Is Tolerance a Bad Thing?
Any virtue that is emphasized out of its proper context becomes an idol.
Recently, a reader challenged the very concept of tolerance. He stated that mercy was a virtue, but tolerance was a vice. I plan to discuss this, too, but first, let’s talk about the positive side of tolerance.
What is Tolerance?
Tolerance: When you are willing to tolerate those you don’t agree with.
Tolerance is NOT when you are willing to shout about and celebrate something you think the other guy doesn’t agree with.
Supporting the alphabet soup group, if you are a Leftist, isn’t tolerance, any more than supporting one’s church is tolerance on the Right.
My whole life, I have striven to be tolerant—not for show, like a virtue-signaler, but for real—to listen to and understand people who are different from me or with whom I do not agree, to try to see their point of view, even when I disagree with it.
I have worked at it my whole life, and yet, I tell you, it’s hard. Understanding things you don’t agree with takes patience and effort.
Recently, however, I have begun to wonder if our culture has taken tolerance too far.
Are we too tolerant?
Any time you take a good thing and emphasize it above other good things, it becomes an idol. And as soon as it becomes an idol, we begin to see the bad side of it.
Instead of one virtue among many, supporting each other, it becomes a cudgel. Without the context of other virtues, the thing—however good on its own—becomes rife for abuse.
Treating others with kindness is obviously a good thing, and yet… intolerance, expressing dismay, is one of the mechanisms society uses to enforce its customs, which means when we start tolerating anything, we stop being able to enforce cultural standards.
An example:
On Twitter (X), there is a young woman who is detransitioning.
Once upon a time, her family supported her transition—in part because they were told she might commit suicide if they did not, but also because they wanted to show how tolerate they were, how accepting.
Then she came out for Trump.
How accepting, how tolerant, do you think her family was of this?
Her mother wrote her and said she should stop supporting Trump. She was upsetting her aunt. She should be more sympathetic to her aunt—who supported her by giving money to help her (the niece) have her breasts cut off.
The family is so tolerant that they stood by—no, sorry, they paid—to mutilate her (her own term,) but they cannot find the tolerance to support her when it was discovered that she had a different point of view.
Is Tolerance a bad thing?
People object to “slut-shaming,” but how else can society protect marriage and the family than by sowing disapprobation toward those who violate these sacred institutions?
Because it is not just our cultural standards of fashion and taste that require intolerance to maintain themselves, but also morality.
If we stop objecting when someone behaves immorally, we stop telling them that we should not. We stop letting them know that their behavior is harmful—to society and to them.
It is a travesty that we have reached the place where a person wishing to speak out for virtue is considered more worthy of shame (for our culture shames those who “slut-shame” or “fat-shame” others) than the person committing the vice.
If we support a young woman when she wants to mutilate herself and cut off her breasts, but we won’t support the same young woman when she changes her political views—we have gone way beyond the point where tolerance is a good thing.
Tolerance vs. Mercy
A reader of our previous column by the name of Joe Katzman made a very thought-provoking observation: Mr. Katzman said:
"Tolerance is showing kindness towards people you disagree with."
NO. That is civility - and even that is only proper within the bounds of law and custom and civilization.
Tolerance is not a Christian virtue, and is mentioned several times in the Bible as an outright SIN - vid. Jeroboam. It is the attitude of the spiritually weak, and a failure to enforce boundaries.
Mercy may be a virtue. Kindness may be a virtue. Discernment that differentiates between the significant and insignificant, or foregoes addressing a lower virtue to maintain a higher when that is truly the case, may be a virtue.
Tolerance as I use it above includes two things: being polite to those you disagree with, here called civility, and attempting to understand why others feel as they do, which could be considered discernment.
If you take it beyond civility and discernment, it becomes acceptance of vice. In fact, isn’t the Bible full of occasions when the Israelites tolerated some vice that God had told them not to tolerate?
Mercy and kindness are certainly virtues, and we want to show mercy, even to those who sin.
But it is no mercy to them to encourage them to sin. It is no kindness to ignore the harm now and let them face torment in days to come.
Should we rush around telling everyone everything they are doing wrong? No. That is where civility and kindness come in. If a woman is acting like a slut, maybe this should be brought to her attention. I would say that depends on the particulars of the situation and whether the young woman was a person towards whom we had a duty or not. If not, speaking out may not be the wise course. But not everyone who is overweight is gluttonous. Often these days, there is a health issue involved. Shaming someone for a health-issue would just make us look like a jerk.
But tolerating sin, embracing it for social reasons, that is the primrose path to perdition.
He that covereth his sins shall not prosper: but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy. (Proverbs 28:13)
Tolerance comes under the virtue of prudence. In other words, one must make judgment calls about when it is wise to be tolerant to the human being(s) you are dealing with, in order to attain higher goods.
As such, I would describe it as an accidental attribute of Prudence in the Thomistic sense. That or maybe it falls under Long Suffering - forgive me, but I'm not going to break out my copy of the Summa at the moment for this. But I do believe that the militant posturing against such positions is losing some of the humane treatment and Prudent judgment in the swing back towards the correct mean.
Which is understandable. Aristotle and Thomas both say that in order to find the mean, one often has to over correct in order to habitualize oneself to the correct behavior. That applies to societies as well. But that doesn't mean that we, as individuals, should lose sight of what that golden mean is nor try to pull the society back towards it.
In my humble opinion:
Tolerance for its own sake without context is not a virtue and is actually inherently hypocritical.
If Tolerance is an end unto itself, then in order to achieve it, one must be intolerant of intolerance, which is a violation of the initial premise. It is a self-defeating concept.
The left demonstrates this every day. "Cancel culture" is a manifestation of this principle. When they discover someone who has ever made a statement or performed an act that they deem "intolerant" they do not tolerate it...they shun that person, attack them, shut them out of the means of discourse and even attempt to destroy their professional lives and future prospects as well.
Doesn't sound very "tolerant" to me.
In other words, they are not "tolerant" of everyone and everything, they choose what to tolerate and what not to tolerate.
Just like everyone else does...even those horrible "intolerant" Christians who have the temerity to insist that behaviors specifically decried as sins in the Bible are actually [gasp!] sinful and are not to be tolerated.
In other other words: they are hypocrites.