Between Individuals: In the absence of their own experiences, individuals base their impressions and opinions of one another on assumptions. These assumptions can be influenced by the positive or negative beliefs of those who are either closest or most influential in their lives, including parents or other family members, colleagues, educators, and/or role models.
In the Media: Individual attitudes are influenced by the images of other groups in the media, and the press. For instance, many Serbian communities believed that the western media portrayed a negative image of the Serbian people during the NATO bombing in Kosovo and Serbia.[5] This de-humanization may have contributed to the West's willingness to bomb Serbia. However, there are studies that suggest media images may not influence individuals in all cases. For example, a study conducted on stereotypes discovered people of specific towns in southeastern Australia did not agree with the negative stereotypes of Muslims presented in the media.[6]
In Education: There exists school curriculum and educational literature that provide biased and/or negative historical accounts of world cultures. Education or schooling based on myths can demonize and dehumanize other cultures rather than promote cultural understanding and a tolerance for diversity and differences.
This post is also part of the
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To encourage tolerance, parties to a conflict and third parties must remind themselves and others that tolerating tolerance is preferable to tolerating intolerance. Following are some useful strategies that may be used as tools to promote tolerance.
Intergroup Contact: There is evidence that casual intergroup contact does not necessarily reduce intergroup tensions, and may in fact exacerbate existing animosities. However, through intimate intergroup contact, groups will base their opinions of one another on personal experiences, which can reduce prejudices . Intimate intergroup contact should be sustained over a week or longer in order for it to be effective.[7]
In Dialogue: To enhance communication between both sides, dialogue mechanisms such as dialogue groups or problem solving workshops provide opportunities for both sides to express their needs and interests. In such cases, actors engaged in the workshops or similar forums feel their concerns have been heard and recognized. Restorative justice programs such as victim-offender mediation provide this kind of opportunity as well. For instance, through victim-offender mediation, victims can ask for an apology from the offender and the offender can make restitution and ask for forgiveness.[8]
Individuals should continually focus on being tolerant of others in their daily lives. This involves consciously challenging the stereotypes and assumptions that they typically encounter in making decisions about others and/or working with others either in a social or a professional environment.
The media should use positive images to promote understanding and cultural sensitivity. The more groups and individuals are exposed to positive media messages about other cultures, the less they are likely to find faults with one another -- particularly those communities who have little access to the outside world and are susceptible to what the media tells them. See the section on stereotypes to learn more about how the media perpetuate negative images of different groups.
Educators are instrumental in promoting tolerance and peaceful coexistence . For instance, schools that create a tolerant environment help young people respect and understand different cultures. In Israel, an Arab and Israeli community called Neve Shalom or Wahat Al-Salam ("Oasis of Peace") created a school designed to support inter-cultural understanding by providing children between the first and sixth grades the opportunity to learn and grow together in a tolerant environment.[9]
Conflict transformation NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and other actors in the field of peacebuilding can offer mechanisms such as trainings to help parties to a conflict communicate better with one another. For instance, several organizations have launched a series of projects in Macedonia that aim to reduce tensions between the country's Albanian, Romani and Macedonian populations, including activities that promote democracy, ethnic tolerance, and respect for human rights.[10]
International organizations need to find ways to enshrine the principles of tolerance in policy. For instance, the United Nations has already created The Declaration of Moral Principles on Tolerance, adopted and signed in Paris by UNESCO's 185 member states on Nov. 16, 1995, which qualifies tolerance as a moral, political, and legal requirement for individuals, groups, and states.[11]
Governments also should aim to institutionalize policies of tolerance. For example, in South Africa, the Education Ministry has advocated the integration of a public school tolerance curriculum into the classroom; the curriculum promotes a holistic approach to learning . The United States government has recognized one week a year as international education week, encouraging schools, organizations, institutions, and individuals to engage in projects and exchanges to heighten global awareness of cultural differences.
The Diaspora community can also play an important role in promoting and sustaining tolerance. They can provide resources to ease tensions and affect institutional policies in a positive way. For example, Jewish, Irish, and Islamic communities have contributed to the peacebuilding effort within their places of origin from their places of residence in the United States. [12]
When Sarah wrote this essay in 2003, social media existed, but it hadn't yet become popular or widespread. Facebook and Twitter hadn't started yet (Facebook started in 2004, Twitter in 2006.)
In addition, while the conflict between the right and the left and the different races certainly existed in the United States, it was not nearly as escalated or polarized as it is now in 2019. For those reasons (and others), the original version of this essay didn't discuss political or racial tolerance or intolerance in the United States. Rather than re-writing the original essay, all of which is still valid, I have chosen to update it with these "Current Implications."
