Tolerance – the enigma

Tolerance is a trait which has been inculcated into living beings from the time life started to exist. Tolerance to the harsh environments in which they survive, tolerance to various plants and animals which they feed on, tolerance to other living beings who they live with.  That was a time when interdependence was a necessity and way of life. A man who was not part of a community or tribe was deemed dead because of his inability to survive alone in the wild. Hence, his ability to sponge up anything that was thrown at him by the other members of the tribe was acute. As time passed, the level of interdependence tapered. Large communities or tribes became smaller and more nuclear. Further, the advent of technology and the invention of machines, made him independent. As a by-product of this independence, his innate feelings of superiority or inferiority surfaced, hence dissipating the level of tolerance in him.

We can see this all around us. Just a glance through the headlines in the daily newspaper or half an hour on the news channel would give us enough instances of this intolerance. It comes in various shades, whether it is racial intolerance, religious intolerance, intolerance sprouting out of beliefs and principles and even dietary choices, age or time. A white cop shoots an unarmed black man, a terrorist outfit kills a hundred people in a university, a group of religious fanatics get together a few villagers and put up a show of their re-conversion to their ‘original’ religion, the occupants of a car beat a biker to death because his bike grazed their car in one of the busiest streets one will find, a Government in a province bans consumption of beef because their religious beliefs do not allow it, people decide to maroon their aged parents in a festival ground because they were ‘too old’, a member of parliament shoots a duo of siblings who took a few extra minutes to remove their truck from the thoroughfare to let his vehicle pass.

If we compare the first paragraph (early days) above with the second (current days), we will see a thin but prominent difference. In the first instance, we see that there was an effort to understand the circumstance before the tolerator tolerated or the tolerated imposed. Actually, one of the two is enough for the situation to end on a happy note. Even in statistics, tolerance means a measure of multi-collinearity which is a phenomenon in which two or more predictor variables are highly correlated, thus making one of the variables linearly predictable with a high level of accuracy. In simple words, a little bit of knowledge or effort on one side keeps the tolerance high and the friction minimal. These days, we don’t find that effort to understand or yield. Hence, the word tolerance has been currently replaced with the words “put up with”.

When people boast about what all they put up with and thus their high tolerance levels, they don’t understand that putting up with something is actually pushing something away, unwantedly or half-heartedly. It is not in the true sense of the word understanding and co-existing. In short, putting up with equals intolerance.

Hence, do think about this. Tolerance is not measured by the extent to which we can put up with something or somebody but by the extent of ease with which we can co-exist with something or somebody without having to put up with it or them.