From Tolerance to Bigotry

The opposite of tolerance is intolerance, which has several shades of intensity. Intolerance may start with narrow-minded disapproval of someone else’s behavior or way of doing things. Narrow-mindedness chokes the enjoyment out of life and closes one’s mind to new ideas.

For instance, a straitlaced person may recoil from the bouncing enthusiasm of a child. A young person may yawn at the meditative ways of someone older than himself. Ask a cautious person to work side by side with someone who is adventurous, and they could both get irritable. Why the recoil, the yawn, and the irritation? Because, in each case, the one finds it hard to tolerate the attitudes or behavior of the other.

Where intolerance breeds, narrow-mindedness can escalate into prejudice, which is an aversion to a group, race, or religion. More intense than prejudice is bigotry, which can manifest itself in violent hatred. The result is misery and bloodshed. Think of what intolerance led to during the Crusades! Even today, intolerance is a factor in the conflicts in Bosnia, Rwanda, and the Middle East.

“Human beings do not want to be tolerant,” wrote Arthur M. Melzer, an associate professor at Michigan State University. “What comes naturally is . . . prejudice.” So intolerance is not simply a character flaw that affects only a minority; being narrow-minded comes naturally to all of us because all mankind are imperfect.—Compare Romans 5:12.

Potential Busybodies

In 1991, Time magazine reported on the growing narrow-mindedness in the United States. The article described “life-style busybodies,” people who try to impose their own standards of conduct on everyone. Nonconformists have been victimized. For instance, a woman in Boston was removed from her job because she refused to wear makeup. A man in Los Angeles was fired because he was overweight. Why the zeal to make others conform?

Narrow-minded people are unreasonable, selfish, stubborn, and dogmatic. But are not most people unreasonable, selfish, stubborn, or dogmatic to a degree? If these traits find a firm foothold in our personality, we will be narrow-minded.

What about you? Do you shake your head at someone else’s taste in food? In conversation, do you normally want the last word? When working with a group, do you expect them to follow your way of thinking? If so, it might do some good to add a little sugar to your coffee!

But, as was mentioned in the preceding article, intolerance can come in the form of hostile prejudice. One factor that can make intolerance escalate is severe anxiety.

“A Deep Feeling of Uncertainty”

Ethnologists have looked into mankind’s past to discover when and where racial prejudice has been evident. They found that this sort of intolerance does not surface all the time, nor is it manifest in every land to the same degree. The German natural science magazine GEO reports that racial friction surfaces in times of crisis when “people have a deep feeling of uncertainty and sense that their identity is threatened.”

Is such “a deep feeling of uncertainty” widespread today? Definitely. As never before, mankind is beset by one crisis after another. Unemployment, the spiraling cost of living, overpopulation, depletion of the ozone layer, crime in the cities, pollution of drinking water, global warming—a nagging fear of any of these increases anxiety. Crises breed anxiety, and undue anxiety opens the door to intolerance.

Such intolerance finds an outlet, for instance, where different ethnic and cultural groups become intermingled, as in some European lands. According to a report by National Geographic in 1993, Western European countries were then host to more than 22 million immigrants. Many Europeans “felt overwhelmed by the influx of newcomers” of a different language, culture, or religion. There has been a rise in antiforeign sentiment in Austria, Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Sweden.

What about world leaders? During the 1930’s and 1940’s, Hitler made intolerance a government policy. Sadly, some political and religious leaders today use intolerance to gain their own ends. This has been the case in such places as Austria, France, Ireland, Russia, Rwanda, and the United States.