Tolerance vs. Acceptance
People often mix up the words tolerance, acceptance, and understanding. I found an article in Psychology Today, posted on February 25, 2014, that I would like to share with my dear readers. I feel this article will work in a better way to enlighten the topic. It compares the concepts of tolerance and acceptance, and then considers them in relation to understanding.
Tolerance is a fair, objective, and permissive attitude toward those whose opinions, practices, race, religion, nationality, etc., differ from one’s own; that is, freedom from bigotry.
Acceptance in human psychology is a person’s assent to the reality of a situation, recognizing a process or condition (often a negative or uncomfortable situation) without attempting to change, protest, or exit it.
Tolerance is a virtue. It is a version of the golden rule in that, insofar as we want others to treat us decently, we need to treat them decently as well. It is also a pragmatic formula for the functioning of society, as we can see in the omnipresent wars between different religions, political ideologies, nationalities, ethnic groups, or other us-versus-them divisions. It is a basis for the First Amendment protections that enabled the U.S. to avoid the religious strife that plagued Europe for centuries. (It is a reason to be skeptical of slogans such as “Zero Tolerance.”)
Acceptance goes a step beyond tolerance. If a sign of tolerance is a feeling of “I can live with X (behavior, religion, race, culture, etc.),” then acceptance moves beyond that in the direction of “X is OK.” You can tolerate something without accepting it, but you cannot accept something without tolerating it.
For example, when a son or daughter tells a parent about an unwelcome career choice, or marital partner, he or she wants that information not only to be tolerated but to be accepted.
Moving beyond tolerance and acceptance, we come to a third concept: understanding. Here is Wikipedia’s shortened definition: “Understanding is a psychological process related to an abstract or physical object, such as a person, situation, or message whereby one is able to think about it and use concepts to deal adequately with that object.”
Here is the problem. It is possible to tolerate or accept someone without understanding him or her; and the same goes for tolerating or accepting a different culture. The converse is also true. It is also possible to understand a culture or a person without acceptance, or even tolerance—think, for example, of undercover spies.
It is good to know that some people are impressively free from prejudice against those with whom they have had little or no contact (or even abstract knowledge), as part of a live-and-let-live attitude toward life.
Tolerance and/or acceptance are desirable, but they are not a substitute for understanding. They are relevant for getting along with others in the world (although understanding helps), but understanding is essential for the social and behavioral sciences.
UNESCO’s strategies and actions to promote tolerance are worth mentioning here.
Along with outright injustice and violence, discrimination and marginalization are common forms of intolerance. Education for tolerance should aim at countering influences that lead to fear and the exclusion of others, and should help young people develop capacities for independent judgment, critical thinking, and ethical reasoning. The diversity of our world in terms of religion, language, culture, and ethnicity is not a pretext for conflict but is a treasure that enriches us all.
1. Fighting Intolerance Requires Law
Each government is responsible for enforcing human rights laws, as well as for banning and punishing hate crimes and discrimination against minorities, whether these are committed by state officials, private organizations, or individuals. The state must also ensure equal access to courts, human rights commissioners, or ombudsmen, so that people do not take justice into their own hands and resort to violence to settle their disputes.
Ban on Cow Slaughter
With much grief, here, I write about the complications people are facing in India, as perhaps no issue today is more nationally divisive than that of cow slaughter. The majority of the community wants to have the cow declared the national animal and a countrywide ban on the killing of all cows imposed. In Hinduism, the cow is sacred, deeply respected. According to Hindu belief, the cow is a maternal figure; hence, Hindus are strictly against the slaughtering of cows, calling themselves gaurakshak (cow protectors).
According to the Times of India, only eight of India’s 29 states permit the slaughter of cows. Although India’s top court rejected a petition seeking a nationwide ban on cow slaughter, people still face violence regarding the same. Some states have, in recent years, pushed for tougher penalties, including 10-year jail terms for those convicted of cow slaughter or possession or consumption of beef. The banning of beef is troublesome for poor people as goat and other meats are far more expensive than beef.
