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: 2015-12-04 03:02 pm (UTC)This is a tangent, but it reminds me of something that I was thinking about, that I admire pure pacifism as a principle, but I'm not sure I can embrace it as a universal. The examples given are usually about people choosing not to defend themselves, which I admire, but it seems much more difficult to agree it's moral to let someone else die when you could have defended them. Like, I think the closer we can get to that, the better, if we can protect people without risking killing anyone that's a lot better. But if violence is the only way to protect someone, I think it's better to accept that than let it happen :(
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Date: 2015-12-04 04:27 pm (UTC)The government of Elbonia decides to prohibit convicted criminals from voting. The Kneedonian minority feels it has been wrongly picked upon by the brutal and unaccountable police force for decades, with the result that a significantly larger proportion of Kneedonians than the majority Elbons have criminal records. The Elbons retort that the Kneedonians genuinely are more criminal, especially blaming their patellas — independent religious schools widely suspected of fomenting fundamentalist Kneedam.
When the government passes this law, rioting breaks out in several major cities and the police struggle to contain it. After a few months, it's clear the situation has become a civil war in all but name. Elbonia responds by cutting off electricity and telecoms to the breakaway republic of Kneedonia.
Now the Pelvonians decide this is unjust and resolve to intervene to help the Kneedonians. They condemn the cynics who point out that they rely on the Kneedonian asparagus crop for their national dish. They send drone aircraft to attack Elbonian troops in the conflict zone and manage to keep civilian casualties below 30%.
After five years and 300,000 deaths, with Amnesty International accusing both sides of war crimes, Brazil, the principal importer of Elbonian bismuth, persaudes the 93-year-old Elbonian President Gobshite to stand down. In the following election, the moderate Dr Git GitGit is elected and immediately holds a referendum in which Kneedonia is granted its independence.
In Kneedonia, there is rejoicing. However, in their first post-independence election the Kneedam party wins a landslide on a platform of enforcing traditional values. They impose a theocracy, outlaw other political parties, and cut off the asparagus supply to Pelvonia.
Then a Kneedam extremist, whose uncle once owned a shop in the capital of Kneedonia, assassinates Chancellor Merkel. All of a sudden, Germany notices the evil theocrats in Kneedonia, which they'd previously been studiously ignoring. They establish military bases in Pelvonia and invade in order to restore democracy. The Groini people from the Pelvonian marshlands then move into the power vacuum and occupy most of the adjacent marshland in Kneedonia, which they claim as an ancestral homeland. They promptly impose a 20% duty on asparagus transit through the marshes and demand reparations from Pelvonia for a perceived genocide against them in 1837.
The Pelvonians therefore start attacking the Groinis and the Kneedam fundamentalists support them. The Germans give up after ten years, fifty billion euros and two thousand combat deaths. Chancellor Bleer's name is now mud, especially as it eventually turned out that fundamentalist assassin had actually been radicalised half-way across the world in San Shitbag. The Germans stage a phased withdrawal.
Now what?
More importantly, which people acted wrongly at which stages in that narrative?
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Date: 2015-12-05 04:39 pm (UTC)But, my point is, quotes from Jesus like "Do not resist the one who is evil" seem to me to being saying you shouldn't resist people doing bad things EVER in ANY circumstances, or pure pacifism. And I think that's a laudable ideal, but a practical society can only aspire to it, not necessarily reach it. I'm not sure if you agree that's what Jesus meant, or if you agree with the conclusion?
If you agree that sometimes you do have to act in defence of someone else, you already agree with what I was trying to say. I didn't mean, "you can ALWAYS do so". I agree -- it's difficult to know WHEN you should do that, and when it will just make matters worse. Your example is a good one but I never thought otherwise.
Whereas, if you do mean, you should NEVER act to defend someone that, then you wouldn't need to show an example where you shouldn't, you need to show that in ALL examples, however clearcut, you still shouldn't...
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Date: 2015-12-05 05:37 pm (UTC)And I feel it's important to take a nuanced view about people saying "that's a laudable ideal, but". It is understandable for people to say that. It would be hypocritical of me to condemn others for saying that. It's going to happen. But that doesn't make it good, and I should personally abstain if I can.
Back in January, I wrote "Little Gidding", which elaborated my thinking on such topics in a certain amount of depth. Right now, I'm re-remembering one of the passages from Slate Star Codex which I quoted back then:
Now that I think this way, whenever I hear "that's a laudable ideal, but", the "but" is the rumble of the bus's axles flexing to bounce over some waived ideal that's been thrown in its path.
