On Being Tolerated
On Being Tolerated
On Being Tolerated
Leslie Green
point de religion….
—Voltaire 1
pogrom. But being the object of someone’s toleration does not always
feel very good, and that may be why most philosophical defences of
is acceptance.
as crudely as I just did. Yet they respond to a genuine worry, the sources
explore how far a liberal political morality can and should respond to that
discomfort. For these purposes I take for granted the validity of the
1
Traité sur la Tolérance (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1975), 40.
Leslie Green 2
familiar ideal that we inherit from Locke, Voltaire, and Mill. However, I
also want to propose something that has been less prominent, at least
we still have things to learn from H.L.A. Hart’s famous dispute with
standards.
II
directs people who make adverse judgments about others not to act in
certain ways on those judgments, and to refrain from doing so for reasons
of a certain type.
many ways. For example, toleration does not condemn abstaining from
Salvation belongs only to himself. But I would not have this understood,
Leslie Green 3
affectionate Endeavours to reduce Men from Errors; which are indeed the
Duty of a Christian. (…) But all Force and Compulsion are to be forborn.
Toleration in this sense is not always called for, not only because
some things should not be tolerated, but also because some adverse
bizarre to suppose that judging that John’s hair is too long gives one a
prima facie reason to hold him down and trim it, which reason then needs
there is no reason to interfere in the first place and that, as far as our other-
commits one to little more than giving such advice, if asked. We should
judgment does support intervention. If you think that permitting the tiny
of civil marriage, then (supposing you also hold conventional views about
prevent it—as you also will if you judge that early abortions are murders,
these cases, it is hard to see how anything other than a robust principle of
2
Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, J.H. Tully, ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett
Publishing, 1983), 47.
3
I owe the point to Jeremy Waldron.
Leslie Green 4
restraint could stop one from trying to prevent these evils, as far as one’s
powers permit.
III
worries about toleration have a different source: they flow from the fear
remedy for the vices of toleration with a remedy for vicious toleration.
conduct that gives rise to the adverse judgment, or what is wrong may give
his claim was not that toleration is of its nature a regressive force. It was
4
Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” in R.P. Wolff, B. Moore, Jr, and H.
Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance ( (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 82.
Leslie Green 5
“repressive tolerance”, he meant it in the exact sense. If asked (at any rate,
in 1965, when Marcuse was writing) many Americans would have judged
these states of affairs wrong or at least regrettable, yet few did anything to
prevent them. Perhaps some felt simply felt powerless (a matter to which I
return below.) But others surely stayed their hands in the interests of the
(3) A third way toleration can go wrong is based not on its objects
but on its grounds. Toleration should be based on the right reasons. There
there are other principled arguments, including the fact that toleration
to-eye on life, and without even needing to make their allegiances in this
department very clear. Toleration can also be valuable for the Burkean
they do because they are organically connected with the life of a society.
5
Ibid, 83.
Leslie Green 6
“To use coercion to maintain the moral status quo at any point in a
social institutions their value.” 6 Toleration can draw support from many
considerations.
On the other hand, there are reasons for toleration that are morally
suspect. J.S. Mill famously argued that we are entitled to “the liberty of
tastes and pursuits; of framing the plan of our life to suit our own
do does not harm them….” 7 Notice that this statement of the harm
are granted the freedom to make their bed that they may need to lie in it.
The harm principle secures their autonomy to choose the good or the bad;
this is the nature of liberty. Consider, then, one who tolerates another in
order to make bad outcomes more likely, by securing a liberty with the
smoking in order to increase the odds that Bill will get cancer and
6
H.L.A. Hart, Law, Liberty and Morality (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1963), 75. See also R.M. Dworkin, Is Democracy Possible Here?(Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2006), 74-5, 88.
7
J.S. Mill, On Liberty (New York: Modern Library, 1981), 15.
8
For discussion of such examples, see Peter Gardner, “Tolerance and Education,” in John
Horton, ed., Liberalism, Multiculturalism and Toleration (New York: St. Martins Press,
1993), 90, and A.J. Cohen, “What Toleration Is,” 81-83.
