The non-hypocricy of tolerance
Dec. 3rd, 2015 12:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackDid I talk about this before?
Sometimes people you share a society (or a household) with are wrong about really important things. But it's usually best to say, if they're not harming *other* people, to allow your views to be known, but mostly simply let it go. For several reasons:
* Partly practical reasons, that changing someone's mind is often a difficult or impossible, so haranguing them is likely to make you feel better but not actually help, and mutually agreeing to suspend the haranguing unless you have time to talk about it properly is better for both of you.
* Partly humility, you can't be right about EVERYTHING, and how are you going to improve if you don't listen to other people?
* Partly morality: that imposing your opinion on someone else, even if you're right THIS time, erodes people's right to decide for themselves in lots of other cases.
Unfortunately, it's rarely that simple, because often people ARE harming other people, and you SHOULD try to fix it, but sometimes you're forced to compromise for now anyway just because there's only one of you and lots of other people and you can't overpower all of them instantly, and it's hard to find an acceptable compromise, but necessary to try to live in a society with other people at all.
However, whenever I recap the argument for tolerating opposing viewpoints in my mind, I always ask myself, "But what about people who DON'T agree to let it go and allow people to decide for themselves, people who insist their views MUST be imposed on you (whether for good reasons or not)?" As a practical matter, if you don't want to capitulate, you have no choice but to resist. But only recently did I admit, I basically had to accept, tolerating OTHER views as long as they didn't harm anyone else, but that itself was an exception, you had no choice but to impose "tolerate other views as long as they don't harm anyone else" on people if you can, even if you disagree...
Sometimes people you share a society (or a household) with are wrong about really important things. But it's usually best to say, if they're not harming *other* people, to allow your views to be known, but mostly simply let it go. For several reasons:
* Partly practical reasons, that changing someone's mind is often a difficult or impossible, so haranguing them is likely to make you feel better but not actually help, and mutually agreeing to suspend the haranguing unless you have time to talk about it properly is better for both of you.
* Partly humility, you can't be right about EVERYTHING, and how are you going to improve if you don't listen to other people?
* Partly morality: that imposing your opinion on someone else, even if you're right THIS time, erodes people's right to decide for themselves in lots of other cases.
Unfortunately, it's rarely that simple, because often people ARE harming other people, and you SHOULD try to fix it, but sometimes you're forced to compromise for now anyway just because there's only one of you and lots of other people and you can't overpower all of them instantly, and it's hard to find an acceptable compromise, but necessary to try to live in a society with other people at all.
However, whenever I recap the argument for tolerating opposing viewpoints in my mind, I always ask myself, "But what about people who DON'T agree to let it go and allow people to decide for themselves, people who insist their views MUST be imposed on you (whether for good reasons or not)?" As a practical matter, if you don't want to capitulate, you have no choice but to resist. But only recently did I admit, I basically had to accept, tolerating OTHER views as long as they didn't harm anyone else, but that itself was an exception, you had no choice but to impose "tolerate other views as long as they don't harm anyone else" on people if you can, even if you disagree...
no subject
Date: 2015-12-03 04:32 pm (UTC)~Tom Lehrer
But yeah, imposing "tolerate other views as long as they don't harm anyone else" by police fiat is a little tricky, and not merely in a theoretical way. If you dig beneath the foolishly fearmongering accusations that Islamic fundamentalists wish to impose 'sharia law' on the West, the somewhat more serious flip side is the anxiety that tolerance of divergent ideas goes too far if it allows for the promotion of anti-democratic ideas about the legal system.
And to what degree is the gain of democratic political power for anti-democrats a threat to a democracy, and to what degree does the system protect against its own overthrow?
no subject
Date: 2015-12-04 03:06 pm (UTC)Good point, and I don't know. I think accepting a reasonable amount of obnoxious political beliefs is usually better than trying to restrain them, but I agree, there may be a tipping point where it's better to restrict views you know are going to be damaging. But I'm not sure where that point is.
no subject
Date: 2015-12-04 04:22 pm (UTC)I mean, maybe you construct a utilitarian cost-benefit analysis: If prospective government B gained political power, it would restrict personal freedoms by X amount, so I as a leader of current government A am better serving the people as long as I only restrict personal freedom by less than X. But that seems wrong to me- that kind of utilitarianism seems like it would breed cynicism and mistrust in government A, if Government A is promising to be open and free and in actuality is only a little better than prospective government B. I want open government to be its own advertisement of its superiority, but that's not really necessarily the case. If an open democracy is struggling economically people are potentially likely to favor an undemocratic government that promises better economic circumstances, at least under some conditions.