An essay shared at First Christian Church Disciples, Redding, California, December, 1999
by Madge R Walsh
It seems to me
tolerance is getting some bad press lately. We’re being told that tolerance “isn’t
enough,” at least when dealing with a recent, specific situation in which two
men were murdered because they were homosexuals. I’m not quite sure how
tolerance fits in this scenario, as we certainly do not “tolerate” murder. On
the contrary, what we should be concerned about is the lack of tolerance so arrogantly displayed by the alleged murderer(s).
Perhaps what is
felt to be inadequate is the effectiveness of tolerance as a safeguard against
such expressions of intolerance. Too late for these victims, our collective
guilt is assuaged by offering support as a sort of apology or compensation for
past (and unfortunately, continuing) discrimination (there’s another misused
word!). Personally, I can tolerate what people do in the privacy of their
homes, as it is none of my business. As long as people are doing the best they
can with what they have, are using their gifts and talents to the best of their
ability, their “sexual orientation” is irrelevant, as is their color, or gender,
or whatever.
And everyone has,
to a greater or lesser degree, suffered from some form of discrimination. People
act or feel intolerant toward others because of age (young or old), race
(black, white or in-between), gender, sexual orientation, homelessness,
poverty, illness, disability, education, occupation, physical appearance (such
as being short, or overweight, or left-handed, having long hair, or none, or
someone else’s)—think of any human attribute. I recall that my grandmother
considered anyone with red hair as extremely unfortunate, someone to be pitied,
and she was not alone in this view. On the other side of the family, my
great-grandfather married the young woman who had stood up for him when their
classmates teased him mercilessly about his red hair. Views change with time,
thank goodness; we were not only tolerant but pleased when our daughter’s inherited
genes gave a reddish tinge to her hair, and again when this was exhibited even
more flagrantly in the next generation. A gift from the past.
So, how do we encourage
and strengthen tolerance, how do we counteract or eradicate an intolerance that
unfairly victimizes people for something they most likely have little or no
control over? We can try to expedite a change—for example—by school buses
transporting children to balance racial mixtures at schools. A grand
experiment, although it could be viewed as a piecemeal quick fix achieved by
threat of force, an inflexible mandate, though it was perhaps unnecessary in some
schools in a city such as San Francisco with its already happily diverse ethnic
population. But across the U.S., school integration exposed various racial
groups to each other in interactive situations, and it did show that a
generation of children could adjust, and function quite well even when their
parents were at odds with the system. Was it enough? Were the economic
reverberations worth it? Integration could do almost nothing about improving
the caliber of teachers, or a paucity of resources (financial or communal), or
the quality of education in general. A social
integration that could maintain itself could not be simply legislated into
existence. And at its worst, such affirmative action resulted in a backlash, a
flight to the suburbs, and “reverse” discrimination.
Perhaps toleration
enforced as governmental policy is not a good example. Perhaps easier of
evaluation is the success of religious tolerance, with its extended history of development
here in America. Although often cited as initial impetus for colonial
settlement, the freedom to worship (or not) as one pleases was not guaranteed
until the colonies had to tolerate other colonies’ religious preferences in
order to unite for the common welfare. The early Puritans were highly
intolerant of other forms of Christianity—especially of Quakers or of such
heretics as Ann Hutchinson, who was actually expelled from her community and
sent into exile in the wilderness, a virtual death sentence. Fortunately, the
framers of the constitution held out for separation of church and state; so we
are free to go shopping among all varieties of religion to find one that suits
us. But that’s tolerance. We do draw the line when some religious expression
becomes harmful, to oneself, or to others, or to others’ property, or to dumb
animals. We tolerate others’ beliefs, and expect them to reciprocate by
tolerating ours. This applies as well to politics, for instance; or to a choice
of which team to root for; or other vital matters.
We tolerate
opposing views, alternative solutions, though we may argue against them; we
respect others’ individual choices, no matter how wrong they would be for us. (Was
it Thomas Paine who said something about disagreeing with what you say, “but I will
defend to the death your right to say it”?) What more should we be expected to
do? Do we have to mute our voices, listen in silence (“don’t ask, don’t tell”)?
We have some freedom of choice—we can vote at the ballot box, or with our feet.
Do we emulate Galileo, and recant under pressure, knowing Copernicus was correct
in placing the sun, not Earth, in the center of our solar system? We have
already let the theory of evolution, arrived at by scientific method, be repudiated
by creationism based on mythical precepts. Myths have their place, but not at
the expense of “true” facts. That is illogical.
Reciprocal acceptance
is important to tolerance. In a company where I once worked (a long time ago)
as a secretary in the advertising department, there was a non-reciprocal
situation that led to problems. The staff included a man who was in charge of
training salesmen about the products of the company. This man had a hard time
keeping a secretary, and I found out why when I filled in as his secretary for
a (blessedly) short time. He was quite zealous in his religion and tried to
convert any young woman who worked for him. He apparently had a belief in his
own infallible righteousness, and its corollary, that he knew what was best for
whatever young woman came within his sphere of influence. He saw himself, no
doubt, as merely playing a paternalistic role. Each new secretary would
tolerate him for a while, but then would invariably request a transfer. The Personnel
office always granted the transfer, and must have suspected there was a
problem, if not the exact nature of it.
