Tolerance In Everyday Life: Resources And Formats Of Existence

Abstract

In the global world, tolerance is understood and implemented in different ways, according to the historical socio-cultural context in which this or that subject of international relations was formed and its situational involvement in the sphere of interests of the generators of globalism policy. The difference in understanding and implementation of the principle of tolerance, which is demonstrated by the followers and opponents of globalism, is seen not only at the conceptual level, but also in the daily life of people. For this purpose, society has at its disposal resources of various levels: mental and ideological. Mental resources contain such complexes of ideas and ideals, which are tested by all historical practice and therefore remain relevant and effective regardless of the circumstances of the current situation. These are "resources of eternity", which include values that allow to make strategic decisions in the name of the triumph of universal justice, and therefore are perceived as sacred. Traditional Russian religious organizations initiate the appeal of their followers to mental resources, which ensures the spread of the principle of tolerance in practice. But there are other resources – ideological "time resources" – that allow solving tactical problems based on profit indicators. Such value orientations reduce a person's readiness to follow the principle of tolerance and make his behavior when meeting an unfamiliar phenomenon little predictable. At the level of everyday life, these resources are in demand to a varying degree, which is reflected in the variety of formats for implementing personal tolerance.

Keywords: Toleranceglobalismdaily lifementalityreligion

Introduction

In the conditions of aggravation of various kinds of social contradictions and increase of conflict, the question becomes especially important both for the authorities and civil society, what is the content and real embodiment of tolerance – peaceful coexistence on a parity basis or persistent patience in relation to incomprehensible and unpleasant actions. Reflecting on this problem, domestic researchers increasingly conclude that true tolerance does not imply readiness for any compromise at all costs ( Danilkina, 2016), but should be a way of listening to the position of others, improving their understanding and approach ( Bilalov, 2016). For many researchers, it is clear that tolerance is strongly linked to multiculturalism, the principles of which "must be observed" in a multicultural world ( Kalabekova, 2019). But it is also clear that multiculturalism's policy "periodically comes down to calls to "tolerate," without explaining how much to tolerate and, most importantly, for what purpose and for what purpose to tolerate. After all, under the pressure of the facts, such a policy is declared a failure ( Lithuanian, 2017). Increasingly, there are proposals to understand tolerance not as it is proposed in the Western world, but taking into account the specifics, values and interests of peoples and states living in other civilizational spaces.

Problem Statement

The content of the principle of tolerance, despite the rather long definition of the term in the "Declaration of Principles of Tolerance", approved by the General Conference of UNESCO on November 16, 1995, is interpreted differently, based on the specific conditions of the cultural and socio-political landscape. The problem increases with the degree of approaching the level at which real mass social contacts are carried out – the level of daily life of people. Ideally, tolerance is to be understood as a moral quality characterized by a tolerant attitude to the interests, beliefs, beliefs, behaviour and habits of other people. However, in today's Russian society, with tougher legal norms ensuring equal rights for the self-expression of various social actors, conflict is growing at the interpersonal and intergroup levels of interaction, i.e. where official ideology and law weaken their influence, giving priority to other normative regulators. Usually, these regulators include ethno-cultural traditions and religious settings. Are these regulators the ones responsible for spikes in intolerance at the domestic level? Or is it that religious and national morals simply do not work anymore, having dissolved under the pressure of global standardization?

Research Questions

In connection with this question is the need to study interpersonal and intergroup interactions of people in the domestic sphere, fixing specific manifestations of relations within the scale of "tolerance – intolerance".

Purpose of the Study

Importantly, we need to identify the resources that ensure the choice of a person in a situation of encounter with a stranger or just a complete stranger, and the typical formats of tolerance and intolerance of dissent in which people live on a daily basis.