Leslie Green 7
that smokers die early enough to yield net savings in pensions and
Texas, Justice Clarence Thomas dissented from the proposition that the
on the ground that “this does not appear to be a worthy way to expend
is hard to know exactly what thought Justice Thomas was trying to frame.
because, and to the extent that, the police have more serious crimes to
investigate and the courts more serious wrongs to repress. Had that been
accepted as the basis for toleration, gay Americans would rightly feel
uneasy.
H.L.A. Hart’s, were worked out for the purpose of fixing the proper limits
of the criminal sanction. When the Model Penal Code and the Wolfenden
resilient. Presumably it was under its spell that Thomas Nagel could
write, back in 1995, that “There has recently developed in our culture a
fairly widespread (though still far from dominant) attitude of toleration [of
eight years before a murky and split decision of the Supreme Court finally
elections can still be won or lost on the issue of what to do about the gays
minorities remain the brunt of a legal hostility now rare in the mature
democracies.
that there are lots of good reasons for not applying it, many of which have
easy to forget that she launched it with the argument that criminal
women who can prove they have been harmed by the circulation of
10
Thomas Nagel, “Personal Rights and Public Space,” in his Concealment and Exposure,
and other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 47.
11
Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003).
Leslie Green 9
pornography. 12 The idea behind this, I need scarcely point out, was not to
many ways of doing so, including through the law, that do not involve
often true, that toleration is a grudging virtue. The explanation for this is
not complicated. People can see the force of an argument without taking it
to heart, and they can feel compelled to conform without even seeing its
force. Thus, while tolerating they can also make it perfectly clear that
they wish they didn’t have to be tolerant. Individual cases come to mind:
whom few others speak. There are also public cases. After the Supreme
12
See Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. MacKinnon, Pornography and Civil Rights: A
New Day for Women’s Equality (Minneapolis: Organizing Against Pornography, 1988),
Appendix D: ‘Model Antipornography Civil-Rights Ordinance.’
Leslie Green 10
or to at least be consistent with, the reasons that ground it. (People do not
and that is our second corrective. One may also tolerate joyously and
religious duties discharged when they accord others “the narrow Measures
of bare Justice”, conforming to the morality of the Law but defying the
linked attitudes without which toleration is, in its own terms, deficient.
The important point is that a grudging toleration, even when it satisfies the
of one species, who share common ancestors, and whose most basic needs,
in ways consistent with that status. We don’t hear as much about these
13
John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, J.H. Tully, ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett
Publishing, 1983), 31.
14
David Hume, Enquiry, III.1
Leslie Green 12
IV
about? We are assuming, for now, that toleration is of the right objects,
based on good reasons, and that the tolerated conduct is not only
appropriate to the case, and that all this is done in an ungrudging spirit and
in ways consistent with the status of the tolerated as members of our own
Toleration is therefore not only consistent with, but depends on, the
merely permissive attitude towards φ-ing does not show that one tolerates
Although I would never think of trying to prevent it, I also see nothing
15
Among “deficiencies” I include things like being incomplete, one-sided, and so on.
These are not always moral vices, and they can be necessary conditions of having certain
virtues: See Joseph Raz, “Autonomy, Toleration, and the Harm Principle,” in Susan
Mendus, ed. Justifying Toleration: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988), 165-65.
Leslie Green 13
simply does not arise. On the other hand, I do tolerate the ritual
person’s religious convictions about what would be good for the amputee.
on the opposite verdicts: approving the cutting while deploring the loving.
If so, they tolerate what I do not. Which acts we can be said to tolerate
depends not only on what we are (not) willing to do about them, but also
acting. 16
That points to the first and easiest explanation for why a broad and
lives that they are likely to find unwelcome. One might object, “But how
will they know whether anyone one endorses that judgment? Provided
there is no overt grudge, surely all they will see is the fact of permission?”
Well, when that is true, toleration may not sting. We are trying to explain
how such feelings may arise—not how they must arise. (We already know
that they may arise, because we know that they do in fact arise.)
16
There are complications here worth flagging. First, there is a question of whether the
judgment needs to be conscious. Should we say that someone tolerates an activity if she
is “committed” to an adverse judgment about it though she is herself unaware of that
commitment? Second, does any old “con-attitude,” as they used to say, qualify as an
adverse judgment, or does it need to be an attitude with a certain structure, or capable of
taking a certain object? (Is blind hatred a judgment? Can racial difference be an object
of toleration?) A full study of these issues would take us too far afield for present
purposes, though I do briefly touch on the second.