In 2019, the intolerance between the Left and the Right in the United States has gotten extreme. Neither side is willing to accept the legitimacy of the values, beliefs, or actions of the other side, and they are not willing to tolerate those values, beliefs or actions whatsoever. That means, in essence, that they will not tolerate the people who hold those views, and are doing everything they can to disempower, delegitimize, and in some cases, dehumanize the other side.
Further, while intolerance is not new, efforts to spread and strengthen it have been greatly enhanced with the current day traditional media and social media environments: the proliferation of cable channels that allow narrowcasting to particular audiences, and Facebook and Twitter (among many others) that serve people only information that corresponds to (or even strengthens) their already biased views. The availability of such information channels both helps spread intolerance; it also makes the effects of that intolerance more harmful.
Intolerance and its correlaries (disempowerment, delegitimization, and dehumanization) are perhaps clearest on the right, as the right currently holds the U.S. presidency and controls the statehouses in many states. This gives them more power to assert their views and disempower, delegitimize and dehumanize the other. (Consider the growing restrictions on minority voting rights, the delegitimization of transgendered people and supporters, and the dehumanizing treatment of would-be immigrants at the southern border.)
But the left is doing the same thing when it can. By accusing the right of being "haters," the left delegitimizes the right's values and beliefs, many of which are not borne of animus, but rather a combination of bad information being spewed by fake news in social and regular media, and natural neurobiological tendencies which cause half of the population to be biologically more fearful, more reluctant to change, and more accepting of (and needing) a strong leader.
Put together, such attitudes feed upon one another, causing an apparently never-ending escalation and polarization spiral of intolerance. Efforts to build understanding and tolerance, just as described in the original article, are still much needed today both in the United States and across the world.
The good news is that many such efforts exist. The Bridge Alliance , for instance, is an organization of almost 100 member organizations which are working to bridge the right-left divide in the U.S. While the Bridge Alliance doesn't use the term "tolerance" or "coexistence" in its framing " Four Principles ," they do call for U.S. leaders and the population to "work together" to meet our challenges. "Working together" requires not only "tolerance for " and "coexistence with" the other side; it also requires respect for other people's views. That is something that many of the member organizations are trying to establish with red-blue dialogues, public fora, and other bridge-building activities. We need much, much more of that now in 2019 if we are to be able to strengthen tolerance against the current intolerance onslaught.
One other thing we'd like to mention that was touched upon in the original article, but not explored much, is what can and should be done when the views or actions taken by the other side are so abhorent that they cannot and should not be tolerated? A subset of that question is one Sarah did pose above '"How can we be tolerant of those who are intolerant of us?"[3] For many, tolerating intolerance is neither acceptable nor possible." Sarah answers that by arguing that tolerance is beneficial--by implication, even in those situations.
What she doesn't explicitly consider, however, is the context of the intolerance. If one is considering the beliefs or behavior of another that doesn't affect anyone else--a personal decision to live in a particular way (such as following a particular religion for example), we would agree that tolerance is almost always beneficial, as it is more likely to lead to interpersonal trust and further understanding.
However, if one is considering beliefs or actions of another that does affect other people--particularly actions that affect large numbers of people, then that is a different situation. We do not tolerate policies that allow the widespread dissemination of fake news and allow foreign governments to manipulate our minds such that they can manipulate our elections. That, in our minds is intolerable. So too are actions that destroy the rule of law in this country; actions that threaten our democratic system.
But that doesn't mean that we should respond to intolerance in kind. Rather, we would argue, one should respond to intolerance with respectful dissent--explaining why the intolerance is unfairly stereotyping an entire group of people; explaining why such stereotyping is both untrue and harmful; why a particular action is unacceptable because it threatens the integrity of our democratic system, explaining alternative ways of getting one's needs met.
This can be done without attacking the people who are guilty of intolerance with direct personal attacks--calling them "haters," or shaming them for having voted a particular way. That just hardens the other sides' intolerance.
Still, reason-based arguments probably won't be accepted right away. Much neuroscience research explains that emotions trump facts and that people won't change their minds when presented with alternative facts--they will just reject those facts. But if people are presented with facts in the form of respectful discussion instead of personal attacks, that is both a factual and an emotional approach that can help de-escalate tensions and eventually allow for the development of tolerance. Personal attacks on the intolerant will not do that. So when Sarah asked whether one should tolerate intolerance, I would say "no, one should not." But that doesn't mean that you have to treat the intolerant person disrespectfully or "intolerantly." Rather, model good, respectful behavior. Model the behavior you would like them to adopt. And use that to try to fight the intolerance, rather than simply "tolerating it."
