Tolerance, Intolerance and Respect

Hard to Accept?

J. Dobbernack, T. Modood, J. Dobbernack, T. Modood

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230390881
• eBook ISBN: 9780230390898
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

Across European societies, pluralism is experienced in new and challenging ways. Our understanding of what it means for societies to be accepting of diversity has to therefore be revisited. This volume seeks to meet this challenge with perspectives that consider new dynamics towards tolerance, intolerance and respect.

Part I

Beyond Toleration?

1

Moral Minimalism and More Demanding Moralities: Some Reflections on ‘Tolerance/Toleration’

Veit Bader

Recently, we have seen powerful trends in many European countries that one can describe as different but interlinked varieties of ‘muscular’ secularist, republican or liberal-democratic intolerance.¹ These trends make use of and juxtapose arguments from the following domains:

i. comprehensive liberal autonomy and paternalist ‘emancipation’ versus external freedoms of religion and collective/associational autonomy (banning male circumcision, kosher slaughtering, hijab, burqa, etc.);

ii. non-discrimination (or ‘non-domination’ as an overriding principle/right) versus individual freedom of belief/conscience (e.g. conscientious objection to perform same-sex marriages) and associational autonomy of (organized) religions and faith-based organizations (e.g. selection of teachers and students by religious schools);

iii. emphatic substantive equality (of opportunities) imposed on non-liberal and non-democratic (religious) minorities and organizations;

iv. aggressive individualist secularism and absolute freedom of speech/expression versus non-discrimination and minority protection.

This is the reason why I focus in this contribution on tolerance/toleration and try to demarcate and defend a minimalist conception of ‘gritted teeth’ tolerance/toleration that should be clearly distinguished, both analytically and normatively, from more demanding concepts such as liberal and equal respect, the recognition of cultural differences or pluralist difference.

My second key proposal is to distinguish between, on the one hand, principles and rights of tolerance and, on the other, attitudes, virtues, practices and regimes of toleration. Here, my claim is that learning toleration and liberal democracy by doing, as well as institutional learning, is ultimately at least as important as doctrinal learning of the principles of individual and collective tolerance or individual and associational freedoms of religion, which in themselves are often in conflict with each other (see the section ‘Tolerance and toleration: some basic demarcations’ below). ‘Gritted teeth tolerance’ and collective toleration are part and parcel of any minimalist morality and of any ‘decent’ polity. Liberal-democratic constitutions, in addition, require individual tolerance and also a more demanding, but still minimalist, form of equal respect.

My third key proposition concerns the concept of recognition of cultural practices and/or ‘identities’. Here my claim is that ‘recognition of collective identities’ should not be the business of states. Instead, we should defend and fight for full freedoms of political communication. In addition, the recognition of minority cultural practices, of ‘diversity’ or ‘difference’, can be praiseworthy only if these principles and policies do not infringe on but rather strengthen a minimalist conception of tolerance/toleration.

Tolerance and toleration: some basic demarcations

Tolerance and toleration are essentially contested concepts. As in all other cases, this is due to the fact that they contain multiple aspects and dimensions and conflicting normative and cognitive perspectives. My intent here is not to add another volume to the existing ones in the idle hope that, eventually, we could reach conceptual consensus. Analytically, I only want to clarify the meanings, different connotations and uses of the concepts so that we more precisely know where we disagree. In addition, I briefly defend my minimalist but differentiated moral approach – elaborated in more detail in my book Secularism or Democracy (2007a: Chapter 2) – and its applicability to the subject under discussion. I begin with a clarification of relevant dimension of tolerance/toleration and make some terminological proposals.

Tolerance/toleration, according to the minimalist but broadly accepted definition by King (1998: Chapter 1), means that the tolerator tolerates objected beliefs or practices even if he has the power not to do so. This power to interfere is not something the tolerator forgets (as in acquiescence) or omits to use: he explicitly refrains from interference (see also McKinnon, 2006: 14; Lægaard, 2010: 23–24). The reasons and motives to interfere or not to tolerate can be as manifold as reasons and motives for self-restraint. They are as context-dependent and historically changing as the ‘objected’ beliefs and practices.