Leslie Green 14
sure that gay boys growing up in Laramie, Wyoming remain well aware
that their lives are often deplored. And we need to take notice of the
“often”. In the cases that are politically most salient, toleration cohabits
constituting attitudes towards love, faith, work, and so on. The practices of
general disapproval that can limit the terms of political discourse within
their societies. In extreme cases, it may seem that there is not even a
say, “Get over it”? That is a very hard saying. It would take a Socrates
not to care about how others react in these circumstances, and it would be
as far as the tolerated are concerned. After all, it protects them from the
senses and reverse the judgments on which their toleration depends. But if
Leslie Green 15
that is not likely or (for reasons I’ll discuss below) not appropriate, how
could the tolerated not welcome toleration? The answer lies in another of
of restraint when one believes, falsely, that one has or may come to have
the power of prevention. 18 But normally, the reason people believe that
they have the power to prevent is that they actually do. So while the
on the one hand and endurance or resignation on the other. For example,
government, then the fact that I put up with it shows, not that I tolerate it,
not a form of power over others, for it does not give any capacity to affect
their interests that the tolerator does not already have. But it points to the
17
D.D. Raphael, “The Intolerable,” in Susan Mendus, ed. Justifying Toleration, 139.
18
I am indebted here to the discussion in Andrew Jason Cohen’s paper, “What Toleration
Is,” 115 Ethics (2004), 93-4.
Leslie Green 16
environments in which power is or may soon be in play, and those are not
People resent having their noses rubbed in the fact that others have (or
suppose they have) the power to prevent them praying, loving, or working
as they judge right, especially if they have no similar power over their
but asymmetric relations, like offering mercy or taking pity, which can
features of the societies around them, for example, to the fact that their
girls will grow up seeing women wearing short skirts, flirting with
societies can (we hope) learn to tolerate the fact that some of the Muslim
girls will veil. Things being what they are, the host society has options
that the immigrant minority lacks. Toleration does not cause, ratify, or
legitimate that difference in power; but it does reflect it. Given the choice
between a situation in which someone has the power to prevent you from
praying as you want but will tolerate you doing it, and a situation in which
otherwise sound may give rise to discomfort on the part of the tolerated: it
expresses an adverse judgment and it reminds them that others have the
It is at this point that we usually begin to hear demands for more: people
tempting, this idea proves incoherent. In the circumstances that give rise
toleration. For example, when gay people say that want to be accepted in
the US armed forces, and not merely tolerated under the Clinton policy of
“don’t ask, don’t tell,” they are not hoping that their superiors will think
that it swell that they are gay, or will march with them in the Pride parade.
They are objecting to the fact that being openly gay remains a ground for
dismissal, and that they are therefore not now tolerated, or are tolerated
who have disabilities, it must also admit them into the workforce and then
of, and expresses respect for the abilities of, people with disabilities. All
of this is, however, compatible with the fact that the disabled are tolerated
not soften the judgment that it is a matter of regret that anyone needs them
or that it would be much better for the productivity of the firm if they did
but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can
spark like a dialectic.” 19 These are hard days for dialectics, and for
differences, the love of which some think has already gone too far. Even
if it has not been given a full trial, however, Lorde’s proposal will not help
here. Social difference is one source of creativity; but valuing it does not
living. It does not follow that we need all of the actual options that our
shows that we can get plenty of creative sparks flying between Anglicans
19
Audre Lorde, “"The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House," in her
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (Freedom, CA: Crossing, 1984),
111.
Leslie Green 19
support for more exciting and unusual ones that would bring still greater
among our existing options, one will need not only the abstract love of
difference that Lorde urges, but a love of our own differences. That pulls
Parents should not merely tolerate the homosexuality of their child. They
should accept it. The reason they have for doing so is based on the sort of
relationship they should aspire to have with their children. But it may not
sickness, or simply disgusting, first need to let go of the idea that they can
do anything about it. For some this will be an enormous step, requiring
them to abandon their fantasies of parental power. And that is only the
sexuality. The judgment that confirms is likely to deform the love that
parents owe their children and to undermine the honesty with which
children should engage their parents. Parents need to accept their child’s
not only a transformation in the parents’ values, but in their way of life.