-- Heidi and Guy Burgess. December, 2019.
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[1] The American Heritage Dictionary (New York: Dell Publishing, 1994).
[2] William Ury, Getting To Peace (New York: The Penguin Group, 1999), 127.
[3] As identified by Serge Schmemann, a New York Times columnist noted in his piece of Dec. 29, 2002, in The New York Times entitled "The Burden of Tolerance in a World of Division" that tolerance is a burden rather than a blessing in today's society.
[4] Jannie Malan, "From Exclusive Aversion to Inclusive Coexistence," Short Paper, African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD), Conference on Coexistence Community Consultations, Durban, South Africa, January 2003, 6.
[5] As noted by Susan Sachs, a New York Times columnist in her piece of Dec. 16, 2001, in The New York Times entitled "In One Muslim Land, an Effort to Enforce Lessons of Tolerance."
[6] Amber Hague, "Attitudes of high school students and teachers towards Muslims and Islam in a southeaster Australian community," Intercultural Education 2 (2001): 185-196.
[7] Yehuda Amir, "Contact Hypothesis in Ethnic Relations," in Weiner, Eugene, eds. The Handbook of Interethnic Coexistence (New York: The Continuing Publishing Company, 2000), 162-181.
[8] The Ukrainian Centre for Common Ground has launched a successful restorative justice project. Information available on-line at www.sfcg.org .
[9] Neve Shalom homepage [on-line]; available at www.nswas.com ; Internet.
[10] Lessons in Tolerance after Conflict. http://www.beyondintractability.org/library/external-resource?biblio=9997
[11] "A Global Quest for Tolerance" [article on-line] (UNESCO, 1995, accessed 11 February 2003); available at http://www.unesco.org/new/en/social-and-human-sciences/themes/fight-against-discrimination/promoting-tolerance/ ; Internet.
[12] Louis Kriesberg, "Coexistence and the Reconciliation of Communal Conflicts." In Weiner, Eugene, eds. The Handbook of Interethnic Coexistence (New York: The Continuing Publishing Company, 2000), 182-198.
Use the following to cite this article: Peterson, Sarah. "Tolerance." Beyond Intractability . Eds. Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess. Conflict Information Consortium, University of Colorado, Boulder. Posted: July 2003 < http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/tolerance >.
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“Can you name the truck with four-wheel drive, smells like a steak, and seats 35?”
Back in 1998, “The Simpsons” joked about the Canyonero, an SUV so big that they were obviously kidding. At that time, it was preposterous to think anyone would drive something that was “12 yards long, two lanes wide, 65 tons of American Pride.”
In 2024, that joke isn’t far from reality.
And our reality is one where more pedestrians and bicyclists are getting killed on U.S. streets than at any time in the past 45 years – over 1,000 bicyclists and 7,500 pedestrians in 2022 alone.
Vehicle size is a big part of this problem. A recent paper by urban economist Justin Tyndall found that increasing the front-end height of a vehicle by roughly 4 inches (10 centimeters) increases the chance of a pedestrian fatality by 22% . The risk increases by 31% for female pedestrians or those over 65 years, and by 81% for children.
It’s hard to argue with physics, so there is a certain logic in blaming cars for rising traffic deaths. In fact, if a bicyclist is hit by a pickup truck instead of a car, Tyndall suggests that they are 291% more likely to die.
Yet automakers have long asserted that if everyone simply followed the rules of the road, nobody would die. Vehicle size is irrelevant to that assertion.
My discipline, traffic engineering , acts similarly. We underestimate our role in perpetuating bad outcomes, as well as the role that better engineering can play in designing safer communities and streets.
How bad are the bad outcomes? The U.S. has been tracking car-related road deaths since 1899. As a country, we hit the threshold of 1 million cumulative deaths in 1953, 2 million in 1975 and 3 million in 1998. While the past several years of data have not yet been released, I estimate that the U.S. topped 4 million total road deaths sometime in the spring of 2024.
How many of those are pedestrians and bicyclists? Analysts didn’t do a great job of separating out the pedestrian and cyclist deaths in the early years , but based on later trends, my estimate is that some 930,000 pedestrians and bicyclists have been killed by automobiles in the U.S.
How many of those deaths do we blame on big cars or bad streets? The answer is, very few.
