The one way out of our stalemated culture wars

Rediscovering the trick to living side-by-side with people whose views we find truly repellent.

Remember tolerance?

The word feels dated, doesn’t it? It’s the kind of words boomer liberals threw around 40 years ago because they didn’t know any better. Younger people discarded long ago in favor of more radical alternatives. Tolerance feels half-assed, timorous, incomplete. Those of us on left these days know our job is to embrace difference, to celebrate diversity wholeheartedly, not tolerate it grudgingly.

Tolerance is tricky as a concept, and trickier still as a virtue.

To tolerate is to accept a discontinuity between our private judgment and our public response. To tolerate something is to be opposed to it privately but neutral about it publicly. It’s to choose not to act in accordance with your moral judgment. Not to be true to yourself. What kind of a virtue is that?

To answer that question, it helps to go back to where the idea started — or rather when the idea started: all the way back in the middle of the 17th century. By then, Europeans had spent well over a hundred years slaughtering one another in huge numbers over questions that, to us today, look ludicrously petty. Questions like whether the communion wafer actually transubstantiates into the body of Christ when consacrated, or whether the wafer merely symbolize the body of Christ.

Catholics and Protestants had entrenched views on such things, views they took to be rooted in scripture and aligned with profound truths revealed directly by God.

The scriptures were plain. So plain that error carried a strong whiff of Satanic influence. How else to account for people’s insistence on views that were plainly heretical?

When you’re convinced you’re defending God in his fight with the actual, literal Devil, choosing to do nothing about error is no virtue. It’s the opposite of virtue.

It took the obscene bloodbath historians now call the Thirty Years’ War for Europeans to begin, reluctantly, to start to consider the alternatives. It took the violent death of 1 in 5 Germans for the radical thought to begin to suggest itself: maybe this fight isn’t worth it. Maybe we can continue to hate them without organizing our lives around trying to kill them.

That’s how tolerance first arose, as a regrettable compromise with a profoundly distasteful reality. It was only later that historians would piece together that places that more tolerant places, like Holland, later grew richer faster than places that were less tolerant, like Spain. And it was only much, much later that tolerance began to be viewed not just as a messy compromise with a recalcitrant reality but more as a positive civic virtue, a mark of civilization and sophistication, something good for its own sake.

Tolerance is an adaptive social response to polarization: a way of managing the tensions that arise when we have to share society with people we profoundly, fundamentally disagree with. It’s incredibly cognitively demanding, because it only works if we make an active choice not to fight things we’re privately convinced are truly evil. That’s hard. It’s almost inhuman. Because there isn’t anything more human than wanting to eradicate evil.

And that’s just as true today as it was 400 years ago.

Sharing our society peaceably side-by-side with people who think slavery taught enslaved people valuable life skills feels intolerable. Doesn’t it? Intuition screams to us that that kind of ideology ought to be stamped out. Trucking with it feels like an abdication of virtue, doesn’t it? Slavery is so abhorrent, making excuses for it feels, well, almost satanic, doesn’t it?

It does! To me at least. But that’s precisely why tolerance, real tolerance, is always so hard. Because tolerance is only useful as a concept when the difference you’re being called on to tolerate cuts down to the moral bone, to the center of your conception of what it means to be a good person. Tolerance demands that we relativize the values that feel most absolute to us.

Which is why calls to “celebrate diversity” and “embracing difference” are such an inadequate replacement for the virtue of tolerance. You want to celebrate the diversity of views about whether slavery had upsides? No! It’s crazy to ask people to celebrate views they see as truly evil. Only evil people embrace evil views. But good people might, reluctantly, come around to tolerating evil views, if only because the alternative is so much worse.

This view is, I recognize, wildly at odds with the times. Today’s social media echo chambers, reinforce our intolerances as a matter of course. The internet of 2023 rewards absolutism. The sophisticated cognitive task tolerance involves goes directly against the grain of a technology that showers dopamine on the intolerant.

To state the painfully obvious, rewarding intolerance is dangerous. It leads to violence. It always has, and always will. Worse, it leads to violent stalemates, stalemates we’ve only ever managed to climb out of through tolerance.

Which is why I’m convinced tolerance is an old idea whose time will come again.

We have no choice but to live side by side with people whose views we find not just wrong but truly abhorrent. Those people, in turn, find our views not just wrong but truly abhorrent. Fantasizing about what society would be like if they didn’t exist is tempting, but incredibly dangerous. It was Catholic fantasies about a world rid of Protestants that led to half the massacres in the Thirty Years’ War…and Protestant fantasies about a world rid of Catholics that led to the other half.

Nobody I know wants to live in a society where some people think slavery had its good sides, drag queens read kids stories in libraries to groom them, and Barbie is a plot to indoctrinate our girls. Then again, the people who think that way are exactly as appalled as we are about having to live in a society where Southern heritage is denigrated, sexual deviance is celebrated and men are systematically emasculated. In our more sober moments, we realize that the divide is here to stay.

Once we accept that, we grasp that our only real choice is between unending war and tolerance. We should just thank our lucky stars that in our case war means merely culture war, rather than the kind that leaves millions dead.

Sooner or later, the culture war will have its Westphalia moment: the moment when we realize the stalemate is permanent and continuing to fight is entirely futile. When we finally accept we cannot eradicate error, we’ll agree to tolerate it, to work out a modus vivendi with it that stanches the bleed. It can’t come soon enough.