WHICH TOLERANCE?
Tolerance today occupies a prominent place among the most valued virtues in the West. Thus so confirm all the surveys. To be tolerant is today a social strength that keeps growing. Young generations no longer support intolerance or the lack of respect for the other.
We must celebrate this new social climate after centuries of intolerance and violence, perpetrated often in the name of religion or dogma. How our conscience today is shaken when we read works like the excellent novel The Heretic of Miguel Delibes, and what joy our heart experiences in the face of his passionate song to tolerance and the freedom of thought.
All that doesn’t stop us from be critical about a type of «tolerance» that goes beyond virtue or human ideal and is a coldness toward values and an indifference before the meaning of any human project: each one can think what he wants and do what he feels like, since it matters little what anyone does with his life. This «tolerance» is born when clear principles are lacking to distinguish good and evil or when moral demands end up diluted or stay at the minimum.
True tolerance isn’t «moral nihilism» or cynicism or indifference in the face of today’s erosion of values. It’s respect for the conscience of the other, openness to all human values, interest for what makes the human being more worthy of that name. Tolerance is a great value not because there’s no objective truth or moral whatsoever, but because the best way to come close to these is dialogue and mutual openness.
When that’s not the case, it soon gets unmasked. Tolerance is presumed, but ends up reproducing new exclusions and discriminations; respect for others is affirmed, but it disqualifies and ridicules any bother. How to explain that, in a society that proclaims itself tolerant, there once again arises xenophobia and we find nourished the mockery of what’s religious?
In the dynamic of true tolerance, there’s a desire to always seek what’s best for the human being. To be tolerant is to dialogue, seek together, construct a better future without despising or excluding anyone, but it isn’t irresponsibility, abandonment of values, forgetting moral demands. Jesus’ call to enter through the «narrow door» has nothing to do with a touchy and sterile rigorism. It’s a call to live without forgetting the demands, sometimes urgent, of all life that’s worthy of being human.
José Antonio Pagola
Translator: Fr. Jay VonHandorf
