A Critique of Pure Tolerance: Part 2 – Tolerance and the Scientific Outlook

Barrington Moore Jr. has argued in his essay “Tolerance and the Scientific Outlook” that the secular and scientific outlook is adequate for both understanding and evaluating human affairs because it is able in principle, and less frequently in practice, to yield clear cut answers to important questions. Moore sees the scientific outlook as a necessary tool for avoiding watery toleration that accepts the world as it is and fanatical single-mindedness that paralyzes the will and the intellect. He redefines tolerance as a procedure for testing of ideas. Genuine tolerance involves the existence of a distinctive procedure for testing ideas, resembling due process in the realm of law. So, for example, when a defendent is tried in a court of law the legal process does not always acquit but rather exmaines the evidence to determine guilt or innocence. In the same way, Moore argues, tolerance must be a process of understanding and evaluating human affairs. Genuine tolerance can never be an uncritical acceptance of ideas.

According to Moore, the metaphysical outlook with its dubious ontology and epistemology is a crutch that must be abandoned in favor of the scientific outlook by which we recognize that God and his metphysical surrogates are dead. Science, writes Moore, is tolerant of reason; relentlessly intolerant of unreason and sham. Moore’s endorsement of the scientific outlook is a critique of a weak and indiscriminate tolerance that in his view amounts to intellectual cowardice. To be tolerant of the Ku Klux Klan’s claim that there is a Zionist conspiracy controlling the world is, in Moore’s view, intellectually repulsive. The Klan’s view must be tested for accuracy according to scientific principles before it can be tolerated. Tolerance must be limited by science.

Moore’s argument for a genuine tolerance that is rational and scientific provides a necessary corrective for the weak version of tolerance that rejects nothing and thereby reduces everything it accepts to irrelevance. If every horse wins the race, what is the value of winning? However, as Hans Oberdiek has pointed out, Moore’s genuine tolerance presupposes skepticism (Oberdiek, Hans. Tolerance: Between Forbearance and Acceptance, 149). This presupposition equates tolerance with acceptance and only that which has been vetted by science can be accepted. However, this presupposition is unnecessary. Tolerance merely requires that the other person and their viewpoint be taken seriously in order that they can be rationally critiqued. If the Klan, for example, claims that there is a Zionist conspiracy, their claim can be taken seriously by understanding how this kind of a claim arose within our society in general and how it functions in the Klan’s organization specifically. Any criticism of the Klan’s claim must be made on the basis of this kind of analysis but this analysis does not require accepting the Klan’s claim. However, under Moore’s model, the Klan’s position would be dismissed outright as an intolerant and unscientfic viewpoint which would further isolate the Klan and galvanize their positions. Tolerance must retain a critical element that avoids what Karl Popper called the the paradox of tolerance that accepts even that which undermines tolerance but it also must be continually open to new insights that may be present in the viewpoint of the other.

A Critique of Pure Tolerance: Part 1 – Beyond Tolerance

I have been reading a small book written in 1965 titled A Critique of Pure Tolerance. The book contains three essays which I will reflect upon in the next three posts. I invite your comments, questions and reactions to these essays. 

The first essay was written by Robert Paul Wolff and is titled “Beyond Tolerance.” In this essay Wolff argues that tolerance is “the virtue of the modern pluralist democracy.” According to Wolff, pluralisic democracy played a vital role in the development of American democracy but is no longer viable because it can no longer answer the needs of modern society. Wolff concludes that the model of pluralistic democracy and its corresponding virtue of tolerance must be transcended.

Wolff sees tolerance as a necessary instrument of pluralistic democracies where competing interests must be allowed to exist and be pursued. He points out that individual personalities are developed and shaped by the social group he or she identifies with. There are no groupless individuals. Human beings are social animals and their personalities are socially constructed. Thus, difference is not a social evil to be obliterated in a single universal brotherhood; but a constituent of human development and society. Tolerance is therefore a necessary instrument for preserving difference in the interest of human development and a just society.

While agreeing that pluralism and tolerance played a formative role in the American democratic society, Wolff disagrees that pluralism as a social model and tolerance as its instrument are capable of sustaining a just society at this stage of its development. He points out that in a pluralistic society where group interests compete against one another the national interest is not adequately addressed or allowed to emerge. Social problems are viewed as the result of inadequacies in distributive justice and remedied by equally distributing power and resources. But, Wolff argues, if individual group interests are maintained in a pluralistic dialogue the nation cannot emerge to address national intersts. In fact, Wolff writes, One could hardly expect a committee of group representatives to decide that the pluralist system of social groups is an obstacle to the general good! He concludes that individual group interests must give way to a national interest and that the common good must be raised above the the pluralisitic goal of distributive justice. In short, pluralism and it’s requisite virtue of tolerance are no longer viable social theories for modern society and must be transcended in the interest of the common good.

