Trevor Merrill paper COV&R 2007

The fear of offending minorities today has caused some to call for curbs on freedom of expression. Partisans of tolerance condemn expressing opinions that might hurt the feelings of others, while those who defend free speech fear that we are giving in to a dubious minority lobby. Salman Rushdie and others warn of Islamic totalitarianism, while Rushdie's detractors in Iran and Pakistan lodge official complaints upon the decision to award him knighthood.

In a polemical essay entitled The Tyranny of Penitance, the French essayist Pascal Bruckner earlier this year attacked what he calls "Western masochism," the tendency to cry mea culpa that he believes is a sign of a profound malaise in European culture. What seems to irritate him is not the idea of repentance per se, but rather the obsequious, craven nature of our self-criticism. Why would a whole culture put itself on trial, except in anticipation of a verdict about to be handed down from an enemy? We have become so averse to confrontation that we prefer to issue fatwas against ourselves, hoping to elicit the approval of our detractors.

The crisis in Dutch society seems exemplary, because it provides an example of the limits of tolerance, that resource which, like our oil and fresh water supplies, is not as infinitely renewable as was once imagined. It might be said that tolerance is the means of living together in a multicultural world. Though we may disagree with our neighbor and even try to convert him to our point of view, the imperative of tolerance implies that we will refrain from using coercion to bring him over to our side. We will let him go about his business, and in this way diversity can flourish. Suppose, however, that some refuse to subscribe to our idea of tolerance; suppose that a minority exists which is not opposed, a priori, to the use of intimidation and violence? This, it seems to me, is the question that our liberal societies are now trying to answer.

What appears increasingly clear is that we cannot hope to appease our enemies by flagellating ourselves, even if doing so makes us feel that we are reaching out to them. If we are to recover our courage, we need to find a common denominator, a value we can rally around. I believe that tolerance could be that value, but only if we define it in a certain way. A significant paradox underlying one current notion of tolerance, which at times seems poised to become the prevailing one, is that it is founded upon an expelled supplement, an origin upon which it relies without acknowledging its sources. In short, the tolerance that prostrates itself before minority pressure is divided against itself.

Tolerance has not always been the positive value that it is for most of us today. I will use the French context as a primary example, both because it is the only one I can claim any familiarity with, and because French history really is a rich source of examples. In the years following the Edict of Nantes, at the end of the sixteenth century, Catholics and Protestants preferred tolerance to war, perhaps, but neither side was comfortable with the idea of prolonged coexistence. A minority was in favor of tolerance in the modern sense, but on the whole, it was believed that there was room for only one Church. The idea of forced conversion was still taken very seriously.

The dictionaries I have consulted suggest that from as early as the fourteenth century, to the sixteenth and into the seventeenth century, the word "tolérance" had a negative connotation. It implied the indulgent attitude of authority toward something bad. In French, the expression "maison de tolérance" for a house of prostitution retains this old sense of the word, which has been more or less lost. A sentence from Mirabeau also expresses the tension at the heart of the word tolerance: "I come not to preach tolerance; the most unlimited freedom of religion is, in my eyes, such a sacred right that the word tolerance, which seeks to express it, seems to me in a certain sense tyrannical itself, because the authority that tolerates could just as well not tolerate." In the sixteenth century, Protestants tended to use words like "permission" when they wanted to ask the king to give them the freedom to practice their religion. Hard-line Catholics were the ones who employed the word "tolérance."

It is with Locke, and later with Voltaire, that the word acquires a new meaning, closer to our own modern sense of tolerance. Some historians now believe that Locke was quite interested in the Bible despite his deism. In his Letter concerning Toleration, published at the end of the sixteenth century, he championed tolerance as a Christian virtue. A few decades later, Voltaire spoke of tolerance in vaguer terms as "l'apanage de l'humanité" ("the privilege of humanity"). "We are all formed of weakness and error," he writes. "Let's forgive each other for our silliness, it's the first natural law."

One thrust of Locke's argument is that forced conversions will bring people into the Christian fold who do not really act or think in a Christian way. The community will be corrupted. For the sake of the unity of the Christian community, it is better to show tolerance. The other point he makes is that wanting to swell the numbers of one's religion at any cost stems from human imperialism, and not from some divine prescription.

An interesting hallmark of the uneasy coexistence of Catholics and Protestants in the sixteenth and seventeenth century was the idea that salvation depended on converting everyone to the same religion. Force could be excused in this case, because it was for everyone's good. Locke does not buy it. Without denying that we should look for lost sheep and try to bring them into the fold, he opens up an implicit distinction between a purely human conception of religion, which admits of violence, and a Biblical Christianity, which he believes is truer and prefers tolerance to coercion.

Around Locke's time, Bayle speaks of "universal tolerance" in regards to Miguel Servet, who was burned at the stake in Geneva. To be for universal tolerance was to be against burning people at the stake. Tolerance in this case was not an indulgent attitude toward evil, it was an ethical position that equated intolerance and evil.

Briefly put, the question is whether we are ready to acknowledge the Christian inspiration of this ethical stance. When René Girard speaks of "intolerant mobs" in his book The Scapegoat, he draws the connection between our modern notion of tolerance and the anti-superstitious, Biblical viewpoint. The Judeo-Christian sympathy for dissenters stands in opposition to the human imperative to unanimity, which admits of no exceptions. I may be mistaken when I detect a hint of this same recognition in Locke. What is less in doubt, however, is that any trace of deference to the Biblical tradition tends to disappear in the eighteenth century.

