Liberalism and Toleration – a Tricky
Combination
(This a revised and expanded version of
post from November 2015 on Toleration and replaces that post)
Most people would probably
agree that toleration is an essential component of liberalism, even if, if
pressed, people’s definition of “liberalism” may differ wildly. Nonetheless, it
is broadly true that modern liberalism, in most of its guises, has a large part
of its origin in developing theories of toleration.
Toleration as a virtue to be
extolled has many antecedents (including the New Testament), but really gets
going in Western European societies as a result of the Wars of Religion in the
16th and 17th centuries, which demonstrated the endlessly
bloody consequences of too much intolerance, and the related and gradually
increasing criticism of absolutist rulers claiming the right to dictate ideology.
Philosophers such as John
Locke claimed that belief could not be forced (a questionable claim perhaps)
and that different varieties of religious practice should be “tolerated” – by
which he meant, “permitted” by the authorities. Locke excepted from toleration
atheists and Catholics, on the grounds of their alleged lack of allegiance to
the sovereign. (One should note here that the “Lockean proviso”, as one might
call it, is an eminently flexible instrument, reappearing throughout history in
various guises. Doubtful allegiance is a concept capable of much political
manipulation.)
The Lockean kind of
toleration as “permission granted” is a matter of state policy. From the point
of view of the tolerated, their situation is not a particularly comfortable
place to be, although a lot better than persecution. For example, in Muslim
Spain during the middle ages there were certain periods in certain kingdoms
when Christians and Jews were benignly tolerated (although as inferior
citizens). However, this policy could, and did, abruptly change with a change
of regime, or a tightening of ideology. And, after the Christian Reconquista,
Jews and Moors were variously tolerated, persecuted or expelled. In France, at
times fairly contemporary to Locke’s life, religious savagery gave place to
official toleration, which was in turn rescinded.
The latter part of the 18th
Century saw toleration put on firmer philosophical and political foundations:
essentially privileging freedom of conscience (the US Constitution is the great
documentary embodiment). Then, a few decades later, came John Stuart Mill. He
is the founder of modern liberalism with toleration at its core. His influence
endures, despite many assaults on his theory, not all of which are unjustified.
Mill, for reasons based on
his wider utilitarian philosophy, privileged “autonomy” as the key to the
flourishing of an individual’s life – the right to make one’s own choices. From
this he derived the “harm” principle of liberal social/political toleration:
“We” should not interfere with the way others choose to live unless those
chosen ways lead to harm being inflicted on others, although “We” may try to
persuade the others to a different way of life. Of course, what counts as
“harm” is a much-contested subject. But, in spite of this difficulty, Mill’s
principle still broadly holds sway in the policy making of many modern
societies.
There are variants. In
France, for example, citizens are supposed to conduct themselves in the public
sphere according to secular norms – La
Laicite. Accordingly, religious cultures are for “private” practice and
certain overt religious symbols are not tolerated in the public realm. Perhaps
this follows from an unduly wide definition of harm – harm to La Laicite. But including ways of life
or belief among the categories of the potentially “harmed” can lead to other
calls for intolerance derived from the premise that any outraging of social or
religious sensitivities constitutes a “harm” which should outlawed on Millian
grounds. This problem is forever with us.
Implicit in most of the
theories touched on so far is the more or less unspoken idea of a “we” who are
to do the tolerating. Who are “we” (or “they”, if we are the ones asking for
toleration). “We”, often, are those of some majority political group or social
culture. So toleration often reverts to the question of to what extent “we”
should tolerate minorities, even if we are guided by Millian rather than
Lockean principles.
Of course, there are many
advocating equality between cultures, so that toleration is not about allowing,
but about respecting difference. The premise here is that there is not, or
should not be, some dominant “We” (often dismissed as some hegemonic relic). In
such a society advocates of tolerance, building on Mill’s principles, argue
that “we” should mean “all of us”, and that we should live together with mutual
respect. So, reciprocally, as equals we agree to differ about beliefs and
practices, according none a superior status to others, and let each group live
according to its own lights.
A corollary of this might be
that public, civic discourse should be conducted with concepts that can be
accepted by all, or nearly all, citizens. (This does not imply political or
social agreement. It means, to take a couple of intractable examples, that a
conservative religious citizen should defend or promote a policy against
abortion or gay marriage on grounds other than that his religion outlaws such
things, even though he remains strongly motivated by his beliefs.)