acceptance has, for most of us, powerful appeal. Parents who really
may be worse than that. If their hostility drives their children into hiding,
they may lose any authentic relationship with them. Second, this example
also shows why it is idle to hope that the difficulties of toleration can be
motivations to try, may still be unable to accept. The odds that weaker
20
I emphasise “full”. I do not deny that such parents have a conditional love for their
children, and I certainly do not assert that their incapacity for full love entails a hatred of
their children. (Though such cases are not unknown.) The parents’ failure, though
regrettable, may even be blameless. Acceptance, like belief, is not directly subject to our
will. We cannot simply decide to accept that p, when we feel deep in our gut that not-p;
and no cool, rational, argument is likely to persuade us otherwise. We may therefore need
to sneak up on not-p, exposing ourselves to influences that display the possibility that p,
or that interpret things on the footing that p, and so forth. Over time, we may therefore
come to see that p is possible, eligible for endorsement and then, if we are lucky,
acceptable. (Some horses do drink when led to water.)
Leslie Green 21
these options will bring alienation from a way of life in which he is not
only entrenched, but which normally has its virtues. Secular parents face
challenges no less deep. They may need to change their views about the
their sexuality in ways that embarrass the most liberal of parents. Secular
parents who would find moral judgments about the orientation of a child’s
homosexual. And of course all parents, religious and secular, who accept
their gay children will need to reject or tolerate their own homophobic
To the extent that the good is plural, such costs are an inevitable
to function well and to realize the ideal of pluralism.” 21 Wolff offers this
21
Robert Paul Wolff, “Beyond Toleration,” in R.P. Wolff, B. Moore, Jr., and H.
Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Toleration (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 4. The most
influential modern defence of this view is Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1986). I discuss some hazards of value pluralism as a general approach
to cultural difference in, “Pluralism, Social Conflict, and Tolerance,” in A. Soeteman, ed.,
Pluralism and Law (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), 85-105.
Leslie Green 22
pretends). But his point is correct: toleration is indeed a virtue needed for
VI
towards of the shape of the principle we are seeking: it has to be one that
aspired to by the tolerator and the tolerated. Those are not the
wrong. The impulse to repress and discourage does not inspire one to find
more complex way that toleration may misfire. Assume that we should
nuns wearing habits, Muslim women wearing the hijab, and Sikh men
wearing their ceremonial dagger, the kirpan. I assume that none of these
and so forth. There are, however, various routes by which we might arrive
at that conclusion. These include the idea that people are entitled to wear
public interest for them to refrain. On this interpretation, the habit, hijab
and kirpan are all to be tolerated in the same way and for the same reason
and Scots bearing the sgian dubh. They all come under the liberty to dress
as one pleases, which is one aspect of Mill’s cherished liberty of tastes and
liberty of tastes and pursuits is an important liberty, and one that grounds
value the tolerated activities under the description I have just given. It is in
expressions of a general liberty to dress as one pleases, for they are aspects
of ways of life that reject that liberty. The habit, hijab and kirpan are
attracting too much attention to its consequences, but it would also distort
One might ask, what does that matter, so long as we get to the right
intolerance, and that may affect what the bottom line requires. Consider
enjoyed the power to prohibit marriages between black people and white
people, and a number of them still exercised it. It goes without saying that
this offended freedom of association. But to think that was the only
moral stake in Loving v. Virginia 22 is to miss the worst evil of the anti-
association but, along with separate schools and train compartments, they
22
388 U.S. 1 (1967).
Leslie Green 25
did so in order to secure the central planks of apartheid. The point is not
the intolerance it targeted; race-hatred was its root. Had Loving been
Perhaps this only pushes the question further back. Granted that
Loving was about racial equality and that the liberty to wear the hijab
policies notice that? Interracial marriage was not tolerated in Virginia, and
perhaps would not have been tolerated as early or as far had the court
lacked the courage to name the vice. But wearing the hijab is already
23
Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Amy Gutmann, ed., Multiculturalism
and ‘The Politics of Recognition,’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 25-73;
Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, trans
J. Anderson, (London: Polity Press, 1996).
Leslie Green 26
dialogue with others. Hegel suggested that the mutuality involved can
others see us, recognition requires the power to see others as they see
not only an injury to the tolerated, it is also an injury to the tolerator. One
is no sort of Christian if you do not understand the ways in which Jews are
the contrary, recognition aims to represent it: the idea is not that I need to
share your values but that I need you to know your identity. I do not need
that you do. But in order to properly represent this fact about you—a fact
which may in some complex way also prove crucial to the shape of my
There are various doubts one might raise about this story: how
coherent and stable are these identities? What does it take to get them
24
Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” 25.
