Too little
Making preference law
How can anyone enjoy that?
A harmless difference becomes a defect for someone to defend.
Tolerance
A dish can be unfamiliar without being on trial.
Readiness to permit harmless difference despite personal dislike.
Tolerance permits harmless differences to exist without demanding their correction. A visitor encounters preferences, manners and ways of living that do not match home. You can keep your own taste while declining to make it everyone else’s test of acceptability.
Tolerance gives company across harmless differences
Your host offers a dish you have never tried. You pause with a reply half-formed: several sentences about how meals are done at home. A simpler answer is available. Ask what you need to know, try some if it suits you, or say, “No, thank you.” The host has offered lunch, not opened a debate about whose food deserves to exist. You can decline a plate without delivering a verdict.
Finding the balance in Tolerance
An illustrative everyday situation
Respond considerately to an unfamiliar dish, whether choosing to try it or declining.
A fitting response
Leaving room
It is not for me, and it does not need to be.
Both preferences can coexist without a verdict.
Pursued too far
Ignoring an actual effect
I must accept anything called a custom.
A real problem or unwanted demand is hidden under the language of openness.
Disliking something and needing it to stop are different judgments.
When the situation changes
You need not eat something to demonstrate openness. Dietary, allergy, religious and personal constraints do not require a public defense. Ask for information if you need it and decline when that is the appropriate choice.
What Tolerance makes possible
You may find more room for ordinary coexistence when every difference does not become a debate. Understanding can deepen tolerance, but you need not become an expert or admirer before leaving a harmless preference alone.
Tolerance in ordinary life
Someone else’s music
A fellow traveler listens through headphones to music you dislike. If it does not affect you, the preference can remain theirs. If there is an actual problem with sound or shared rest, discuss that effect.
A public celebration
You may observe from a suitable place, participate if welcome or choose something else. Declining participation need not entail disparagement.
Nearby virtues, different work
Discernment
Discernment distinguishes harmless difference from a genuine concern; Tolerance permits the former without constant correction.
Courtesy
Courtesy shapes the exchange; Tolerance concerns the room you allow for difference even when nothing is said.
Tolerance and its counterfeits
Counterfeit: Patronizing permission
Announcing that you generously tolerate someone’s taste can imitate Tolerance while claiming authority over it. Genuine Tolerance need not congratulate itself.
Counterfeit: Relativism without judgment
Saying every practice is beyond criticism mistakes Tolerance for abandoning ethical judgment. Genuine Tolerance keeps consent and consequences visible.
How to cultivate Tolerance
Name the preference as yours rather than as a universal standard.
Ask whether there is an actual effect to discuss.
Leave a harmless difference without a closing verdict.
Try it today
You may decline food or participation without explaining private needs. Tolerance does not require accepting harm. A respectful boundary can preserve room for both people.
Notice one harmless difference in a shared setting. Let it remain different without correcting, mocking or endorsing it.
While visiting an unfamiliar place
Make room for harmless ways unlike your own.
Questions worth returning to
What effect is troubling me beyond its unfamiliarity?
Can I leave this unjudged without pretending to enjoy it?
Keep the practice proportionate
You may decline food or participation without explaining private needs. Tolerance does not require accepting harm. A respectful boundary can preserve room for both people.
About these practices · DisclaimerQuotations and further reading
Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.
Travellers who require that every nation should resemble their native country, had better stay at home.
Wollstonecraft challenges visitors who make home the standard for every place. This does not oblige agreement with harmful conduct.
I cannot help wondering, as I transcribe these notes, whether a Protestant born and bred is in a fit state to understand these signs, and do them what justice they deserve; and I cannot help answering that he is not.
The Protestant narrator questions his capacity to judge devotional signs. Recognizing a limited standpoint can make room for another practice.
He did not realize that Lucy had consecrated her environment by the thousand little civilities that create a tenderness in time, and that though her eyes saw its defects, her heart refused to despise it entirely.
Lucy can recognize defects without despising a familiar place. Visitors can likewise distinguish criticism from contempt.
When I have been abroad out of France and that people, out of courtesy, have asked me if I would be served after the French manner, I laughed at the question, and always frequented tables the most filled with foreigners.
Montaigne welcomes a meal in the manner of the place he visits. The passage expresses receptivity, not a duty to ignore dietary or access needs.
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.
Twain praises travel’s promise here, although his own book also contains prejudice. Encountering difference offers a chance to question assumptions; it does not guarantee openness or make people who cannot travel less broad-minded.
And which is more, I fancy that I have met but with few customs that are not as good as our own; I have not, I confess, travelled very far; scarce out of the sight of the vanes of my own house.
Montaigne combines openness to other customs with an admission of limited travel. His claim remains personal and provisional rather than a ranking of whole societies.
We judge our ancestors from a more divine position; and the dust being a little laid with several centuries, we can see both sides adorned with human virtues and fighting with a show of right.
Stevenson is reflecting on historical religious conflict. Distance can make the humanity on more than one side easier to see; the passage does not make every action equally right.
Continue exploring
Take these ideas into everyday life
Read freely, follow the fifteen-virtue program, or adapt this collection in My Virtues. A local outing can be enough.