The counterfeit virtue of tolerance

Human nature has a couple of characteristics that come near to being constant.

1. We don’t, generally speaking, attain virtue because it’s too hard.

2. We like to think that we are virtuous.

Because of the second characteristic, even when Satan has us trapped in vice, there’s always the danger (from his perspective) that we will long for redemption and that grace will find us. Imitation virtues are the substitutes that Satan provides in the place of true virtues in order to keep us from longing after the real thing. They are the vaccine with which Satan inoculates us against the desire for genuinely admirable character by reassuring us that we already possess it.

An obvious example is the false virtue that encourages us (if I may paraphrase Sheldon Vanauken) to hate the oppressors of our neighbor, and then congratulate ourselves on how much compassion we have for our neighbor. Taking up offenses – that is, reveling in an anger that implicitly claims that our neighbor’s oppressor owes it to us not to oppress our neighbor – is a vice, not a virtue; but it is very easily confused with the virtues of compassion and of chivalry. Rachel Corrie – consumed with hatred of Amerikkka, her face distorted in rage as she burned her Amerikkkan flag, and then dying pointlessly and asininely in an utterly useless gesture of protest – was no doubt confident that she was motivated by “compassion” and was “defending the oppressed.” That any half-decent Marine does more for the oppressed than a thousand Rachel Corries or Cindy Sheehans, is something that the Corries and Sheehans can’t face up to; much less that it is really hatred, not compassion, that is their defining characteristic.

But when I think of false virtues, the one I think of first, at least in connection with America, is tolerance.

Now the true virtue that tolerance attempts to replace, is love – but when you use the word love you have to be careful because what God means by love is not generally what we mean by it. To love somebody is to desire his good; and unconditional love desires good for the other person no matter how badly that person behaves.

Of course, if a person is behaving badly, then love doesn’t necessarily mean that you stand back and let him keep doing so, especially if he is hurting other innocent people. There are some kinds of behavior that ought not be tolerated; and there are some kinds of behavior that we are emotionally incapable of tolerating. Ideally those two classes would perfectly coincide; in practice they do not. By that I mean that most of us tolerate in others some kinds of behavior we ought not tolerate, and find intolerable other kinds of behavior that we ought to put up with. What the virtue of love tells us is two things.

First, it tells us that we ought to put up with the tolerable kinds of bad behavior rather than demanding that the rest of the world, or even just one or two other people, adjust their lives and convenience to a tyranny of our peeves and peccadillos. Where our innocent desires happen to be in conflict, we should be just as willing for the other person to get his way as we are willing to get our own; for we should desire his good as we desire our own. Love makes his good, our good, because we desire for him to receive good things.

But second – and much more formidably – love tells us that even when we have to step in to put a halt to behavior that ought not be tolerated, we still have to desire the good of the person. The extreme example of this template comes from the traditional words with which we sentence people to execution: “...and from thence to the place of execution...,” because his behavior was that intolerable, but also, “...and may God have mercy on your soul,” because we do still love him and do still genuinely hope that he will yet find grace and eternal life. But any parent who has ever disciplined the child she loves, knows this dynamic intimately from personal experience that is just as real, if rather less dramatic, an outworking of this principle.

Tolerance, in other words, is not a virtue in the sense that love is. It is always good to desire the good of another person – though we may err by misunderstanding what his true good is, or how we may best advance it. But assuming that that which we desire for him is truly good, to desire it and to take that action that is most likely to accomplish his good, is always virtuous. But while tolerance is often a good thing, it also often is a bad thing. And this is particularly true when “tolerance” comes to be defined, as it is among the more foolish subcultures of the Left, as “not saying that somebody is behaving badly.”

In other words, tolerance properly speaking is allowing somebody to behave in a manner that you find morally wrong or personally annoying. You don’t like it; you don’t necessarily even pretend to like it; you may urge him to think better of his folly; but you don’t try to force him to stop. And even with that definition of tolerance, there are many types of behavior that no genuinely moral person would tolerate – for example, a man who would stand by and do nothing while a much smaller and weaker man than he raped an old lady, would not be demonstrating virtue by his tolerance of the rapist. How many more exceptions to the general rule that tolerance is good, then, will we encounter when the scope of “toleration” is expanded to include even the expression of doubt as to the factual accuracy of another person’s opinions, or as to the wisdom of his decisions!

So when tolerance is promoted to a virtue, three things happen.

