TOLERANCE

Living today in the IT age presents far more challenges than we thought. We all expected things to be easier. We were wrong. As in every aspect of life, for every positive introduced there is a negative. That is the way the universe works.

In the 21^st Century, we are a world community bound together across the boundaries we have arbitrarily established to identify ourselves, and found that we share so much, and that we differ so much. The tragedy is that we treat those differences as further boundaries. They become the subject of derision, pity, disgust, intolerance: a rage of negatives that threatens at individual and social and national levels to create firestorms of discontent. Differences in culture, religion, morality, expectations, understanding: these enhance rather than coalesce, community/social/cultural variations. It becomes too easy to say: I don’t do things that way: that is odd/bad/evil and so on. Instead of appreciating differences, we exacerbate them by exaggerating what divides us to the point of distaste.

On a personal level, we are capable of responding to jingoistic calls for national service and loyalty in times of war, even though we may disagree with, say, war. We abhor violence, but we take up arms. This is where we fail. Unless people are able to see differences as spices enhancing the basic flavour of the human cake, we will continue to be willing participants in the march towards total breakdown.

This may seem extreme, but think on it for a moment. Politicians and their business surrogates (or vice versa depending on your perspective) stir up our parochial eed to be unique and great and wonderful and loyal to the point where our own sense of right and wrong is ground under foot. When trouble looms, loyalty is something we give to our own kind: not to others.

We are stirred up in fiery speeches by adept politicians (demagogues?) who paint the opponents we allegedly have—often those standing in the way of international business—and any love, compassion or humanity flies out the door. We resort to anything but love and tolerance and understanding: we fervidly embrace violence as the only solution. It happens internationally and inter nationally. Society ends up as a force to impose force and violence as the only way. It has always been that way. We are supposed to learn from the failures of wars, violence and the machinations of history in which we are the fodder. War achieves nothing. Violence achieves nothing. Except reciprocated violence. We fail to learn from history, and as Geroge Santayana observed: that condemns us to repeat the mistakes of the past. “We are in the right: therefore you must be in the wrong”.

Consider what happens between faiths. Consider the bane of todays anti immigrant policies. Consider the impression the rhetoric gives that Islam is our greatest foe. It is not, but the more we back violent or even divisive rhetoric towards them, our fears will become self fulfilling: not because Muslims are evil, but because we pushed them into reaction.

There is so much more to living than building a wall of exclusivity around what we are. Multi culturalism has, it must be said, not always worked. But in so many respects it has made our countries far richer. If we could only learn respect, tolerance and interest without dogma and judgement, we would be far better off.

The word we should champion is tolerance.

“So you don’t do things the way I do? Fine. That’s your prerogative. I’d love to talk to you about it someday if you are interested”.

Of course, that is hard to do. I have lived in Islamic countries for over forty years. I have travelled the world. I have seen dozens of cultures, practices, belief systems and so on—all of which are ‘strange to me”. Do I deride them? Do I say “I know better because of what I am?” That was the first lesson I had to learn. If I go into your home, maybe I don’t like the way you have decorated your home or I dislike the habits you display in bringing up your children. Do I criticise? Of course not. I might talk about it to someone I trust—and that is not a good thing, I suppose. But it underlies the tolerance and respect of which I speak. We stand to learn much more than we can teach from those who differ from us.

Perhaps in a confrontation, the other party may attack our values. Fine. Learn to ride with it. Whether we can or net depends a great deal on our individual (and societal/ political) personalities. Therein lies the problem: hot heads can lose it. The result? Disaster. Let people speak. Let them exchange ideas. Everyone has the right to an opinion. Sometimes those opinions will jar with our own principles. So? If we were all the same, it would be a vanilla world.

And the meek? Inherit the earth? Gandhi did. There is no reason others can’t.