more on intolerance

[eirias]

Shoot, a stray mouse click erased my half-completed post.

I'd hoped that my earlier writing on this topic would get the thoughts on intolerance out of my system, but it didn't seem to work that way -- which probably means I missed something. Maybe this shot will do the trick.

I think that part of my problem -- which perhaps is what cos was alluding to -- is that I was trying to treat tolerance as a binary: you tolerate something or you don't. ukelele added a nuance -- tolerance of beliefs vs. people -- but it only seemed to confuse the matter in my head, because I was trying to conceptualize it as a separate dimension (obviously not orthogonal but nevertheless distinct).

Today I began wondering if perhaps a sliding scale is more appropriate. Here I will try to make one up, with totally invented numbers, as a sort of thought-experiment. Because I am neither a professional psychometrician nor a professional philosopher, it will be clumsy, so anyone with relevant expertise who cares, feel free to poke me with improvements.



Let X be some proposition about the world, e.g. "Falun Gong is the path to salvation." Here is a scale of possible government responses to X.

-300 [Belief that X] is forbidden.
-200 Belief is unregulated, but [publishing that X] is forbidden.
-100 Publication is unregulated, but [acting on a belief that X] is forbidden.
0 No regulation of X.
100 Publication is unregulated, but [acting on a belief that not-X] is forbidden.
200 Belief is unregulated, but [publishing that not-X] is forbidden.
300 [Belief that not-X] is forbidden.

Here I tried to distinguish between public and private heresy; one can imagine a society that, e.g., permits private Falun Gong belief but prohibits advertisements about meetings in major papers. One could probably interpolate other government-actions on this scale as well.

Of course, as libertarians are fond of noting, there are ways of persuasion that don't require the government sledgehammer. I have no idea where to put these -- realistically I suspect they should be interleaved with the above in some more sophisticated way -- but for now I will just sandwich them in the middle like so:

-30 [Belief that X] makes you a social leper.
-20 Belief has no major consequences, but [publishing that X] makes you a social leper.
-10 Publication has no major consequences, but [acting on a belief that X] makes you a social leper.
0 No regulation of X.
10 Publication has no major consequences, but [acting on a belief that not-X] makes you a social leper.
20 Belief has no major consequences, but but [publishing that not-X] makes you a social leper.
30 [Belief that not-X] makes you a social leper.

By "social leprosy" I mean that X has major social consequences, such as discrimination in employment or housing.

Finally, because I think social consequences must admit to finer distinctions, here's a third scale:

-3 [Belief that X] is considered rude.
-2 Belief is a matter of taste, but [publishing that X] is considered rude.
-1 Publication is a matter of taste, but [acting on a belief that X] is considered rude.
0 No regulation of X.
1 Publication is a matter of taste, but [acting on a belief that not-X] is considered rude.
2 Belief is a matter of taste, but [publishing that X] is considered rude.
3 [Belief that X] is considered rude.


And here is an example analysis.

Let X be "women suck at math and science."

• US government: I would rate this a -100: you can talk smack all you want but you can't use gender as a hiring criterion, and if it becomes obvious that you have, you are wide open for a lawsuit.
  
• Major social consequences: Based on Larry Summers' experience, I think I would put this as a -20. (This is where more sophisticated interleaving is needed... or maybe just 3 separate, correlated scales.)
  
• Minor social consequences: Highly dependent on the circles you run in. In most of the circles I'm in it would be a -3. However, there are some in which it would rank as a -1 or a 0.
  

Now we get into the part where ukelele's cry for tolerance of people has me confused, because I explicitly meant to put it in this scale somehow, and yet I'm not sure what it maps to. It's clear that anything with an absolute value from 10...100 is insufficiently tolerant of the people -- but stuff in the very middle, well, I'm just not sure.