First, tolerance/toleration can refer to (a) an articulated normative principle, (b) an individual attitude/disposition or a personal virtue and (c) to collective practices and institutional regimes. When I mean to address articulated normative principles, I shall use the term tolerance; when I refer to attitudes/virtues, practices and institutional regimes, I use toleration.²

Second, the object of tolerance/toleration can be ‘individual conscience’ or ‘belief’ (this I call individual tolerance/toleration) and/or ‘collective practices’ (this I call collective tolerance/toleration).³ In terms of freedoms of religion and their intrinsic relations to historical and recent debates about tolerance/toleration, this can also be framed as ‘internal’ versus ‘external’ religious freedoms, or in the frequently used language of ‘autonomy’, ‘individual’ and/or ‘associational’/‘collective autonomy’.⁴

Some minimal explications may be appropriate here: in the case of individual tolerance, the tolerator (individual or collective actors) tolerates objected beliefs of individuals even if he has the power not to tolerate. The tolerated individual raises a claim or a right to freedom of conscience (and to being allowed to practise religion at least ‘in private’) and related claims or rights to freedom of exit from and entry into religious communities or organizations. In the case of collective toleration, the tolerator tolerates objected collective practices of individuals as belonging to and/or identifying with a specific group of practitioners or as members of associations or organizations even if, for example, states and/or religious majorities and their organizations and associations have the power not to tolerate. The tolerated groups, associations, or organizations raise claims or rights to practise their religion collectively and publicly and also to (various degrees of) associational freedom or collective autonomy.

The conditions for the emergence and learning of tolerance/toleration also need to be distinguished: in the case of collective ‘agonistic’ toleration this would be the existence of rival or conflicting groups, associations or organizations of practitioners that object to each other’s practices and of majorities which, having the power not to tolerate, have to learn to tolerate objected collective practices; in the case of individual tolerance this is the existence of dissent and conflict emerging from within groups, associations or organizations of practitioners. Objected practices can be conceived either broadly (sex/gender, ‘race’, age, social class, ethno-national and religious cultures) or narrowly, as in my following argument on religious tolerance/toleration.⁵ Obviously, different practices as well as the two forms of toleration/tolerance are intrinsically linked.

Third, tolerance/toleration can be confined to a minimalist principle or attitude of self-restraint. This requires a tolerating actor to voluntarily endure an object that is objected (disliked, disapproved, etc.) under the condition that he has the power not to tolerate.⁶ Or it can be meant to require stepwise more demanding principles.⁷ Here the important terminological issue is whether more demanding or maximalist concepts should be included in the language of tolerance/toleration or whether they go ‘beyond’ toleration and hence, as I think, should better be called by their more proper names: ‘equal respect’ (or ‘respect for the individual dignity of persons’) or ‘pluralist’ or ‘difference respect’ (Burg, 1998: 240) or – in order to make the notion of respect less ambiguous – ‘recognition’ (of collective, cultural identities and/or of cultural practices).⁸

The substantive issue is: if normative principles of equal respect and concern or the more demanding enthusiastic praise of difference in itself are really ‘internalized’ (as effective, action-motivating dispositions and commitments), the objects of tolerance/toleration are no longer ‘merely tolerated’ but positively promoted. There are two reasons why it may still be legitimate to talk about tolerance/toleration in such cases:

i. There may be (and usually is) a gap between normative principles of tolerance (and by the way also of ‘equal respect’ or ‘difference respect’ as rights) and actual, more or less ‘intolerant’ dispositions (and also actions, if not prevented).

ii. Minimalist tolerance and toleration may not only, rightly, be conceived of as ‘less than ideal’ (Horton, 1992: 65) but as inherently unstable if not backed by more demanding principles/rights and virtues (often related to the misleading claim that minimalist tolerance would only be a matter of strategic prudence, not a moral principle of peace-keeping in itself, see below).

After these clarifications about the meaning and scope of tolerance/toleration let me now briefly present my own substantive position.

With regard to the first dimension, the reduction of toleration to articulated normative principles of tolerance (whether minimalist or maximalist) is unconvincing. First, normative principles of tolerance that are not backed by appropriate virtues (conceived as dispositions and commitments) are clearly insufficient for the stable reproduction of regimes of toleration, whether minimally decent or liberal-democratic.⁹

Second, when it comes to learning toleration or liberal democracy, the learning of virtues is at least as important as the doctrinal learning of principles of tolerance. Most philosophers think of the relationship between principles and virtues/attitudes as a one-way street. Principles have to be first agreed upon and then ‘internalized’ and without the internalization of the principle it is said to be impossible to develop the virtue of toleration and to exhibit a tolerant attitude towards difference in action. They neglect or forget to analyse that attitudes of toleration can develop even if principles of tolerance are not spelled out, not agreed upon, or remain highly indeterminate. Moreover, our attitudes and virtues inform our articulations and interpretations of under-determined principles. I claim that these processes of attitudinal learning are at least as important as the one-sided ‘internalization’ of principles and doctrines.

