People having unconventional ideas wish that society could be more tolerant.  For every free-thinker there are a dozen intolerant people ready to censure the expression of new thoughts.  Is it logically consistent for the free-thinker to wish for a way to constrain the actions and expression of intolerant people?  Can someone preach tolerance, wishing for a more tolerant society, and also call for restraints to be placed upon intolerant people?

Is it not paradoxical to propose the promotion of a more tolerant society by advocating intolerance of a specific category of that socity's population?  It's always unnerving to encounter paradoxes, such as the slip of paper that states, on both sides "The statement on the other side of this paper is false!" yet that seems to be the same category of paradox faced by tolerant people wishing to rid society of intolerant people.

I suspect that intolerance is an invention of the genes.  An evolutionary psychology article (Boyd and Richerson, 1985 and Henrich and Boyd, 1998) models a behavioral trait called "conformism" and shows that individuals within tribes fare better when they tend to adopt tribal customs and beliefs.  The model shows that "a tendency to acquire the most common behavior exhibited in a society was adaptive ... because such a tendency increases the probability of acquiring adaptive beliefs and values."

The term "adaptive" is crucial to understanding the implications of this work.  Presumably the genes that incline the individual to conform are the beneficiaries of the conformism.  But a behavior that is adaptive for the genes that construct an individual may not be "adaptive" for the individual.  In other words, a behavior might jeopardize the well-being of the individual while it serves his genes.  Reproductive activities are the most glaring example of this, for they place the individual in harms way (male/male combat during competition for female access, female dangers during birth process, etc.), and force individuals to engage in much more work than would be needed to merely sustain themselves.

If conformance benefits the genes, then might the enforcement of conformity also benefit the genes?  Intolerance of noncompliance with group norms could be a mental mechanism invented by the genes to overcome logic and enforce conformity when it is patently not in the individual's best interests to do so.  A young boy may prefer to chase butterflies when he is expected to learn warrior skills, and since butterfly chasers are less useful to fellow tribesmen than warriors, it is natural to expect that the genes have provided a mechanism for tribal members to pressure errant individuals to adhere to what is in the common (i.e., shared genes) best interests.  The social pressures used to enforce this adherence to tribal customs is what more recent generations, groping for liberation and experimenting with  individualism, have labelled "intolerance."

Conformism and intolerance could be "opposite sides of the same coin" for getting a genetic job done.  This "coin" would sometimes help an individual become better adapted to conditions, but on occasion it would impede the individual from achieving individual well-being.  And always, conformism and intolerance work against individual liberation from the accident the culture the individual was born into.

I like living within a culture that has become more tolerant of new ideas than perhaps at any previous time.  It seems impossible to imagine a primitive tribesman insisting upon expressing beliefs that conflict with those enshrined in tribal custom, since a deeply entrenched part of us knows that the disobedient individual would be banished.  And banishment, for our distant ancestors, was equivalent to a death sentence, as the support of a tribe was essential to survival.  Individuals who demanded tolerance of new ideas would have simply disappeared, and will not be found among our ancestors.

So this is a theoretical explanation that might account for the intolerant attitude that comes so naturally to humans.  If intolerance comes naturally, then it will be difficult to discourage, and tolerant socieies may be short-lived.  Specific conditions may elicit intolerance, even among people who would agree with arguments for tolerance under benign conditions.

In this way we might try to understand what happened in pre-war Germany.  If Germany's economy had been better, if Germany's prestige had not been so extremely decimated by lopsided settlement conditions of the first world war, perhaps the Nazi's would not have recruited so many followers to their intolerant cause.  Some "brown shirts" might use my argument to exclaim "my genes made me do it" and seek exoneration on the basis of special circumstances.  But I would argue that not all Germans succumbed, and those who took heroic stances by protecting Jewish neighbors show that people have different intolerance predispositions.  As with all human traits, even those that are contingent on situation, every person inherits a different trait strength - which is to say that they inherit a different probability of exhibiting the trait compared to others in the identical circumstance.

I am arguing that some people are inherently less tolerant than others, and it is in real-world situations that we begin to learn which people are inherently less tolerant.  It may be that the expression of intolerant attitudes is only 40% genetic, and the rest environmental.  It can still be argued that real-world situations reveal in a statistical sense those people who are inherently intolerant.

I shall stop-short of recommending how those of us who are inherently tolerant should deal with that majority among us who are inherently intolerant.  Rather, let me suggest that thinking people be aware, and be wary.  Let us never apologize for the differentness of our ideas even though we are cicumspect in our expression of them.  For anyone engaged in a journey of discovery in the realm of ideas it is important to climb forbidden hills, and look upon those valleys so feared by the masses.  There may be a better place in one of those valleys, not just for individuals, but also for societies.  Our timidity has its origins with the genes, which are not necessarily designed to assure healthy societies or individuals.

A free-thinker's stance on intolerance must acknowledge realities, especially in public proclamations.  Intolerance is a formidable force endurably entrenched in human nature, and it awaits the thinker having new ideas with unkind intent.  Mindful of these realities, I conclude that the prudent path in life for thinking people is to quietly refrain from berating intolerance!

References:
Boyd, R.and P. J. Richerson, 1985, Culture and the Evolutionary Process, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Henrich, J. and R. Boyd, 1998, "The Evolution of Conformist Transmission and the Emergence of Between-Group Differences," Evolution and Human Behavior, 19, 215.
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