Leslie Green 27
right? And just how interdependent are they? Assume we can skirt these
worries about toleration? I can recognize your faith while rejecting it, but
perhaps the idea that your difference somehow feeds into my own identity
suggests that we have a common stake here. Perhaps there are forms of
disapproval that are pragmatically at odds with the idea that our identities
are dialogically related, and that recognition may therefore soften the
neither does it presume any beliefs about one’s own power over another.
main virtue here is as a conduit for these, at least as they are understood by
the tolerated.
recognition can give them life. It sets the bar too high. In aiming to
the ways she interprets her life may be so bound up with radically
different practices that our nearest match may not be good enough.
attitudes may nonetheless have such causal power that they interfere with
getting a clear fix on other people and their practices. Nagel criticizes
The doubt we can confidently move forward on the basis of “an accurate
sex that make it hard to correctly recognize the other. For one thing, it is
25
I assume that our conception of a “tribe” will not even come close. It is too obviously
shaped by our fictitious organizations imposed on the aboriginal populations of North
America and Australasia, and too coloured by our fantasies (good and bad) about those
peoples.
26
Thomas Nagel, “Personal Rights and Public Space,” 50.
Leslie Green 29
sexual imagery and stories to fix the human imagination means that one
tends to react to them on the basis of how one would feel or respond if one
were involved oneself. And sex is not unique in this. The same seems to
be true of food, where people also engage in wild projections when they
contemplate the diversity of culinary habits, for instance, when they learn
that in a certain culture people enjoy eating dogs or horses. Along such
Now, Nagel wants to make use of this fact to help delimit the
meanings here that interference is wrong. This proves too much. There is
also a riot of conflicting meanings in many areas that are assuredly within
not want to say that control over external resources should not be subject
Our legal systems collide with customary practices of land use that do not
to think that control over real property falls into the “private sphere”. We
Leslie Green 30
however, what I take to be Nagel’s central point: there are many areas in
which the most reliable prediction is that we will in fact fail. That seems
toleration.
VII
than to the acceptance solution, but it is less demanding than either and it
misguided, we can still try to understand them. What I have in mind here
we can, the meanings that acts and symbols have for others.
rest of us abhor: “it’s not that they are delighted by the same thing that
Leslie Green 31
revolts me; it’s something else that I don’t understand, because it does not
lays claim to a fair degree of understanding, for in order to know that the
sadist is not delighted by the same thing that revolts me, I need to know at
least that fact—we are not just talking about someone who is wired
desires are forms of sexual desire. And there is more. He also sees that
their desires involve “something having to do with the sense of one’s body
good guess. At any rate, it is not unlike what those who are both
27
Ibid.
28
For example, Pat Califia, “Feminism and Sadomasochism” in her Public Sex: The
Culture of Radical Sex (Pittsburgh, PA: Cleis, 1994), 164-74.
Leslie Green 32
understand as far as we are able, consistent with the limits our knowledge
to feel the need to veil one’s face in public; but I do know that it is not
misrecognition; that is, there are aspects of its significance that elude me,
perhaps necessarily. But I have some idea of the interaction among beliefs
about personal modesty, the place of sexuality, and the value of tradition
that inspire and structure such a view, and therefore some idea of what is
basis as a teenager’s fashion crimes. This may have two results. Where I
broader framework. It may start to seem less like a gross error and more
tolerate for the wrong reasons. And where I am not disposed to tolerate,
Lord Templeman, in the majority, was scarcely able to see the conduct as
bound to protect itself against a cult of violence. Pleasure derived from the
the facts, it was hardly surprising that the only argument for toleration that
assertion that “every person has a right to deal with his body as he
pleases.” Yet no one in Brown was claiming a right use his body to
simply an irrelevant fact that the activities in question were sexual, that
they took place among a group of people sexually attracted to each other,
order to have that sort of sex, and that they enjoyed it when they did.
