“The eclipse of tolerance as a liberal virtue”
“The eclipse of tolerance as a liberal virtue”
To agree to disagree enables a civil society to exist. The ability to understand the classic maxim that as per the hive, we live amongst those we may not like, we may not have many similarities, but we both agree and importantly disagree on multiple levels. This of course is natural – to disagree is a healthy maxim for a civilised society, as it acts as a tool to pursue balance. Disagreement is not the end, but a means to an end to what we all subconsciously desire – the balanced society; the balanced economy; the balanced life. We gain this by tasting a spoonful of the medicine of distaste and difference, swallowing with a metaphorical grimace but acknowledging the benefits it brings to us – we need to tolerate disagreement.
Parliament and the parliamentary process is a guttural process, a beautiful sewer. Natural, uncodified, and non-ideological, it is the body politic which acts as the bowels of the nation state. This sewer on the grandest scale syphons us, organises and arranges our differences until an imperfect perfection is excreted for the public, again, either to love or loathe, and the process continues. Every day, within every media outlet and forum, the criticism of our parliamentary process is one of outrage and media scorn, he postmodern quest for statutory destruction and bourgeoisie self-promotion, but the Parliamentary process continues to act as a lightning rod to intolerance.
Media classes and progressives alike, bash the uncodified constitution for not delivering the entitled equality. But the beauty of the legislature, its symbiosis with the executive, is that is rejects perfection or equality, for the natural acceptance of disagreement and tolerant, robust debate. The adage where there is muck there is brass could not be so pertinent as our differences are processed through an engine of constitutional tolerance, a garden of differences where the whole is far, far greater than the sum of its parts. Now, of course this is not perfect, and indeed it cannot be – party political dogma, three-line whips, egomaniac MPs with personal agendas and lobbying which blurs democratic accountability and clarity – but the forum of liberal democratic tolerance holds sway.
Via the parliamentary imperfections of a legislative, executive, judicial processes; classical liberalism allows, and even demands a difference of opinion, contrasting visions. Liberalism encourages our difference of opinions, and our systems of governance are constructed around this formula – we need difference for our democracy to flourish, we need the crucial oxygen of debate for our political eco system to thrive, and now survive? And yet there are some who disagree. There are ever growing sections within western political thinking – both progressive a populist – who reject our classical liberal institutions of debate and thought and strive to embrace dogma and introspective condemnation of disagreement.
John Stuart Mill describes those who attempt to suppress different voices as those who feel or engage in being infallible. What does Mill mean by this, to be infallible? The core of his thinking is the idea of a measure of our understanding of our innate natural weaknesses, opposed to our strengths. We are by nature creatures who are fallible to the whims of ourselves and to the insecurity of our system; a contemporary society that engages in competitive values, ranging from vanity to hedonism to the pursuit of wealth and power. Our contemporary world of global certainty of values, where all spectrums of society are incessantly correct, rubs directly against the classical of liberal social contract theory. Mill understands that within the confines of a modern Victorian society, with all its hypocrisies and opportunities, no doubt infallibility and individualism can become a byword for success and power – but what does this do for society? Or indeed, for the individual?
Mill argues that no opinion is infallible, we are infinite creatures of a pursuit of goodness and happiness, and this is not achieved via the dogma of certainty – opinion must not be suppressed, noting,
“First: the opinion which it is attempted to suppress by authority may be true. Those who desire to suppress it, of course deny its truth; but they are not infallible. They have no authority to decide the question for all mankind and exclude every other person from the means of judging. To refuse a hearing to an opinion because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility. Its condemnation may be allowed to rest on this common argument, not the worse for being common.” 1
Let's break this down. Mill looks to the authority of others who refrain from the notion of doubt and engage in certainty. Modern progressive, and importantly neoliberal society, acts as a metaphor for the certain – if we firstly construct on an economic level a certainty of neoclassical need - phone, flight, internet, artificial intelligence – this need, this certainty will and is omnipresent and omni potent. This certainty is manifested in the new political arena of the contemporary “silencing of discussion” - the no platforming and self-righteous damnation that is now so prevalent within a progressive society that represents infallibilityy. To know nothing; to be curious to our failures; to be economically insecure in the face of neoliberal onslaught; to not acknowledge the certainty of critical theory and the pursuit of utopia.
We face certainty in our modern society at every frontier. The rise of religion to challenge the uncertainty of our deaths; the politics of virtue that cannot be challenged by reflection or debate, and above, the contemporary progressive bourgeoisie who challenge the maim of a form of collective idealism and questioning. Within our institutions we now face a status quo that is linear – neoliberal and progressive in unison who, a Mill argues, “refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false.” 2
The evidence is clear. Populism rises at a time when people feel marginalised and unheard, unseen, and on an economic level, unemployed. These are a mass who do not feel certain, who do not feel recognised, who have adhered for generations to the classical liberal social contract and engaged in societal justice, only for neoliberalism and progressive certainty, to have been silenced, as Mill argues, by “an assumption of infallibility” - by a contemporary bourgeoisie whose currency is both the citadels of both economic and moral power.
They have not been tolerated. Post industrial society has diminished the Marxist principles of division of labour and economic equality. The new bourgeoisie are not the factory owners but the moral currency owners – those who decide what and who to tolerate. There has become a toleration lottery, where brokers of certainty offer out morality at a whim to whom, how, and what is decided through various mechanisms of unseen power. These new bourgeoise work in the shadows and yet create clarity of purpose and morality and deem, in clear absolutist terms, that the masses are wrong; the working classes, a new proletariat, indeed a condemned lumpenproletariat, who clung so officiously to the social contract through generations of political discourse and trade union representation – are wrong.
They, working people, are now seen through the lens of intolerance of a neoliberal progressive lens. The demands of the post war working and indeed, lower middles classes, have been eradicated. Political and social debate, dialect and discourse, has been stifled, and echo chambers of certainty formulated and fortified. The liquidity of post modernism has been cemented into an ideological, neoliberal template, that must be observed. So, is classical liberalism in the abattoir ready to be mourned? Has tolerance as a liberal value been seceded by the multiple pronged attack of identity, AI, and neoliberalism, all brandishing the weight of postmodern liquidity of challenge.
Well, to conclude, as history dictates there are periods when the symbiotic nature of classical liberalism and the masses who conform to and with the social contract, is frayed; when tolerance is rejected for the simplicity of certainty. John Stewart Mill offers a pertinent a consistency of solution to innate levels of economic, cultural and progressive intolerance;
"What distinguishes the liberal is that he respects the ideals of others as he does his own. This does not mean that he agrees with them ... nor does it imply that he lacks confidence in his own ideals . . . It is part of the liberal's ideal that a good society, whatever else it is, is one in which the ideals and interests of all are given equal consideration.”3
The good society is one where voices, humanity and individual autonomy is tolerated – a good society is tolerant of the voice which we may not always agree with.