The word “tolerance” has various meanings. My favourite is its characterization as lying between that of soft-headedness and narrow-mindedness, per Aristotle. I’m wondering how this is evaluatively different from the very romanticized ideal of the word “tolerance”, and one at the core of democracy, that one should tolerate the other, in the other’s interests and goals, while respecting one’s own. As discussed previously, multi-culturalism is basically the bracketing of one’s own interests and goals to appreciate the other’s. Multi-culturalism: it has become a precept, dogma of democracy.

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