tolerance

Medialens, the excellent media-watchdog, is having another go at George Monbiot - the excellent environmentalist and Guardian correspondent. On the environment, and probably on most other issues, you couldn't put a rizla between them. And that is not something you could say about almost any other mainstream journalist.
So why fight? Why pick on the differences between the positions rather than joining forces on the common issues? Why not - for the moment at least - tolerate the differences in order to win the bigger battles?
This is not just about Medialens and George Monbiot - or even about Medialens and the Guardian, which is the real battleground. It is about anyone working for social change, how we work with institutions or individuals that do not fully share our values, and how much we compromise on what seem to be fundamental points of principle. Why, for example, does antarchia criticise the ngo-businesses and human rights educators, all of whom are apparently working towards the same good and noble goals?
The ngo-businesses, just like the mainstream media, have numbers on their side. The BBC (and probably the Guardian) reaches millions; Medialens maybe reaches thousands. Save the Children, Amnesty International, the Council of Europe (a business, if not an ngo-business) reach out to - and spend - millions (mostly on themselves). A lone ant reaches tens or hundreds at the most.
So should we join the colony?
Not easy to answer, and it depends partly on what you are fighting against (or maybe for). In the new world, for example - do we want huge ngo-businesses, based in London, Strasbourg or New York, eating up the vast majority of the resources we manage to squeeze out of governments or individuals for those in dire need? Do we want media corporations, dependent on advertising revenue from the aviation and motor industries? If we do - then we should probably work with them now. If we don't, then we need to ask whether their existence now is actually the best way of ensuring an end to the status quo; whether it is the best way of ensuring their non-existence some time in the future. That seems unlikely, but maybe it is worth discussing.
Another question is whether we have an alternative model that would work better. We can admit that SCF, Oxfam, AI, the COE are massive resource drains, often compromising on points of principle in order to retain their influence; but they do some good, undoubtedly, and what can we suggest instead? That point needs answering, and I shall (not now). For the moment, let's also note the 'bad' that a lot of these structures encourage as well: partly in terms of monopolising the resources for their London offices and European salaries, but also in terms of propping up and failing to challenge the very system they rely on for their own existence.
A third question is whether, given the dominance of the ngo-businesses (and the media corporations) the lone ants can actually do anything to dilute their might - even if they can propose a different model once the might is gone. Medialens - and programmes like Democracy Now or FAIR in the US - appear to show that in the world of media, they can. I am less sure at the moment if that is true for the ngo-businesses - but time may tell.
And then perhaps the biggest question is whether our energies are best spent fighting the people or organisations closest to our own ideals; whether we spare them, let them do their good (and their bad) and move to other battlegrounds; or whether we try to swallow the differences and work with them.
No answers, really, and I suspect that every case needs to be decided individually. Three tentative responses to that last general point:
Sometimes the 'collaborators' in the opposite camp - the Monbiots in the mainstream press - can do more damage than the right-wing idiots we can simply laugh off. The Monbiots give credibility to the mainstream media, and promote the idea that no opinions and no issues are out of bounds. In that way, they (possibly) sustain the mainstream media. And in the same way, human rights educators working with the government give credibility to the government; the good work done by Amnesty campaigners gives credibility to the enormous and extravagant executive structure sitting in East London; and Oxfam's good work in reducing poverty gives credibility to Blair's pretence that he was trying to do the same.
Secondly, sometimes these huge ngo or media corporations themselves do more damage than good. That is clearer in the case of the media corporations - but I do wonder if we are looking at the balance sheet correctly in the case of the ngo-businesses. The question is not: what if Amnesty International disappeared and there was nothing? It surely ought to be: what if AI disappeared, or became leaner, or moved its operations, and resources were transferred to other efforts?
Finally - and this may in the end be the decisive point - there is always the question of whether, if we join the colony, we can continue to look at ourselves in the mirror (Michael Albert's expression, from here). Sometimes those compromises are just too difficult to make. Should we force ourselves to make them? Should we try harder to work with or for organisations whose overall values we cannot quite share, just because they have the might, and because our presence may make their mighty impact less bad than if we were to refuse to cooperate.
No answers. But I tend to think not.