And this is where we get back to why I wish we weren't relying so much on this word in the first place -- what does it mean to tolerate a person? Does it mean "to separate judgment of a person from judgment of his beliefs"? With some extreme beliefs, this is neither possible nor practical: I'm sure there are some otherwise-lovely racists in this world, but I'm not all that keen on inviting them to alphabet nights. I don't think a single person who knows me would object to this decision. However, if I turned it around and said I wasn't going to invite any Christians to my parties, I'd definitely be the bad guy. I want some way of distinguishing the two cases that doesn't rely on "it's different because I said so" -- which, frankly, every liberal apology for the distinction seems to do.

I guess a lighter way of putting it that might also be a little clearer is: What niceties does one owe to the rude? Is it OK to write someone off for rude beliefs? statements? actions?

I bet for all of us the answer is, "It depends on the belief." Which is precisely why I think generic "tolerance" is the wrong way to look at it.

Comments

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

The use of "tolerance" vs. "acceptance" above points to an important distinction; to wit, they're not the same thing.

This is problematic because "tolerance" is generally used in political discourse to mean "acceptance". When you see big old banners hanging in towns or schools that say "Tolerance" in a happy rainbow font, they're not talking about "civility to everyone even if you don't like them!" They're promoting "celebration of marginalized cultures or peoples and open-mindedness about things not historically in the mainstream". But, see, that isn't tolerance. That's acceptance (well, of some things).

As people point out above, tolerance, real and literal tolerance, isn't really nice. It isn't really welcoming. But it is the baseline of civil society, of living together with a variety of people. Acceptance is a step beyond that -- and it's something most people aren't actually interested in doing with people too unlike themselves. Maybe that's bad, but it is very human, hence something we have to cope with.

This is perhaps the distinction I was getting at in an earlier comment on a different post when I said "hate the sin, love the sinner" is a tolerant position, if people really mean it when they say it. It's totally tolerant. It's a way of coping with others civilly even if you disagree, or abhor. But it is not at all accepting.

And that's what I'm getting at when I say it's not right to get into other people's minds and change them...I can expect tolerance, because that manifests in particular outward behavior which is the minimum for civil society. But I can't compel acceptance, which is an attitude behind actions. And I don't need to. I don't need other people to like me, to agree with the choices I make, to celebrate my unique cultural differences (whatever, and however few, those might happen to be), unless they want to be good friends. I need people to tolerate me.

Maybe this gives you a way into your problem. Even if people are complete jerks, I ought to behave in certain fundamentally civil ways toward them -- say "please pass the salt" instead of reaching over their plate at table, say "excuse me" if we run into one another, surrender a seat on the bus if they're elderly or pregnant, not torture them if I happen to be their jailer, let them vote, etc. But I don't have to like them, and I don't have to give them any particular right to know my thoughts or feelings or engage in more than superficial conversations with me, unless they've got something else going.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

I think this is progress, yes. I think the distinction between tolerance and acceptance turns out to be crucial (thanks, radicalteacher).

But I'm still stuck with the problem of how much leeway basic civil tolerance must allow for others to act in ways that do not meet one's own approval. Because it seems to me that one can be tolerant, in the sense of basic politeness, without accepting that people have the right to behave in a particular way. Tolerance clearly does not require that I permit people to steal my wallet, for instance. And given this, I'm hard pressed to see where basic tolerance requires, say, Harvard to admit blacks, or Wisconsin to grant civil marriages to gay couples, or Arkansas to allow a woman to obtain an abortion. It seems that pure tolerance would allow one to deliver nearly any blow that modern liberals might label as "intolerant," as long as it is done politely and with clean gloves on...

Perhaps tolerance requires not just politeness but an acknowledgement that others have certain rights. But because these rights are not universally agreed upon, what looks like basic tolerance to a liberal (it is only polite to let me marry; it does not harm you) looks like forced acceptance to a conservative (you may do what you like in private, but you may not expect that I or my representatives in the government condone it with the symbol of societal approval that is ours to bestow). And I don't see any way out of this rhetorical muddle, actually.

In any case I become further convinced that tolerance is not really what liberals are after, for several reasons I had not thought of upon making my first post!