Toleration, Radical Moderate Style

Toleration in a 4D social, moral, and political world

Image credit: New Orleans Museum of Art. Karma, by Doh-Ho Suh

Toleration, like moderation, is often received with a collective yawn. We all sort of agree it’s probably a good idea in a very general and very boring way, but we don’t really care enough to defend it very vigorously. My friend Andrew Jason Cohen describes it in his book defending toleration as an “unfortunate virtue of liberal societies"; it’s unfortunate because our defense of the virtue comes from our own imperfection. As Cohen points out (in more scholarly language), toleration is a necessary virtue because humans are going to human. We’re going to disagree and argue and fight and want to control other people and dislike people who don’t share our values and try to force people to think things they don’t want to think. Toleration as a virtue is necessary only because we’re so imperfect.

Toleration and Moderation: Too Boring to Go Viral

Because both share somewhat prosaic roots in humanity’s imperfections, moderation and toleration seem sort of lame and unexciting to people who think about ideas all day and they seem sort of obvious in a boring procedural way to the everyday person on the street.

“Of course we have to tolerate a lot of stuff”, we think. “That’s just the cost of living around other human beings.”

Or we think: “Sure, toleration is fine because otherwise we’d be at each other’s throats all the time.”

In both those conceptions, toleration is something we do because it provides modest benefits and not something with much moral weight on its own.

Unfortunately, thinking about toleration in this bare procedural or consequentialist way actually undermines a lot of the really important moral and political heft that toleration pulls along with it. It also, by denuding toleration of its real moral, social, and political power, opens it up to a growing number of criticisms by folks who see toleration as a serious challenge to either social improvement or remedying injustice (or both).

Eroding Toleration

People who are committed to social change, who see injustice all around them, who are concerned with high moral values or with the fate of the worst off (or both) often see toleration as a kind of bourgeois virtue or, even worse, a dangerous capitulation to the banality of evil. “There are some things we can’t and shouldn’t tolerate!”, these people yell. “Toleration is in fact the worst thing we can do when faced with evil or injustice!” “We have a duty to fight these things, not stick our heads in the sand!”

These criticisms are even more salient at a time when social justice and rising inequities are ever more visible.

And of course, they’re true, at least to some degree. We don’t talk about tolerating murder, because murder is intolerable. We don’t (now) talk about tolerating segregation, because segregation is intolerable. So it’s not just that we sometimes have a hard time defending toleration, it’s also that we’re often not quite sure where it ends, which leads us into all sorts of muddy waters, seen clearly via modern “cancel” culture.

Both sides fail here in part because we’ve lost sight of why toleration matters and why it’s worth preserving. And it’s important not just because it helps limit conflict, but also because of what it says about the other human beings with whom we share our space and lives.

4D Moral Thinking and Toleration

Some of this problem goes back to a kind of a lack of imagination. To go back to the junk metaphor from a while back, it’s easy to disagree with someone else’s junk and argue we shouldn’t tolerate it. It’s harder to dig into why people might have that junk in the first place. This seems to be, in part, a tendency of thinking about the world in 2D, a kind of flat space where we all occupy roughly the same plane in terms of information, resources, and experiences.

But of course we don’t occupy those same spaces. Instead, when we decide whether or not to tolerate other people’s junk or their beliefs or their way of life, we need to understand why they are making those decisions. That includes understanding (or trying to understand) the part of the moral landscape they’re living in, and what constraints and opportunities come along with it.

This means recognizing that some people have had moral landscapes we couldn’t possibly comprehend. There’s a great interview with Father Greg Boyle, founder of Homeboy Industries, and journalist-turned-meditation-guru Dan Harris about radical love. Father Boyle describes a conversation he had with a gang member who has done some pretty unspeakable things. The gang member asks Fr. Boyle to pray for him to become a better man. And Fr. Boyle responds with something along the lines of “I can’t imagine you a better man than you are right now.”

Boyle’s point, when you take it in the context of the 4D moral landscape we’re trying to paint here, is pretty profound. Envision two humans in a 4D moral landscape: One was born in the equivalent of a social and moral pit (to use a phrase from David Schmidtz’s work on justice), surrounded by metaphorical spikes preventing him from getting out, subjected to massive trauma throughout childhood, with violence a learned way of life. The other, like me, was raised in a stable and relatively level middle class world and encouraged to follow her passions and develop her talents. It’s not that one person is a better person than another, but really that comparing the two isn’t appropriate in the first place.

Boyle’s point isn’t that comparisons are completely useless. He’s not moral relativist. But we have to make the right kind of comparisons. This former gang member, fighting tool and nail to better himself within the confines of a political, moral, economic, psychological, and emotional moral landscape that differs wildly in all kinds of negative ways from my own, is, in fact, the best human he can possibly be at this point in time. He’s also making different choices precisely because his moral landscape (let alone his ability to navigate that landscape) is so different from mine. (Boyle probably also meant his comment in a broader transcendent context about God’s love too, but we really don’t have to go there to understand the more practical point.) The point is that while morality in the grand scheme of things itself isn’t relative, people’s moral progress through our 4D moral landscape is, in fact, quite relative to the geography of that space and their location in it. Ignoring people’s experiences in the 4D moral landscape is just another way we view others in 2D, stripping them of their humanity, complexity, and moral worth.

Radical Love and Toleration

None of this means, of course, that we tolerate the harm that other people do to each other and nor does it mean that there shouldn’t be consequences for the harm even very broken people do to others. But thinking about other human beings as decision-makers in a complex moral landscape implies a more radical piece of reasoning. And that moral piece of reasoning suggests that people *are* in fact rational decision-makers - that they have moral agency and that their decisions matter. Their decisions matter because they are rooted in a particular person’s experience, preferences, and understandings of their own moral space and inner life.

The greatest token of respect we can offer another individual is to recognize his or her humanity and to tolerate - as far as we can - the decisions he or she has made about how to navigate their particular moral landscape.

While there are a lots of good consequentialist reasons for this, including limiting conflict and avoiding errors, the deontological reason for toleration comes fundamentally from our humanity. As humans, we have capacity for choice. And that choice matters precisely because our location in the 4D moral and political landscape is uniquely our own. Will people always make good choices? Probably not. Will they always be choices the majority of people would agree with? Almost definitely not. But unless we recognize other people as decision-makers navigating a landscape that’s different from our own, we’ll make all sorts of moral, political and social mistakes. And those mistakes matter. A lot.

I’ll have more on this topic next week, but for now: drop me a line and let me know your thoughts! As always, comment, share, and subscribe!