Tolerance - what is it? And how can it be?

Tolerance - what is it? What is behind this concept today, when it is so often used in modern rhetoric? Often it is associated with the construction of multicultural societies and related ethnopolitical problems. Without minimizing the importance of such issues, it should also be noted that this concept covers a wider range of meanings.

Biological tolerance - what is it?

Initially, this term was used by biologists who used it, denoting the corresponding properties of living organisms. Translating the word "tolerate" from the Latin language, we get literally "patience" and "addictive". That is, it is called the ability of the immune system to adapt to antigens. The immune-tolerant organism for some reason does not produce antibodies to counteract the antigens that have got into its organism.

And it should be noted that the development of tolerance in this area is not always negative. More often even on the contrary, the organism does not reproduce antibodies just by virtue of absence of necessity for those. For example, the development of the fetus in the mother's body will never cause rejection in her body. This is also a tolerance, and in this case it is an essential vital necessity. Scientists and ecologists use this concept. Tolerance - what is it for them? And in this case, the ability of organisms to perceive and survive in a very wide range of climatic conditions is implied. Also very important and useful characteristic of the organism, is not it?

Social Tolerance - What Is It?

And in this sense the concept is used in very different planes. It can be applied to people with disabilities, women, and sexual minorities. In any case, to any social categories. At the same time, tolerance, whose importance is most often associated with interethnic problems, has a vivid negative connotation. The modern ultra-right in other states and in the Russian conditions made great efforts to turn tolerance into an abusive concept, trying to expose any argument in its defense as a laughingstock. And yet it must be remembered that tolerance for representatives of a different social category, culture, race is the basis for the normal and lasting functioning of any human society.

And it does not presuppose any automatic submissiveness to inappropriate actions, for example, from the national minorities. It often happens that migrants, who were raised in a completely different system of social relations and values, are trying to transfer it to new countries for themselves. However, tolerance can not be extended to acts that openly contradict local norms. They should not be patience or humility at all. Such problems need to be solved not by closing the borders - globalization is still a progressive phenomenon, which can hardly be stopped. The problems can be solved quite effectively only through the formation of these peoples and the pulling of their socio-economic and cultural development to the level of advanced societies of the planet.