Antagonistic Tolerance

This paper develops a concept of competitive sharing to explain how sacred sites that have long been shared by members of differing religious communities and may even exhibit syncretic mixtures of the practices of both may come to be seized or destroyed by members of one of them in order to manifest dominance over the other. This competitive sharing is compatible with the passive meaning of tolerance as noninterference but incompatible with the active meaning of tolerance as embrace of the Other. Confusion of this passive noninterference with the active embrace of the Other is shown to lie at the heart of a critical weakness of most current explanations of nationalist conflict in the Balkans and communal conflict in India. Several discomfiting conclusions follow. One is that positive tolerance requires social stasis and thus is akin to a LviStraussian myth, a machine for the suppression of time. Second, democracy based on the consent of the governed may often be incompatible with programs that mandate positive tolerance. Third, syncretism may be fostered by inequality and is actually endangered by equality between the groups. Rather than try to avoid these uncomfortable conclusions, the paper adopts the argument of Max Weber and Tzvetan Todorov for the superiority of an ethics of responsibility over an ethics of conviction, concluding that scholarly ethics requires reporting research findings that are contrary to that which many would prefer to be true.