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Young World
Respecting differences
Mukund Padmanabhan
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Fighting intolerance is a complex issue. For this involves a number of things including enforcing the law, fostering education and providing free access to information.
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Tolerance is essential for the sucess, in fact the very survival, of India, which is diverse in its cultural, social and religious character.
Tolerance is the virtue of a man without convictions,'' G.K. Chesterton maintained. The poet and essayist was probably construing the concept of tolerance in an extremely narrow fashion when he made this remark — as a form of moral passivity. But tolerance has a wider or more common meaning, which is healthy and positive. It signifies respect for beliefs and practices, which differ from one's own.
Respect for the beliefs and practices of others is not the same as agreement or moral endorsement. Rather, it means a willingness to try and understand why people think and feel differently from you. It means the capacity to treat such people with dignity. It means the ability to hold on to your convictions while accepting the right of others to hold on to their own. Tolerance is not acquiescence, but a recognition of difference.
Defined like this, it should be easy to see why tolerance is not merely an important attribute, but the very cornerstone of any liberal democracy. Tolerance helps to keep a society together, even when it is riven by conflict. Conflicts can be resolved if there is a general agreement that they can be dealt with in a peaceful and tolerant manner. Democracy is hard, if not impossible to sustain, if people are not generally committed to the principle of tolerance.
We live in a world where there is a multitude of views, values and practices. A tolerant individual does not suppress ideas he dislikes or disagrees with. By extension, a tolerant society gives free play to a number of opposing ideas — it extends rights to all individuals, it accords them the freedom to speak, criticise and oppose.
At one level, tolerance is a personal virtue but at another it is an absolute prerequisite for peaceful co-existence. Intolerance, as the world is rapidly beginning to realise, is the path to war and disorder. How does tolerance express itself in political terms? At a general level, the answer is the form of political liberalism. In more specific ways, this would include an acceptance of multi-culturalism or pluralism and a commitment to a genuine secularism (founded on the concept of equality).
Religion or religious differences have led to wars (consider what happened in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries) and all manner of strife. However, no correlation can be drawn between being religious and being intolerant. Mahatma Gandhi is a good example of someone who was deeply religious and profoundly tolerant.
Similarly, tolerance does not automatically follow simply because one professes a certain political ideology. Both the extreme Right and the radical Left have been guilty of intolerance. It's just that the form of shape taken by such intolerance varies. Extreme Right wing intolerance often manifests itself as racism or xenophobia (a fear of foreigners or strangers). Dogmatism and a disregard for human rights such as freedom of expression have sometimes been a result of Leftist intolerance.
Mapped against the canvas of human history, tolerance — at least in the context of mainstream Western intellectual tradition — is a relatively recent political virtue. The concept perhaps originated in the context of the struggle between science and religion in Renaissance Europe. The fact that some of the most strongly held views began to be questioned, or proved as wrong, strengthened the view that one could be mistaken about one's beliefs. Looked at in this manner, tolerance is the product of a recognition that man has a tendency to be dogmatic.
Endless agony...a need for tolerance.
Tolerance is essential for the success, in fact the very survival, of a country such as India, which is diverse in its cultural, social and religious character. The same is true for other parts of the world. It was the recognition of this, which led the United Nations to launch a global quest for tolerance. The Declaration of the Principles of Tolerance were signed by UNESCO's 185 member states seven years ago.
Fighting intolerance is a complex issue. But as UNESCO has pointed out, this would involve a number of things including enforcing the law (for enforcing human rights and for banning hate crimes), fostering education (intolerance is often rooted in ignorance), providing free access to information (hatred and lies flourish in the times of censorship).
As an idea, tolerance often comes under attack from certain quarters. It is painted as a weak concept, a mark of false civility and — as Chesterton put it — a sign of not believing passionately about anything. Such criticism does not devalue tolerance. It only draws attention to the fact that it is important to distinguish between a genuine tolerance (which is born from a commitment to weigh differences honestly) and a debased kind of tolerance (which stems from indifference and lack of conviction). It is the former that poses a real challenge for us. It tests our ability to stand by our convictions even as we allow others to adhere to their own.
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