To be intolerant has become very much a part of our lives. This is unfortunate, for while tolerance is often necessary for us to all get along and better understand each other, no one who defends tolerance could consistently hold that it can be unlimited. Otherwise what was the need for disrespect to National Flag in Jammu and Kashmir by some sections of students that to after India-West Indies match in the ongoing World Cup T20 championship. Pakistan is nowhere and it was India which was defeated by the West Indies. But the reaction was students of the two institutes indulging in pro and anti-India sloganeering and the ruckus. This is no intolerance but hooliganism by a particular section for their sadistic pleasures. No game gets charged up as much as cricket played between India and Pakistan. And on Thursday evening it was India-West Indies when the trouble erupted. Some things are truly intolerable but the problem is where to draw the line when we move beyond such evidently intolerable things. Disagreements about which acts are intolerable give rise to some of our deepest moral and political conflicts. And, today India is witnessing this change in social phenomena, where each and every one is intolerable to one another. However, there are moral issues that go beyond the political, or which are left unresolved by the State. We can be put in an uncomfortable position if we happen to think that some legally-permitted practice or activity is deeply immoral. Just because something is legal doesn’t imply that it’s moral – consider lying while not under any formal oath, or in the eyes of some, and more contentiously, abortion. What are we supposed to think, or do, about those engaging in what we believe are legal but immoral activities? The liberal answer, broadly speaking, is that we must sometimes tolerate things we find deeply wrong. But the imperative that we must tolerate what we find intolerable seems a self-contradictory demand. Perhaps the weakest form of action against the intolerable is verbal condemnation.
