Tolerance

Understanding Tolerance

Tolerance is a readiness to let people hold and express legitimate differences without making agreement the price of ordinary coexistence. It takes an active form: share the space, hear the unfamiliar preference, and distinguish an objection to an idea from a wish to exclude its holder. A reader can dislike the other book and still make room for it.

Tolerance: finding the balance

Two readers need the same small table.

The fitting arrangement respects both difference and fair use; disagreement about books need not become a dispute about belonging.

Tolerance gives…

People gain room to participate without disguising every difference. Attention can move from guarding a group’s sameness to arranging fair use of its resources. This is especially valuable when several preferences can be accommodated without deciding which is best.

What Tolerance makes possible

A shared space becomes more interesting when its occupants can contribute different tastes. Tolerance allows a conversation to continue before either person has changed a mind. It also makes disagreement more precise: the question becomes what a particular action does to others, rather than whether the person resembles us.

Tolerance in ordinary life

• Share a music queue without treating your favorite style as the entrance requirement.
• Let a neighbor decline an optional celebration without questioning their goodwill.
• In a conversation, ask about a different practice before treating it as an insult.

Nearby virtues, different work

Openness invites the unfamiliar closer; Tolerance allows it room even when interest or agreement does not follow. Civility concerns the manner of disagreement. Fairness asks whether access and burdens are justified. Here the distinctive work is permitting a difference to remain.

Openness · Civility

Tolerance and its counterfeits

Indifference to injury is a counterfeit of Tolerance: a host lets one guest mock another and calls objection narrow-minded. Genuine tolerance protects room for legitimate difference; it does not give contempt sole possession of the room. Patronizing permission is another counterfeit when one person presents ordinary equal standing as a personal favor.

How to cultivate Tolerance

Notice the extra conditions you attach to sharing a space. Which are needed for its fair use, and which simply protect your taste? Practice stating a preference as your own. Agree on usable arrangements rather than demanding a shared opinion before any arrangement is possible.

Try it today

In a harmless shared choice, make room for one preference different from yours. Name the arrangement you can welcome without pretending that you share the preference.

Keep the practice proportionate

This is not an invitation to tolerate threats, harassment or abuse. A boundary against harmful conduct can preserve coexistence rather than defeat it.

A question worth returning to

Which conditions protect fair use, and which merely protect my preference?

Quotations and further reading

These historical passages offer different philosophical and literary perspectives. Each note identifies its setting, point of comparison and relevant limits; none supplies an official definition of this virtue.

1. But if he refrains from molesting others in what concerns them, and merely acts according to his own inclination and judgment in things which concern himself, the same reasons which show that opinion should be free, prove also that he should be allowed, without molestation, to carry his opinions into practice at his own cost.

   John Stuart Mill · On Liberty

   CHAPTER III. OF INDIVIDUALITY, AS ONE OF THE ELEMENTS OF WELL-BEING. · Walter Scott Publishing edition with W. L. Courtney introduction dated 1901; selected passages from Mill’s main text, first published 1859.

   Mill connects freedom of opinion with harmless personal conduct at one’s own cost. Tolerance concerns room to live differently as well as room to say something different; effects on others remain relevant.

2. First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true.

   John Stuart Mill · On Liberty

   CHAPTER II. OF THE LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION. · Walter Scott Publishing edition with W. L. Courtney introduction dated 1901; selected passages from Mill’s main text, first published 1859.

   Mill’s first reason against silencing is the possibility that a rejected opinion is true. The reader need not agree in advance to leave room for a hearing.

3. I look upon the too good opinion that man has of himself to be the nursing mother of all the most false opinions, both public and private.

   Michel de Montaigne · Essays

   CHAPTER XVII——OF PRESUMPTION · Charles Cotton translation, William Carew Hazlitt edition, 1877

   Montaigne identifies excessive confidence in oneself as a source of false opinions. The passage directs criticism toward our certainty rather than merely toward another person’s difference.

4. In short, if youth is not quite right in its opinions, there is a strong probability that age is not much more so.

   Robert Louis Stevenson · Virginibus Puerisque, and Other Papers

   CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH · , exact-print and territory review held.

   Stevenson challenges the assumption that age automatically settles a disagreement with youth. Neither side gains a right to exclude the other through age alone.

5. To approve of another man’s opinions is to adopt those opinions, and to adopt them is to approve of them.

   Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments

   CHAP. III. Of the manner in which we judge of the propriety or impropriety of the affections of other men, by their concord or dissonance with our own. · , exact-print and territory review held.

   Smith distinguishes approving an opinion from merely hearing its holder. This is a comparison with his account of sympathetic agreement: tolerance permits room without requiring adoption.

6. But a lover must have two wills for the realisation of his love, because the consummation of love is in harmony, the harmony between freedom and freedom.

   Rabindranath Tagore · Sadhana: The Realisation of Life

   THE PROBLEM OF SELF · Linked 1916 Macmillan text; first publication 1913. Chapter VI translated by Surendra Nath Tagore; other English translation contributions acknowledged in the preface.

   Tagore describes love’s harmony as a relation between freedoms. The comparison helps explain coexistence that preserves another will rather than absorbing it.

7. I quarrel with no man's tastes, nor would set my thin face against those excellent things, in their way, jollity and feasting.

   Charles Lamb · Essays of Elia and Last Essays of Elia

   GRACE BEFORE MEAT · Elia (1823) / Last Essays of Elia (1833) in E. V. Lucas’s edited Works, volume II; editorial notes excluded, exact edition/contributor rights held.

   Speaker: Elia, Charles Lamb’s essay persona

   Lamb allows other people’s tastes in jollity and feasting while describing his own. Difference can remain inside company without producing an artificial shared preference.

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