Extremism starts at home. Whether it ends with dictatorial regimes bent on genocide or religious fanatics slaughtering innocents, extremism is often born of the attitude: “I am good. They are different. Therefore, they are bad.”
This attitude denies our basic shared humanity, to the point of dehumanizing anyone who is not like us. Once the others – be they different for reasons of religion, race, political or economic belief, sexual orientation, physical or intellectual capacity, or maybe just their taste in clothing, music, or ice cream – are no longer considered fully human, then they can be treated as we often reprehensively treat animals. They can be neglected, abused, driven out, locked up, beaten and even killed.
“They are bad, so I am no less good for treating them cruelly. In fact, by punishing the bad for being bad, I become better.”
At least that seems to be how many extremists justify their harsh and violent reactions to anyone they see as different. The answer, many say, is for all of us to learn tolerance. However, that is simply not enough. Tolerance is a step in the right direction, but it does not carry us out of the danger zone.
Dictionaries mostly emphasize and reinforce the positive aspects of tolerance. The online version of Merriam-Webster, for example, defines it as “sympathy or indulgence for beliefs or practices differing from or conflicting with one's own”.
The online Cambridge Dictionary is more succinct: “the ability to deal with something unpleasant or annoying, or to continue existing despite bad or difficult conditions”. The MacMillan Dictionary seems most positive, so consequently perhaps the most inaccurate, depicting tolerance as “the attitude of someone who is willing to accept someone else's beliefs, way of life, etc., without criticizing them even if they disagree with them”.
What the definitions essentially have in common is the recognition that something can only be tolerated when it is “differing” or “conflicting”, when it is a subject of disagreement, when it is “unpleasant” or even “bad”.
So we come full circle: We tolerate something that is bad. Tolerance does not require a change of heart, or the adoption of a new perspective. Tolerance does not remove the motive to do harm, it only stays our hand. Tolerance does not eliminate disdain, disgust, or hate, it only hides them inside the heart, or conceals them behind inaction.
That in itself is, of course, a good thing. To stay our hand is better than to strike a blow. To hide hate is better than to act upon it. To show tolerance toward “beliefs or practices differing from or conflicting with one's own” is better than displaying intolerance, as unbridled intolerance often leads to unwarranted attacks on innocent people and the places they congregate.
The problem is that the opposite of “intolerance” is not “tolerance”, it is “acceptance”. As long as we insist on regarding the different as bad we will reserve the option of rejecting it, of not tolerating it and possibly denying its right to exist. Given the right circumstances the step from tolerance to intolerance can be exceedingly short. The answer, therefore, is to increase the distance of that step. We should not only tolerate differing beliefs, we should accept them. A different belief is not bad; it's just different. Accepting the right of another person to hold a different belief does not weaken our own. One belief should not endanger another. The only real threat to a belief is an adherent who does not trust in its intrinsic strength, in its inherent ability to stand on its own in the face of differing views. If an adherent feels the need to resort to hatred and violence in an attempt to bolster it, he or she only succeeds in proclaiming to the world: My belief is weak.
To begin to eliminate extremism – to prevent it from being birthed at home in the minds of ordinary people – we must know in our hearts that all peoples, all ethnicities, all orientations, all capacities and all beliefs are equally acceptable and have an equal right to exist in our global society. If we accept that another belief is valid, no better or worse than our own, then at least that reason for hostile thought or action against something different would be removed. Extremism would lose a great deal of its power.
In short, tolerance is not enough. We need acceptance.
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