People have always learned important life lessons from theater. Take the plays of Shakespeare, for example. The moral of Romeo & Juliet is clearly that nothing good can come of hatred; Macbeth is chilling in its lesson that danger and darkness lie in deep ambition. Julius Caesar? Maybe it’s this: Be careful how you wield power (and who you choose as friends).
Good advice for contemporary politics in all that, right? But I want to draw you attention today a line that Dan Aykroyd delivered 35 years ago in Driving Miss Daisy, the Oscar-winning movie about the relationship between a fierce elderly southerner, played by Jessica Tandy, and her chauffeur, portrayed by Morgan Freeman. In an early scene, Dan Aykroyd’s character, Boolie Werthan, the woman’s grown son, reacts to what we quickly grasp as typical pushback from his stubborn mama. Boolie shakes his head at the grouchy matron, and says, amiably, “Mama, you’re a doodle.” I loved that line.
Nobody has ever defined what a “doodle” is in that circumstance, exactly, but we know from that moment that Boolie accepts his Mama, rather than judges her. As for Miss Daisy Werthan herself, Tandy won an Academy Award for her subtle evocation of friendship emerging from the poison of her overt racism. Mama was a doodle, all right, but she grew into somebody more admirable as we watched her over the years.
Back in the 1980s, when the movie was made, we might have said that Miss Daisy had grown by embracing tolerance. That term — tolerance — was popular then, and a lot of us imagined that all we needed was greater tolerance to overcome racism, not to mention discrimination based on sexual orientation, nationality or religious beliefs. But when we tolerate something, we’re saying that we are enduring what we find awkward or inappropriate or painful. That’s hardly a healthy way of thinking about relations with another person or a group. At best, tolerance is a small step toward more appropriate and useful goals, like acceptance and respect. Boolie Werthan didn’t tolerate Miss Daisy; he loved her.
Yet tolerance is at least better than hostility. And here’s a striking notion: If we have moved beyond mere tolerance as a goal in race relations, we are barely achieving it in our political conflicts. Tolerance isn’t good enough in the face of racism or gender discrimination. No, indeed. But it would actually be an improvement from the rising enmity, from the outright nastiness, that now grips our political divide.
Two years ago, research published by the Association of Psychological Sciences described tolerance as “a cornerstone for reducing intergroup conflict in diverse societies.” So tolerance ought to help our political system move beyond the paralysis that has gripped it, and the political chaos that has ensued. Consider the intolerance that so many of us, left and right, display toward folks on the other side of the American political divide. We don’t want to live near the other type, join their clubs or attend their churches. We’d rather our kids not play with theirs. We consider those other people not just wrong on the issues, but morally inferior.
I’m guilty of this feeling, certainly, and as a political progressive, I know it leads some folks on the right to consider me self-righteous. Mind you, I’m not going to back away from what I think is a right judgment that some behavior is indeed immoral: advancing the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, pushing the racist myth that a cabal on the left wants to replace white American voters with foreigners, riling up hatred toward LGBTQ people, defending the Jan. 6 insurrection that aimed to subvert our democracy. Those are intolerably offensive notions in today’s politics.
But calling out political calculations that are beyond the pale isn’t the same as imagining people whose perspectives we don’t share are beneath contempt. We all come to our views through our experiences, and except for a relatively few people whose ambitions cloud their judgment – like, say, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik – it’s a rare American who intentionally descends into political behavior we might fairly call despicable. You know some of those sort, but most of our fellow citizens are deserving of, well, tolerance. At least.
Social scientists in recent years have studied the psychological impact of being tolerated in diverse societies. Researchers from Utrecht University and the University of Canterbury found that the people being tolerated often see that their standing as depending upon others who smugly assume their own tolerance is praiseworthy – which in turn leaves the tolerated folks feeling angry and disappointed. It’s likely one of the dynamics that led to the rise of Donald Trump: the anger of his alienated base, who have felt barely tolerated in their own land.
When each side across the political divide feels that anger, it’s hard to find the common ground that can sustain a nation’s shared sense of purpose.
Sometimes, then, rather than a hot partisan response to something that ticks us off, we might consider whether that person on the other side is less a jerk than, well, a doodle. It could be good for us. Shakespeare, of course, offers such advice: “Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot/That it do singe yourself.” That’s from Henry VIII – a play about a guy who was, as you may recall, notably intolerant.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.