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then, are not just the practices of toleration, but also the practices that sur-
round that common goal. The latter practices create the trust that is neces-
sary for a deeper form of toleration; with luck, they may even promote
genuine understanding between people. In any case, once someone can
trust members of a different group, then she will no longer begrudge her
toleration of them and, at minimum, she will no longer resent the diversity
that others represent. That sentiment, I take it, is the minimum require-
ment for a more robust form of toleration in which toleration is seen as a
good in its own right. Thus, a minimal form of trust is needed before toler-
ation is possible, that toleration makes a deeper form of trust easier, and
that deeper trust can lead to a more robust form of toleration. To become
established, trust and toleration must feed on each other in a virtuous
cycle.
A society built on a robust form of toleration thus requires two distinct
kinds of practices: (1) those that deal with the institutions of toleration
itself, that is, those that guard the boundaries that toleration is supposed
to support, and (2) those that generate the trust between groups and create
the common goals on which toleration can flourish. In many ways, the
point here is obvious. On the one hand, people have to trust one another
enough to make toleration possible; people have to feel that their funda-
mental moral interests are not threatened if they accept toleration. When
that trust breaks down, then civil war in either the hot or the cold
variety will resume. Trust thus generates toleration. On the other hand,
the toleration must be robust enough that members of particular groups
feel that what is important in their way of life is never threatened by the
society at large. Toleration thus generates trust.
Many liberals have implicitly assumed or hoped that trust and solid-
arity could be built on the basis of toleration itself. Behind the claim that
we do not need a shared sense of the good life to have a society is the
Toleration and the limits of trust 103
assumption that toleration itself can provide a common bond strong
enough to sustain itself. My argument over the next two chapters is that
although we do not need a shared vision of the substance of a good life,
toleration itself is not sufficient to ground a stable society. The groups that
comprise a society must also share at least a weak form of identity, created
out of practices that build trust between them. Nevertheless, the relation-
ship between these two projects building trust and sustaining tolera-
tion is quite complex. On the one hand, efforts to build trust, I will
argue, are crucial to setting the limits of toleration. But, on the other hand,
the requirements of toleration will also set limits for what kinds of trust-
building activities are permissible.
Building trust
In England after the Act of Toleration of 1689, I have argued, the success
of the limited form of toleration that existed depended not on broadly
institutional features, but on contextual features, the most important of
which was the fact that the Anglicans, Presbyterians, and Quakers who
were parties to the toleration shared a common identity as Protestants and,
importantly, as anti-Catholics. That common identity as anti-Catholics
gave them an important shared goal: the defeat of Catholic forces both
outside and inside of England. The activities in pursuit of that goal thus
secured a bond of solidarity between them. In the English case, we have
seen, that bond was sealed by the strongest possible means: war. Over the
next quarter of a century, England fought in a series of continental wars
against the aggrandizing policies of Louis XIV, first in the Nine Years War
(1688 97) and then in the War of Spanish Succession (1701 14). The
work for a common purpose of extreme importance then gave everyone
some reasons to believe that others could be trusted. Of course, putting the
point in this way glosses over the many bitter political fights between the
supporters of the Established Church, particularly in the Tory Party, and
the supporters of a broader toleration among the Whigs, yet the sense of
solidarity in the war effort was real (Jones 1978: 256 301).
War is certainly a powerful trust-building activity, as Robert Putnam
has shown in the case of the World War II generation in America (Putnam
2000: ch. 14). In America, the social capital that was built during the war
sustained civic life for the rest of the twentieth century. But we hope
war is not the only means to build civic trust. Some such bonding activities
are, however, essential. The need for them is clear when we understand the
basic dynamics of the situation. As I argued in the last chapter, when toler-
ation is regarded merely as a modus vivendi, the structure of the situation
and the reasons that both sides hold such a position give neither side
incentives to accept toleration as a good in itself.
104 Toleration and the limits of trust
The role of toleration in trust
The practices of toleration focus on the goods of trust. The practices that
support toleration are designed to prevent one group from interfering with
the achievement of a good sought by another group (Weinstock 1999:
300 1). Of course, no trust is possible at all if a group believes that its
goods are incompatible with the presence of others. As long as Catholics
thought their salvation was threatened by the mere presence of Huguenots,
no trust and no toleration even as a modus vivendi was possible. In the
circumstances with which we are now concerned, however, those goals are
not threatened by the mere presence of another group. Insofar as the other
group has the power to interfere with the first group s practices, it can
interfere with the pursuit of those goals. The practices of toleration engen-
der trust because the systems of rights and laws and sanctions that guaran-
tee freedom of conscience attempt to make it difficult for one group to
sabotage even unintentionally the efforts of another. Without these
institutions of toleration, efforts to build trust with common activities may
be seen as a means to co-opt rather than to cooperate.
To be effective, however, the guarantees behind these institutions must
be credible. In France, the problem with the institutions of toleration that
were established after the Edict of Nantes is that everyone believed that
they could be easily overridden by the French Crown as indeed they
were. Even though the edict gave the Huguenots institutional guarantees of
security, those guarantees were never regarded as sacrosanct. The tradi-
tions of limited government which made those guarantees credible in
England did not exist in France. More than anything else, then, the institu-
tions that lie behind autonomy, democracy, and even capitalism are linked
to toleration, because they reinforce the idea of limited government. So
although the guarantees offered to minority groups in the Act of Tolera- [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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