Wolff’s critique lends itself to a homogeneous society where sameness has greater currency than difference. However, homogeneity is actually an impediment to progress. Homogeneity resolves conflict by neutralizing difference, but conflict is the catalyst for change. Kant, and then Hegel both realized the necessity of opposites in the development of human cognition. The same is true for social progress. A homogeneous society is a stagnant society. The competition of group interests within a pluralistic society is what drives the progress and development of the society. To arrive at a common good it is necessary to silence or ameliorate the weaker voices within society. The common good always privileges the powerful majority who reduce minority voices to irrelevance. It is important to remember that the greatest changes in human civilization have come from the bottom rather than the top. The minority report often has more to contribute than the majority allows. Tolerance, far from being an outdated virtue, is the perenial virtue of a progressive and just society.

Olafur Eliasson: The Chiasm of Art and Philosophy

On a recent visit to the Dallas Museum of Art my wife and I experienced the intersection of art and philosophy in the work of Olafur Eliasson. His current exhibit is called Take Your Time, and I highly recommend it to anyone who questions the boundaries between reality and perception.

Eliasson’s work is indebted to the phenomenological insights of Husserl, Bergson, and Merleau-Ponty, all of whom emphasize perception as a moment of embodied consciousness. For these thinkers there is no such thing as consciousness but only conscious acts. We are not disembodied minds detached from the world but embodied minds embedded in reality and creating reality.

Xavier Zubiri drawing from this same tradition has emphasized what he calls sentient intelligence where the senses are turned towards the intellect and the intellect is turned towards the senses so that perception is not a disembodied act of a mental subject to a physical object, but rather a physical moment of perception where the outside is inside and the inside is outside. Zubiri points out that man is not simply before things, but moves among them, deciding in each case what they are. Eliasson echoes this insight in his work. He describes his current exhibit as the experience of “seeing yourself seeing”.

In one of Eliasson’s most dramatic pieces, light and color are used to bring the visitor into a co-creative role with the exhibit. My wife and I entered a circular screened area illuminated with color that changed as we moved within it. Our physical movemnents altered the exhibit. We were clearly part of the exhibit. The closer we moved towards the screen the more the boundary between the light and us became less clear. For a moment I experienced a oneness with the light where I could not tell where I stopped and the light began. It was simply a moment of being immersed in color and light. I experienced myself in the other and the other in me.

Olafur Eliasson is one of the most important artists of our time, in my opinion. His work is a chiasm of art and philosophy that calls us back to our bodies that are not just in reality, but of it.

Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance and the Limits of Tolerance

I have recently been browsing books on tolerance and found an interesting discussion of Karl Popper’s notion of “the paradox of tolerance” in the book The Boundaries of Liberty and Toleranceby Raphael Cohen-Almagor. It raises some interesting questions.Karl Popper has argued that a strong advocacy of toleration involves a fear of being intolerant, which leads to an extension of toleration to intolerant ideologies. In an attempt to be tolerant, those advocating a strong policy of toleration end up tolerating intolerance. According to Popper, to advocate free speech for those who seek to eliminate it is paradoxical and raises the moral question, “How free should free speech be?” and “Are there moral grounds for limiting free speech?” More broadly, it raises the question that I have often been asked, “Is there a limit to tolerance?”

Susan Mendus distinguishes between a strong form of tolerance that is based on objective moral judgments and a weaker form that is based on subjective judgments of taste or pereference. For example, tolerance of the torture of a child cannot be advocated given the objective moral judgment that the torture of a child is wrong. However, tolerance of a person wearing sandals with a suit can be advocated given that judgments of appropriate attire are based on subjective judgments of taste or preference. But what about religious differences or differences in sexual orientation? Is tolerance in these areas based on objective or subjective judgments?

There are more questions than answers at this point, and admittedly, there are still many “knooks and crannies” of this issue that need to be examined. However, the dignity of the human person is paramount in my estimation. Whatever limits we impose on tolerance they must not diminish the dignity of the human person.