The Times of India reports that on March 29, 2017, Raman Singh, the chief minister of Chhattisgarh (a state in India), stated that anyone found killing cows in Chhattisgarh would be hanged.
Do you understand the extremism in the order? The state of Gujarat, meanwhile, has adopted the toughest law against cow slaughter in the country: the crime is punishable by 14 years of jail and carries a provisional fine of up to USD 7,757 and not less than USD 1,550.
Reading an article in the Guardian published on July 20, 2018, I noted the clear rising tide of hate surging through India, and of toxic speech and attacks on religious minorities, mostly Muslims. On Tuesday, July 17, 2018, the supreme court of India condemned the epidemic of mob lynching in India, and asked the Indian parliament to draft legislation that would stop people from taking the law into their own hands.
Within hours of the judgment, in the provincial state of Jharkhand, Swami Agnivesh, a spiritual leader and former minister known for promoting communal harmony in the country, was brutally attacked. The assailants were allegedly members of the youth wing of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the party of the prime minister, Narendra Modi.
It is worth mentioning here that Swami Agnivesh is the winner of the 2004 Alternative Nobel Peace Prize (the Right Livelihood Award). At the young age of 28 years, he abandoned a promising career as a professor of law and management in Kolkata for a life of activism. Born into a South Indian family, he shed his name, caste, religion, family, and all his belongings and property to adopt the life of a “Swami” or renunciate, and began his life’s crusade for social justice and compassion. The term “Swami” is misused and misunderstood. It denotes, as with Christian or Buddhist monks and renunciates, one who gives up all his individual, social, and birth-based identities and belongings to serve humanity and pursue spiritual truth. In 1994, Swami Agnivesh was appointed the Chairperson of the UN Trust Fund on Contemporary Forms of Slavery. He is better known across the globe in general and in India in particular for his campaigns against bonded labor and is founder-chairperson of the Bandhua Mukti Morcha (Bonded Labor Liberation Front).
Most Indians see the 78-year-old Agnivesh as an elegant and soft-spoken seer in saffron robes, his head wrapped in a turban; yet on July 17, 2018, Tuesday afternoon, the Swami was kicked and punched by young men chanting, “Jai shree Ram” (victory to Lord Ram): his bare head on the ground, his turban flung at a distance as he pleaded with them to show mercy.
In an interview with a news agency, Chandreshwar Prasad Singh, a minister from the same BJP-ruled state, justified the attack and said, “He talks against Hindus, makes anti-national comments, supports Kashmiri separatists and Naxals.” Singh speaks the language of the mob, a mob that has been given the responsibility of creating a new order in India, where the minority who speaks on their behalf is attacked with impunity.
Inhuman Act
Barely a month prior, in the city of Hapur, an hour’s drive from the capital, Delhi, two Muslim men were attacked on the street while police stood by guarding the mob. One of the two was kicked and dragged along as he lay unconscious and later died of his injuries. The other, an elderly man, was pulled by his beard and dragged through a field, blood dripping from his face as he begged for mercy while they kept thrashing him with wooden planks. The emboldened crowd recorded a video of this inhuman act and shared it across WhatsApp and social media, a common practice associated with these acts of mob violence.
New Zealand to Slaughter Cows
Moving forward with the same topic, I would like to address here a very ambitious plan announced by the politicians and industry leaders in New Zealand to slaughter about 150,000 cows. What is contradictory here is that there are many people who oppose the slaughtering whereas there are still many who understand the importance of slaughtering cows.
New Zealand is home to some 10 million cows, about double its human population. Per news on May 28, 2018 on The Independent, NZ was attempting to eradicate a strain of disease-causing bacteria from the national herd. Officials said it will cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and, if successful, would be the first time an infected country eliminates Mycoplasma bovis, which mainly affects cattle and has little effect on other production animals.
Found in Europe and the U.S., Mycoplasma bovis causes a constellation of diseases, including mastitis in dairy cows, arthritis in cows and calves, and pneumonia in calves. They are not considered a threat to food safety but do cause