That is the process I tried to illustrate with my narrative: a tangled mess of agents, all optimising for proximate goals, all looking at the idea of peace and saying "that's a laudable ideal, but". I intentionally created a fictitious scenario, and tried to leave out any details which might make it easy for an onlooker to say "Well, agents A,D and G were in the right, but B,C and E were dead wrong. F was right at first, but wrong later." History tries to make "sense" of wars along such lines centures later, but even if they somehow judge rightly, that's no guide to B,C,E and F at the time, when they're in the thick of it. And even if A,D and G are in the right, that doesn't make it right for them to wage war.
Meanwhile, in my narrative, things gradually got worse and worse, without any step being locally pessimal.
If we don't want to live in a world with such descents into Hell, or even if we accept such descent will happen but want to minimise the part we personally play, we have to take a step back and optimise at a higher level. Pacifism is one such higher-level optimisation.
I've adopted pacifism. I won't say I'm a "pure" pacifist, firstly because I'm flawed and secondly because I'm open to the notion of alternative high-level optimisations. What I try to reject is sacrificing it to more short-sighted objectives.
From a Christian perspective, success in moving towards such "higher goals" is immensely spiritually satisfying, bringing a peace and joy, even sanctification which is its own reward, more than offsetting any mundane losses one might suffer in the process. Also, what we call the Holy Spirit is sent to aid us, allowing us to act in ways more noble than we ever could have by our own strength alone.
Also, from a Christian perspective, it's acknowledged we're not perfect and we are forgiven our manifest and manifold lapses. But are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means!
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Date: 2015-12-05 06:27 pm (UTC)But to me, there also examples where acting is just clearly better than not acting. Think of something really blatant, like lynching people because of what race they appear to be. That used to be effectively legal. Then it was made illegal, and there was a long, very painful process of actually enforcing that. But even if some murders got put in prison, that CLEARLY seems better than the previous situation. Would Jesus rather we just TOLD the murderers not to lynch anyone? I'm worried that if I were a better person, I would find a better way of persuading them they're wrong. But arresting them is clearly violence, but seems clearly better than just letting them go on killing people.
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Date: 2015-12-05 07:50 pm (UTC)The passage speaks to several issues, but in this respect my thinking structures roughly as:
Did Jesus condone the actions of the crowd by telling the disciples not to stop them? No.
Did Jesus in turn physically prevent the disciples from attacking the crowd? No.
When the crowd wasn't stopped, did they go on killing people? Yes.
Is this story a special case, specific to the passion narrative, or is it an example with broader applicability? I'd say the latter.
Now the difficult bit: when Jesus told people not to attack the crowd, did He "let them go on killing people"? In the short term, plainly yes. Taking the two-thousand-year view, what happened that night had lasting implications, making the world a considerably better place.
On a less epic scale, that kind of story has played out many more times in many more places.
So. On one level, Jesus said "whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it". If people come to kill you, and you have a gun, put the gun down. Meeting violence with violence doesn't help, and there are more important issues at stake. Yes, even more important than your life.
On another level, that's a hard teaching, and one I know I'll find it very difficult to put into practice if push ever comes to shove. When someone opens fire on the mob that's come to kill them, maybe we try to take the middle path between condemning and condoning. That middle path is one Jesus exemplified, yet is missing from a lot of moral thinking.
Meanwhile, I personally know someone who did, in apartheid-era South Africa, step between the black protesters and the white police officers who were about to attack them. "In the name of Christ, I ask you to stop." And, well, they did stop. She's here to tell the tale. That sometimes making oneself vulnerable is the greatest form of strength isn't just a hypothetical from the land of fairy tales.
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Date: 2015-12-08 03:09 pm (UTC)But if someone asks "if you have the power to prevent A killing B at a small risk of hurting A, should you do so?" it seems to be dodging the question to say "if you CAN'T stop A, you shouldn't hurt them"..?
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Date: 2015-12-08 05:54 pm (UTC)It's somewhat worrying how short the Bible is on guidance when it's someone else's life at stake. It would be really easy to use B's plight as an excuse for selfish deeds, especially if you got to choose which of B,C or D you fancied protecting. But if it's a straight choice between "stop A from killing B, at no cost" or "omit to stop A from killing B"… my instinct is clearly to stop A.
But that's the kind of crack into which Satan can introduce a crowbar. "Ask God on a case by case basis" seems a good option, for those who have that kind of relationship with Him.