Tolerance

Tolerance gives a city with more than one way to belong

Coming home to your apartment, you meet a cooking smell in the hallway that you would never choose for your own kitchen. For a moment, your nose prepares a set of building regulations. Then you unlock your door. Someone is making dinner; you are making yours. A shared address can contain more than one idea of a good meal.

Finding the balance in Tolerance

Let an unfamiliar, ordinary cooking smell remain part of living near other households.

Living close together asks for judgment about effects. Familiarity and personal taste cannot settle that judgment by themselves.

What Tolerance makes possible

Sharing a building gives people access to a city without requiring everyone to live the same way. Meals, languages and daily rituals carry meaning for the people who choose them. Allowing harmless differences leaves others at home in their own lives. You gain that freedom too, including on the evening when your favorite dinner is nobody else’s.

Tolerance in ordinary life

A public reading room

Read beside someone wearing a spectacular flowered hat. The flower is quiet and the aisle is clear.

Conversation at the next table

Let a group enjoy a conversation in a language you do not understand. Shared space does not make their conversation yours.

Nearby virtues, different work

Fairness

Fairness weighs relevant claims on a common place; Tolerance leaves harmless difference room within it.

Benevolence

Benevolence wishes the other person well. Tolerance allows a choice even when warmth or admiration does not follow.

Tolerance and its counterfeits

A private house rule

Treating personal dislike as proof that someone else is using their home wrongly counterfeits concern for the building. Name the actual effect before asking for a change.

Anything goes

Ignoring a persistent ventilation or access problem does not help people share a building. Address the concrete problem without condemning a household’s habits.

How to cultivate Tolerance

1. Separate dislike from a specific effect on others.

2. Let an unfamiliar harmless choice remain visible.

3. Describe an actual access or conduct problem without condemning a whole style or group.

Try it today

Notice one harmless choice in a shared place that differs from your taste. Let it belong there without supplying a correction.

Questions worth returning to

• What consequence concerns me beyond personal dislike?
• Would I apply the same standard to a style I enjoy?

Keep the practice proportionate

A recurring ventilation problem or blocked passage calls for a practical response. Distinguish that effect from simply disliking an unfamiliar meal.

Quotations and further reading

Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.

1. Though your judgment in matters of speculation, though your sentiments in matters of taste, are quite opposite to mine, I can easily overlook this opposition; and if I have any degree of temper, I may still find some entertainment in your conversation, even upon those very subjects.

   Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Part I, Section I, Chapter IV

   Smith separates disagreements of taste from personal injuries. The companion need not acquire our preferences before conversation, or a shared reading bench, can be enjoyable.

2. You have liberty to laugh at me, but I have liberty to be indifferent to you.

   A. G. Gardiner · Leaves in the Wind · On the Rule of the Road

   Gardiner imagines walking down the Strand in unconventional clothes. His reciprocal freedom leaves room for an odd appearance and for other people’s reactions without making either person the ruler of the other’s taste.

3. They not only celebrate the feasts and holidays of the fatherland, but have each their own public expression for their mutual benefit societies and for the observance of American anniversaries.

   Jane Addams · The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets · The House of Dreams

   Addams describes immigrant communities contributing their own celebrations to American city life. Participation does not require giving up every earlier custom; different traditions can become part of the shared calendar.

4. Indeed, the more you know of any people the less you feel able to sum them up in broad categories.

   A. G. Gardiner · Windfalls · On Manners, I

   Gardiner answers criticism of English manners by admitting the differences within a nation and region. Familiarity can loosen a generalization instead of supplying a new reason to enforce it.

5. He who has much looked on at the childish satisfaction of other people in their hobbies, will regard his own with only a very ironical indulgence.

   Robert Louis Stevenson · Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers · An Apology for Idlers

   Stevenson turns the amused observer’s gaze back toward the observer. Our own enthusiasms may look just as peculiar from the next chair, a useful check on policing someone else’s harmless taste.

6. Let them agree to differ; for who knows but what agreeing to differ may not be a form of agreement rather than a form of difference?

   Robert Louis Stevenson · Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers · Crabbed Age and Youth

   Stevenson is weighing the rival claims of age and youth. Agreement about living with a difference can be possible before agreement about the difference itself.

7. To individuality should belong the part of life in which it is chiefly the individual that is interested; to society, the part which chiefly interests society.

   John Stuart Mill · On Liberty · Chapter IV, Limits to the Authority of Society

   Mill is drawing a boundary between personal choice and shared concern. The distinction helps us ask whether an unusual preference actually prevents someone else from using a common place.

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