Beyond Toleration
THERE is no doubt that Political Liberalism is responsible for steering the Western world away from the path of bitter sectarian conflicts, tyranny and civil war and into the path of sustainable political stability and democracy. Orchestrated by Locke and Montesquieu, crystallized politically by America’s Founding Fathers, and culminated philosophically by John Rawls, Political Liberalism provided the only viable answer to the question on how to create peaceful societies in a world deeply divided by conflicting world-views[1].
This answer, as I have argued in several previous posts, elegantly solved the above dilemma by erecting a wall between the private and political sphere of individuals. This separation between private and public spaces which now seems natural to us is actually relatively new in human political history. Most political systems before our modern Liberal State found their source of legitimacy in a common world-view shared by all of society’s participants. On the contrary, faced with the irresoluble and bloody separation between Catholics and Protestants, the Liberal State had to grapple with a new problem: how to create a stable and legitimate State while giving up on the effort of enforcing a common world-view to its inhabitants.
Before Political Liberalism, a State could only achieve stability when a particular world-view managed to assert itself above others, either by crushing or pursuing competing world-views or in the best cases by actually convincing the vast majority of the population of its real appeal. Political Liberalism provided an alternative to this scheme. The backbone of this alternative was the introduction of the concept of Toleration. Fast forward to the Twentieth Century and we find Rawls’ version of Political Liberalism expanding Toleration to every aspect of human life while downsizing the role of political discussion to the establishment of a framework that is neutral between controversial and conflicting world-views. In exchange for political stability, we mutually agreed to closet our world-views and agreed to tolerate those of others as long as these remained closeted too.
As successful as Political Liberalism has proven to be, its sustainability looks increasingly uncertain with the advent of the globalized and digitally-interconnected era. The internet together with multiple global communication instruments has created a space where vastly diverging world-views can increasingly challenge and clash with each other. Political Liberalism’s effort to keep world-views and moral outcomes secluded as de-politicized private matters looks increasingly untenable. Heated debate on moral, religious and epistemological issues is on the rise and the outcome of these discussions is indeed having vast political implications. Consider for instance the discussions regarding abortion, homosexual rights, the role of religion in politics or the arguments over evolution and creationism. Is tolerance really sustainable between the opposing sides of each one of these debates when one can easily voice its particular preference to the world via the web? For Toleration to work, a certain level of mutual avoidance had to exist between opposing parties. This mutual avoidance has been destroyed by the internet and other global communication tools. If Toleration becomes impracticable (as I think it has), so does Political Liberalism. The real question then is what are the alternatives?
The obvious alternative to Political Liberalism is an all-encompassing political structure that embraces and promotes a particular and unique world-view and eschews tolerance. This is basically a return to pre-Liberalism status but with global ambitions given our new interconnected reality. Viewing the world from this perspective, some argue that we are currently in the middle of a “clash of civilizations” or a final race between diverging world-views looking to become the unique, dominant and global “way of life”.
This, of course, is not my reading of the situation. I do agree that we are testing the limits of Toleration as a viable solution, but I disagree that the alternative is to drop it and assert a particular world-view as the global way forward. The alternative, as I have emphasized in older postings, is to go beyond Toleration. What I mean by this is the following: the fact that Toleration is struggling to contain the mounting clash between competing world views does not speak badly of Toleration per se; it speaks badly of our obstinate unwillingness to discuss our own world-views. In other words, the root of the problem is not Toleration as a weak strategy to regulate diverging world-views; the root of the problem is that we all assumed from the get-go that no compromise or fruitful dialogue could be established between diverging world-views.
As such, the root of this political conundrum is purely epistemological: it resides in our stubborn conviction that our world-view is the one that truly gets the world as it really is, while that of others is erroneous. From this starting point, no dialogue is possible; either you privatize world-views and tolerate otherness for the sake of political stability — as Political Liberalism suggested — or you go full force seeking to impose your own. Yet there is hope for an alternative solution. This alternative solution tackles the epistemological root of the problem: our conviction that our sets of religious, moral and philosophical beliefs are the ones that get the world as it really is. If we manage to abandon this conviction and stop viewing our own world-views as true representations of reality then a genuine opportunity to go beyond Toleration emerges.
As I have argued in multiple posts, I believe Pragmatism provides the conceptual ammunition to replace certainty by ongoing open dialogue. Pragmatism offers a way to stop viewing our own beliefs as true representations of what reality really is and instead start viewing them as pragmatic responses designed to cope with our given environment. From such a perspective we no longer “tolerate” others’ beliefs: by viewing world-views as contingent and pragmatic answers to the question on how should one live we abandon the inflexible starting point that Toleration aimed to circumvent and we reestablish dialogue among competing world-views, effectively going beyond Toleration and towards an ongoing open conversation. A pragmatic understanding of what beliefs and world-views are — not true representations of the world but instruments to cope with our given reality — puts us all on a level playing field where dialogue among conflicting ways of life can be established.
But there is more. It is easy to dismiss the above argument as philosophical utopia as in reality no one is actually willing to yield on its own beloved world-views. This is true but it is also true that this attitude is changing rapidly. And here is where the advent of the internet plays a key role, one very different than the one I described a few paragraphs ago. This other role is the one of breeding a generation of individuals for whom the exposure to a variety of ways to live life is common currency. In the world of Political Liberalism and Toleration, otherness was an annoyance, an impediment that we needed to deal with in order to go on with our own lives. Quite differently, in our interconnected world, otherness is front and center. This complete awareness and constant encounter with alterity is making us increasingly conscious that our own world-view is just one among a variety of ways we have to carry on with our existence. As such, this increasing consciousness of alterity renders claims of certainty suspicious while laying the ground for Pragmatism to bloom. And as this consciousness grows, so does my hope that we can move beyond Toleration and towards an ongoing open conversation.
[1] By “world-views” I mean the set of religious, moral and philosophical beliefs we all hold; this is equivalent to what Rawls called “comprehensive doctrines”
