Again: Tolerance, Democracy, Pluralism -An Exchange

...In this respect Wolff's essay in the Critique of Pure Tolerance is a real contribution, and deserves more—much more—commendation than criticism...

...Tolerance" of political ideas can mean nothing more (nor less) than the utopian ideal of complete free speech —the ideal that no utterance about politics is to be legally proscribed...

...2. Philip Green, like the authors of the volume he defends, urges intolerance toward ideas he doesn't like, e.g., Nazism and anti-Semitism...

...The dominant tendency in American political science today holds that democracy is to be valued primarily to the extent that something called an open democratic process ("the rules of the game") is maintained, rather than by the results for real human beings which are produced by that process...

...But aside from the question of practicable alternatives, there is a minimal expression that we all—especially those of us who are academics—ought to expect of each other...

...1) The Madisonian system is not majoritarian but is rather decisively anti-majoritarian, and favors negativist coalitions of established minorities— this in itself sounds the death-knell for the kind of coalitionism that Spitz offers as the hope of poor Americans...

...As a starter, however, I would refer Spitz and DISSENT readers to the growing literature on decentralization and direct community action...

...Neither Wolff nor I attack "democracy" or "pluralism" in principle...

...Somewhat dangerous it remains— but for God's sake it's dangerous to be poor or black in the U. S. right now, and bids fair to remain so for a long time to come...

...He dislikes Marcuse's version of Rousseauianism, and I agree with him in this (so does Michael Walzer, and Wolff might too, as the preface of the Critique makes dear) . Obviously, much work remains to be done in the search for alternatives...

...for how can the social pressures that, as Mill correctly saw, threaten freedom of expression be successfully restrained by those against whom the pressure is directed...

...What Wolff and I do attack is precisely A merican-style democracy and sham pluralism which are maintained by, among other things, the ideology of pure tolerance, of "the rules of the game...

...As for political speech and action, however—as opposed to merely idiosyncratic personal behavior or mannerisms— the position is quite different...

...I would like to attempt to offer some clarifying distinctions about "tolerance"— both the word and the act...

...This is to be deplored...

...One—but only one—aspect of Mill's plea for tolerance in On Liberty may be taken as a plea for tolerance of idiosyncratic personal behavior...

...It is David Spitz who confounds principle with practice by suggesting, as above, that in order to defend those principles one must accept their American versions as one's starting point...

...Will he forgive me if I find this seeming distinction less than clear...

...1. The Wolff-Moore-Marcuse volume is avowedly a critique of Pure Tolerance, that is, an attack on a principle...

...But it remains true that within that system a disadvantaged group, say a small union or a racial or ethnic minority, can both plead its cause and unite with others of its kind, and perhaps with sympathetic elements within one of the major political parties, to fashion a stronger adversary to its otherwise more powerful opponent, say a giant corporation...

...What social outsiders do need is the kind of spirit that moved, say, the Abolitionists or the sit-down strikers...

...Rather, one simply resolves to redouble one's efforts to counter "untruth" with "truth" (not dogma) whenever one can, and especially to convince relevant elites to enter the lists against such pressures...

...non-cooperation with, disobedience to the prevailing system...

...Thus, the laundry workers should be "tolerant" of General Motors' efforts to use its "access" in the pressure system, and vice-versa...

...2) In any event, if the system were reformed to be majoritarian, an effective majority would probably be formed out of those who benefit materially from the system...

...In any of these respects, what can possibly be the "value," after all, of the spread of the doctrines of Nazism, even when they are dissociated from overt acts of violence...

...it is a monstrous folly...

...I even offer the latter as an alternative...

...Of course, one could justify majoritarianism itself on the same grounds Mill uses to justify free speech...

...the problem of social justice for all would still be far from solved...

...It need hardly be added that this is a far cry from the pseudo-pluralism of American theory and practice today...

...My starting point is simply to assume at least an initial predilection for majority rule, on unspecified grounds, on the part of all the participants in this discussion...

...After all, politics is concerned with the struggle for power (ultimately) over the conditions of life and death, and in that struggle who wins and loses matters at least as much as how the game was played...

...Brief and significant further comments will be printed.—En...

...I think he is wrong...

...Otherwise their power must be respected out of prudence, but its legitimacy can only be attenuated: maldistribution of power and/or income can only be greeted with intolerance...

...The U. S. today is not the Weimar Germany, Czarist Russia, or Batista's Cuba...