Research Methods

In order to obtain reliable results, we will rely on the approaches and principled positions of the national social philosophy, the space of which determines that, firstly, tolerance contains a priori elements of intolerance ( Kalabekova, 2019), second, globalization and the post-industrial shifts associated with it do not stimulate the growth of the culture of tolerance ( Tazurkaev, 2015), and third, tolerance is an instrument for changing social reality, not an end in itself ( Danilkina, 2016).

Findings

In our country, the greatest attention is focused on the implementation of the principles of freedom of conscience and tolerance in the sphere of interethnic and inter-religious relations, which is reflected in the recognition of the inextricable link between freedom of conscience and religious freedom, and, accordingly, the principle of tolerance is understood as tolerance of religious beliefs. In this regard, in the practice of social interaction a new ratio of religious and secular is formed, which has a special impact on both systemic and personal tolerance. The modern world provides its space for a variety of beliefs, convictions, ideologies, and subcultures. But the situation with many cultures, with the coexistence of these cultures is not a guarantee of true tolerance. In other words, tolerance may be absent in a society where representatives of many cultures live and exist in a society with homogeneous culture.

The social consequences of globalization are manifested in many different ways, including a positive impact on the organization of public life. But globalization is an objective historical process, and globalism is a policy aimed at using the features of global processes in the interests of individual political actors. For example, Nietschman ( 1999) notes as characteristic features of the new world global manifestations of ethnocide and ecocide as a result of the desire of 168 internationally recognized nation-states to capture, suppress and exploit more than 5000 unrecognized nationalities.

As a result of the politics of globalism, the personal type of active participant of public processes changes, the criteria of his spiritual life, the meanings and purposes of existence change ( Moss, 1996). As Moosmuller ( 1998) writes on this occasion, the groundless cultural nomadic today acts not as a regrettable figure, but as a cultural hero, called the term "global player". This type of person enjoys the advantages of a cold and unconstrained attitude to the country of residence, alien to moral obligations and sentiments. It stands between two cultures... but in the middle of the world ( Moosmuller, 1998). The new global personality, ignoring the established social, group and cultural identity and related value codes, enters into unregulated transnational contacts, which gives rise to an individual without norms. Only a community of individuals with absolutely opposite qualities can resist such a person. A simple return to discipline and responsibility, hard work and patriotism will no longer be enough to compensate for the losses suffered by society from the activities of the apologists of globalism. It will take not just self-limitation, but a conscious asceticism of consumption and creative tension to give both nature and society the opportunity to restore its resources and find new opportunities for development.

Antagonize globalism and offer an alternative variant of participation in global processes under the power of only the cultural system and civilization. Panarin ( 2002) names three variants of confrontation with the West by forces of non-western civilizations. In his opinion, the first option is to mobilize anti-Western militarism (China); the second option is able to give the modern Muslim world, while the third option can form Orthodoxy. As we can see, we are talking about civilizations based on the principles correlated with the sphere of the sacral, and therefore reflected in traditional beliefs.

The mentality of people belonging to the abovementioned civilizations is based on the recognition of the leading role of morality. This peculiarity of mentality is in contradiction with the desire of some active participants of social and economic transformations to establish limits for morality (rules of morality) as a whole. They prefer to establish and explain the possibilities and permissible limits of behavior regulation from the point of view of individualism ethics, free market and competition. These limits and forms of regulation are called "rules of the game", which are formulated in the form of an ideological complex of "human rights", which is implemented in the form of political correctness (as a behavioral expression of what they call tolerance).

Political correctness is a positive phenomenon, but it belongs to the category of external regulators of behavior, which may not capture the inner conviction of an individual, do not change anything in his or her preferences, interests, and aspirations. As a result, it is possible that at any moment there will be a departure from the external forms that bind the person and the real, inner essence of the person will come out. Only where these external norms are filled with moral content, their essence changes – indifferent political correctness becomes a mutual interest and desire to create a common cultural space for diverse forms of existence.

