Tolerance Is Just One of Many Important Virtues

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. — Aristotle

There is a dichotomy of thought present when tolerance is the subject. Thomas Mann asserted that “tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.” Then there is Bertrand Russell’s comment, “Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.”

The vast majority of people look at tolerance somewhere between those extremes. Moreover, when asked, they seem quite convinced of the lack of tolerance in the world, except when it relates to them, personally.

Perennially, modern liberals have complained about intolerant conservatives. This view is ever present in the news. On the other hand, the latter point the finger at modern liberals as being afflicted with the same “malady,” and who use the strictures of political correctness and “wokeness” as a weapon of oppression.

So, which side of the political divide is right?  For years, sociologists have told us that in developed countries, such as the U.S., conservative populations (including fundamentalist Christians) exhibit characteristics that tend to predispose people toward being less “open-minded.”

For example, this group is oriented towards tradition and believe in objective truth. Modern liberals (including agnostics, atheists, and those with no religious interest) are more open to relativism and new interpretations of correctness, and many truths — traits ostensibly associated with being more “open-minded.” Thus, one could surmise that conservatives and Christians should be given to prejudice more than our modern liberal.

How Left and Right See Tolerance

More recent psychological research regarding prejudice has some unexpected results. Some of it, presented at the annual meeting of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology, reveal some striking characteristics about “left” and “right.”

Research papers published in Social Psychological and Personality Science asked a variety of Americans about their political ideologies. Liberals were found to be as discriminatory toward conservative groups as conservatives were toward liberal groups. And these findings have been echoed elsewhere: Independently and concurrently, the work of John Chambers at St. Louis University and Jarret Crawford at The College of New Jersey have also found essentially equal prejudice among conservatives and liberals.

We Tolerate People Similar to Us

None of this, of course, explains why liberals’ open-mindedness doesn’t better protect them against prejudice as psychologists expected. One theory is that the effects of liberals’ unique traits and worldviews on prejudice are swamped by a simple fact about humanity: We like people similar to us. There’s a long line of research showing that we prefer members of our own group. Social identity is strong — stronger than any inclination to seek or suppress novelty. Thus, apparently the openness-related traits of liberals defined by psychologists are not an antidote against prejudice.

Education Teaches Us to Cover Up Prejudice

Knowing all this, since prejudice and discrimination apparently exists across the political divide, is it possible to alter one’s degree of tolerance for an “other”? One might expect that the presumed mind-expanding enterprise of education would reduce prejudice (i.e. increase tolerance). But according to another presentation at the SPSP meeting, it does not. It does, however, teach people to cover it up.

Researchers at the University of Kentucky, asked people if they would consider voting for a presidential candidate who was atheist, black, Catholic, gay, Muslim, or a woman. When asked directly, participants with a formal education beyond high school reported a greater willingness to vote for these groups than did those with less post-secondary education.

But when asked in a more indirect way, with more anonymity, the two groups showed equal prejudice. Thus, higher formal education seems to instill an understanding of the appropriate levels of intolerance to express (i.e. what you can and can’t say so as to appear less prejudiced and thus more tolerant). Thus, education does not necessarily reduce prejudice or provide any increased degree of tolerance.

Education’s suppression of expressed prejudice suggests a culture of political correctness in which people don’t feel comfortable sharing their true feelings for fear of reprisal—just the kind of intolerance conservatives complain about. Liberals, of course, try to make the argument that conservative intolerance does more harm than liberal intolerance, as it allegedly targets more vulnerable people.

According to the research, there is liberal pushback when it is suggested that prejudice towards Christians and conservatives is prejudice. It seems that, to those who identify as liberals, many say it’s just standing up to bullies.

Conservatives, however, don’t view it that way, and this has been going on for some time. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, remarked to a reporter: “We are on the losing side of a massive change that’s not going to be reversed, in all likelihood, in our lifetimes.”

Context apparently is critical. Secularism, the circumstance in which all the above research was carried out, and to which the issue of tolerance is inextricably linked, is not a neutral governance structure; rather it has its own interests and strives to protect and perpetuate itself.

Moreover, through the state, the education system, and the media, secularism exercises awesome disciplinary power and control mechanisms to achieve its agenda. It authorizes (i.e. tolerates) certain kinds of subjectivity, truths, and behaviors while marginalizing others (in today’s woke world that translates as censoring). Secularism, therefore, is coercive through its means and frequently disguises this under the name of “tolerance.”

Among academic, political and social elite classes, those who most advocate “tolerance” are themselves frequently and fervently “intolerant.” In the early part of this essay, we observed how and in what ways different groups are less than tolerant of each other. But what is apparent is that irrespective of one’s political views, education or socioeconomic status, the lack of tolerance for the “other” remains an intractable problem that remains unremitting.

So, why is that?

If one approaches the question from a purely philosophical perspective, the answer may lie in the concept of tolerance and with its character as a virtue.

People today often are intolerant, because they have no idea what it means to actually be tolerant. Said another way, according to the research, people often behave in ways completely inconsistent with their claimed intentions.

To accomplish what we, ostensibly at least, intend — thought, word and deed must serve that purpose. To understand why this does not happen today with regard to tolerance, one must understand what tolerance really is (a virtue) and its fundamental interrelatedness with the other virtues.

Tolerance Isn’t the Only Virtue

A huge concern in today’s society is that the virtue of tolerance is often attempted in isolation and promoted apart from other traditional virtues such as justice, temperance, courage, and, of course, wisdom. The result is a society populated by individuals who single mindedly extol tolerance, but who clearly lack the wisdom necessary to avoid the extremes of too-tolerant and not tolerant enough. Those who fall into the latter extreme — of suppressing what should be put up with — are those “intolerant” people who are so self-assured of their own tolerance. The former are those who are “intolerant” of almost any degree of intolerance.

Dr. Montague Brown, Saint Anselm College Professor and Thomistic scholar, spoke of the stark choices for us, today in society, regarding tolerance:

“Tolerance accepts some inappropriate behavior for the sake of the common good.”

“Relativism denies that good has any universal meaning and so accepts all behavior.”

This state of affairs should be a warning to us all. We cannot compensate for the collapse of tolerance in society by solely advocating tolerance as an end in itself. This is the mistake to which academics and social critics seem oblivious.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle proposed that humans are social, rational animals that seek to “live well.” To that end, he proposed a system of ethics designed to help us reach eudaimonia, a state that means living well or flourishing. Eudaimonia is reached by living virtuously and building up your character traits until you don’t even have to think about your choices before making the right one.

Aristotle sees virtues as character traits and tendencies to act in a particular way.

This student of Plato and tutor of Alexander the Great was clear regarding the virtues and how they influence each other to form character traits.

Absent temperance, courage and justice, there can be no wisdom, and without the latter – tolerance or ‘practical wisdom’ is just a word we use to make ourselves feel better – about who we say we are – in relation to others.

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