Fortunately, a new
secretary was found for him who could tolerate his missionary efforts
indefinitely; she was apparently impervious to them. She happened to be Greek
Orthodox, and though my generalization may be mistaken, they have a tendency to
regard their church as the “real” one, being directly descended from, and hence
closest to, the earliest Christian church, therefore incorporating the truest
Christianity. Western, latter day sects simply don’t count.
Even back then, the
man’s proselytizing was inappropriate in the workplace. For one thing, it was a
misuse of his power in his position as the secretary’s boss. All the tolerance
here was on one side; it should be a give-and-take between two equals. This
story has a sort of happy ending, depending on your point of view: The man did get
his comeuppance, not from his secretary, but from his wife. One Friday as we
were finishing work, he announced that he and his wife were going to shop for a
new car that weekend. The following Monday, I casually asked if they’d found a
car, and he said yes, they had found a vehicle
just right for a family car—a sedate four-door sedan in a conservative shade of--brown.
This very day he’d told his wife to go and buy it. He was really looking
forward with satisfaction to going home that evening and finding it safely in
their garage.
The next morning, however,
he seemed somehow deflated, not as satisfied as I had expected. Was there
something amiss with the car? He looked at me rather ruefully and then admitted
that his wife had indeed bought a car—a bright, shiny red convertible. Two-door.
She had driven it home, knowing full well they would have to keep it. He wasn’t
angry—at least, not any more. He loved his wife, and tolerance and love go hand
in hand.. With one simple act, not an argument, she showed him he had been
blind to her needs and opinions. I think her disobedience opened his eyes to
the fact that he had not treated her as an equal partner in their marriage, and
he realized he was at fault in not making the decision a mutual one. It was a
hard lesson for him—a major attitude adjustment. I never met his wife; I wish I
had. I try to imagine him driving the car, but my mind boggles.
We say Americans
value the individual and the rights of the individual. This, despite a constant
assault or pressure—intentional or unconscious--to have individuals adjust to
uniform standards, go along with the crowd, behave as everyone else does. We
are expected to conform. Oddly enough, we will champion the underdog at the
same time that we try to discredit the powerful; both are part of the
equalizing process. It seems we can tolerate some differences, but apparently
there is a limit, albeit a fuzzy one. If we consider human behavior as a
continuum, then we are most comfortable somewhere in the middle; anything marginal
or on the fringe is not “normal,” though of course anything you can think of
that humans could do, has been or will be done, somewhere or sometime in this
world.
It is not always
easy to accept ideas and behaviors outside of our usual experience. It goes
against primeval human nature to welcome the unknown stranger. In doing so, we
put ourselves at risk, so we are naturally wary of strangers or new ideas, and
often reject them the first time around. We have to enter into a dialogue, learn
to trust, to be open; and after the first disappointing discovery that not
everyone thinks as we do, we have to rethink what we can accept, how much we
can tolerate. We may learn tolerance in childhood, from our parents’ example or
from other teachers, or later by conscious effort. Sometimes simply exposure to
an array of valid, though different, cultural systems may be enough; sometimes
it’s not. We have to recognize their validity. It also depends on how deeply
ingrained our attitude is. As the song in South
Pacific says, we have to be carefully taught to love and hate, before we
are six, or seven or eight, taught to hate those whose eyes are differently
made or those whose skin is a different shade. It was easy to engender hatred
for the Japanese in World War II; they looked
different from us. We could even pack them off to concentration camps—but, as
far as I know, we didn’t do that to any naturalized German citizens. Intolerance
was abetted by stereotyping, categorizing a whole group on the basis of a generalization
from a statistically inadequate sample. When you get to know an individual, you
discover the personality that differentiates each one of us, somewhere along
the spectrum of possible human traits, and it becomes impossible then to see a
group of individuals as homogeneous.
Mutual tolerance
is the very basis for peace. The disturbing issue of abortion, for instance, is
distressing partly because the pro-choice advocates can tolerate those who
espouse a pro-life stance, but the reverse is not true. The argument gets very
nasty when the anti-abortionists are rigid in their stance, with no allowance
for exceptions or compromise. The lack of tolerance often explodes into war,
and the “pro-lifers” make a travesty of that term when they bomb and kill
clinic workers. Sometimes intolerance becomes a shooting war on both sides, as
in Ireland or innumerable other places; sometimes it’s a milder intolerance or
antagonism that permits expression in jokes--the so-called “war between the
sexes,” for instance. The joke relieves the tension.
Even in the
closest relationships—between siblings, spouses, parents and children--tolerance
is, has to be, a buffer. It’s well-known that hoping to change a person’s ways
after you are married is doomed to failure; best learn to tolerate that idiosyncrasy, that harmless peculiarity, and love them the way they are, for
what they are.
Tolerance is the
hallmark of civilization. “The life of man in the state of nature is nasty,
brutish, and short” (Rousseau, I think). Where would we be if we did not
tolerate each others’ foibles, each others’ shortcomings?
Welcome the
stranger, then, not in spite of his or her being different, but because we are
different, each unique, yet all human. We’re in this life together; let us help
one another. Tolerance is a form of love.
[Editor's note: to read more about the case, see
Wikipedia]