But for such an essential filling of the norms of external behavior it is necessary to have moral resources capable of providing a solid basis for the formation of ideas about the meaning and purpose of life, as well as the means to achieve them. Conditionally, such resources can be divided into at least two classes: mental resources and ideological resources. They are formed, accumulated and transmitted from generation to generation by entire communities, and have an impact on the state of the spiritual world of generations and individuals.

In the history of human development, the most concentrated mental resources and ideas about how to use them are fixed in the content of humanistic religions. Spiritual values, which make up the content of mental resources, retain their semantic value for such a long time that can be attributed to the "resources of eternity".

Another class of resources, of course, suitable for the choice of life goals, contains such values that remain relevant for the foreseeable future, and can be called ideological "resources of time". These can include concepts such as sociocentrism and anthropocentrism, which set the goal of development as a society or individual, taking into account the needs of the momentary existence. Hence, the focus on economic efficiency and political expediency, the movement to benefit, to priority, to dictate in one form or another. The basis for building relations between people is the category of commodity exchange. The main ideas and concepts of this resource class are concentrated both in non-religious theories and in the teachings of some anti-humanistic religious cults.

In real life, society and people demand both these and other resources, but in different proportions. The task of the society is to form the need for its members to choose the resources of a certain character for the construction of their lives. Whether this resource will be embodied in a person's belonging to a traditional religion or to a civil-political system – it depends on the free choice of the person himself.

The mental resource of faiths that are part of Russian history and culture (Russian Orthodoxy, Islam, Buddhism), closely interacts with humanistic secular culture (the whole of Russian classical secular culture is the result of interaction and development of a multi-confessional and multinational society). The task of modernity is to expand the possibilities of the influence of mental resources.

In fact, the modern problem of activating the moral potential of traditional religions in Russia is an integral part of the task of ensuring the priority of moral norms in evaluating the results of life. We can assert that theoretically secular and religious principles of organization of the universe of culture are not absolutely mutually exclusive. Society can be humane, and its members can be moral, in conditions of any ratio of religiousness and secularism (except for the situation of total suppression of one of the components of this tandem). At the present historical stage of interaction between secular and religious cultures, the possibilities of their complementary and parallel development are growing. This happens for at least two reasons: the first is that religious and secular culture faces the same challenges, while the second is that religious and secular culture is facing the same challenges.

The common objectives are to choose effective actions to preserve the environment and peaceful coexistence as conditions for the preservation of life as a whole, to choose possible actions to establish equality and social justice as a condition to preserve the right to identity, originality and uniqueness of each individual, country and culture. The same dangers that need to be overcome by religious and secular cultures are the dangers of the spread of quasi-religionism, distorted spirituality, spirituality, selfishness and selfishness as forms of consumer individualism.

The unity of religious and secular culture, the unity of religious and secular morality consists in their unconditional humanistic orientation, recognition of the values of social justice, the balance between private and common (national and universal) in culture. The unity of religious and secular morality also consists in the goals set by these normative systems – to equip a person with methods and means of self-identification, adaptation and self-realization in various (favorable or not) social conditions.

Public humanistic and democratic principles of freedom of conscience and tolerance are embodied in the ideal norms of law, but the practice of everyday life generates special forms of their implementation. Everyday life is a real life, spiritual-practical and practical activity, in which all the aspirations of an individual are carried out, in forms that depend on the personal and social hierarchy of values, common standards of success and available mechanisms of their achievement. Everyday life determines the format in which the principle of tolerance is implemented by a specific person or social group. There are reasons to speak of the existence of several tolerance formats in modern Russian society, which we have defined as follows: "permanent loyalty," "false compromise," "intervention," "victory parade," " ariergard".

The format of "permanent loyalty" allows individuals who are completely indifferent to the opinions of other people and have vague ideas about the content of other people's beliefs and who have not formed their own to carry out their daily activities. Transition to the position of the most trendy direction in the practice of public relations, the desire to preserve the emotional serenity and satisfaction with one's own everyday achievements – this is what distinguishes the subjects who choose this format of the embodiment of tolerance. For example, such people are used to recruit masses of newly converted "believers" who take part in religious activities without knowledge about the essence of a particular religion and without personal reference to it.