In fact, if you subscribe to the human rights faith, only Nice people do Nasty things. There are no non-Nice people.
That is not meant (for once) to be a dig at the HRE (or the human rights) community. Really. If you believe in human rights, then it only makes sense if every individual, whatever they do or have done, is still fundamentally human; still has fundamentally human emotions, reactions, desires, regrets, intentions, hopes, fears, and little bursts of irritation, admiration, inspiration and frustration; still tries to do good for his or her immediate circle; and possibly tries to Do Good in a wider sense as well.
'Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right.' So said someone who, in trying to do what he thought was right, did one of the nastiest things imaginable, with horrendous and irreparable consequences. And actually – I even believe he had persuaded himself it was the right thing to do. Certainly a lot of people I know (and respect) thought it was the 'right' thing to do at the time.
But where does all that get us? If everyone is Nice, and everyone tries to do what they think is right - and I think I believe that as well – and yet we end up with crimes against humanity, not to speak of lesser crimes: how should we react? Do we just shrug our shoulders and reckon that what will be, will be? Do we aim to be tolerant and see the humanity in the doers of Nastiness? Do we draw the line anywhere – and if so, where?
The safe answer is to say that we condemn anything - but nothing else - that violates human rights. And the fashionable answer is that we don't condemn the person, merely the act: we aim to understand the person, to give him or her a second chance, to be tolerant.
In theory, that is a noble answer. Maybe - in theory it is the 'right' answer. But there are problems:
1. 'Human rights' is a relatively arbitrary line (which anyway shifts). It is OK for pragmatic purposes to use this line (and essential in matters of international politics) but it does not advance the ethical argument. It merely gives us a line in the sand which we can use to hide behind (excuse the mixed metaphors). Don't we want to be braver than that, and think about where we would like it to be? Someone has 'decided' where it is at the moment, after all. We shall look pretty silly when it changes.
2. Where the human rights line is at the moment is almost bound to be inadequate - too far back - because it has been agreed primarily by pragmatist governments at a level, and in such a way, that it is far enough removed from normal practice as to be relatively harmless. To see that, you only have to look at the state of the world today and the things that still fall on the 'right' side of the human rights line (for the purposes of governments, anyway) - homelessness, lack of health care, control orders.
3. More to the point for the purposes of this question: where the human rights line is at the moment is inadequate as a guide to human behaviour because it is not intended to be a guide to human behaviour. It is intended to be a guide for governmental behaviour. We use it as a 'guide' for human behaviour because the ethical system that underlies it is sympathetic (and noble) to us. But the ethical system is both richer and stricter (I think) than the legal system it gave birth to. It must be.
1 - 3 above are about where the line should be, where it is now and what it is intended for. The hardest question - and the question HRE needs to address - is what we do in the realm that human rights is not intended for: in the realm of personal attitudes. Human rights are about behaviour, which may be a consequence of 'nasty' (or nice) attitudes. The realm that is troubling is precisely the realm of those attitudes.
2 more things, just to note:
1. I remember being surprised when I first started working in Russia that human rights activists were often at each others' throats. It seemed that if there was ever a group of people who should work together, who should be able to swallow (and tolerate) their differences - it ought to be human rights activists. I wondered - and wonder - whether HR activists (not only Russian ones) are actually some of the least 'tolerant' people; and I wonder if that is a coincidence. It is hard to be tolerant when you spend your working and resting hours looking at mutilated bodies or photographs of them, reading or listening to endless accounts of yet more brutal, sadistic, and inhumane acts.
2. I wonder if intolerance in HR activists is not only a fairly natural reaction to the world they tend to see, but also a necessary quality for the work they try to do. Tolerating torture doesn't get you very far in trying to put an end to it.
And then I wonder... whether the human rights and the human rights education communities need to be, should be so very far apart that what is valued in one community is despised in the other.

Just suppose...
... that we were living in one of those 'rogue' states that human rights educators (and moral philosophers) love to latch on to - Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Russia. How would we as 'human rights educators' respond to that? What would be the values or the 'competences' we would think it important to try to develop?
Or just suppose that we were living in Gaza / Iraq / Chechnya / Afghanistan today - or any other place around the globe where life is almost not worth living. (How) would we respond to that as human rights educators? (Or is the question quite as idiotic as it sounds)
And now: just suppose that we are living in Israel / the UK / USA / Russia / or any other country actively or passively supporting terror around the world. How, as human rights educators, should we respond to that?
Or is that an idiotic question as well?
I genuinely don't know the answer. But I can't see how we are not troubled by it; and I am surprised that it almost doesn't seem to be a question that the HRE community discusses. There are media workers against the war, military families against the war, war veterans against the war, and a few teachers against the war. Where are the human rights educators against the war?
Our defence is that we are working for the long term: that we are teaching the values that will ensure we do not go to war again. But I am not so sure... I am not sure that we can afford to (or are entitled to) refuse to work for the short term, when things are as they are; and I am also not sure that the values we concentrate on in HRE are really those which are going to best ensure that future populations stand up to governments that carry out crimes against humanity.
I am reminded of a quote from Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela's wonderful book about Eugene de Kock ('Prime Evil') - 'A Human Being Died that Night':
De Kock and many of the apartheid government's operatives have said repeatedly that what kept them going - what sustained their zeal and conviction in the rightness of crushing the heads of thousands of black activists - was the tacit but powerful support they felt they were receiving from the beneficiaries of apartheid privilege - the polite churchgoers, the cultured suburbanites, the voters. It is at their feet that the responsibility for apartheid, ultimately, can be laid'.
No lesser crimes are being committed today: are we so very different in our cultured suburban educating?

