It was George Bernard Shaw who famously said” The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
Recent events seem to prove him right. In India, Anna Hazare, a Gandhian activist, decided that the government was not doing enough to curb corruption in public life and that he would force a decision by embarking on a fast unto death till they did. It was not by any measure a reasonable approach. Except it did arouse a citizenry from its torpor and the media soon turned it into a major satyagraha movement with large number of public spirited citizens lining up to support and continue his fast. And this unreasonable act did lead to the prime minister Manmohan Singh to accept setting up a parliamentary committee to introduce a bill for an ombudsman for public servants. But this same approach can also lead to completely opposite results. Consider the U.S.
In the U.S, the last ten months have seen an outpouring of anger at the rising deficits and the tea partiers have managed to route this outrage into the election of at least 80-90 republican members of the house. These members in the last few days managed, by their unbridled intransigence, to force a reduction in spending of $ 39 billion for this year. Emboldened by this success, they now intend to hold the country to ransom on the critical issue of raising the debt ceiling.
In both these cases, it really were the unreasonable men who managed to prod forward action where previous efforts to persuade and cajole had failed. The question is can this be repeated for all critical issues or is it simply a firework that can only be fired once? Is there a moral framework which says that this radical approach to negotiation of critical issues is permissible in one area and not another? Satygraha for clean public life is admirable but shutting down the government because the ruling party will not follow your philosophical ideas is not?
In the U.S the conservatives have learned how to use the intransgience of a small group of their members in an effective ploy to essentially get their way even though the majority does not support them. The liberals on the other hand tend to feel that they have been rolled over and are still at their wits end to decipher and develop a strategy to counter the ransom - my way or highway- approach of the conservatives.
"Perhaps the real problem isn’t a liberal weakness", argues columnist and social activist Sally Kohn, “It’s something liberals have proudly always seen as a strength — their deep-seated dedication to tolerance. In any given fight, tolerance is benevolent, while intolerance gets in the good punches. Tolerance plays by the rules, while intolerance fights dirty. The result is round after round of knockouts against liberals who think they’re high and mighty for being open-minded but who, politically and ideologically, are simply suckers.”
Social science research has long dissected the differences between liberals and conservatives. Liberals supposedly have better sex, but conservatives are happier. Liberals are more creative; conservatives more trustworthy. And, since the 1930s, political psychologists have argued that liberals are more tolerant. Specifically, those who hold liberal political views are more likely to be open-minded, flexible and interested in new ideas and experiences, while those who hold conservative political views are more likely to be closed-minded, conformist and resistant to change. As recently as 2008, New York University political psychologist John Jost and his colleagues confirmed statistically significant personality differences connected to political leanings. Brain-imaging studies have even suggested that conservative brains are hard-wired for fear, while the part of the brain that tolerates uncertainty is bigger in liberal heads. These studies found consistent and converging evidence that personality differences between liberals and conservatives are robust, replicable, and behaviorally significant, especially with respect to social (vs. economic) dimensions of ideology. "In general, liberals are more open-minded, creative, curious, and novelty seeking, whereas conservatives are more orderly, conventional, and better organized."
Political tolerance is supposed to be essential to the great democratic experiment both in India and the United States. As Thomas Jefferson put it in his first inaugural address, those who might wish to dissolve the newly established union should be left “undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”
But some errors, by their nature, undermine reason.
Writing in 1945, philosopher Karl Popper called this the “paradox of tolerance” — that unlimited tolerance leads to the disappearance of tolerance altogether. “Unlimited tolerance” he said, “ must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”
Of course Popper is not arguing that we should suppress the utterance of all intolerant philosophies. But we should be able to counter them by argument and keep them in check by public opinion. We should, however, in the final analysis claim the right to suppress intolerant philosophies, if necessary even by force, for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to ever meet us on the level of rational argument. Instead they may direct their followers to not listen to rational argument, and teach them instead to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
“We should therefore claim,” he continues, “ in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
To put the current political climate in Popper’s terms, if liberals are not willing to defend against the rigid demands of their political opponents, who are emboldened by their own unwavering opinions, their full range of open-minded positions will be destroyed. Liberals will be ultimately neutered by their own tolerance.
Thomas R. West notes that tolerance is often used in a pejorative way to make excuses for inequalities in power. West makes the same critique of negotiation: When fundamental rights and core values are on the table, just talking about negotiating means you’ve already lost. Conservative television evangelist Pat Robertson once said, “I have a zero tolerance for sanctimonious morons who try to scare people.”
Liberals can keep patting ourselves on the back for standing tall and tolerant while conservatives land blow after blow, but taking the high road of civil compromise will feel less and less noble as decades of vital government programs pile up in bloodied heaps on the ground. In this context, liberals will look increasingly less like open-minded statesmen and more like sanctimonious morons.
There is a time for tolerance and compromise, and a time to fight.
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