A poster over at Right Reason has put together an argument for a classical liberal conception of tolerance that has apparently appealed to various independent thinkers alarmed by 20th century fanaticisms. It’s more sober than the usual praise of tolerance found today but still an attempt to get something—a reliable guide for conduct—out of nothing—a claim of fundamental ignorance—and so doesn’t really stand up.
His summation seems sensible:
A toleration worth wanting and having is valuable because truth is valuable. It is threatened in two ways. It is threatened both by those who think they have the truth when they don’t and those who are indifferent to truth.
True enough. Some sort of tolerance is necessary so thoughts and perceptions can be articulated and rational investigation and discussion carried on. The problems come in when people (liberals) try to make tolerance primary rather than secondary. It can’t bear the weight. His more specific comments are therefore less sensible:
People who are convinced that they have the truth will not inquire whether it really is the truth. Worse, they will tend to impose their ‘truth’ on us and prevent our inquiry into truth. Many of them will not hesitate to suppress and murder their opponents.
It sounds like he’s saying that convictions are at odds with rationality and characteristically lead to suppression and murder. If true it seems we should be promoting comprehensive skepticism as the only possible basis for tolerance. Otherwise there will be some issues on which we will have convictions, and since we rely on things we think are solid those are the issues we will treat as basic. For example, if I’m convinced that tolerance is absolutely basic to a tolerable society, and indeed to the peace and well-being of the world, then quite possibly I won’t inquire into its basis and justification but will instead try to impose it on others, by murderous force if necessary. The wars in Serbia and to some extent in Afghanistan and Iraq might serve as illustrations.
There’s no doubt something to the claim that convictions can be dangerous, but I’m not sure how far that claim can lead us. Life can’t be made safe, it always ends in death, and we can’t get by without convictions. Comprehensive skepticism can’t really be a position. If it were, then it too would be a conviction and so would refute itself. The reasonable view, I think, is that having convictions can’t be bad: the issue is the nature of the convictions. (It should be noted that convictions affect character, and thus the manner in which they are held.)
Our poster goes on to say:
My first point, then, is that toleration is a good because truth is a good. We must tolerate a diversity of views, and the people who maintain them, because we lack the truth and must find it, and to do so we must search.
The rational search for truth has been going on for 2500 years. If we still lack the truth altogether then it’s not clear what further searching is going to do for us. One response to the difficulties of the search has been the attempt to get along without truth, by pure will or whatever. Such attempts evidently don’t work, so it seems we will inevitably have convictions as to basic matters. As Pascal points out somewhere in his Pensees, if we didn’t act as if we possessed the truth on basic points we couldn’t decide whether to get out of bed in the morning. But we can’t really live “as if.” We can’t adopt a comprehensive scheme of life without adopting the attitudes, including the beliefs, that go with it. The basic question isn’t toleration, therefore, but what convictions to accept on basic points like the nature of the world and human life.
Toleration can’t be basic in any event because it must be intolerant on its own behalf. As the poster points out,
If toleration is truly a value, then one ought to demand it not only of oneself but of others. My toleration meets its limit in your intolerance. I cannot tolerate your intolerance, for if I do, I jeopardize the very principle of toleration, and with it the search for truth.
Tolerance, left to itself, destroys itself. We can only make sense of it by subordinating it to something greater, the search for truth for example. That search, however, is an instrumental value, at least mainly so, and is subordinate to truth itself. So toleration turns out to be subordinate to truth, and thus, inevitably, to our convictions regarding truth. It follows that it can’t be used in a neutral way to determine the relations between conflicting understandings of truth, because its demands can be determined only by reference to some such understanding. Once again, the liberal attempt to ground something definite on the impossibillity of getting everyone to agree on something definite fails.