by Mike Bendzela
The idea that “the only intolerable thing is intolerance” wears its contradiction on its sleeve. It also violates the Golden Rule–to behave toward others as you would have them behave toward you. We all have limits to our tolerance–call them “intolerances”–and it’s not too much to ask others to tolerate them, within reason. Let them hold the backs of their hands against their foreheads and declaim their forbearance of poor, weak us. Like they’ve never been a pain in someone else’s ass.
It’s unfortunate we have to use the word “tolerance” to express the capacity to interact with various kinds of people. It has a whiff of victimhood about it, as if one were asking to be admired for one’s stamina and not for one’s humanity. “Tolerance” seems as if it were a physical capacity to withstand repugnant stimuli: One has high or low levels of “tolerance” for cigarette smoke, alcohol, pollen, toxins, sunlight, and cats. So, the same goes for homosexuals, Jews, and Republicans? “Tolerance” doesn’t adequately express that the issue is one’s comportment, not one’s fortitude, when it comes to facing others who differ from oneself.
Here’s Karl Popper on the Paradox of Tolerance, as served up by Wikipedia:
Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.
For this to be graspable, we need a demonstration of just what the intolerance of intolerance would look like in everyday life.
The key is limits, as the writer acknowledges. It’s a true “Paradox”: Just as “unlimited tolerance” is intolerable, unlimited intolerance is intolerable. We should not stand idly by as people are spat at, beaten, or shuffled into camps.
But what are these limits, and who gets to set them? It gets kind of scary when Popper says, “we should claim the right to suppress them [the intolerant] if necessary even by force. . . .” Who is this “we”? And “suppress them” how? By shuffling them into camps?
I agree that intolerance needs pretty strict guardrails–or else it becomes a sluice way leading to all sorts of atrocities. Yet, we’re all intolerant of something, or we’re liars. So, tolerance should be kept elastic. Don’t you want people to show you some tolerance when you’re being an asshole? Who isn’t an asshole during some hour of the day?
What follows is a list of some petty intolerances–native and imported–and how I try to manage them. How do I stand myself, as well as others? Some of the examples are fictionalized to protect the beset-upon. Some are completely authentic. Others hybrids, composites of actual and hypothetical individuals. They illustrate that “tolerance” does not mean one accepts the beliefs of those one tolerates. In other words, tolerance does not equal countenance. One may even be intolerant of the beliefs while expressing tolerance toward the persons. We all must tolerate some intolerance if we’re going to live together peaceably, like those precious kittens in the basket.
Flesh and blood
My father had a Catholic funeral, which is exactly the way he wanted it. My brother’s parish priest offered to perform the eulogy, and he gave the perfect, traditional sermon, full of religious gravitas, reading from scripture and leading prayers in a packed hall. To me the most memorable moment was when my father’s cousin’s cellphone began to blast surfer music into the somber hall, soon after the priest had just admonished everyone to turn off their phones. Dad’s cousin sat there, with the deer-in-the-headlights look, while everyone turned to glare at him. The priest paused . . . and paused . . . until “the penny dropped” and my dad’s cousin came to and shut off his phone, and the eulogy continued. This was a moment of tolerance by the priest.
We were asked to recite the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostles’ Creed, and other texts deeply inscribed in my gray matter from years of parochial school and many Masses served as a boy. But–given that this is the Church that considers my husband’s and my relationship “intrinsically disordered,” that “actively opposes” our marriage–I did not utter a word of prayer. Certainly, I stood in respectful silence and actually felt some gratitude that my dad received a sending off that would have pleased him. But I let the Catholic stuff pass by like a cloud of gnats. Karl Popper says,
We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.
The Church is a deeply intolerant, even homophobic institution. But what am I supposed to do, forego my dad’s funeral service? The most I can muster toward the Church’s intolerance of me is complete indifference. The prayers affect me so little now that they might as well be recited in Latin, or Hebrew, or Arabic. My tolerating them shows how little power they have over me anymore.
The world is not simple. When I saw that one of my parents’ best friends, also a Catholic priest, had managed to attend the funeral in spite of a debilitating spinal condition, I was grateful, even delighted, to see him. This is a man who had called my father at precisely the right moment, as Dad lay ill in hospice, and offered to pray with him over Dad’s little flip phone. I felt privileged to have been there to greet him at the funeral. I even use the appellation “Father” to address the man out of respect for his close friendship with Dad.
Call me a hypocritical nonbeliever, but that’s just me.
More flesh and blood
My father-in-law decided not to attend the private wedding my husband Don and I held in 2013. This was OK with us, as we had not planned to have any family or friends there anyway: After over twenty-five years together, marriage was simply a formality for us, a stamped document. Besides, both our families lived out of state. We simply wanted our neighbor–a Notary Public–to come over to the house and officiate, while our landlords stood by as witnesses and another old neighbor, who had just turned eighty, stood in for our parents.
