LIVE AND LET LOATHE
Incest and other harmless perversions should be tolerated, says Felipe Fernandez-Artnesto
HAS this country ever been less tolerant? I doubt it. On the one hand are those miser- able wretches facing the 'zero tolerance' of New Labour: the squeegee touts, travellers, fox-hunters, beggars, vagrants, drug-takers, conservatives. When it dare not prosecute these recreants, the government tries to excite a climate of disapproval against them. And as for the allegedly intolerable Conservatives, they won't even tolerate a front-bench spokesman who says he wants to oppose homophobic bullying in schools. 'Social indifference', which used to be a guarantee of peace, is now condemned as an antisocial activity. A scale of values with liberty at the top is, says the Prime Minis- ter, 'libertarian nonsense masquerading as freedom'.
It is becoming clear that long experience of toleration has made the British compla- cent. They do not realise how fragile their ancient disposition may be. Let us therefore restate the case. Toleration is good, not just for the individuals or minorities who are outside the social mainstream, but for soci- ety. Tolerance liberates individual autono- my, enables citizens to feel fulfilled, heads off alienation and frustration. A dollop of tolerance helps keep the peace.
That is the principle, though it is hard to apply. Everyone claims to be in favour of toleration, yet everyone acknowledges that some things should not be tolerated. And groups with conflicting ethics or cultures have irreconcilable views about where the limits should be fixed. As multiculturalism multiplies the frontiers of toleration, the problems get worse. A plural society such as ours makes toleration both more necessary and more elusive.
Tolerance is riven by paradox: how can you think it right to tolerate something you think is wrong? When our tolerance snaps, the state has to take responsibility. It is 'an issue' only when conflict puts it to the test. Every intervention by the state creates dis- satisfied constituencies. Tolerance for Orange Order marchers or republican gun-toters is not neutral; nor is toleration of racists on the streets or gay activists in schools. Just by being tolerant, the state seems to take sides. Logically, everyone should want maximum toleration because everyone can benefit from it. But it is prac- tically impossible to convince intolerant people of the virtues of tolerance. You cannot make them understand that what you do unto others, others, when they get power, may do unto you. Whenever people feel revulsion from some practice or take offence at some phrase, they start a cam- paign to ban it.
There are three critical areas where we seem unable to agree what the limits of tol- eration should be: freedom of expression, freedom of association, and freedom to choose a way of life outside the dominant culture. In deciding what to ban, we cannot appeal to the old cop-out criterion: 'Only what is harmful'. Harm, too often, is in the eye of the beholder. Some gains are insepa- rable from some pain. We cannot leave the problem to democracy, because democracy is part of the problem: confidence in the wisdom of the majority is chilling to those of us who belong to minorities. In Blair's Britain, the way things are going, we could end up with no security outside the focus groups. We cannot fix the limits of tolera- tion by 'social consensus' because there is no social consensus, or demand adherence to 'core values' or 'basic tenets' that fellow citizens reject.
We ought to recoil from Tony Blair's solution — a morally committed state and officially licensed virtues — because one man's morality is another man's poison. A morally impartial state is a condition of success in modern, plural, secular life. Nor can we expect intolerance to wither away through social change. In theory, the increasing diversity — indeed, the atomisa- tion — of society might detach people from traditional tribal loyalties and mutual hatreds. But such a development would result in a dystopia of alienated individu- als, unable to sustain or reproduce a worth- while culture.
There is only one decent answer to the problem of toleration: to let pragmatism kick in and tackle it piecemeal. In each case, in the interests of freedom we should err on the tolerant side. Hatred is horrible. But it might be wise to license a right to live and let loathe. Libel is vicious. But we have learnt, I hope, to value freedom of speech for journalists, rather than millionaires' free- dom to cheat. Now that some sexual devian- cy is government-approved, we could liberate others: incest is an essentially harm- less perversion which it is ridiculous to restrain by law. If we are serious about appreciating cultural diversity and individual freedom, we should stop demanding confor- mity to 'the basic tenets of British society'. If we are confident about our values, we must defend them in open competition with the rivals we hate or fear.
In the interests, for instance, of one kind of tolerance — in favour of a minority culture — well-intentioned meddlers demand tough- ened blasphemy Laws. It would be more equi- table to abolish the blasphemy laws entirely. When you maximise freedom for pornogra- phers, you infringe decent sensibilities. But sensibilities are worthily martyred in the cause of freedom. We limit freedom for asso- ciations which defy mainstream values which exclude women or blacks or gays. We should be wary lest in a less benign climate the same exemptions could extend to Scien- tologists, say, or synagogues or 'the forces of conservatism'. Even people who claim to love plurality and multiculturalism advocate selec- tively the politics of the taxi-cab. Child betrothal? Polygamy? Fundamentalist schools? They can't do that 'ere. People of my acquaintance, who are zealous to keep drugs banned on the grounds that they diminish the user's reason and responsibility, happily forfeit their own self-control in hyped-up emotion at Holy Trinity, Bromp- ton, or juiced-up evenings at El Vino. Yet they would be outraged if the law tried to restrain them from these forms of self-harm.
A free society is secure precisely because it embraces groups who hate each other: any privilege conceded to intolerance fuels resentment and makes conflict more likely. When threatened by clashes of ethics and cultures, we should look for a solution in the realm not of the state but of human rela- tionships. Tolerance is best treated as a problem of human psychology, even of human nature, rather than of politics. The state should, perhaps, have a role in arbi- trating between mutually intolerant groups, but no right to intervene on behalf of some rather than others. The law should not endorse anybody's intolerance: not any minority's, but not the majority's either. The limits of toleration are best left loose, unfixed by the state, to be negotiated in freedom rather than imposed by force.
The author presents Analysis on toleration on Radio Four at 9.30 p.m. on 12 December.
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