of realism, a recognition that the idea of tolerance may afford one answer to society's moral and political dilemmas but no easy answers. This is what makes it among the thorniest of issues, wrestled with by politicians, philosophers and the public alike. If the need for peaceful co-existence makes it necessary, its complexities sometimes make it seem almost impossible.

A danger lies in ignoring such difficulties in order to fashion "tolerance" into a propaganda weapon, seeking control of the T-word in a back-handed tribute to its power in modern politics, condensing 400-odd years of conceptual history into a few lines of political polemic.

Ms McGrail's call for a critical examination of how the meaning of tolerance has changed must be welcome if this alerts us to the way the notion has never been an absolute whereby "true tolerance" can simply be stipulated and any deviation from this definition dismissed. Armed with a little history, we might better understand how and why tolerance has become so central and yet remains so contested.

Unfortunately, Ms McGrail stipulates and dismisses in her pre-emptive strike ahead of the civil union debates. The only change detected is from a "true" version Maxim favours to a "new" version it dislikes, ignoring the way the true itself emerged from the new in the past.

Ms McGrail emphasises tolerance as a personal virtue, putting up with something you disapprove of, and insists that this means there can be no role for Government in enacting tolerance and no role for tolerance if disapproval is replaced by approval - with the Civil Union Bill held to transgress on both counts.

Yet the history of tolerance has revolved around the state's role in securing a more tolerant society, whether by penal inaction or legislative action, either of which could set the tone for wider society. The origins of modern tolerance lie in making a virtue of political necessity in the face of intractable religious conflict following the Reformation.

The history of tolerance also revolved around attempts to overcome the negative nature of a stance rooted in disapproval. When Tom Paine urged recognition of the "rights of man" at the time of the French and American revolutions, he saw this as replacing what he called the despotism of existing tolerance, which presumed a right to grant liberty rather than recognising liberty and equality as rights.

Paine's priorities were not our own. But related concerns about equal respect, freedom and opportunity underlie modern thinking about tolerance, questioning how far these are achieved if we continue to rely on what the philosopher Immanuel Kant called the "haughty" version - the grudging allowance that negates the equality of others even as it pats itself on the back for being tolerant.

Mr Stevens proclaims his commitment to the equal, tolerant, open society. His call for awareness of the development of toleration since the Renaissance must be welcome, then, if this reminds us that the idea's roots lie in the Christian defence of liberty of conscience and if it avoids the haughtiness that mistakes secularism for tolerance.

Unfortunately, he throws out the Christian baby with the Maxim bathwater, portraying tolerance as the product of science overcoming religion, which is historically false, and presuming that the knowledge afforded by science means religious belief can be ridiculed and discounted. This is ethically suspect.

He suggests that whereas homosexuality is a genetic given, Christianity is just a choice, somehow unworthy of moral respect.

But this is not how history sees it; tolerance was founded on the acknowledgment that religious belief was not a free choice like changing your hairstyle. People were rarely ready to be burned at the stake for their hairstyle.

This is also not how some recent theorists of tolerance see it. They point out that the open society favoured by modern, secular liberalism reserves "full tolerance" mainly for things that modern, secular liberals like. Religious beliefs are tolerated insofar as they remain privatised and marginalised.

So when Mr Stevens endorses religious freedom as a private matter, while objecting to religious beliefs intruding on political debate, he should have at least some small questioning pang about the limits of his tolerance.

And when he lambasts the "simple-minded certitude" of those claiming religious truth, he might wonder whether it is from a standpoint of sophisticated-minded certitude that is uncomfortably close to Archbishop Bossuet's famous justification of his own intolerance: "Because I am right and you are wrong."

It might well be that one interpretation of tolerance must succeed and another fail in the civil union dispute, but in the meantime tolerance in general is having a hard time of it.

* Dr Geoff Kemp lectures on toleration and censorship in Auckland University's department of political studies.