The format of the "false compromise" is implemented in conditions of inability or unwillingness of a person to openly oppose the generally accepted norms of communication with people of a different culture, beliefs and way of life. An individual transfers all disagreement and criticism of social foundations into a family or friendly circle, creating for others the appearance of involvement in official norms and showing their true attitude where their personality may remain unrecognized or unpunished. For example, by supporting the idea of peaceful inter-ethnic communication and equal cultural value of all nations and nationalities "in public", some individuals do not miss the opportunity to insult and humiliate representatives of other nationalities when confronted at home.

The format of "intervention" is implemented in cases when the interests and values are defended by an entity that is opposed to the public system of values and has for various reasons powerful resources to organize the impact on public opinion. The needs of this subject with the help of aggressive processing of mass public consciousness can be presented as strategic for the whole society. For example, representatives of the homosexual minority constantly try to present their problem as a problem of society's choice of a democratic way of development.

The format of the "victory parade " is implemented when we are talking about individuals, groups or organizations that express the position recognized by society as the leading and correct as a result of the actions of the authorities. Relying on the power of the propaganda machine, these subjects can openly criticize their opponents and emphasize their obvious and potential advantages. The beliefs of the "winners" become a model of attitude towards life and are transmitted not only through the media and cultural products, but also in the education system. Tolerance in this case means patience with such forms of dissent that do not constitute a clear competition, but in discussions with them it is possible to prove the validity of the official position.

The "ariergard" format is implemented where freedom of conscience is exercised by individuals whose beliefs have ceased to be "in the trend", have left the sphere of mass recognition and no longer find official support. Therefore, they no longer have access to the media and are being forced out of the sphere of public dialogue. For example, representatives of Russian science, who remain in the position of scientific atheism in their opposition to clericalism, in their view, represent a small detachment that covers the withdrawal of the ideology which used to have official status.

All of these formats of tolerance implementation are quite conventional and certainly do not exhaust the whole multifaceted reality. The emergence of other formats of tolerance that reflect the whole positive nature of this phenomenon depends on many additional conditions.

Conclusion

Tolerance, as an attitude, takes many forms, and tolerance, as a practice, can be carried out in different ways, in a changing atmosphere of public sentiment. Different starting conditions and current circumstances determine the nature and format of tolerance on a daily basis.

Among the factors determining the ability to display tolerance at the everyday level, we will highlight the atmosphere of public sentiment, which is the most mobile and subject to the influence of opposite tendencies. Objectively, there are reasons for the growth of conflict in society, but equally objectively there are circumstances that contribute to the development of an atmosphere of cooperation and solidarity in Russian society. Among them is the mutual sympathy of ethnic groups and people who have their historical territories and religions in our country, as well as the lack of connection in the expressions of antipathy to individual peoples with racial, ethnic and religious differences. Thus, religious organizations have not lost their influence as regulators of personal and public morality and can implement the function of integration of society on the principles of tolerance, being organically present in the mental "resources of eternity".

There are many similarities in humanist religions, but there is no need to think about their possible unification. If we are talking about a theoretical paradigm that is common to all Russian society and which would embody, in addition to the principle of tolerance, other important values, we should probably talk about the state idea (ideology) embodied in theoretical postulates and state decisions, artistic and epic images.

The existence of such an idea, which addresses the historical memory of the people of the country, always strengthens social unity through the awareness of the commonality of past achievements and prospects for the future, the inseparable connection and interdependence of all citizens of the state. Modern Russia is looking for concrete forms and images of the state idea, which will not only serve the unity of the peoples of the country, but will also strengthen the traditions of true tolerance in everyday activities.

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