It is time to move beyond tolerating,

TOLERANCE is a low horizon. It is often held up as a virtue which Australians should display to accommodate the nation’s diversity of human experiences. But it does not lead us towards our richest flourishing, and it is not magnanimous.

In recent years, the word has frequently appeared in public conversations and policies about diversity and multiculturalism. In these contexts use of the word ‘tolerance’ is mostly intended to communicate notions of non-judgmental acceptance. As a result of being used publicly and frequently in this way, its meaning may have shifted.

It is used in many other contexts without positive intentions and so its meaning of putting up with but not enjoying continues to be reinforced

If as individuals and a nation we wish to flourish most richly in our diversity, we need generous public language to assist us — not begrudging language thinly draped with an intended meaning.

Begrudging language will elicit begrudging.

Generous language will elicit generosity.

Words are symbols and we respond to the meanings they carry both conceptually and emotionally.

And the emotional response is often stronger. Language matters. It primes us.

Most human beings do not want to be tolerated. They want to be known. To be held with positivity in the mind of the person they are interacting with. To be seen by that person for who they are; for what hurts them, what expands them, what they have to give and to share.

Putting up with, but not enjoying, another person brings diminishment and dissonance.

There might be nothing overtly wrong in the behaviours going back and forth, but two people are nevertheless being diminished. And usually, they both know it. Or they feel it.

And the arising dissonance does harm — to relationship, to mental health, to physical health.

The use of the word “tolerance” in diversity conversations gives a message that this diminishment is somehow OK. It’s not.

Australia and Australians can do much better than tolerance.

We can preference public and private language in ways which give us higher horizons — and help us reach them.

What would serve us better than “tolerance”? Some of it we already see — empathy, compassion, openness, shared humanity, acceptance, transformation.

But there is much, more rarely seen in public — kindness, love, forgiveness, generosity, grace. The latter are long eschewed in public language. Their emotive power is hard to box and contain.

But the power of positive emotion is exactly what is needed in Australia’s diversity