In our everyday lives, we use a lot of words without spending too much time thinking about the real meanings behind them. And that’s good! That’s the magic of language. It can carry a lot of complexity, centuries of depth and nuance. And all you need to remember is a bunch of letters in the hopefully correct order.

That efficiency is also what makes it possible for language to, sometimes dangerously, slip ideas into our consciousness that we should spend a bit more time on. In this Quick Why, I want to talk about a word that often gets used to hide something. It obscures something, and I want to look behind it.

Tolerance. It’s a term we use in design and engineering. It’s used in medical contexts, and we use it to talk about personal limits. But where it obscures things, and what I want to talk about, is when we use it to talk about a kind of acceptance.

I’ve lived in Norway for most of my adult life, but I’m originally from the Netherlands, and to a lot of people, that’s a “cool country”. Maybe it’s the idea of a country that’s one third under sea level, … maybe it’s the weed. It’s supposedly cooler than Norway, even according to a lot of Norwegians.

So a few times a year someone asks me if I don’t want to move back to the cool country.

And people typically want me to explain why. Sometimes they even ask me, “isn’t it nicer there?” “Aren’t the Dutch tolerant?”, because they have sure marketed themselves with that. “Isn’t it grand of them that they tolerate you?” That’s typically the key to the answer that I want to give.

I have to ask you a question in return. Is tolerance nice? Is it even positive? Is it anything to brag about?

In engineering and design, tolerance is the small difference that allows something to work. I know that doesn’t sound so bad, so let me reword that. Tolerance is the narrow range of allowed variance before something fails.

Okay, maybe that’s sounding a little bit less positive. And personally, if you tolerate something, is that good? Sure. I have a level of pain tolerance. That’s very cool of me. That’s a positive life skill. But it would be better without the pain. I wouldn’t need to tolerate pain if I wasn’t in pain.

Is it so positive, broadly speaking, to tolerate bad things? So then you just have to think about someone tolerating you in their country. I’d rather be welcomed, accepted, heck, even loved. But tolerated? Tolerance isn’t positive, and it’s nothing to brag about. Tolerance is zero. Tolerance is the minimum requirement of civility. Tolerance is a necessary baseline for life experience, but it’s not special and it’s not a pure moral good.

Some people have made it a kind of branding exercise to be the tolerant ones, and for some reason they think it makes them look good. They’ll “tolerate” immigrants, queer people, trans people, neurodivergence and most religions.

What they don’t ever tell you is the narrow range of allowed variance before they reject you, before they inevitably want to get rid of you. Tolerance isn’t anything to brag about.

Robin Mientjes, 2022 (original publication)/2023 (text form)