...This is not accomplished by exposing the deficiencies of American practices, however accurate that exposure may be...

...That is not to say that unpleasant or dangerous ideas should be outlawed...

...It is only to say that in intellectual discourse (as opposed to legal discourse) moral perversity, or the injurious distortion of what one thinks one has discovered, after intelligent and lengthy consideration, to be true, should be treated (as Barrington Moore suggests) with the intolerance that they deserve...

...After all, GM is not the only or even the worst enemy of the laundry workers: having the rest of the working class and the affluent labor movement for friends, they don't need enemies...

...As for the majority, however, all one can ask of it is that it continue to grant to one the legal right to engage in these activities: and this not because of any claim to be tolerated—why should "they" be any more tolerant of my attempts to lead them into error than I am of their attempts to lie to me?—but because the doctrine of majority rule itself demands free speech as an adjunct...

...It is not an accident, therefore, that survey research so often shows a positive attitude toward these rules on the part of those who benefit most from them, such as community leaders, the well to-do, academics, etc...

...otherwise we run the risk of throwing out the baby with the bathwater...

...To an observer, the recent controversy over tolerance in the pages of DISSENT has shed more heat than light—chiefly for the reason that the disputants have been talking about different things while seeming to be talking about the same thing...

...3. Like tolerance, democracy and pluralism are political principles, not to be identified with the practices and arrangements of any specific system such as the American...

...It's precisely the system's built-in elitism— a small number of people making decisions for millions without being effectively accountable except in rare cases—that Wolff and I chiefly object to...

...Is the example unfair...

...it probably would not exist as a political force at all...

...Mill is in the end simply wrong about the supposed value of free expression: that in every case we court stagnation, dogma, or the "waste of gifts" (in Morley's phrase), by suppressing objectionable speech...

...5. Finally, if Philip Green wants to value—define?—democracy not by its process but only by its results, he might not like to know that in this he is at one with Hitler and Stalin and the leaders of present-day People's Democracies...

...All of them claimed, and those still alive continue to claim, that their systems and only their systems were "true democracies" precisely because they operated in what their rulers conceived to be or said were the people's interests...

...How, for example, are virtuous ideas eventually strengthened (Mill's ultimate desideratum) by having to do combat in the marketplace with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion...

...I'll make one last try to clarify those...

...We continue the discussion that has been running through several issues of DISSENT, first occasioned by David Spitz's review of the volume, The Critique of Pure Tolerance, by Robert Paul Wolff, Herbert Marcuse, and Barrington Moore, and then followed by contributions from various hands...

...and for another perspective, to the recent work of Peter Bachrach (The Theory of Democratic Elitism, e.g...

...The rules of the game are rigged, sometimes by deliberate manipulation, most often simply as the result of a long historical process...

...which represents the beginnings of an attempt to reconstruct for industrial society a genuine pluralism (and which should be read in conjunction with Michael Walzer's recent paper on "The Obligation to Disobey...

...that is, in which everyone's engagement in the political process should be equally respected by all regardless of the results of that process: 1) a Rousseauian social contract in which the laws are made equally and directly by all, where there are no permanent minorities, and no extremes of income distribution: 2) a genuinely pluralist society (A la Figgis and the early Laski) in which mutual respect and community-spiritedness are the rule with regard to the allocation of power and income, as well as with regard both to the expression of opinion and to idiosyncratic personal behavior...

...In these terms, to call for elitism or for the abandonment of imperfect arrangements in favor of some non-tolerant, non-pluralist, non-democractic system is more than self-defeating...

...Nor will tolerance ultimately lead to equality in political decision-making, since the rules of our game themselves forbid that: our version of "democracy" is profoundly elitist...

...I suspect that all the contributors to this ongoing debate (and to that book) would agree with me that contrary attitudes about personal deviance are in most cases to be considered evidence of bigotry, and to be eschewed...

...American system...

...4. No one will deny that vast inequalities of economic and political power characterize the...

...We're equalitarians, not elitists...

...The various contractarian versions of majoritarianism are themselves not free from grave ambiguities—if they were, polit ical philosophy would have ended with them—but one must start somewhere...

...Thus the logical demands of majoritarianism itself, not Mill's sometimes specious remarks about the prospects for improving the state of our moral and practical knowledge, are the real justification for the constitutional right of free speech...

...We should, in our teaching, our writing, our speaking, not make the confusion between our own class interest and the interests of all members of society...

...Without free speech we can never be sure that the majority formed in a supposed democracy is actually a freelyformed majority...