But word leaked out a few weeks before we were to be married, and it’s understandable that some of Don’s family would want to drive up to Maine to witness An Historic Event, that is, a “gay wedding.” We welcomed them, of course, and had a total of eight in attendance that November day. Our landlords provided garden flowers, and the in-laws-to-be brought a home-baked cake. My parents in Ohio telephoned in a bouquet, which the florist managed to deliver during the service itself. I read aloud the card statement my mother had dictated over the phone, beginning, “To Mike and Dawn.” We all howled.
It turns out that Don’s brother and sister-in-law had asked Don’s parents to come up with them. While his mother was eager to attend, his father said, “You know I don’t believe in that.” That settled it. Don’s parents were “bookends,” as he put it, so neither Mum nor Dad attended. Like my father, Don’s father was a traditional Catholic, but with a different temperament. Who were we to tell him what to believe and do?
Some proof that natural family bonds blow religious strictures out of the water: When his father entered hospice, Don began refurbishing his own coffin for him. (Why Don had already made his own coffin is the subject of a separate essay.) Don’s father died in the midst of covid (not of covid), and he had always wanted a “plain pine box” . . . which Don happened to have in the attic. So, in December of 2020, Don spent a few days in his workshop repainting the exterior of the coffin, lining the interior with fabric, and making a little pillow. Don’s dad, too, got the sending off that he desired.
I would call this a fine way of tolerating intolerance–giving up your own coffin for your dad who doesn’t believe in your marriage—but maybe that’s just me.
Faith-in-the-flesh
An old time musician buddy of mine retired from a career in molecular biology a few years ago to spend more time with his family, his synagogue, and (sadly) his banjo.* He began making aliyah–that is, being called to the Torah–to reconnect with his spiritual heritage, even though he is more of an identity-driven than a religious Jew. He began learning some Hebrew and reading the Bible, and sometimes we talk “scripture,” as I’ve taught “Old Testament” books to literature students in the past and am very interested in the history of the Torah’s composition, the Documentary Hypothesis and such. But this does not make me any more sympathetic to Jewish beliefs than to the Catholic ones I grew up with. I am happy that my friend has developed a closer relationship to his Rabbi and the congregants at Temple. No religion for me, though, thanks.
Let’s just imagine my friend decides to go the whole matzoh and starts training to become a Rabbi. I imagine my response would be no different than to my own father’s adherence to his Catholicism: I would still cherish the person. I’d start calling my friend “Rabbi,” if he requested it, and if invited to attend any ceremony honoring his new status, I’d happily go–I’d even play fiddle if it came to that–but if he asked me to recite the Shema, it would be strictly out of cultural curiosity, not out of any preference for Judaism over Christianity. To tolerate is not to privilege. Any inquiries into Israel or what it means to be “chosen people” would be left out in the snow to freeze over–along with Hell and the Trinity.
In other words, I have no truck with religious beliefs. Any of them. Of dear Dads. Of good buddies. Call this my chief intolerance. I eschew oaths, catechisms, and slogans of all sorts. I believe we are neither chosen of God, nor children of God, but descendants of apes. The whole retinue of what it means to be a person stems from that primal fact.
In similar fashion, a fellow student from back in my college days decided later in life to step out of her identity as “Melissa” and step into being “Mel.” There were no signs in advance, as far as I could tell, that this would happen: Up to that point, I had always known a rather lean, nerdy poet. I grant that transitioning in middle age must be an ordeal. It seems to me as unlikely as Transubstantiation.† Yet–following the philosophy of live and let live–I must greet Mel as a man. He has now acquired secondary male sexual characteristics and tattoos. I don’t know how much further the transformation has gone. That is his business, and it’s not my place to tell him what to do or believe to make himself happy.
As “misgendering” is the cardinal sin in the transgender paradigm, I’ll call Mel a “man,” as long as he agrees not to call me a “cis man.” Luckily, using “Mel” is not difficult, given that was Melissa’s nickname anyway. I’ll use the preferred name–the same way I use “Father” for Dad’s pal or would use “Rabbi” for my friend in the hypothetical example. I’ll swap out pronouns. But if I am asked to chant the mantra, “Transmen are men, transwomen are women,” he can forget about it. That catechism can freeze out in the snow along with Hell and the Trinity and the Shema.
“But you’re gay,” some might say. “That makes you part of the LGBTQIA+ community.”
That “community” is a political cartoon, a farrago served up by a credulous media. (Although I suppose if you get enough true believers to agree, anything can be called a “community.”) It’s an enormous instance of question-begging: Instead of just assuming “X,” it assumes whole chunks of the alphabet. But each of those letters represents a separate interest, sometimes in direct conflict with another. Some of those letters are flapdoodle. Count me out of that dustpan of dropped Scrabble tiles. That makes me an “apostate” in more ways than one.
