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Don’t look down. Classic advice when someone is crossing a threadbare rope bridge strung up over an abyssal crevasse. Looking down immediately inspires a stress response. Clammy hands mean you’re less likely to grip if you fall. Adrenaline fuels your panic, making a misplaced step ever more likely.
In 1974, a study by Dutton & Aron showed that a high bridge can have even more disastrous effects, and make you think you’re attracted to someone who you wouldn’t necessarily be attracted to at sea level. Why? They suggest that the panic you feel from potentially plunging to your death is misattributed to the rush of romance. It turns out there is some truth to the concept of “falling in love”.
One of the reasons that a bridge can mess with your head so much is because they are instinctively dangerous. If a bridge gets too hot or too cold, if it holds too much weight or if it gets too windy, it will collapse. And if you’re on that bridge when it does, that is a problem; and your brainstem knows it.
Tolerance
Luckily humans are quite good at reducing risk. In engineering, almost every product on the earth goes through rigorous testing to the point of failure. The outcome of this testing is a tolerance limit which dictates the point at which a piece of equipment will break beyond repair, or in the case of our bridge, collapse. This is known as engineering tolerance and is the most typical definition most people give when asked what tolerance means.
However, tolerance has a different significance when applied socially. In the context of friendship, relationships or (especially) as a parent, tolerance is a flexible concept and an essential part of human development. This can be defined as social tolerance.
Consider how good parents will shift the focus of their entire lives in order to assist the development and future of their children, putting aside passions and hobbies they used to enjoy, all for the good of their offspring; offspring that would happily shit their pants without even a moment of thought for the parent.
Best friends will tolerate frustration and pain to help each other succeed and thrive, through the horrors of hardship, addiction, grief. Long-standing couples will try to take time to listen to each other and compromise, rather than rushing in and saying something mean and hurtful, that feels good.
In each of these cases, social tolerance will take different forms. People will lean on compassion, explanation, patience and calculated pressure to ensure that relationships don’t crack and collapse. It’s an active process, designed to push previous limits for the greater good.
The fundamental difference between the tolerance limit for a bridge and tolerance among people is that the social concept of tolerance contains inherent flexibility. It requires constant assimilation and application of new information to create a new working model of the world. These models are necessary as people grow – from children to friends to parents and beyond. This flexibility allows for creativity, mistakes, novel thinking and second chances. Most of all, it promotes the possibility of progress.
Despite its virtues, this is not the model of tolerance that is widespread in society. It seems almost non-existent when people are dealing with each other. The Twittersphere, Cancel culture, censorship and IQ testing are all major symptoms of a brutal and ossified concept, of a type of tolerance made for machines and structures rather than people. These elements are more closely aligned to the weight limits on a bridge than the compassion integral to a community.
Does the social tolerance model work?
Yes. There are lots of potential scenarios where social tolerance is effective compared to a rigid, engineering-like system. There are some examples suggested below, there are no doubt many more:
- According to the Harvard Business Review, companies who reduce staff turnover tend to be more profitable. When happy employees are asked why they stay, its typically because of things like a supportive culture. This is reversed in companies with high staff turnover. In many ways, its an example of social tolerance vs engineering tolerance.
- Drug addicts are far more likely to recover from combined rehabilitation techniques involving family and friends than they are from arbitrary sentences and incarceration.
- Hostage situations that engage the use of empathetic negotiation techniques have a significantly lower mortality rate than those that involving harsh deadlines supported by heavily armed response.
- Stable attachment types in children are more likely when the parent is fair, consistent and tolerant as opposed to parenting styles which are rigid, bullying and abrasive.
So what?
People are not machines and the application of an engineering style of tolerance, one based on breaking points and limits, does not help humanity unpick the complex political and social situations that are dominating current affairs.
In fact, by reducing the scope for conversation and placing arbitrary limits on what can and cannot be said, then censoring anything that sits outside of those narrow parameters, it makes it even more likely that intolerant, authoritarian and despotic systems will emerge.
The Paradox of Tolerance is a concept devised by Karl Popper in 1948. He suggests that, in a civilised society, we should be tolerant of everything; except intolerance. When it comes to intolerance, society should work enthusiastically against it and its proponents. If we fail, the intolerant will crush those who concede and eventually overtake society for themselves. And as we’ve seen, through centuries of war and imperial conquest, humans tend to get a little bit invade-y when that happens – be it an invasion by land or an invasion of privacy.
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