1. It practically always replaces love in the “tolerant” person’s moral system. In my own experience, if you show me a person who talks about “toleration” as though it were one of the highest of all moral virtues, I can almost always show you a person who will tell you plainly that it’s impossible to hate a sin and still love the sinner – and whose behavior proves it to be true in his own case. But anyone who doesn’t understand that the more you genuinely love a sinner, the more fiercely you will hate his sin, doesn’t really understand the first thing about love.

2. It can’t be worked out coherently as a fundamental virtue because there are too many things that morally ought not to be tolerated. It can be brought into an ethical system as a derivative and contingent virtue – that is, as a course of action that under certain circumstance can be the proper expression of one or more fundamental virtues – but it can’t be a fundamental virtue itself.

3. It can’t be lived out systematically because for every individual person there are certain behaviors that he is emotionally incapable of tolerating in others.

What is so devastating about the third in particular, is that the person who has promoted tolerance to the level of a fundamental moral requirement and then finds himself face-to-face with intolerable behavior, has a fundamental emotional conflict that simply doesn’t exist for the person who is pursuing the virtue of love.

Here’s what I mean. Let us say that you have been taught, correctly, that it is your duty to love everybody with whom you have dealings – but there is that one guy that just drives you crazy, and no matter how hard you try, you just can’t help feeling most of the time that you’d like to wring his neck. Now, it is absolutely open to you to confess that emotion to God in your prayers and to choose to say to God, “He drives me crazy but bless him anyway...ideally with a brand new and much less annoying personality, if that suits Your plan for him; but at any rate, Thy will be done, and give me the grace to do for him whatever Your plan for his life requires me to do.” You can pray for the man, and thus choose to act for his good, even if all you can feel for him is annoyance or even hatred.

But what if you have been taught that tolerance – in the particular sense of not imposing your own religious opinions on others – is a moral requirement; only you’re dealing with a homophobic theocrat who wants to discriminate against homosexuals by refusing to go along with their ordination into the priesthood, or to rent apartments to gay couples? It is extremely difficult to find any way to justify bringing the law to bear on the evangelical landlord that does not, in the end, mean that you are forcing him to conform to your own religious opinion, namely, the opinion that God does not object to homosexuality. You are, quite clearly, being intolerant; which given your conviction that you need to be tolerant so that you can feel good about yourself morally, is a guilt-inducer. And while a particularly agile mind might be able to work out some set of principles under which the obligation of toleration was suspended in the case of the “intolerant,” that would still tend to leave open the question of why you should get to decide which kinds of intolerance are okay and which aren’t, plus – much more importantly – that would be a helluva lot of intellectual work.

So instead, it seems to me that the Tolerance Movement (if that calls to mind the Temperance Movement, it should, because they have much more in common than the Tolerance Brigade would like to admit) is driven much more often than not to exaggerating the moral turpitude of the people that they can’t tolerate, so that they won’t feel guity for being intolerant themselves. Since love leaves you free to say that some acts are intolerable but you can still love the person even while stepping in to make him stop what he’s doing, that particular emotional self-contradiction simply doesn’t come into play for those who pursue love. Thus the more committed you are to “tolerance” in the abstract, the more you have to demonize the people whom you can’t tolerate, in order to justify to yourself your own obvious intolerance of those people.

Even more devastatingly, I think, is this: in the very act of convincing yourself that they are so bad that you don’t have to tolerate them, you convince yourself that they are so bad that you have no moral obligation left to them at all. For after all, your fundamental obligation to them is the obligation of tolerance; but they have forfeited it. Love says that even if you have to kill them, you still have to desire their good; you still have to pray that they find grace and that you will rejoice to find them in Heaven with you for eternity. Nothing they can do can release you from the obligation of loving them. But if your core obligation is the obligation of tolerance...well, there’s plenty that people can do that relieves you of the obligation of tolerating their behavior; and if toleration is your fundamental obligation, then when they forfeit that then all bets are off...and since you are almost certainly exaggerating their degree of depravity in order to reassure yourself that it really is okay in this particular case to be intolerant, the level of viciousness is even more exaggerated.

At any rate, whatever you think of the emotional conflict I’m here hypothesizing, I think it’s a simple and obvious empirical fact that the people who make the most noise about “tolerance” have long been the people who are most active in trying to ban from the college campus speakers with whom they disagree. I think this is precisely because they have stopped valuing love and have instead made an idol out of “tolerance.”

But that’s just my opinion; I could be wrong.