cannibalism.
has to face, not only the contempt of those who think it unmanly and
therefore unfit to consort with virtues like equality, respect or justice, but
Leslie Green 34
also the charge that it is morally lax. As then-Prime Minister John Major
nothing of the kind—which is not to deny that it may have other effects on
such “utilitarianism without facts” are what most people remember of his
argument. In fact, it was only half of his case. The second half, rarely
the standing threat of their application. This not only interferes with
Leslie Green 35
frustrates and the role those play in human life. To see this, imagine
would not think that a thief’s temptation to steal is any reason for
the crooked as on the honest.” Hart saw why this would be such a poor
part of daily life” and thus, “Resistance to the temptation to commit these
developed and hedged in the ways they should be if we are to have a fully-
they were to the argument of Law, Liberty, and Morality. When Hart
happiness and personality, was not exactly a received idea. This was an
era in which gay men were offered, and sometimes tragically sought,
30
Hart, Law, Liberty and Morality, 21-22; cf. H.L.A. The Concept of Law, 2nd ed., P
Bulloch and J. Raz, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 175.
Leslie Green 36
would be more than a decade before homosexuality was removed from the
gay men and official toleration of private anti-gay violence were quite
desires involved stakes utterly unlike those in ordinary crimes, cut like a
homosexuals who adopt or are assigned a gay identity. What does the
homosexually inclined will leave one with a very small pool of potential
acknowledgement of any sort of identity. (It need not even concede that
construct identities.) And it does not tell us much about what it is like to
implications for the development of toleration and for the way the
and the way it plays a role in deploying the harm principle. It is worth
noting that it is not only the tolerated, but also the tolerators, who need to
and social life. He was well aware no intelligible rationale could be given
would be absurd to deny the title of morality to social vetoes of this sort;
indeed, sexual morality is the most prominent aspect of what plain men
31
Some religions that proscribe homosexual conduct fully acknowledge this. It is in
virtue of some other feature that they condemn it—such as being “unnatural”, or non-
procreative, or contrary to a purity code. These features are present in many heterosexual
or autosexual acts. (The fact that some of these religions make such little effort to
prevent other species of the prohibited genus may count against their sincerity, but not
against their principles.)
32
Hart, The Concept of Law, 174-75.
Leslie Green 38
jurisprudence, this idea should ring a bell. It also lies at the core of Hart’s
need to see it, not as it might appear to the detached but well-informed
who actually uses it to guide and appraise conduct. It has been long
legion of scholars who have speculated about the moral bearing of Hart’s
would be good for it to be. But he did think that to understand things like
law (or, as we have just seem, sexuality) one would first need to
understand the role it plays in the lives of those who live with it. That is
take “the internal point of view” is associated not only with descriptive or
33
Ibid., 174; cf. 182.
Leslie Green 39
VIII
can be nothing other than my religion. We know how that line of thought
can be nothing other than my sort of family, and so on. We also know
where it ends: in things like the claim that rough sex is an intolerable cult
have come together with reasonable success. But for our failures we need
34
Witness the furious reaction to Judith Levine’s moderate and careful book, Harmful to
Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2002). Levine received death-threats and public condemnation in the
state legislature. To its discredit, a frightened University of Minnesota administration
Leslie Green 40
the observation of the protagonist in Graham Greene’s, The Power and the
Glory: “When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always
begin to feel pity….When you saw the corners of the eyes, the shape of
the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a
failure of imagination.” 35
toleration will come to the right answer for the wrong reasons. When we
Muslim women, we will have a firmer grasp of the stakes in tolerating the
veil. It also makes it less likely that we will tolerate the intolerable, or fail
to tolerate the tolerable. It does not, I think, do much for the unhappy
awareness that the tolerators usually have the power, but perhaps its other
features makes even this a bit less worrying, for that power will be less
ordered an outside review of its Press’s editorial policies, including the perfectly normal
peer-review that endorsed publication of Levine’s monograph. See Amy Benfer, ”What is
so Bad About Good Sex?”
http://archive.salon.com/mwt/feature/2002/04/19/levine_talks/index.html
35
Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (London: Penguin, 1940), 131.
Leslie Green 41
be at the sharp end of the stick. Understanding does not bring anything