Scroll through any social media feed and you will find a familiar demand: don't just tolerate people who differ from you—celebrate them. Anything less feels like a moral failure. But this expectation would have puzzled the Enlightenment thinkers who first argued for religious and political tolerance.

For Locke, Voltaire, and Mill, tolerance was never about approval. It was a grudging peace treaty between people who genuinely disagreed, designed to stop them killing each other. Understanding this older, harder-edged concept of tolerance might help us think more clearly about what plural societies actually require—and what they don't.

The word tolerance has a revealing etymology. It comes from the Latin tolerare—to bear, to endure. You tolerate a headache. You tolerate a bad smell. You don't celebrate it.

When John Locke wrote his Letter Concerning Toleration in 1689, he was addressing a continent exhausted by religious wars. His argument was not that Protestants should admire Catholics, or vice versa. It was narrower and more practical: the state should not punish people for their beliefs, because belief cannot be coerced and the attempt to coerce it produces only bloodshed.

This framing matters. Tolerance presupposes disagreement. If I already approve of what you're doing, there is nothing to tolerate. The concept only does work when I genuinely think you are wrong—mistaken in your religion, misguided in your lifestyle, confused in your politics—and choose to let you continue anyway. Tolerance is moral restraint, not moral agreement.

Takeaway

Tolerance is only meaningful in the presence of genuine disagreement. When we demand approval instead of mere permission, we quietly abolish the concept we claim to defend.

There is a paradox at the heart of Enlightenment tolerance: by asking less of citizens, it delivers more freedom. A society that demands only non-interference can accommodate enormous diversity. A society that demands enthusiasm cannot.

Consider the alternative. If coexistence requires that we all affirm each other's deepest commitments, then any genuine disagreement becomes intolerable. The orthodox Jew and the secular atheist, the devout Muslim and the gay rights activist, the traditionalist and the progressive—each holds views the others find wrong, perhaps deeply wrong. Demanding mutual celebration sets them on a collision course.

Voltaire's famous principle—defending someone's right to say what you hate—captures this logic. The protection is strongest precisely when the disagreement is sharpest. By lowering the bar from approval to non-interference, Enlightenment tolerance creates space for people to live according to conflicting visions of the good without requiring them to pretend those visions are equally valid.

Takeaway

The less we demand from each other emotionally, the more room we leave for each other practically. Minimal tolerance is a feature, not a bug, of genuinely free societies.

Contemporary discourse has quietly shifted the goalposts. The question is no longer whether you will allow others to live differently, but whether you will affirm their way of life. Silence reads as hostility. Neutrality reads as complicity.

This shift has consequences the Enlightenment thinkers would have foreseen. When approval becomes the price of peace, dissent becomes dangerous. People learn to perform agreement rather than express honest disagreement, which corrodes the public reasoning that democracies depend on. Habermas warned that a healthy public sphere requires the capacity to air genuine differences, not manufactured consensus.

There is also a psychological cost. Pretending to celebrate what we actually find strange, objectionable, or simply uninteresting is exhausting—and when the pretence cracks, the backlash is often worse than honest disagreement would have been. Recovering the older, sparer concept of tolerance might ease this strain. You don't have to love your neighbour's worldview. You just have to leave them alone.

Takeaway

Demanding celebration where tolerance would suffice trades durable peace for fragile performance. A society that can argue honestly is stronger than one that agrees dishonestly.

The Enlightenment case for tolerance was modest by design. It asked citizens to endure disagreement, not to dissolve it. That modesty is its strength.

In an age that oscillates between demanding total affirmation and retreating into hostile tribes, the middle path Locke and Voltaire carved out remains available. Tolerance without acceptance, coexistence without celebration—an unglamorous peace, but a durable one.