...of, in a word, difference...

...Spitz asserts that despite its weaknesses this system offers the only hope for its own improvement, and this because of its emphasis on tolerance...

...Since his time, this conception of tolerance has been steadily further extended under the rubric of "cultural relativism," and we are nowadays enjoined by enlightened persons to be tolerant both of deviant individuals (or subcultures) within our own culture, and of, more generally, deviant cultures (deviant from our own, that is...

...we should not confuse the particular version of democratic process from which we so fortuitously benefit with social justice...

...Nonsense...

...The ideal of tolerance is of only limited value with respect to speech and is subject to grave distortion with respect to action...

...The more powerful can expect the less powerful to abide by the rules only to the extent that they are willing continually to surrender more and more of their power...

...indeed, Mill himself seems to do this on occasion...

...This can be said in full awareness that one's own ideas may be given such treatment by the majority of a society (as might be the case with the ideas of Wolff, Moore, Marcuse, Spitz, or myself...

...is to affirm rather than to deny the position I advanced against the authors of A Critique of Pure Tolerance...

...David Spitz—and he has not been alone in making this criticism—asks Wolff what can possibly replace our rules-of-the-game "tolerance" (which, to repeat, is a false tolerance—the tolerance of the strong for the weak as long as the weak play by their rules...

...nor has Wolff, as I read him, said anything of the kind...

...One does not in that circumstance plead for a chimerical "tol erance," which will in any event never be granted...

...I have absolutely no doubt that Robert Paul Wolff's (and probably Herbert Marcuse's) attitudes are in this regard no less Millian than David Spitz's: there is certainly nothing in Wolff's essay in the Critique of Pure Tolerance which would Iead one to think otherwise...

...it's Spitz who accepts a system which, though it makes "the people" the ultimate rulers in principle, is concretely elitist in operation...

...Without tolerance and pluralism and democracy —even that "rigged" democracy that distresses Green and Wolff and many others, including myself—the disadvantaged union or racial group would not only be less powerful than it can presently (in concert with others) become...

...yet he would not outlaw them...

...However, I am assuming an independent justification for majority rule, such as the social contract theorists have used...

...If American practices significantly depart from or contradict those principles, we require a careful analysis and set of recommendations that will bring those arrangements into harmony with the principles...

...If ever the system is so close to achieving a meaningful degree of social justice and political equality that the abstract principle of pure tolerance loses that character, I'm sure Wolff and I will be more receptive to it...

...DAVID SPITZ Our differences may be deeper than I thought, but some are still differences of vocabulary...

...That all ideas should be initially treated with equal weight, or should be indiscriminately encouraged in their dissemination, however, is a doctrine that has never been put into practice by anyone—nor should it be...

...And "pure tolerance," because of its effectively ideological and class character, fosters such acceptance of inequalitarianism...

...both should also have affirmative attitudes toward the system itself...

...On the contrary, it's all too typical...

...one does not have to be a moral absolutist to say that the world can only be better off in every way if such "ideas" are never heard of—not because they are offensive to other persons' sensibilities (the bigot's intolerant reaction to deviant behavior) but because in the end they do damage to other persons' lives...

...They won't get it from rules-of-the-game tolerance, which takes from them a potent (nonviolent) weapon—radical opposition to...

...Finally, the notion of tolerance with regard to political action is easily converted, as it has been in the United States, into a sham, a facade—and since it is this notion with which Wolff's original essay in the Critique is chiefly concerned, most of the criticisms which have been made of that essay miss this most important point...

...In the end, I can think offhand of only two (ideal) types of society in which tolerance should be the political norm...

...Finally, I'm saddened by the New Left baiting of David Spiti s remarks about Hitler et al...

...To confuse this legal tolerance with intellectual tolerance is to vulgarize the intellect...

...Philip Green's communication— strikingly at variance with his sensitive and insightful writings elsewhere—confounds the commonplace distinction between a political principle and the practices of a particular society allegedly committed to that principle...

...Exalting social justice and equality above process is less dangerous the better the material prospects for achieving them—and the U. S. surely has good credentials on that score...

...Moreover, for Green to condemn American political science for accepting the actual rather than the ideal rules of the game—a condemnation surely inapplicable to all American political scientists, among whose number Professor Green presumably includes himself—and to urge greater decentralization and direct community action (more pluralism...

...conversely, a negative attitude on the part of those who don't benefit as much...

...Mill speaks primarily of acts within the boundaries of one culture...