Tolerance

"What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly—that is the first law of nature." — Voltaire, The Philosophical Dictionary

"Human diversity makes tolerance more than a virtue; it makes it a requirement for survival." — René Dubos, Celebrations of Life

Sometimes the rigidities of our maps can become a hindrance to creative growth and positive collaboration. Rigidities of all kinds can cause brittleness, splintering and other types of structural deformation. As it is with bridge spans and house frames, so it is also with human psychology and, for lack of a better word, that unidentified spectre, the soul.

The belief that there needs to be an explicit metaphysical ground upon which to base this soul concept seems to me nothing more than a wishfully thinking knee-jerk reaction to the incomprehensible position we are in as living beings. Which isn't to say that there's no reason to wonder or speculate about the possibilities.

We experience strong feelings throughout our lives! They are point-sources of psychological development. Freud took a powerful leap in correlating the emotional experiences of childhood with the personality that ultimately arises from them. Freud had his own particular attachments to the model representing the id, ego and superego, from which he interprets the significance of the observed phenomena.

We don't need to accept his personal theories as to what mechanisms are at work and what that means, to see that it is self-evident that these events would shape our psychological development, and that these primal human experiences are not just simple, rational, and conceptual learning processes, but a potent cocktail of mystery, wonder, bewilderment and the unfortunately ever present: disappointment.

By recognizing that the shared physical and psychological experiences relating to our human condition (birth, nursing, growth, maturation, aging, sickness and death) are many orders of magnitude larger and more significant than our specific social and genetic differentiations, we start to see where the commonalities can be bridged, and where our differences can be respected and worked through.

Ultimately, fairness needs to be negotiated. People are quick to complain about lawyers, but the legal system is where most of our contemporary societies have agreed to work out our differences (abstractly, and imperfectly, through the so-called social contract). There's a desperate need for a common language and a reasonable legitimacy that can be relied on and trusted by all.

It is perhaps a tendency of all human beings to magnify and exploit differences. When we look at the social behavior of other primates, we almost always find typical dominance behaviors. If we are ever to see anything in human consciousness approaching unbiased reason, we must certainly try to compensate for these known limitations as much as possible and try to think beyond them towards what is possible with cooperation and coordination.

There is no simple utopian method for ensuring fairness and humanitarian behavior. It currently is and has always been a struggle, at times flaring into violence, with the inevitable damage that results. Our models for the management of human relationships are incomplete and often times misleading. This is an area where much could be gained by throwing out some preconceptions and finding the structural similarities between cultures.

Perhaps it inevitably comes down to how well we're able to communicate with each other, and what position we're all in to respond.