CONDITIONS FOR TOLERATION

Contemporary non-trivial cases that raise issues of toleration typically involve situations in which members of a new minority exhibit their differences in some public–political space – differences that are regarded by the cultural majority as unfamiliar and strange, often outrageously excessive, and potentially threatening to the standards of proper behavior and civility of that society. The public visibility of these differences produces a general feeling of uneasiness among the majority, some of whom may also hold political office. Such uneasiness usually occurs when the differences show themselves to be incompatible with liberal principles, demonstrating a lack of shared moral values, or when they appear to pose a potential danger to the liberal order as a whole. Based on these arguments, the need to limit public toleration of cultural differences is a view which comes to be strongly and consistently held among sectors of the majority and the political class, cutting across the traditional left–right cleavage and joining conservatives with liberals and traditional leftists, both groups concerned about what they see as the breakdown of universalism. On the opposite side of the coin, representatives of minorities advocate the public acceptance of their differences as the symbolic recognition of the legitimacy of their public presence.

I have argued that to see these issues as the product of a clash between religious, moral, and cultural differences, as liberal theory does, is to adopt not merely a limited, but also a misleading view.