The best we can hope for is tolerance

17 February 2007

John Gray, Britain’s foremost political philosopher, says that Ruth Kelly’s new campaign against Islamic extremism is doomed because it exaggerates the scope for cohesion in our fragmented modern world

In any imaginable society we will have to put up with many things we reject as false or bad. When society is as plural as it is today, nearly everyone will find much in it that is distasteful and even hateful. In these circumstances, the virtue of tolerance is needed more than ever. Yet curiously it has fallen into disrepute and been replaced by a cult of rights, with the result that conflicts of values are now fought out as competing legal claims. The trouble is that serious differences are rarely resolved by such procedures. If people have very different beliefs about the good life, they are likely also to have different views of human rights. Rights are far from being as easily defined as contemporary liberals like to think, and — as when free expression collides with protection from hate speech — they quite often conflict with one another. Turning moral conflicts into clashes of rights makes them even harder to resolve, for it prevents compromise. The end-result of this sort of legalism can be seen in America, where entrenching a constitutional right to abortion has not stopped doctors who perform it from facing death at the hands of ‘right-to-life’ fundamentalists.

If liberals have given up on toleration in favour of the adjudication of rights, it is probably because history has not turned out as they expected. Most have held to a teleological view of human development, believing that in the long run a society of the sort they wanted would come into being as a by-product of the free expression of ideas. The actual course of events has come as a terrible shock. Even in societies where expression is most free, there is nothing resembling agreement. Religion — which many contemporary liberals have come to see as an evil — has not disappeared, but grown stronger. There has been no movement towards consensus — liberal or otherwise. The idea that the practice of toleration leads to a convergence of values seems more and more like whistling in the dark. This may be the source of the strident, bullying tone many secular liberals adopt when they address religious believers. Their own faith in progress is on the line, and they are afraid of losing their nerve.