Not That There's Anything Wrong With That
Why It's Important to Show Respect for Things You Don't Care About
The letter arrived from an office in the Midwest, which turned out to be an arm of the local Catholic diocese. It announced an investigation, by a committee of priests, into whether my previous, long-ago-ended marriage should be deemed "a nullity."
In the eyes of the Church, the letter added. They didn’t want to leave me with the impression they were trying to deny or denigrate my experience. They made it clear they respected that heathen marriage from long ago. But the Church has its own laws that they wanted to apply to the question, and would I please fill out the enclosed form?
I didn't mind. (I am friendly with my ex-wife, who is a nice person). But I was surprised, because she's Jewish.
It turned out she'd recently remarried, and her new husband is Catholic. The Church considers marriage eternal, not affected by the declarations of mere governments. So if you're married to someone who was divorced by a secular judge long ago, then as far as the Church is concerned, you're living with an adulterer. In this state of separation from the godly, you cannot take communion. Her husband didn't want to be cut off from the Church in this way. This required my ex be redefined as someone who — in the eyes of the Church — had not been married before.
As a matter of common sense, this looked like a tall order. I mean, there are pictures from the wedding. And the honeymoon. Cards. Cheese platters and serving trays given, thank you notes sent from the conjugal address. And so on.
But institutions have ways around common sense. (Maybe that is what institutions are for? To replace people's muddling, inconsistent hunches about How Things Are with the precision of Law.) If the prior marriage was a "nullity," unreal by the definitions of canon law, then the people in it can be deemed never-married. Problem solved.
I filled out the form. The faraway priests investigated and duly decided that this marriage of 35 years ago suffered from a case of nonexistence. Situation resolved to the satisfaction of all parties.
A task required by modern life: To participate in an action that other people revere, cherish and love -- without caring a whit about it.
I don't recount this because I found the circumstances weird. Quite the opposite. The whole exercise felt familiar. It was just an unusual version of a usual task required of us all by modern life: To participate in an action that other people revere, cherish and love -- without caring a whit about it.
I am not a Catholic, not a believer, and not inclined to think that celibate men should pass judgement on a two people in a marriage (isn't that kind of like the lion in the zoo scoring a savannah-hunting pride?). But my skeptical indifference isn't important here. What was required was what I did: maintain a respectful, cooperative manner and a careful silence. My job was to show in word and deed that even though your thing is not for me, I find no fault with it, and am glad that those who cherish it may do so without interference.
The final letter from the church tribunal was courteous in the same spirit. It kindly noted that while my Marriage Number 1 was a nullity, this did not mean it was meaningless. If we had offspring (we didn't) they were still well-loved children of God, and so on. Tolerance, which had flowed from me to them, was now coming back around. You're doing your thing, we say, which is not my thing. And we add in speech and action, as much as we possibly can, that sentiment best expressed in the words of the classic sitcom: "not that there's anything wrong with that."
I did find myself wondering, though, why we manage our indifference in this way. What motivates this tolerant role-play before we do it, or justifies it afterwards?
In the realm of personal relations, the most common answer is simple: Love. The parent listens to the kid rattle on about Power Rangers or New York Rangers or Space Rangers, uninterested in their details but happy that the child is happy. Your spouse nods indulgently as you tell that same old story in the same old way about people she never met in the first place — like, for instance, your first wife who married that nice Catholic fellow. Indifference to the tale is supplanted by love of the teller. Sometimes that may even bring us along into a genuine interest in their thing. In my experience, though, even then my enthusiasm and respect will always be tinged with my love for the person who first found truth or beauty in it.
But this motive — love of a particular individual — doesn't apply to communities and whole kinds of person. Why do we express respect and sympathy for things we would never do or believe or say, when they're enacted by strangers?
The first answer that comes to my mind is the Golden Rule, a version of which exists in so many different traditions. We do unto the beliefs and passions of others as we would have those others do unto our own cherished practices and convictions. Under our differences, perhaps we share this principle, so we can apply to even the most alien-seeming people. You may believe in a different God or no God, but we all value peace and right conduct, don't we?
In the words of a celebrated philosopher, yeah, right. Sure, many people would apply the Golden Rule to any decent human being. But their definition of "decent human being" won't include all 8 billion of us. For most of humanity, deep moral convictions aren't felt to be universal at all. For instance, as I believe in everyone's right to bodily autonomy, how can I shrug off the views of someone who is convinced that life begins at conception, with all that implies for restricting women's freedom to make decisions about pregnancy? We can find a way to live on the same street, but we can’t then say, well, we agree about all the important things. We don’t.
Tolerating what we know to be morally wrong is itself a moral wrong
Do we all think that the value of tolerance is so great that it trumps our sense of right and wrong? Nope. Quite the opposite: Tolerating what we know to be morally wrong is itself a moral wrong.
In practice, the Golden Rule isn’t a shared moral ground so much as a kind of mutually assured destruction pact: I express polite respect for your weird beliefs so that you will do the same for mine. I won't burn down your sacred precincts, you won't burn down mine. My conduct toward you, by motivating your reciprocal conduct to me, keeps me unperturbed by your hostile or uncomprehending feelings about my convictions. I don't have to suffer your dirty looks, sarcasm, rocks, brickbats or worse, and you don't have to suffer mine.
But this kind of tolerance is fragile. Someone who has nothing to lose, or thinks he has nothing to lose, doesn't have much stake in the unspoken pact. One growing danger of 21st century conflict, for example, is the ease with which social media spreads the impression that those other people despise us. The social-science term for this is "meta-dehumanization" — that's when I am convinced that your people think of my people as animals, vermin, demons or some other entity outside the human community. The "meta" aspect is that this is a belief about a belief: It's what I imagine you think about me. Studies (like this one and this one) back up the common-sense hunch that thinking other people dehumanize your people is a license to respond, tit-for-tat, with the same attitude. (It doesn't matter if the belief is true.)
If tolerance-as-a-pact is vulnerable to those who think they have nothing to lose, it's even more endangered by people who think they have everything to lose. Mutual-consent tolerance, after all, is about keeping everyone safe. But people don't rank safety as their top moral priority. We all have some beliefs, objects or practices that we would never willingly give up or trade for something else. The anthropologist Scott Atran has formally defined these as "sacred values," and noted that if you perceive yours as threatened, you're game to spit on the thought of mere safety and throw tolerance to the curb. In fact, the conviction that they fight for "sacred values" drives people to kill, and die, with the conviction that they're doing the right thing. A "sacred value," by definition, is not a loaf you split in half to compromise with an opponent. It's not negotiable at all (if it were, it would not be sacred). If I have come to feel that your way of life isn't just odd but a menace to mine, watch out.
Fortunately, this sense of sacredness cannot be ginned up by leaders at will (for all of Vladimir Putin's invocation of a threat to sacred Russian values, many ordinary people in his country don't seem to go along, and many thousands of potential fighters have chosen instead to get out of his grasp). Like them, most of us appear to want, most of the time, to live in a less exalted and more muddled state, in which tolerance serves us well. Not that there's anything wrong with that.