What people are (were?) really saying in advocating tolerance is that we should be tolerant towards ideas and ways of life that are merely different from our own. Even the pathetically anodyne Declaration of Principles on Tolerance makes this clear:
1.1 Tolerance is respect, acceptance and appreciation of the rich diversity of our world's cultures, our forms of expression and ways of being human. It is fostered by knowledge, openness, communication, and freedom of thought, conscience and belief. Tolerance is harmony in difference.
The promotion of Tolerance was a reaction against people being intolerant towards (mere) difference. But the concept has now been extended to mean we should be tolerant of pretty well everything... that if something jars: Be Tolerant! Tolerance has become a value in itself; intolerance a vice.
What if something jars for good reason? Are there then 'good reasons' for advocating tolerance in this case? Possibly: if the benefits of doing so are greater than the damage done by being intolerant. But there's another point here which is often missing in debates on tolerance, related to the jarring. In the old (pre-UN) sense of tolerance, the term applied to something hard to bear, something we should tolerate for a greater good. Tolerance was a shield that stood between us and whatever it was that jarred (protecting the tolerated thing rather than the tolerator).
There are two problems about valuing that shield in itself. The first is that the virtue should come further back: it should be virtuous not that we manage to hide our dislike or disapproval of something merely different, but 'virtuous' not to feel that dislike or disapproval in the first place. Valuing tolerance is like valuing George Bush's missile shield.
The second problem is that the jarring is often (but not always) an important reaction to something in itself non-virtuous, unsatisfactory, unjust. That reaction is a vital element, an essential precursor to acting against injustice. Without the jarring, we don't get past first post. If we put the shield up as well, tell people to sit on their inclination to react to anything that jars - we can be quite sure that the jarrers will rule the roost.
The issue, of course, is where the limits to 'tolerance' should be: which things we should tolerate and which things we should positively not tolerate. The safe (and easy) answer is to draw the line where international law has drawn it for us: 'Tolerate everything that is not a human rights violation'.
Rubbish. Firstly, because there is no reason on earth why we should accept the line drawn by our politicians and their lawyers without question, without thinking; no reason on earth why they - of all people - should be regarded as the ultimate authority on questions of jarring.
More importantly, because even if we do take this to be the line in the sand, we should be very clear that international law offers the bare minimum, a pathetic level of guarantee and even of moral rectitude. We can stay behind the line and still have people homeless on the streets of Oxford; millions dying from AIDS or starving to death in Africa; depleted uranium being fired at children in Iraq; and EU bureaucrats eating up the money meant to go to those in desperate need.

Should we judge others as we judge ourselves? Should we apply the same strict and rigorous standards to other people's behaviour as we apply to our own? The current craze for 'tolerance' seems to say not: judging others is Out Of Bounds. We should be Tolerant.
One can see where it came from - and I think it came from noble motives.
1. Judging without knowing the whole story should be avoided.
2. Condemning someone for ever, just because they have slipped up once, is unfair.
3. We should try to understand the reasons for people's behaviour rather than taking the actions out of context.
4. People are only human.
But these are red herrings: they only say we should be cautious, and understanding. In the same way that we should when we judge our own behaviour. And they say that we should not make blanket condemnations which cannot be reversed if the behaviour or the attitude to the behaviour changes at a later date.
What do we do with our own behaviour, and how would we wish that others responded to our 'slip-ups'? I think I would wish that people judge my bad behaviour harshly, at least until I recognise it myself - and come to regret it. Then I would wish them to be understanding. How can we come to know our behaviour is 'bad' if people are only ever understanding and tolerant towards it? I don't want people to tolerate my bad behaviour.
And why on earth are we bothering to teach people what is 'right' and what is 'wrong' if we don't want them to apply these terms to anyone (except themselves)? What happens if - perchance - that sacred cow International Law happens not to have got it quite right what is 'Right'... but no-one dares to make a judgement outside its boundaries? How, after all, does human rights law develop if not by people making moral Judgements outside what is written now in international law - and pushing to bring it inside? Yet making moral judgements is seen to be no part of human-rights-education (so-called).
The power of human rights is not in what is written down in international law: it is in its inherent moral force. If Human Rights Education is to have any meaning and purpose - surely we need to be teaching people how to make sound moral judgements, and act on them. Tolerance of this unequal and inhumane world-system is precisely what is keeping it going.