Some Thoughts on Tolerance (Or, Tolerance is a Two-Way Street)

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). 

The Horsetown-Clear Creek Preserve, which her friend Gary
was so vested in creating; a legacy to be proud of.

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]