Toleration and Tolerance in a Global Context

Abstract

Although toleration is often seen as a modern and quintessential liberal value that is distinctly Western in origin, scholars are increasingly challenging that perception. As long as religious and moral differences have existed amongst people, the question of how one ought to treat them has existed. Non-Western intellectual traditions offer a range of approaches that have often been far more inclusive than conformity to the standard Western conception of toleration as principled noninterference enables. This chapter explores four non-Western intellectual traditions – Confucianism, Islam, “Hinduism,” and Buddhism – and sketches some of their approaches to diversity in theory and practice. Each tradition shows the importance of toleration when irreconcilable views exist, but they differ over the extent of self-restraint they recommend, their justifications for toleration, and the forms it assumes in practice. Each also offers to varying degrees a more appreciative and magnanimous approach to difference, called in this chapter tolerance. Rather than the “hands-off” state neutrality that liberal advocates of toleration often support, or the communal and hierarchical toleration of the Ottoman Empire, other traditions consider the state has a legitimate role to play in the patronage of diverse sects as a means not just to tolerate, but to honor, them. This chapter shows there is more than one pathway to a tolerant society, but what unites these traditions with contemporary liberal proponents of toleration is their common desire to combat intolerance.