Aggressive Tolerance

In recent decades, scores of politicians, public intellectuals, and scholars of a wide variety of political stripes have converged on tolerance as remedy to the numerous illiberal forces that operate both without and within liberal democratic orders. Such apparent consensus should no doubt be suspect, particularly when it crystallizes into the failure or refusal of the very practice that is being promoted. Indeed, as Wendy Brown argues in Regulating Aversion, to the degree that tolerance functions as a curative, it is something of a pharmakon: a remedy that is no simple remedy but also a toxin that has the capacity, first, to (re)produce as abject its own objects, and second, to provide justification for withholding tolerance in some circumstances, even to the point of rationalizing war and neocolonial occupation.

Brown’s critical engagement with tolerance by no means signals her rejection of it. To the contrary, she recognizes its value as a historical hedge against various forms of (de)politicized religious and ethnic violence, as well as a conceptual stratagem for defusing potential ugliness born of encounters with the unfamiliar. Her emphasis here lies, however, with understanding how tolerance not only averts but can also abet illiberal practices and dispositions within liberal democracies. Tolerance can enact and enforce social norms by marking its objects as deviant or marginal while affirming its practitioners as broad-minded and cosmopolitan, she argues. Moreover, the willingness to tolerate beliefs at odds with our own, as well as peoples who are unlike us, forms the dividing line between the civilized and the backward or barbaric. This is to say, first, that tolerance normalizes specific practices, behaviors, and beliefs — religious, cultural, sexual, and so on — by marking others as aberrant; and second, that tolerance normalizes itself as the most desirable means of engaging difference in liberal terms. Finally, it is to say that consensus around the virtues of tolerance normalizes liberalism more generally so that intolerance, or at least what is (mis)perceived as intolerance, is indelibly marked as a double threat — first, to whatever or whomever is refused toleration, and second, to the continued survival of liberalism per se.

Put another way, tolerance discourse has the capacity to discipline persons and politics alike. The latter capability is especially evident on the contemporary scene where, even on the most hotly contested of political questions, spokespersons all round converge on the language of tolerance, if not on the substance of a given issue. On policy questions regarding homosexuality, ranging from securing fringe benefits for workers’ unmarried partners to the legalization of same-sex marriage, the injunction to tolerate homosexuals is not limited to those who seek an end to anti-gay violence and state-sponsored and/or employer-sanctioned discrimination. It is also likely to come from religious fundamentalists and social conservatives who take cover in tolerance (“love the sinner, hate the sin”) as they work to stave off political calls for equality and justice. While tolerance may figure as a precursor to the achievement of political equality then, it may also prefigure equality’s opposite, allowing liberal democratic orders to avert their eyes from their own refusals of formal or informal equality. Either way, Brown points out, the contemporary call for tolerance traffics more in the realm of virtue than of law or justice. Like any politics of virtue, tolerance discourse participates in a politics of moral superiority, and thus of inequality, at least as much as rights or freedom.

Yet the rhetorical power born of repeated invocation does not, Brown contends, necessarily bring conceptual clarity to either the practice or the doctrine of toleration. To the contrary, both the objects and the significance of toleration have altered since it emerged in response to violence against religious dissenters in early modern Europe. Particularly in light of this shift, tolerance has become an “internally unharmonious term” (25). In the hands of contemporary multiculturalists, tolerance has been transmogrified from a practice once directed almost exclusively at ideas and individuals, dissenters individuated by virtue...