A False Type of Tolerance

Continually there comes before us the question of tolerance. Men, after all, are individuals, and we should find ourselves in hopeless friction without sincere tolerance to allow the give and take of living side by side with differing ideas and differing people. But there should be no tolerance for corruption, no tolerance for lawlessness, no tolerance for tyranny. And we should look critically at the type of so-called tolerance that has in it more of laziness and complacency than it does of honest open-mindedness. We wouldn’t tolerate a vicious animal or a dangerous epidemic. Then why should we tolerate influences which are desperately dangerous to our morals and manners or to the principles on which freedom is founded? It is not only our privilege but our inescapable obligation to rise in righteous resentment and resistance when the law is being flaunted, when outlawed evils are invited in, or when reprehensible practices are passively permitted. Perhaps there have always been those who would flaunt and defraud; but when a society begins to look upon such things with cynical acceptance, when men begin to justify things that nobody should do on the assumption that everybody is doing them, then we have cause for concern. It isn’t only the fact that an evil deed is done, bad as that may be, but the fact that it doesn’t meet more reaction, the fact that it is easily tolerated, that should cause serious concern. Disease germs and viruses are everywhere present and will always make their inroads where they find an easy opening, and the greatest danger comes perhaps not in the presence of the germs themselves, bad as that may be, but in the lowered resistance that permits them to enter in and do their damage. Basically there are no new evils in the world, and no age, no society, no city, is without evils. But the critical condition comes when evil is met with cynical acceptance or passive permission.