How many parents, for example, tolerate their son- or daughter-in-law, and disguise their distaste for him or her, sometimes for decades at a time? Tolerance is (or ought to be) a discipline and perhaps a habit of the heart, but not an ideology.
One always hesitates to say the obvious, but as George Orwell remarked, it is the obvious that intellectuals are most inclined to ignore. There is a good reason for this: there is hardly any point in being an intellectual if you see only what is obvious. An intellectual, almost by definition, is a person who sees, or claims to see, what others do not see, an alternative to which is to be blind to what others do see. It is true that appearances are sometimes deceptive, but more often than not they are very instructive.
Now it seems obvious to me that the notion of tolerance (the queen of the modern virtues, indeed the sole distinctly modern virtue) implies the existence of dislike or disapproval, for surely everyone is able to tolerate what he likes, approves of or is utterly indifferent to. A person who is too inclined to disapprove is censorious, not intolerant; and many a censorious person is in practice tolerant, if only because he has no choice in the matter. How many parents, for example, tolerate their son- or daughter-in-law, and disguise their distaste for him or her, sometimes for decades at a time? Tolerance is (or ought to be) a discipline and perhaps a habit of the heart, but not an ideology.
A tolerant person is one who disapproves of someone or something but does not act as if his disapproval were all that counted in the determination of his conduct towards whomever or whatever he disapproves of. To live and let live is not to approve—much less, in modern parlance to “celebrate”—all ways of life as if there were nothing to choose between them, or to be glad that some people have adopted a morally reprehensible or disgusting way of conducting themselves. Tolerance, moreover, should not be infinite: for to find nothing intolerable is to accept everything, including the worst evils, and is the ultimate form of pusillanimity. It is the refusal ever to confront anything; toleration can be a vice as well as a virtue. Where to place the boundary between the tolerable and the intolerable is, of course, a matter of judgment, and judgment is always fallible, for there is no hard-and-fast rule to help us decide every case, many cases being marginal. What is tolerable in one circumstance is often intolerable in another.
Every scribbler must be secretly relieved that there is no shortage, and never will be a shortage, of the intolerable in this world: for while I do not claim that the intolerable is the only subject worth writing about, literature would be much impoverished without it. What would Richard III be like, for example, if it reflected the real Richard III as the Richard III Society says he was. Somehow the following lines are not as compelling as the original:
“I, that am curtailed of fair proportion,Cheated of feature by dissembling Nature,Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,And that so lamely and unfashionable.
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them—Why I, in this weak piping time of peace. Have no delight to pass away the time,Unless to spy my shadow in the sun And descant on promoting social justice. And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover To entertain these fair well-spoken days, I am determined to prove a righteous king And hate the idle pleasures of these days.”
Economic plans have I laid, social reforms,By good administration, redistributive taxation,To reconcile the social classes with one another,While promoting trade and economic growth.
Such a Richard III would no doubt have been a much better man that Shakespeare’s moral monster, but I doubt that a play about him would long have stayed in the repertoire.
My attitude to the intolerable, then, is akin to my attitude to suffering: each individual instance of it is to be eliminated as far as possible, while being under no illusion that, in the abstract, suffering and the intolerable are not an inevitable concomitant of Man’s earthly existence. Indeed, the attempt to reduce them is what gives many people their sense of purpose in life: a utopia in which “the idle pleasures of these days” are all there were to life would bore them, and they would soon start to make trouble. Man is a problem-creating animal.
