Two Cheers for Tolerance: E. M. Forster's Ironic Liberalism and the Indirections of Style

Tolerance is a defining value of liberalism, but it is also a nagging vulnerability and an embarrassment, as critics and defenders of liberalism both recognize. Liberals call tolerance "elusive," "difficult," "unstable," "contradictory," and even "impossible," but they nevertheless regard toleration as an indispensable practice not only for believers in the values of self-creation and pluralism but also for citizens of whatever persuasion in a world of cultural, moral, and ideological variety.¹ Many of its advocates acknowledge its flaws—for example, that tolerance can be condescending, hypocritical, and insufficiently ambitious in pursuit of justice and equality—but the only thing worse, they agree, is intolerance. As John Horton observes, "Generally, to be the object of tolerance is a welcome improvement on being the object of intolerance, but typically people do not wish themselves or their actions to be the object of either."² Tolerance involves acceptance, sometimes grudging, of beliefs, values, and practices with which one disagrees or of which one disapproves, and that may understandably be felt as something less than the full recognition and equal treatment that dignity and respect require. David Heyd notes that tolerance is "'compressed' between two spheres: phenomena that by no means should be tolerated (like cruelty and murder) and phenomena that should not be objected to in the first place (like gender or racial identity)."³ Both poles here are variable and contestable, however. What counts as intolerable "cruelty" is historically and culturally contingent, as are the practices and identities to which a liberal society thinks it unjust and unfair to deny full, equal recognition. Part of the difficulty here, as Michael Walzer points out, is that "justice is a human construction, and it is doubtful that it can be made in only one way."⁴ As what Judith Shklar calls "the sense of injustice" is contested and a liberal society changes its understanding of the claims of justice, so too will it redefine where tolerance is called for and where mere toleration is not tolerable.⁵

A deeper problem, however, as many liberals acknowledge, is that tolerance may pretend to a neutrality that it does not have. Horton notes that "tolerance is not a virtue that stands altogether outside the moral and political conflicts it often seeks to mediate."⁶ The values that guide it—for example, respect for individual self-direction, appreciation of variety, or skepticism about absolutes—may not be shared (and probably aren't) by the groups one may decide to tolerate (or not, if its values are sufficiently illiberal). Building on the criticism that tolerance is not neutral, foes of liberalism argue that tolerance is not benign, benevolent, and apolitical but is a ruse of power. Wendy Brown argues, for example, that "tolerance as a political practice is always conferred by the dominant" and is a way of containing and regulating those it marginalizes.⁷ By adopting a posture of open-minded acceptance of different viewpoints, according to this line of criticism, democratic tolerance seeks to disguise that it is an ideology allied to particular interests. Taking the position that it is beyond political disagreements is a strategy for protecting the prevailing order of things. Hence Herbert Marcuse's call to "fight against an ideology of tolerance which, in reality, favors and fortifies the conservation of the status quo of inequality and discrimination."⁸ According to this critique, the seeming neutrality of tolerance, by attempting to defuse conflict and deflect challenges to the dominant order, thereby blocks changes needed to remedy injustices and to bring about conditions of greater equality and more fulfilling community.⁹

Despite all of these problems and contradictions, tolerance still has defenders because it seems at the very least a practical necessity for living side by side. As Isaiah Berlin observes: "In a world in which human rights were never trampled on, and men [and women] did not persecute each other for what they believed or what they were, the cause of toleration would not need to be defended. This, however, is not our world."¹⁰ Brown herself acknowledges that "to...