Sorry Justin. I want to talk about tolerance

TOLERANCE MEANS YOU DO NOT PERSECUTE; YOU DO NOT ABUSE.

While everyone else in the press has been combing over the Prime Minister’s Sunday rural corn-roast confrontation with a Facebook troll, I’ve been over here in the corner, feeling quietly annoyed over other words spoken by the PM earlier in the week — words for which he received a standing ovation. Trudeau was orating at Montreal’s Pride parade when he brought up the concept of tolerance.

In an unexpected twist, he’s against it! Or, rather, he asks rhetorically: “Can we stop talking about tolerance? We need to talk about acceptance. We need to talk about openness. We need to talk about friendship. We need to talk about love, not just tolerance.” The audience thought this was boffo, and one cannot get too angry at a politician for tailoring his words to the occasion before him. Pride events are not quite like any other situation, and they are a very natural place for political notions to be blended with more intimate and profound sentiments.

I am less than keen, however, on the contemptuous diminution of the concept of tolerance. A hundred years ago, this word was the ultimate shibboleth of advanced liberalism, a conscious paramount goal to which countless thinkers and artists and politicians dedicated themselves. It developed a sacred quality: it became the litmus test for all political and social regimes, and its opposite became the besetting human sin from which all other ills sprouted. That the word “tolerance” still has remarkable power is obvious, because even as Trudeau asks us to shut up about mere tolerance, he continues to castigate opponents specifically for intolerance.

As he already had ... at the corn roast! “This intolerance toward immigrants has no place in Canada,” he had said to the indignant yokel who had begun jeering at him. “This intolerance with regard to diversity.” One moment the PM is accusing a woman of intolerance, in the apparent expectation that a lightning bolt from heaven might punctuate his words, and only a little later he is hinting that tolerance is a feeble, shopworn idea to be superseded.

Look, I don’t like the parading of emotions by politicians anyway: it’s not to my taste. But for a Liberal to speak ill of tolerance is to square-dance in a minefield. “Tolerance” is shorthand for the existence of a society in which persons cohabit, trade and debate without killing one another over their differences — even those differences which are serious, fundamental and intractable. Tolerance truly is the signature accomplishment of our country, and of countries like ours: it is the crucial difference between nice places to live and the not-so-nice. To dismiss it is to abandon the old liberals’ confidence that familiarity between different groups and sects may in fact lead to love and acceptance — that it is the foundation for the organic growth of a neighbourliness that cannot be ordered up like a meal or created by fiat.

Tolerance represents a mutual compact to which the state itself is a party. And its minimalism is an important feature. Tolerance does not ask you to approve of gay people, or to like atheists, or to appreciate a jaunty Sikh turban, or to trust a redhead. It insists only that you treat them as humans and fellow citizens — equal to yourself in legal endowments and social entitlements, and most particularly in the right to be left alone.

Tolerance means you do not persecute; you do not abuse; you do not commit or threaten violence. It is a restriction on behaviour, above all, or, more broadly, on conduct: it is not a test of one’s disposition, private opinions or feelings.

Which is what Trudeau doesn’t like about it, if we take the meaning of his Montreal Pride speech at all seriously. The fashion now is for us to judge one another on the basis of opinions and feelings rather than conduct. When a politician says that tolerance is not enough — that we must talk of acceptance and friendship and love — it suggests that he is prepared to enforce a standard that has nothing to do with behaviour. His finger is poised on the power button of the X-ray, preparing to check whether your heart (or your summer job program’s heart) is in the right place.

But it seems to me that if you are content to demand mere tolerance from citizens, you have a chance of getting it: if you set out to rearrange their thoughts, you might damage the ideal of tolerance you incautiously scorned.

I DON’T LIKE THE PARADING OF EMOTIONS BY POLITICIANS. — COSH