There are some words which become so familiar that we cease to examine them closely. We assume we know what they mean. We use them casually and frequently. Yet beneath the surface they often carry histories, tensions and insights that merit rediscovery.
Tolerance is one such word. It is a word which has become increasingly important in our time and, perhaps for that very reason, increasingly misunderstood.
On 22 August, people across the world will mark the International Day Commemorating the Victims of Acts of Violence Based on Religion or Belief. It is a day which reminds us that intolerance continues to have consequences. Across the globe individuals still face discrimination, persecution and violence because of what they believe, how they worship or because they choose not to worship at all.
Yet if we are to understand why tolerance matters, it is worth spending a moment with the word itself.
The term derives from the Latin tolerare, meaning to bear, endure, sustain or carry. There is something strikingly unsentimental about these origins.
Tolerance was never primarily about affection. It was not a synonym for agreement. Nor was it intended to imply that all ideas are equally persuasive or equally true. Rather, tolerance emerged from the recognition that human beings will inevitably differ. We differ in our beliefs, our philosophies, our politics, our faiths, our customs and traditions. We have different experiences of the world and often reach very different conclusions about how life should be lived.
The achievement of tolerance was not that it eliminated these differences. It acknowledged them. Indeed, one might argue that tolerance only becomes meaningful when there is genuine disagreement. We rarely need tolerance for those who think as we do. The true test comes when we encounter individuals whose worldview differs profoundly from our own. Historically this was no small matter.
The modern concept of tolerance emerged from centuries marked by conflict, especially religious conflict. The Europe of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries experienced devastating wars and divisions, often fought in the name of competing certainties. Communities fractured. Neighbours turned against one another. The conviction that one possessed absolute truth all too easily became justification for excluding, silencing or punishing those who believed differently.
The idea of toleration emerged as both a moral and political response. It represented a growing recognition that societies could not survive if every disagreement became a battle for dominance. It required individuals to accept that others possessed the right to hold different beliefs whilst remaining members of the same community.
That was a remarkable step forward. Tolerance did not require approval. It did not require admiration. It did not require affection. What it required was respect. Respect for the humanity of another person, regardless of whether one shared their convictions.
In many respects, this remains one of the most demanding virtues. For it is often easier to show kindness towards those who resemble us. It is easier to extend generosity to those who reinforce our assumptions about the world. It is easier to welcome those who think, speak, worship, vote and behave in ways that feel familiar. The greater challenge lies elsewhere.
Can we extend respect to those whose views we regard as mistaken? Can we defend the dignity of those with whom we profoundly disagree? Can we resist the temptation to reduce people to a single characteristic, belief or identity? These questions feel particularly significant today.
Across much of the world there has been a growing tendency to view difference through the lens of suspicion. Public discourse increasingly encourages division rather than understanding. Complex human beings become simplified into categories. Migrants become statistics. Refugees become headlines. Communities become stereotypes. Individuals become symbols onto which wider fears and anxieties are projected.
The language of “otherness” has become commonplace. Sometimes this manifests itself in overt prejudice. More often it appears in subtler forms. An assumption. A casual remark. A willingness to judge before we understand. A tendency to treat unfamiliarity as a threat rather than an invitation to learn.
History suggests that such instincts are dangerous. The path towards exclusion rarely begins dramatically. It usually starts with a failure of imagination. A failure to see another person’s full humanity. A failure to recognise that behind every label is an individual whose life is as complex, as fragile, and as valuable as our own.
One of the privileges of doing the job I do within social care is the ability to witness a different reality. Every day people are brought together who may otherwise never have met. Different cultures. Different backgrounds. Different languages. Different life stories. In those encounters something rather remarkable often happens. Abstractions disappear. The migrant worker becomes a trusted colleague. The newcomer becomes a friend. The person whose beliefs differ from ours becomes someone whose kindness, humour, resilience and compassion we come to know. We discover what should perhaps never have been forgotten: that no individual can ever be fully understood through the lens of a category.
The older I become, the more convinced I am that one of the greatest dangers facing contemporary society is the temptation to see people as representatives rather than individuals. To view them through the prism of ideology rather than encounter. To imagine we already know who they are because we have placed them in a particular group. Tolerance pushes back against that temptation. It asks us to pause before judgement. It invites us to make room for complexity. It encourages us to recognise that disagreement need not become hostility.
None of this means abandoning conviction. Indeed, tolerance has always depended upon people holding strong views. What distinguishes tolerance from indifference is that it combines conviction with humility. It recognises that one may hold beliefs passionately whilst still respecting the dignity of those who see the world differently. That is not weakness. It is strength. In a period when public debate often rewards outrage and certainty, tolerance may be one of the most countercultural virtues we possess.
This week, as we reflect upon those who have suffered because of intolerance, perhaps we might also reflect upon the quiet courage that tolerance requires. The courage not to caricature. The courage not to dismiss. The courage not to reduce another human being to a label, a nationality, a faith, or an opinion.
For societies flourish not when everybody thinks alike, but when people learn how to live with difference without allowing disagreement to diminish their respect for one another. In the end, tolerance may be one of humanity’s most civilised achievements. Not because it resolves disagreement, but because it enables us to remain human in the midst of it.
Tolerance is not the erasure of difference. It is the willingness to allow difference to exist without fear, hostility or exclusion. Nature offers its own quiet illustration. Along the western edge of Scotland, sea and land meet each day, distinct and unchanged in their essential nature, yet sharing the same horizon. Between wave and rock there is neither surrender nor conquest. The shoreline knows something of tolerance.
The Shoreline
The sea never asks where a river has come from.
Not the dark water slipping from peat and moss, nor the burn descending through stone and heather, nor the distant current that has travelled beyond maps and beyond memory.
It receives them all.
Along the edge of the Atlantic,
where salt wind shapes rock into patience,
where gannets wheel between cloud and wave,
where driftwood arrives bearing stories from unseen shores,
there is no demand for sameness.
Only meeting.
The tide enters every bay in its own language.
The shore answers in sand, in kelp, in the slow breathing of the machair.
Neither becomes the other.
The sea remains sea.
The land remains land.
Yet between them a thousand forms of life emerge.
There are lessons in such places.
The dune grass bends without surrender.
The cliff receives a century of storms and still faces west.
The islands themselves are shaped by arrival.
Bird and seed. Boat and stranger. Story and song.
Nothing carried here was asked first to become something else.
The horizon has always known
that distance need not divide,
that difference need not diminish,
that what arrives from elsewhere may bring renewal.
And so the shoreline waits,
patient as weather,
holding together what seems apart.
Wave and rock.
Departure and return.
The familiar and the unknown.
Not in silence,
but in a conversation older than memory,
spoken between sea and land
since the beginning of the world.
Donald Macaskill
