The non-hypocricy of tolerance

[jack]

Did 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...

Comments

[gerald_duck]

This is a messy area in which I've been doing a great deal of thinking in recent years. I'm far from a coherent conclusion, and even the things I'm relatively confident of are hard to articulate.

For now, I'll just raise a few points…

Firstly, how narrowly or broadly do you define "harm anyone else"? For example, is it OK to advertise a product to people who don't need it, or does that harm them financially? What if we define political dissent as an attempt to harm people by encouraging them to vote for the wrong political party?

Now that I'm a Christian, I see a lot more harm in the world than I did as an agnostic. However, I also see the need to tolerate other views even if they harm someone else. "Do not resist the one who is evil." In part, what you rightly say about humility surely applies whether or not you see harm to others in a person's wrongness? In part, resisting a wrongdoer simply doesn't work.

But then this goes meta: we see people doing wrong things, and we see people wrongly resisting them. So what should we do: stop the people wrongly stopping the wrong people? Where does it end? Being topical for a moment, WWIII is where it ends. Yet, seeing where it ends, still we begin. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and all that.

The other issue is that the Golden Rule seems to be the only moral principle we can get near-universal agreement on, but "kill people who are wrong" isn't inconsistent with it. If somebody says to kill people who are wrong, how do you convince them otherwise?

My tendency now is to recognise "don't kill people for being wrong" as a Christian principle. After two thousand years, it's deeply embedded in our Western psyche, so much so that it's surviving secularisation. We all know what it's like to live without the fear of being killed for making a mistake and we're reluctant to live any other way, but that's an experiential justification for incorporating such principles into our social contract, not a rational one.

If someone disagrees, we need to change their heart, not their mind. And that's an important distinction.

[seekingferret]

I'm sure we all agree that we ought to love one another and I know there are people in the world that do not love their fellow human beings and I hate people like that.

~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?

[ptc24]

Judgement calls, precedent, case law. Looking at what worked well or badly in the past and trying to base your actions on that, bearing in mind that history is a vague and ambiguous teacher and many people draw contradictory lessons from it.

My reading up specifically on religious tolerance leads me to believe it has two forms, "vague syncretism" and "war fatigue". The first is the classic Roman religious tolerance, having beliefs that allowed for a large pantheon and for various gods to be identified with each other, and thus to say that other religions aren't that different and they all honour the Gods in their own way. This approach couldn't handle Christianity. The second surrounds Enlightenment ideas of religious tolerance; in the background were wars such as the Thirty Years War and the English Civil War, overall the various conflicts between Catholicism and various Protestantisms had become stuck in stalemates and people were sick of the bloodshed. I may be over-interpreting with the last bit but it's the impression I get.

To a certain extent you can reframe the question as not being "how tolerant should I be" but "what norms of tolerance should there be" - if the norms by which you act would allow other people to make intolerable impositions on you, then there's a problem. On the other hand, there's little point in having a neat little system in your head that has everything worked out, if no-one else subscribes to that system or is likely to - it would be like being the only person who owned a fax machine.

So I suppose the question could be, "What norms of tolerance are there out in the world that deliver (preferably: have a track record of delivering) the best mixtures of peace and progress?", and to subscribe to, promote and develop those.

At this point, we can go no further with armchair moral philosophy, we must look at the world in detail.

(Minor side note: the correct spelling is hypocrisy - cognate with "crisis" (but the etymology is more complicated than that, the old Greek word is a word for an actor on a stage playing a role). It's not a -cracy, there's no suggestion of kratos (rule, strength). I had a fancy that hypocrite might be cognate with critic and on a deep level it is, but not in the way I hoped it might be.)

[hairyears]

Never attempt to change someone's mind unless you've made a careful assessment of your likely success - and weighed up the damage that could follow failing badly.

...And weighed up whether the gain in doing so is wirth the cost - being right is worthless.

That's not the same as saying 'never try'...

...And I'm a very effective public speaker: that's a very dangerous skill to have.

Worse, or better, I'm a lot more skilled at person-to-person and small-group persuasion than I used to be; and, these days, I am fairly confident that I'm not seen as 'tolerated outsider' by a pretty substantial number of people.


Changing minds is dangerous - and I believe that the worst risk of all is succeeding when you're wrong.

Worst of all, I've seen enough of it being done by skilful liars- and I learn by watching - to know that it is far, far easier to change minds for all the wrong reasons, than for any good one.

A hint: walk, don't run, if you ever hear my half-humorous "What could possibly go wrong?"...

...And run, don't walk, if you ever hear a hint of my warning that there is a very special class of lie - the lies that people are eager to believe - because I may have spotted that the people around me are are nodding in unison, led by someone who is almost clever enough to draw me along, too.

Changing minds, indeed... Mostly, it's a subtle art of making them more the same.