As I show in my new book, “ Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies our Transportation System ,” the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration calls road user error the “ critical reason” behind 94% of crashes, injuries and deaths .
Crash data backs that up.
Police investigate crashes and inevitably look to see which road users, including drivers, pedestrians and cyclists, are most at fault. It’s easy to do because in almost any crash, road user error appears to be the obvious problem.
This approach helps insurance companies figure out who needs to pay. It also helps automakers and traffic engineers rationalize away all these deaths. Everyone – except the families and friends of these 4 million victims – goes to sleep at night feeling good that bad-behaving road users just need more education or better enforcement.
But road user error only scratches the surface of the problem.
When traffic engineers build an overly wide street that looks more like a freeway , and a speeding driver in a Canyonero crashes, subsequent crash data blames the driver for speeding.
When traffic engineers provide lousy crosswalks separated by long distances , and someone jaywalks and gets hit by that speeding Canyonero driver, one or both of these road users will be blamed in the official crash report.
And when automakers build gargantuan vehicles that can easily go double the speed limit and fill them with distracting touchscreens , crash data will still blame the road users for almost anything bad that happens.
These are the sorts of systemic conditions that lead to many so-called road user errors. Look just below the surface, though, and it becomes clear that many human errors represent the typical, rational behaviors of typical, rational road users given the transportation system and vehicle options we put in front of them.
Look more deeply, and you can start to see how our underlying crash data gives everyone a pass but the road users themselves. Everyone wants a data-driven approach to road safety, but today’s standard view of crash data lets automakers, insurance companies and policymakers who shape vehicle safety standards off the hook for embiggening these ever-larger cars and light-duty trucks.
It also absolves traffic engineers, planners and policymakers of blame for creating a transportation system where for most Americans, the only rational choice for getting around is a car .
Automakers want to sell cars and make money. And if bigger SUVs seem safer to potential customers, while also being much more profitable , it’s easy to see how interactions between road users and car companies – making seemingly rational decisions – have devolved into an SUV arms race.
Even though these same vehicles are less safe for pedestrians, bicyclists and those in opposing vehicles , the current data-driven approach to road safety misses that part of the story.
This can’t all be fixed at once. But by pursuing business as usual, automakers and traffic engineers will continue wasting money on victim-blaming campaigns or billboards placed high over a road telling drivers to pay attention to the road .
A better starting point would be remaking the U.S.’s allegedly data-driven approach to road safety by reinventing our understanding of the crash data that informs it all.
The key is starting to ask why. Why did these road users act as they did? Why didn’t they follow the rules that were laid out for them? Bad road user behavior shouldn’t be excused, but a bit of digging below the surface of crash data unearths a completely different story.
Figuring out which road user is most at fault may be useful for law enforcement and insurance companies, but it doesn’t give transportation engineers, planners, policymakers or automakers much insight into what they can do better. Even worse, it has kept them from realizing that they might be doing anything wrong.
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A classic essay by E.M. Forster written during the Second World War. It was included in his collection of writings, Two cheers for democracy (1951). ... tolerance-essay-by-e.-m.-forster Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t9x15sq8p Ocr ABBYY FineReader 11.0 (Extended OCR) ... PDF download. download 1 file . SINGLE PAGE PROCESSED JP2 ZIP download ...
Herbert Marcuse. "Repressive Tolerance". This essay is dedicated to my students at Brandeis University. THIS essay examines the idea of tolerance in our advanced industrial society. The conclusion reached is that the realization of the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the ...
102. Repressive Tolerance. \. labor, I maintain that practices such as planned obsolescence, collusion between union leaders}lip and management, slanted publicity are not sim ply imposed from above on a powerless rank and file, but are tolerated by them-and by the con sumer at large.
So, tolerance becomes the virtue that characterizes a pluralist liberal democracy; without it, such a society is not possible. 4.5. Notion of tolerance The origins of the term, 'tolerance 'are rooted in the Latin word tolerabilis , which means carrying or lifting an object. Both tolerance and 'tolerabilis linguistically imply the
Abstract. Tolerance entails acceptance of the very things one disagrees with, disapproves of or dislikes. Tolerance can be seen as 'a flawed virtue' because it concerns acceptance of the ...
Name Last modified Size; Go to parent directory: Tolerance, Essay by E.M. Forster.epub: 08-Nov-2023 17:41: 2.4M: Tolerance, Essay by E.M. Forster.pdf: 20-Nov-2020 08:41
care." See also Tim Scanlon, "The difficulty of tolerance," reprinted in his The Difficulty of Tolerance: Essays in Political Philosophy (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 187: "Tolerance thus involves an attitude that is intermediate between wholehearted acceptance and unrestrained opposition."