Voltaire was inspired by Locke, but it seems he may have felt a bit of an "anxiety of influence," to use Harold Bloom's terminology. In his own writings on tolerance, he claims that it is no great accomplishment to prove that Christians should tolerate each other. Dismissing Locke's achievement with these words, he proudly announces that he will go further, and show that regardless of their professed creed all men, and not just Christians, are brothers. He is aware that this assertion is bound to arouse astonishment, not least because many foreigners regard Europeans as heretics. But Voltaire, who was in favor of religion for the common people but himself had a hard time believing, is prepared with a reductio ad absurdum of religion to convince his foreign brothers that their ethnocentrism is pure folly. Who in his right mind would claim that his God was the true one, and that all the rest were false? Why should the claims of the one be taken more seriously than those of another? Seen with sufficient critical distance, religious disputes look like so much silliness.

Better to follow the example of the Dutch. "The mildness of the [Dutch] government," writes Voltaire elsewhere, "and the tolerance of all ways of adoring God, which might be dangerous elsewhere, but is necessary here, peopled Holland with a crowd of foreigners."

It would be going too far to suggest that Voltaire's anti-clericalism compares to that of the most radical intellectuals of the French Enlightenment, such as D'Holbach. But his deism, his opposition to what today is known as "organized" religion, and his belief that all cultures should tolerate one another, certainly prefigures some contemporary attitudes. Because it equates so-called organized religion with intolerance, this strain of thought seeks to curtail the influence of religion on public life. We might call this strain of thought, which emerges from a radical tradition more or less opposed to Locke, "Voltairean" or even "Spinozist," since many twentieth and twenty-first century radical European intellectuals, such as Deleuze and Antonio Negri, invoke Spinoza as their ancestor.

We see a resurgence of this Voltairean, anti-religious mode of thought today among Anglophone intellectuals such as Dennet, Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens, all of whom have recently published polemical essays warning of the dangers of religion. A skeptical intellectual such as Hitchens pulls no punches when he speaks about Islam, and he is not one to cry mea culpa. But the narrative proposed by these and other contemporary thinkers does not differ very greatly from that of the radical Enlightenment in its negative evaluation of Christianity, except, that is, when it pushes this negative evaluation to new extremes.

To give tolerance back its legitimacy, it suffices to follow René Girard, and, perhaps, Locke as well, in linking tolerance with Biblical opposition to the violence of coercion, of conversion by fire and the sword. This is its birthright. Now that the Catholic church no longer commands armies (unless, that is, we count the Swiss guards at the Vatican), perhaps we can begin to forgive the institution for its trespasses. This, in turn, may enable us to resuscitate Biblical tolerance as a common denominator of contemporary Western culture. It may enable us to find a means of bolstering our courage, now that we find ourselves in a position of real vulnerability, whether we choose to speak out against radical Islam or not.

What is the alternative to acknowledging the Christian sources of tolerance, and thereby investing this concept with a new, positive content? Salman Rushdie and others have condemned "Islamic totalitarianism." I do not feel qualified to say whether the terminology is justified. One defining trait of totalitarian regimes, however, is their absolute intolerance of dissenters. To paraphrase Voltaire, it might even be said that if no dissenters exist, totalitarian regimes have to invent them. Milan Kundera writes in his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting that it is the imperative to unanimity that defines the totalitarian "idyll," the vision of paradise on earth that, by definition, is intended for all, without exception. When the Czechs chose Communism after World War II, they saw only the idyllic side of the idyll, the vision of people everywhere, of all classes and races, unified in brotherhood. They did not count on the anthropological scandal of enforced unanimity, that strangely implacable violence masking as concern for the salvation of its victims. Those who did not have the temperament for the idyll wanted to go abroad; instead, they went to prison.

I am not entirely persuaded by Jonathan Israel's suggestion that naming more streets after Spinoza is the solution to the crisis in Dutch society. The narrative of the radical Enlightenment, the version of tolerance that it proposes, does not seem capable any longer of truly inspiring us, now that the intransigence of a determined minority is challenging it. People like Rushdie, who have experienced coercion first hand, seem willing to speak out without fear of giving offense. But many adopt the less abrasive but also less courageous decision to keep silent for fear of giving offense. Our fear is not unjustified; it is the ancient fear of physical violence and death that possesses our humanist society.

Whatever one can say about them, this fear of death is not shared by young men who join the Islamist cause. One Dutch intellectual, Paul Scheffer, pointed out that for second-generation immigrants who identify neither with their parents nor with European traditions, September 9/11 provided a ready-made narrative. The children of immigrants trying to adjust to a culture that offers "secular allurements" but that has classified its heroes as "dead white males" may initially be tempted by those allurements only to reject them emphatically. This, it seems, was true of Theo van Gogh's murderer, and of other young extremists like him.

To understand the predicament of the second generation, deprived of heroes to identify with, Christopher Hitchens recommends in a recent article about Islamic extremism in London that we turn to literature, and he cites the writing of Hanif Kureishi, author of the short story that inspired the film "My Son the Extremist," and Monica Ali. He might also have cited Zadie Smith's novel White Teeth, in which a young misfit joins a radical Islamic group when he realizes, to his horror, that a girl he is in love with is wearing sexy outfits, displaying her body for all to see. In a burst of jealous rage, he realizes that she is nothing but a whore, and he is converted to radical Islam.

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