These appeals to mutual
tolerance and “political reasons” are the main features of the later political
philosophy of John Rawls. It is an eminently reasonable position, but there are
many problems or obstacles in practice.
First, respectful tolerance
does not logically imply relativism – the idea that ethical values are specific
to societies and that there is no overarching morality against which different
sets of values can be judged. Societies usually consider that their values hold
in some objective sense, whether because they are grounded in a religion or in
reason (in its many varieties). In a pluralist society, different communities
or cultures may hold views which cannot be reconciled or which are bitterly
opposed. (But some different values may be acknowledged or respected, if not
accorded the same, or much, priority in the respectful culture: for example,
the value of family and community in Eastern societies, which trumps the value
of autonomy prized in the West.)
So where stands liberalism,
and its toleration – a beacon for everyone or a way of adapting to pluralism?
John Gray – the Pessimist Liberal
John Gray is the great analyst of
liberalism in our time, and the foremost debunker of liberal pretensions. The
chief pretension he seeks to puncture is that liberalism, as a philosophy of
rational, tolerant human conduct, free from superstition and ignorance, is the
inevitable state on which all societies, guided by science and reason, are, or
should be, converging.
Gray thinks that this is a
delusion of well-off Western intellectuals. On the contrary, he argues that
such liberalism is a highly contingent historical product, lacking any
overarching guarantee from history or human nature. Other ways of life, many
much less, if at all, liberal, will stubbornly persist. (Among other things,
Gray, an atheist, sees no reason for any worldwide diminution of religious
beliefs.)
From this (very potted)
background, Gray is a supporter in principle of modus vivendi – our old friend, toleration and co-existence.
Indeed, given irreducible differences in ways of life, modus vivendi is axiomatic.
However there is a red line
and another, somewhat hidden, axiom which are both present in Gray’s philosophy
and which may set it on a course back to familiar liberal paradoxes.
Gray subscribes to a set of
minimal (perhaps not so minimal from some perspectives) propositions about
human nature. He asserts that there are basic human goods and evils, the latter
including persecution for beliefs, race and sexual orientation. So societies or
communities with those sorts of bigotries are not acceptable and presumably not
to be tolerated.
A corollary of this is that
there implicit need for a referee of toleration. Therefore, somehow, a modus vivendi government must
necessarily stand above the conflicting currents it seeks to harmoniously
channel (perhaps here a nod to Rawls “public reasons”).
Gray is formally agnostic as
to the type of regime that can best deliver modus vivendi and a defence of basic human goods. He points out that even the
latter may have to be traded off to some extent. Not every (relatively) benign
society will have the same priorities. Gray cites the pre-World War 1 Hapsburg
Empire as one kind of exemplar of toleration, such that different communities
lived untroubled and in peace. But other liberties were constrained.
When pushed, Gray
characterises current Western liberal societies as “worth defending”. He
disbelieves and believes. But perhaps this isn’t really a contradiction in his
thought. He considers that modern liberal societies are the best we have
achieved in a tolerant humanist vein; but that they can claim no universal legitimacy
and will always be precarious.
Defence of precarious
liberalism, together with need for an authority to ensure modus vivendi , paradoxically drives liberals, in age where
intolerance is rampant, to their own intolerance – ne plus ultra. But thus it has ever been. There was the modus vivendi of Chamberlain in the
1930s, then a war of intolerance of the intolerable.
In general terms, Gray still
leaves us with the fundamental problem of liberal toleration. A pluralist
society seldom consists of communities of roughly equal size and/or equal
social and political clout. Most such societies contain a majority culture
(even though it itself may be more or less fragmented on many issues of value)
and several minorities. So who sets the limits of the application of any Harm
principle, and sets the terms of debates about values, and fashions the
political mechanisms that ensure modus
vivendi? Some “harms” may be so contrary to majority values (female genital
mutilation, slavery) that the limits are obvious – at least to the majority; others
remain contestable.
The toleration practised in a
plural society (even of the Gray sort), endorsing modern liberal principles,
starts to look a bit like the pre-modern permissive toleration modelled by
thinkers such as Locke – that is, it is practical for rulers (now, majorities)
to tolerate certain diversities, subject to the Lockean Proviso (his earlier
version of the Harm principle) that alleged threats to what we may call liberal
humanistic rights should not be tolerated.
February 2016
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