RYSZARD LEGUTKO
The Trouble with Toleration
There is something sacrosanct about toleration in modern political folk–
lore: Without much exaggeration, it can be said that the triumph of lib–
eralism has elevated this category into the ultimate and almost the only
generally acceptable litmus test of morality. At the very least, no other
single category - not justice, not equality, not even freedom - has won
such wide moral support in the Western world. What the radical philoso–
pher Robert Paul Wolff wrote almost thirty years ago would probably
arouse little controversy today: just as the basic value of a monarchy is
loyalty and that of a military dictatorship is honor, so the basic value of
the modern pluralist democracy is tolerance. The common wisdom per–
meating modern political theory has it that one can get away with any–
thing as long as one is tolerant. Intolerance is more
to
be feared than all
traditional sins. Human vices are deplorable, yet within the framework of
toleration they can be tamed and civilized. When this framework is miss–
ing, it is believed that our social and political life suffer from mortal dis–
ease.
Not surprisingly, the question of whether the concept of toleration
deserves such high esteem is rarely taken up today, although the limits of
toleration are recognized and few thinkers or politicians would profess a
doctrine of absolute toleration, a concept hardly defensible to any non–
doctrinaire mind. Yet whenever conflict arises and a new idea or move–
ment challenges the status quo, a call for toleration usually outweighs any
demand that such an idea or movement should justify its dissenting posi–
tion. In fact, to make such a demand is frequently interpreted precisely as
an expression of intolerance. Most of those who write about or defend
toleration ignore the cost, primarily intellectual and moral , of the puzzling
omnipotence which has been given to a category that originally occupied
a far more modest position. Logically, it would seem that since the con–
temporary Western world is much more human - "tolerant," one might
say - than Europe of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there
should be less need to talk about toleration. What has occurred within
our philosophical and moral outlook to keep us preoccupied with a con–
cept which we apparently have been very successful in implementing?
Stalin once said that the closer the socialist paradise, the more numerous
and more powerful its enemies. Can it be that a similar fear haunts the