PDF | Previous empirical research on tolerance suffers from a number of shortcomings, the most serious being the conceptual and operational conflation... | Find, read and cite all the research you ...
Harvard University, Massachusetts. These essays in political philosophy by T. M. Scanlon, written between 1969 and 1999, examine the standards by which social and political institutions should be justified and appraised. The collection includes the classic essays 'Preference and Urgency', 'A Theory of Freedom of Expression', and ...
In this essay, I reconstruct tolerance as a moral virtue, by critically analysing its definition, circumstances, justification and limits. I argues that, despite its paradoxical appearance, tolerance qualifies as a virtue, by means of a restriction of its proper object to differences that are chosen.
E. M. Forster' s Ironic Liberalism. and the Indirections of Style. Paul B. Armstrong. Tolerance is a defining value of liberalism, but it is also a nag-. ging vulnerabi lity a nd an embarr ...
Tolerance is the very core of social responsibility in a pluralist society. It is the concepts and standards of human rights that specify the forms and goals of social responsibi- lity which designate what conditions are intole- rable and what behaviours are to be restrained. Tolerance can be viewed in both negative and positive terms.
Difficulty of Tolerance - preterhuman.net
Thus, the concept of tolerance is widely embraced across many settings for many sorts of differences (e.g., race, ethnicity, religion, and sexuality), and across a diverse ideological and left-right political field (Brown, 2006).However, our ability to create, evaluate, and implement appropriate policies is limited by tolerance and intolerance having various meanings that can be used in ...
Tolerance was also examined considering its theological and philosophical foundations. The Iranian scholar, Soroush, was a pioneer in this debate. He argued for 'pluralism' as a firm foundation for tolerance (Soroush 2009). His argument led to passionate debates with pros and cons. Whilst some
Tolerance is the appreciation of diversity and the ability to live and let others live. It is the ability to exercise a fair and objective attitude towards those whose opinions, practices, religion, nationality, and so on differ from one's own. [1] As William Ury notes, "tolerance is not just agreeing with one another or remaining indifferent ...
Tolerance is about: • developing an understanding of people, practices and perspectives; Tolerance is the highest result of education. Helen Keller. accepting the challenge of different points of view - to confront ideas, disprove them or having your thinking changed by them; standing up to intolerance, resisting retaliation and being ...
This essay is. This essay examines the idea of tolerance in our ad-vanced industrial society. The conclusion reached is that the realization of the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opin-ions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed.
tolerance: the individual (1) finds a particular practi ce or action objectionable or. even unacceptable (dis approval), (2) has the means to stop this practice (power) but. (3) decides not to do ...
Tolerance Essay by Em Forster Summary - Free download as PDF File (.pdf), Text File (.txt) or read online for free. E.M. Forster's essay "What I Believe" advocates for tolerance as the most important virtue, rather than love. According to Forster, tolerance is needed in the post-war world. Throughout the essay, he makes the case for tolerance by claiming it is a moderated idealism.
THE TOLERANCE GAME. Try this game to get a grip on the nuanced notion of tolerance. It is designed to show how what we tolerate and what we don't tolerate is on a scale, and isn't simple. Each player has to question their own values and opinions. They also gain an empathetic insight into the minds of the other players.
each other, that's in my opinion the definition of tolerance. I think that I'm tolerant enough. I don't criticize people on their looks or religions or something else where people shouldn't judge on. Much people think that if one person doesn't believe in what you believe, he or she doesn't belong in their group.
TOLERANCE (essay) - Free download as Word Doc (.doc), PDF File (.pdf), Text File (.txt) or read online for free. Tolerance is defined as a fair and permissive attitude towards those who differ in race, religion, nationality, culture, etc. Tolerance is necessary nowadays because as social creatures, humans need relationships with others to fulfill life's needs.
A traffic engineer argues that, contrary to his profession's view, 'human error' is not the main cause of deaths in car crashes in the US.
2. For intolerance, there is only one main. type of word cloud in which terms such as "prejudice,""biased,""racism,"and "dis-. crimination "are prominent. 3. Thus, whereas ...
tolerance are available, i.e., G. myrops, R. varieornatus, R. coronifer, M. tardigradum and H. exemplaris. These data aligned with the hypothesis that radiotolerance could be derived from desiccation tolerance and might share some mechanisms between two tolerances. On the other hand, in a marine tardigrade Echiniscoides sigismundi which is