How To Be Tolerant

Blue and red, getting along

The harrowing films of Todd Solondz force viewers to confront the possible limitations of their own principles; he is a great and subtle moralist (whose new film, Life During Wartime, comes out this summer). Okay then, you liberal internationalist, Solondz might say, you who believe that each human being is of equal value, that people are the victims of their circumstances; please check out this ghastly, sadly unreconstructed pederast I’ve got here, and now pity him if you can. Let’s see if you can do it. Show me the pity.

Tolerance is a virtue (and a word, and an abstract concept) much loved by those of the left. In politics, this term is most often used to mean a respectful attitude toward those who differ from ourselves; it means support for the right of all to marry, for example, or to speak, live, work or study however and wherever they please. That part is easy for every member of the U.S. left to subscribe to. Easy! But it becomes complicated when we consider that there are also a lot of highly intolerable things out there-besides pederasts, I mean-such as mosquitoes, Sarah Palin, “martinis” made with vodka, underwater oil volcanoes, etc.

My question is, how much tolerance is the right amount? Where and how is it best applied? When do we dispense with the tolerance and start gathering up the pitchforks and torches instead? When does tolerance reduce harm, and when does tolerance increase it?

I went to a wedding in Sweden last weekend and can attest again to the salutary Obama Effect, by which I mean that our European brethren still appear to be very pleasantly relieved to find that we are not uniformly a nation of belligerent, fat, ignorant savages hell-bent on plunging the earth into a new Dark Ages, as many of them seem to have feared during the Bush years. How narrowly we avoided a President McCain-that very nearly happened!-and I for one would never regret one iota of my own efforts to see President Obama in office, if only for that worthy result. Really, I wonder if the Swedes would have even let us into their castles and whatnot to attend this very lovely, if freezing, wedding, if we hailed from the Real America of President McCain. I would probably have been too depressed to go, anyways.

Obviously this is not the only reason I’m glad that Mr. Obama is in office; I am a staunch supporter of our president, and he is behaving in exactly the manner in which I always expected him to behave, even though my own politics are well to the left of his. Is this because I have become an unprincipled “moderate”? A giver-away of the store to the ruthlessly “effective” Republicans? A “progressive in name only,” or, I suppose, PINO? No. It is because our president is the rare man who fully demonstrates the bedrock liberal principles of tolerance and fair play.

Much as I disagree with Republicans in general over practically any issue you care to name, it cannot be denied that there is something in it when they are yipping against the hypocrisy of “liberal elites” who claim to be open-minded and tolerant but only extend that tolerance toward those with whom they already agree (cf. the many Daily Kos diaries demanding that the Teabaggers emigrate, in a mirror display of Redstate demands that we treacherous liberals all move to Canada during the Bush years). There is a real and implacable bind, here. If the thing you want most in this world is personal freedom and equality (“liberty and justice for all,” as in really, literally that), if you believe that each person should be in control of his or her own destiny, then that conviction will lay a heavy burden on you, the kind of burden that requires, for example, that the ACLU defend even the Ku Klux Klan’s right to free speech. If their commitment to free speech didn’t go all the way, it wouldn’t mean a thing.

President Obama is a steadfast, indeed an obdurate follower of pragmatic moralists from Christ to Niebuhr, and, as I was saying, a man who has consistently demonstrated liberal principles. By “demonstrating liberal principles” I do not here mean becoming shriekingly incensed at the Teabaggers. I mean demonstrating liberal principles by showing tolerance to those who cannot bear the sight of you, and inviting them to join in a constructive dialogue, as evidenced, for example, by the health care talks the President had with the Republicans in Baltimore last January. That is real tolerance-tolerance toward those who not only disagree with your every syllable, but who would also quite obviously prefer to see you thrown in front of a speeding train. That is tolerance with teeth. Because in exchange for that broadminded, patient foray into the lion’s den, the president got quite a lot in return, even aside from his enviable and apparently permanent spot on the moral high ground.

If you want to claim to be tolerant, then you are bound by that conviction to tolerate pretty much everyone, a group that will include hedge fund managers, George W. Bush, Justin Bieber, and all your exes.

At some point, though, you’ll snap, and not be able to tolerate something. Something will transgress too far against other deeply-held values, something that really impinges on the freedoms of others, or on your own. I guess this is a matter of weighing out which outcome is more important to you, and acting on it; necessarily a complex calculation, and one easy to get wrong. Some people and things really do just need to be stopped (thinking of that terrible Children of God business); the line in the sand is drawn in a different place for everyone. But usually, for the most part, I suspect you gain more from letting people be.

This is not to say in the slightest that you ought to agree with every Tom, Dick and Harry, or become a doormat. You might simply ask to talk to those with whom you disagree, and find out why they think what they think, an exercise which can be surprisingly illuminating, and stimulating; you can offer your own reasons for believing the opposite way. One may be able to persuade the other, or else you can “agree to disagree.” This is of course not possible or even desirable with everyone, but it is almost always a good idea to try, for a thousand reasons.

For one thing, it’s good for your own blood pressure to internalize the real reality, which is that some people are always going to have crazy ideas, and that is okay, that is their right. “They get to fuck up,” as my old friend Alison used to say (an AA-derived philosophy, I believe.) Plus, it sometimes turns out that you yourself are the one who has fucked up! This has happened often enough to me, at least, that self-doubt, together with a healthy regard for conflicting opinion, turns out to have a huge value. Anyway, it is marvelously liberating to know and accept that some will always disagree with you absolutely, unequivocally; that some are so out-there that they are no longer capable of a civilized conversation; and finally, that your own principles and ideas can only be strengthened by the give and take of discourse.

It is a wonderful thing, too, the rarest of pleasures, to persuade someone who didn’t agree with you before, to agree with you now.

Sadly, I cannot claim to be as great of a success in the tolerance department as my husband, who is an absolute marvel, pretty much an Obama-level tolerator. When our elderly neighbor “Mr. B.” told us how he was hoping that a black burglar would break into his house so that he, “Mr. B.”, could shoot that putative burglar with a gun (!) it was all I could do to stagger back into my house without screaming. Whereas my husband just nodded noncommittally and said, “Mmhmm,” raising just half an eyebrow at me on our way inside, and thoughtfully adding later that he doesn’t believe “Mr. B”. to be even marginally capable of doing any such thing. People talk a lot of nonsense, he says.

All this came to mind last weekend in the course of studying the responses to The Awl’s resident “Ask a Republican.” The Republican in question got off on the wrong foot a bit by attempting the waggish, hyperbolic tone that characterizes quite a lot of the writing in these pages (an extremely difficult style to handle at all well). He seemed possibly the wrong Republican to be Asking. But here, perhaps, is an opportunity to forgo the temptation to trade insults, a practice that never reflects well on either side. There is a real benefit to hashing these things out in a friendly and serious way.

Maria Bustillos is the author of Dorkismo: The Macho of the Dork and

Act Like a Gentleman, Think Like a Woman.