With regard to the second dimension, I am critical of highly individualized, subjectivized, privatized, ‘enlightened’ or ‘thin’ conceptions of religion that reduce toleration to principles of individual tolerance. Such conceptions of idealized Protestant religion (Bader, 2007a: 1.2.2, more extensively in Jacobsohn, 2003; Bader, 2005a; Spinner-Halev, 2005; Bader, 2011c) discriminate against other religions and are incompatible with the reasonable accommodation of early modern and recent religious diversity (Kaplan, 2007: 239–240, 293, 328–330, 357–358). Moreover, they are incompatible with liberal-democratic principles and legal freedoms of religion which explicitly take into account not only individual or ‘internal’ religious freedoms (of belief, of conscience, foro interno) that are exclusively highlighted by secularist ‘enlightenment’ defenders of ‘individual autonomy’. They also apply to associational or ‘external’ religious freedoms (guaranteeing shared religious practices and some ‘collective autonomy’, Bader, 2007a: Chapter 4.1), which are often completely neglected or refuted by prophets of individual autonomy.¹⁰ Furthermore, my approach explicitly takes into account serious tensions or conflicts between ‘individual’ and ‘associational’ freedoms or autonomies (Bader, 2007a: Chapters 4.3–4.5; Kaplan, 2007 for early modernity).

With regard to the third dimension, it seems wise to stay clear from foundations of rights and from justifications of tolerance in particular that refer to ‘autonomy, rationality, or reasonableness’ and are still so prominent among most liberal philosophers.¹¹ Critics of demanding concepts of individual autonomy that are predicated on ‘rational revisability’ or on the related infringement of collective autonomy (such as Galston, Kukathas, Margalit, Gray) have proposed to replace autonomy by tolerance/toleration. However, there are, again, contested, ambiguous, minimalist and more demanding, maximalist concepts. A minimalist understanding of individual and of collective tolerance is part and parcel of my general defence of moral and legal minimalism (Bader, 2007a: Table 2.1, 72). First collective and, later, individual tolerance have been developed and learned in situations where protracted warfare did not lead to decisive victories.

• Collective toleration is learned under conditions in which it seemed strategically unwise or even impossible for empires/states to extinguish or expel minorities by ‘ethnic’ or ‘religious cleansing’. It is morally learned as a principle of collective tolerance in order to keep peace and minimal security and to guarantee the moral values of ‘life and security’ (e.g. by the imperial elite in Alexandria, Rome, in Muslim empires (see Barkey, 2008); by philosophers as well as by theologians) that should be respected even if extinction or expulsion seemed strategically possible.¹² It commonly did not (and does not need to) include any notion of individual tolerance or individual freedom of conscience: apostasy, conversion, proselytizing and heresy).¹³ It developed at times when fully fledged concepts of individual autonomy were absent, both in Christianity (Madeley, 2007; extensively Kaplan, 2007) and in Islam.¹⁴

• Individual toleration and the moral principle of individual tolerance were learned, first strategically and later morally, when nation-state makers and the political elite saw that the use of state force to change convictions may be spurious or counter-productive, and when believers and the religious elite accepted the view that religious convictions, exactly because they are so deep, should not be imposed from the outside, from above, by force, but freely endorsed from the inside.¹⁵

Both collective and individual toleration by regimes (or ‘from above’) have long been pure ‘permission conceptions’, defined by the authorities alone. ‘Freedom and domination’, ‘inclusion and exclusion’, ‘recognition and disrespect’ were mixed and, again, defined by authorities alone. Eventually, slowly and inconsistently, such conceptions were replaced or, as I prefer to say, complemented by liberal ‘respect conceptions’. These demanded a more secure recognition of collective tolerance as well as of individual tolerance as rights, and eventually also that democratic citizens respect each other as legal and political equals, following a logic of emancipation rather than toleration (Forst, 2007: 224–225; see Henrard, 2011). In the end, liberal-democratic constitutions combine morally minimalist conceptions of toleration with more demanding but still minimalist liberal conceptions of individual and collective tolerance as rights (constrained by other basic rights) and minimalist democratic conceptions of ‘equal respect and concern’.¹⁶

Before proceeding with our discussion of tolerance/toleration, however, we have to pause and try to address three common misunderstandings that my differentiating account faces. By doing so, we can also try to establish a minimal, terminological agreement.

First explication: Collective toleration is, and has to be, constrained by individual toleration and by other basic r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction – The Acceptance of Cultural Diversity in Europe: Theoretical Perspectives and Contemporary Developments
• Part I: Beyond Toleration?
• Part II: A New Intolerance
• Part III: Challenges of New Cultural Diversity
• Conclusion
• Afterword: Religious Tolerance in a Comparative Perspective
• Index