Mahatma Gandhi was one of those rare human beings who was simultaneously a theoretician and practitioner of tolerance. Gandhi was possessed of an inner conviction that tolerance was not only one of the key words of his own century but of centuries still to come. It is in this sense that his ideas on non-violence and tolerance transcend the context of India itself, even though these ideas were initially conceived in relation to India's independence and future. Nevertheless, in spite of what may seem obvious, it is no mere truism to state that Gandhi would not have been Gandhi had he not been born Indian. We say this in order to underscore that Gandhi's concept of tolerance was rooted in Indian culture.

Why does one hear so much about tolerance today, when as little as a few decades ago it was considered an obsolete virtue, anachronistic and outstripped by the progress of our civilization? When a virtue is lacking we remember it most! Must we conclude from the emphasis placed on tolerance these last few years that we have entered an era of generalized mutual incomprehension? The conquests of the intellect; local, national and international juridical practices; education open to global issues; the intermixing of humanity that has never before “moved” so much under the combined effect of emigration; tourism and the developments in transportation and vast information exchanges served by efficient techniques that make communication one of the greatest benefits of our culture; all this could have led mankind into a surplus of exchanges on all levels, and better mutual appreciation leading to more tolerance.

A theologian would be ill-advised if he tried to teach pedagogy to the pedagogues. And indeed it is not my aim to proclaim some way of teaching - even less so after a period of pedagogical experimentation that produced one new model after the other. Rather I would like to buttress the efforts of pedagogues and educators from the viewpoint of ethics at a time when many people talk about an educational crisis.

We have presented tolerance, right from the foreword upon which the present study opens, as the difficult course of a crested road between intolerance and the intolerable. Intolerance constitutes the obstacle never surmounted, the intolerable, the limit opposed to the abuses of a tolerance that has slid to indifference.

Two main but discrepant tendencies characterize the intellectual climate of our world at the turn of the century. We promote, on the one hand, “respect for human rights,” i.e. for certain universal norms, but on the other hand, equally promote “respect to all cultures,”which are differentiated among themselves by their different world-views and their parochial norms. Not rarely do we see that the demands that such parochial norms bring are contradictory to those of human rights.

How define tolerance? Tolerance consists in abstaining from intervening in the actions and opinions of other persons when these opinions or actions appear disagreeable, frankly unpleasant or morally reprehensible to us. But each will feel that there exists a real difference between that which is disagreeable or unpleasant and that which is morally repugnant. To respect this intuition, I would propose to distinguish between a narrow sense of tolerance - I tolerate that which appears displeasing or disagreeable to me, but I do not tolerate that which I judge to be morally wrong - and a broad sense in which I tolerate even that which I disapprove of morally. If we adopt the narrow sense, we have at our disposal a first answer to the question of knowing how far to tolerate: I tolerate that which relates to displeasure or to annoyance, but not that which I believe to be wrong.

Tolerance is the fruit of an asceticism in the exercise of power. It is a virtue. An individual virtue, and a collective virtue. It would in fact be a mistake to believe that it only takes on meaning with a form of power, that of the State. Intolerance has its first impulse in the power that each of us has of imposing our beliefs, our convictions, our manner of leading our lives on others, from the moment that each believes only these to be valid, only these to be legitimate. For each of us, to act is to exercise a power over … This initial asymmetry of action makes it such that every act has an agent and a receiver, a passive agent. But if intolerance is armed with a power over …, it is justified in the eyes of the one exercising it by the alleged legitimacy of the belief, of the conviction. This presumption of legitimacy results from the disapproval of opposed or simply different beliefs, convictions, ways of life. Two elements are therefore necessary to intolerance: the disapproval of the opposed beliefs and convictions of others, and the power of preventing them from leading their life as they see fit. It is here that lies the double reason for the propensity towards intolerance in the human heart. We could think that intolerance only rages when, on the one hand, the power to prevent sits in the hands of the public force, using the secular arm, and when, on the other hand, the disapproval takes the form of a public condemnation by a State partisan professing a particular vision of good. In this respect the religious wars of Europe would constitute the lasting paradigm of intolerance, the Church - or the Churches - offering the unction of truth to the States and the State furnishing the sanction of the secular arm to a given Church. In accordance with this ancient paradigm, the residual religious fanaticisms of old Europe would today find themselves relayed by the fundamentalist fanaticisms coming principally from Islam. It is also against this version of intolerance that the discourse of tolerance constituted itself in the Western world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But if the power of the State, joint until a recent past to ecclesiastical power, is alone in giving a public dimension to reprobation and an historical efficiency to the power of prevention that individual will lacks, public force ultimately only operates through the individual passions that serve as relays in the direction of the most intimate dispositions of the human heart. Even the tyrant needs a sophist to extort the belief by persuasion, flattery or intimidation. It is in the last instance within the individual, even driven by fear, that the destiny of intolerance plays itself out. To reduce the discontinuity between the individual and the institution, it is legitimate to underline the role of what Michael Walzer calls in Spheres of Justice “shared understandings”: it is true that we can always find intermediary communities of allegiance, conviction and power between the individual level and the state level. It is even at this privileged intermediary level that the education of passions which we will discuss later on can be exercised …. In the same way, to return to the period of Enlightenment, it is as much to the individuals called out of the voluntary state of minority (Kant) to the States invited to lift the censorship and also to the enlightened part of the public that the Encyclopedists’ plea in favor of tolerance addresses itself. From this moment it is in a double - or even triple - sense that tolerance is a virtue. The ultimate reason is that power is a general anthropological structure which lets itself be discerned at all levels in which one's power (puissance) to act is susceptible to affecting the other's power (puissance) to act and to diminishing it (Spinoza).

Why do we learn some lessons more easily than others - indeed with alacrity and enthusiasm? Often these are not of the most attractive sort. It seems so frequently as if there is a sheer perversity in us.

The Member States of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, meeting in Paris at the twenty-eighth session of the General Conference, from 25 October to 16 November 1995,

Preamble

Bearing in mind that the United Nations Charter states “We, the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, … to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, … and for these ends to practise tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours,”