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t believe a mammal can change actual sex any more than that bread and wine can change into flesh and blood, and that has nothing to do with homosexuality, mine or others’. Our desired images of ourselves are nowhere near as deep as a billion-plus years of evolution. Call me a Darwinian fundamentalist, if you wish.
Perhaps this is why we have evolved the concept of “gender”–which is not the same as “sex”–into which we may park all our doubts, ambiguities and uncertainties about sex.
No flesh, please
I have associated with lots of people whose diets are cultish. When my husband and I were part of a food cooperative, we used to have large gatherings at the house for food orders and potluck dinners. The group was rife with vegans, vegetarians, and organics acolytes of all kinds.
Imagine if someone were to show up for dinner at your place and exclaim, “I’m not eating your stinkin’ food!” That is not exactly what would happen at our potlucks, but we were continually grilled about what was in our dishes; and after I enumerated the fats, dairy products and meats, I would be met with polite demurrals; so we learned to alter our menus and recipes to make them more . . . inclusive. I no longer cut butter and home-rendered lard into my apple pie crusts but solid vegetable shortening instead. And the Maine baked beans in a traditional clay bean pot–a staple around here in the wintertime–would go into the antique cookstove without the big chunk of home-cured fatback stewing in it. I would use canola oil instead (just as I would for observant Jewish friends as well). These beans were serviceable. But Don and I grew sick of these anemic beans. So, after a few potlucks, we innovated and made two pots of beans for these dinners, one with the canola oil, the other redolent with fatty pork. “Separate but equal,” anyone?
A couple of friends were strict adherents of vegetarianism. They referred to animal husbandry–that is, raising cows for milk and pigs for meat in our barn–as “animal slavery.” Flesh was virtually toxic: “Nothing with a central nervous system for us, please.” Humans’ carnivorous diets were poisoning the Earth and its atmosphere with the effluents and greenhouse gases associated with industrial animal factory farms–a point well taken–but we were doing our tiny, tiny bit to ameliorate that by raising what we could on our little farm, thus slightly reducing our participation in the industrial food system.
Nevertheless, we were regaled at dinner with anecdotes about the horrors of flesh-eating, such as surgeons having to routinely remove parasites from the livers of meat-eaters.
Don and I would just look at each other. What can you do except pass the pot of compromised beans to such folk whom, on the whole, you like so much?
Carnivore. Cis. Gentile. Queer. Apostate. Terms of identity, or terms of opprobrium? Sorry, but I’m none of those. I would embrace “hypocrite” over any such label. At least hypocrisy works as a lubricant in everyday life.
Coda: some self-flagellation
Popper is mostly right, some forms of intolerance are intolerable, even when casually expressed, and not responding to them with pungent intolerance can be scarring.
I was associated with a group of professionals long ago, a group consisting entirely of white men, who were reviewing a piece of equipment that the organization was considering purchasing. An agent had flown up from Florida to go over the specs of his company’s model, and we had all gathered in a parking lot to listen to his pitch.
Before going into his spiel, he stood up on his toes a moment, scanned the crowd, and said: “Looks like only white faces here. So let me start with a joke.”
(Huh?)
“In Florida, we shoot cans for fun.”
During his manufactured pause, I held my breath a moment: What the hell was this about?
“Mexi-cans, Afri-cans, and Puerto Ri-cans.”
There was a smattering of laughter, some of it uncomfortable. That there was any laughter at all was appalling. My immediate thought was, Well, he’s going to catch hell for that, as the group of a few dozen men gathered there included some of high rank in the organization, including those who had invited him up to try to sell his product.
But I didn’t know that he would catch hell. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe the bosses took it as “just” a joke.
If I want to feel like shit for a while, all I have to do is recall my silence in that group after that spectacularly bad attempt at breaking the ice. I thought I didn’t have to say anything because the bosses would take care of it. I too easily slip through the cracks in groups and have never been able to extract any sense of identity from being part of any club, movement, or organization (in case you haven’t noticed), which is why I stay away from them altogether. Hence, my permanent apostate’s status.
The proper thing to do would have been to say something, anything, “That’s disgusting!” and at least walk away. But a need to get along impaired the duty speak up. Would it have made any difference beyond demonstrating my appropriate repugnance? Probably not. The organization would have bought the piece of equipment anyhow. Thus, in this case, tolerance comes off as countenance. Thankfully, no actual persons were hurt or discriminated against.
And yet I wish I had listened to Popper and been a little more intolerant.
*Last month’s essay about American old time music explains the banjo joke phenomenon.
†I learned recently that Richard Dawkins has used the comparison to Transubstantion.